Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture

250 Pages·2006·5.57 MB·English

by  Robert Mills

SUSPENDED ANIMATION
pain, pleasure & punishment in medieval culture
robert mills

Suspended Animation

Suspended Animation
Pain, Pleasure and Punishment
in Medieval Culture
Robert Mills
reaktion books
For Neil
Published by reaktion books ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx,uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2005
Copyright © Robert Mills 2005
All rights reserved
No part ofthis publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system,or
transmitted,in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,
recording or otherwise,without the prior permission ofthe publishers.
Colour printed by Creative Print and Design Group,Harmondsworth,Middlesex
Printed and bound in Great Britain by cpi/Bath Press,Bath
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mills,Robert,1973–
Suspended animation :pain,pleasure and punishment in
medieval culture
1.Violence - Europe - History - To 15002.Violence in
literature 3.Violence in popular culture 4.Violence -
conditions - To 1492
I.Title
303.3’6
isbn 1 86189 260 8
Contents
Introduction:Speculum of the Other Middle Ages 7
1 Betwixt Heaven and Earth 23
2 Skin Show 59
3 Eliminating Sodom 83
4 Invincible Virgins 106
5 Of Martyrs and Men 145
6 Hanging with Christ 177
Afterword:Heaven Bent 201
References 204
Select Bibliography 234
Acknowledgements 239
Photographic Acknowledgements 241
Index 243

Introduction:
Speculum of the Other Middle Ages
‘They used to hang you for stealing a loafofbread,didn’t they?’,retorts the
civilized western subject in the twenty-first century.1The sense of relief is
palpable in the speaker’s tone.We’re comfortably distant from a part ofour
history that terrifies us,fascinates us,the statement implies.These days,
thankfully,the western world is free ofsuch apparent disjunctions between
crime and punishment.Now,when criminals are chastised,at least the
severity ofthe penalty matches more closely the perceived magnitude ofthe
transgression.How could people have performed such acts ofunwarranted
barbarism on each other? What progress there has been in modern times!
The ‘didn’t they?’with which the sentence ends, however, signals an
element offragility in the speaker’s declaration,the faintest recognition that
self-definition is at stake.The expression is edged with the spectres ofdeath
and difference,but also with a voyeuristic sense offascination,even shades
ofidentification – the allure ofthe other.Psychic and social structures often
produce what might be termed an ‘exclusionary matrix’,a dangerous,abject
region that circumscribes the identities ofideas,institutions and selves.The
word abjection (from the Latin abicere,to throw away,throw down,aban-
don,degrade) encapsulates this dynamic offoreclosure:a casting away,the
production ofa domain ofdisidentification against which entities and ideas
stake out their claims to symbolic legitimacy.2Capital punishment func-
tions as a metonym for the brutality ofthe past,establishing an uninhabit-
able space fantasized by the speaker as threatening to his or her integrity
1Anonymous
and consequently disavowed (even though that fantasy remains precisely
Silesian master,
within the subject herself as a founding repudiation, the horror within). Crucifix,
Alterity performs its constitutive work ... c.1370–80,painted
wood carving
from Corpus
The abject also confronts us in another meditation on the vicissitudes Christi church,
ofpenal horror:a late fourteenth-century carved Crucifix(illus.1) from Wrocław
the Corpus Christi church,Wrocław (formerly Breslau,Germany;now a (Breslau).
Naradowe
part of Poland).3It is a supremely provocative and emotive image.More Museum,Warsaw.
7
than any painting by Grünewald,more even than Holbein’s Dead Christ,
the carving demands an immediate response.Taking in the composition,
first ofall,the image seems to move incessantly downwards.Christ’s veiny
arms are stretched tensely, locked in a strained, bony curve. Leaning
slightly to one side,the left arm is pulled taut by the weight of the body,
its (literal) woodenness conveying the impression that at any moment
something might snap.Cadaver,from the Latin cadere,to fall:the etymology
ofthe word is reflected in the unnaturally elongated frame ofthe body on
the Wrocław carving,drawn down along the length of the cross.Christ’s
legs bunch up pathetically,struggling against the weight ofthe upper body
as it sinks downwards.The descending movement ofthe eyes’sealed lids –
circled with a frame ofbloody lashes – draws attention to the most captivat-
ing part ofthe image:the wound in Christ’s side (illus.66).
Moving closer now (if we can), we see that the wound emits rich,
blobby globules of curdled blood.Unlike the lacerations in conventional
crucifixion scenes,which are relatively bloodless in comparison (illus.2),
the gash is fashioned from droplets of blood arranged in neat lines,like
strings of glossy pearls or eucharistic grapes,echoed in the bloody mass
that exudes from the deep cuts that all but obliterate Christ’s hands.The
incessant flow is mirrored in the fall ofthe drapery that frames his sides,
and the entire body is bespattered with miniature scourge wounds,inter-
spersed rhythmically at intervals across his flesh.The rib cage is splayed in
neat, concertina fashion, Christ’s flesh sucked rigidly into his sides; the
stomach is drawn in tight so that the creased lines of the belly echo the
sharp,furrowed lines of the ribs.Even Christ’s hair becomes a bloody,
sticky,matted mess,confusingly assimilated with the surplus secretions
of his wounded side.
How do we approach a culture that put such images at its very centre?
How are we to comprehend such visions ofexcess?
alterity and the medieval penal imaginary
Images of medieval punishment are commonly understood with refer-
ence to what Umberto Eco has dubbed ‘shaggy medievalism’,the idea of
the Middle Ages as a barbaric epoch.4In a culture ravaged by violence,
death,pain and disease,the story goes,it was entirely natural that those
involved in the patronage, manufacture and viewing of artefacts like
the Wrocław crucifix should exhibit a profound fascination with
flowing blood,torn flesh and fragmented body parts.The classic por-
trait of the ‘waning’Middle Ages painted by the Dutch historian Johan
Huizinga in 1919envisaged the fifteenth century as an epoch of‘barbaric’
8 | suspended animation