Embodiment, Identity, and Gender in the Early Modern Age

Amy Leonard, David Whitford, Amy E. Leonard, David M. Whitford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000328738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Embracing a multiconfessional and transnational approach that stretches from central Europe, to Scotland and England, from Iberia to Africa and Asia, this volume explores the lives, work, and experiences of women and men during the tumultuous fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

The authors, all leading experts in their fields, utilize a broad range of methodologies from cultural history to women's history, from masculinity studies to digital mapping, to explore the dynamics and power of constructed gender roles. Ranging from intellectual representations of virginity to the plight of refugees, from the sea journeys of Jesuit missionaries to the impact of Transatlantic economies on women's work, from nuns discovering new ways to tolerate different religious expressions to bleeding corpses used in criminal trials, these essays address the wide diversity and historical complexity of identity, gender, and the body in the early modern age.

With its diversity of topics, fields, and interests of its authors, this volume is a valuable source for students and scholars of the history of women, gender, and sexuality as well as social and cultural history in the early modern world.

PART I

The body and manifestations of gender

1

THE STRANGE SURVIVAL OF THE BLEEDING CORPSE

Joel F. Harrington

In 1503, the village of Ettiswil, in the canton of Luzern, was scandalized by the brazen murder of a young woman, Margarete Spiessin, found strangled in her own bed. Almost immediately, according to chronicler Diebold Schilling, “many people began to murmur and suspect” the dead woman’s husband, Hans Spiess, a mercenary with a local reputation as a “whoremonger, gambler, and spendthrift.”¹ Spurred by the public uproar, the local Schultheiss, knight Peter Feren, ordered Spiess arrested, imprisoned in the local tower, and later interrogated with torture. When, after several sessions, the young mercenary still refused to confess, many villagers clamored for further torture, even to the death if necessary. Instead, Feren turned to an ancient means of adjudication in unresolved murder cases, in this instance suggested by Spiess himself. The body of the deceased, already in the ground for three weeks, was exhumed, washed with wine and water, and placed on a bier in the town square. The accused, naked and shorn, was escorted to the bier, which he ritually circled three times on his knees. In the presence of “seven trustworthy men”² (and many other eager spectators), Spiess then placed two fingers on the breast of his dead wife and swore a ritual oath: “As I hereby see and touch this dead body, I ask God, if I am in any way or form guilty of any encouragement, deed, favor, support, or help in her murder or death, that God Almighty make a public sign here of my guilt or innocence … so help me God and all the saints.”³ Suddenly, according to the chronicler, “a foam began to flow out of her mouth, and the closer he came to her, the more steadily it foamed; and when he came still closer, a red mark suddenly appeared on her chest.” When Spiess kneeled down and further protested his innocence, the corpse began to bleed, the blood running down the side of the bier. Upon this “miracle,” Spiess finally broke down and confessed to the murder, for which he was later executed with the wheel. “Thus, one clearly sees that God lets no murder go unpunished,” concludes the chronicler, and “no one should wonder or question whether there is a heaven or a hell.”⁴

Cruentation, known to jurists as ius cruentationis, and more popularly as “the bier test” (Barhprobe; l'épreuve du cercueil), was ubiquitous in early modern Europe, particularly in northern regions, including France and the British Isles. A supposedly ancient Germanic method for identifying unknown murderers, this curious form of trial by ordeal enjoyed an exceptionally long lifespan in parts of Europe and North America, well into the nineteenth century. How do we account for this longevity, especially given the demise of most other forms of trial by ordeal by the thirteenth century? Even if cruentation were merely a spectacularly resilient popular superstition, its thriving in the midst of dramatic shifts in the early modern intellectual landscape bears closer examination. In fact, I suggest, it was cruentation’s very murky epistemological foundation that made it useful to legal procedures of the time and thus insured its survival into the modern era.

Legal historians of the nineteenth century, the very time that the popular belief in cruentation was finally breathing its last breath, looked to the practice’s origins to help explain its durability.⁵ Trial by ordeal, in general, was absent from Roman law and appears to have originated among the Franks, whence it was later promulgated by Charlemagne.⁶ Unlike the iron glove or boiling cauldron or even the duel, however, there is no mention of cruentation in any surviving source until some twelfth-century sagas. Most famously, in the Niebelungenlied, when Hagen approaches the corpse of the slain Siegfried on his bier, the dead body begins to bleed, thereby unveiling its murderer. Even here, though, as in other literary sources, the perpetrator was not actually suspected before the bleeding, but rather surprisingly revealed by the event.⁷ The same is true of the first apparent real-life application during the murder investigation of a French abbot, Petrus Monoculus, in 1180.⁸ There is in fact no reference to the practice in German law until the Freisinger Rechtsbuch of 1328, more than a hundred years after Lateran IV’s prohibition of all trials by ordeal.⁹ The circumstances of this delayed and curious “created tradition” is a worthy subject for another exploration.

Although the relatively late-appearing cruentation was thus probably not formally a trial by ordeal¹⁰—again, an ecclesiastically-banned legal procedure since 1215—it shared some important traits with the latter. The building of a popular consensus on guilt, for instance, was an integral aspect of all trials by ordeal, with the so-called facts of the event always open to the interpretation of spectators (not unlike the twelve traditional “oath-helpers”). Like other trials by ordeal, it also contained an oath of purgation and an appeal to divine intervention.

More importantly from the popular perspective, cruentation also allowed a deceased victim to accuse his or her murderer directly. The legal standing of dead persons was a particularly deeply entrenched legal concept in German lands, dating back to before Christianization and helps explain the broad appeal of cruentation.¹¹ Well into the fifteenth century, legal authorities permitted corpses to be brought to courtrooms, where they “participated” as either defendant or plaintiff.¹² (There’s actually an illustration of this in the most famous manuscript of the thirteenth-century Sachsenspiegel ). By the later middle ages, many German courts began to bring merely the chopped-off right hand to the trial, so as to proceed with a “complaint with the dead hand.” By the sixteenth century, this custom had been modified still further to allow for a wax facsimile of the dead hand or other “body signs” (Lebenzeichen), such as a finger, lock of hair, or favorite shirt.

Cruentation thus retained the miraculous aspect of other trials by ordeal, but also allowed the victim to play a part in examples of divine justice. Margarete Spiessin’s dramatic exposition of her murderer husband carried enormous popular appeal in a culture still deeply shaped by the Mosaic Law’s life-for-a-life justice. In his 1597 Demonology, James VI gives voice to this visceral attraction of the cruentation spectacle: “… for as in a secret murther, if the deade carcase be at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer, it wil gush out of bloude, as if the blud wer crying to the heaven for revenge of the murtherer, God having appointed that secret super-natural signe, for tryall of that secrete vnnaturall crime.”¹³

Yet once more we return to the central question of why this particular popular custom survived the skepticism or condemnation that learned critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries leveled against other allegedly supernatural means of resolving legal disputes. Why did Protestants in particular—among them learned jurists, physicians, and theologians—not just tolerate cruentation but in some cases actually endorse it—while simultaneously rejecting the miracles associated with saints and holy objects as either superstitious or diabolical? What was different about the bleeding corpse?

In the instance of early modern jurists, cruentation found a sweet spot in the gap between the commonly higher expectations for legal, and especially criminal, procedures and the commonly inadequate means of implementation, particularly in the nature of evidence and proof. During the sixteenth century, many legal jurisdictions throughout Europe established new civil and criminal codifications, which were intended to insure both greater consistency and greater efficiency among their respective courts. Roman-canonical principles shaped much of the new legislation, even in more resistant German lands. Emperor Charles V’s 1532 imperial criminal code, or Carolina, for instance, allowed the Empire’s constituent jurisdictions to retain many local customs in personnel and punishments, but at the same time it attempted to standardize procedure along inquisitorial—canonical—lines. Stymied by the frequent absence of two eye-witness accusers in many criminal cases—the standard Roman legal definition of proof—the Carolina’s drafters encouraged judges to aggressively gather as many other constitutive elements of proof as possible, what they called indicia, or indices, especially physical evidence (bloody clothing or weapons, burglary tools, etc.) or confession.¹⁴ Yet recognizing that these indices themselves were often lacking, the code’s authors felt impelled to provide detailed instructions for local legal authorities on one other means of building evidence: special inquisition, aka torture. Although the Carolina urged great restraint in relying on this “last resort,” the code’s unintended legacy turned out to be an unprecedented spread of what might be called enhanced interrogation throughout the Empire in a variety of criminal cases, most infamously in the pursuit of alleged witches.

The incomplete shift from an accusatorial to an inquisitorial form of criminal justice evident in the Carolina and most sixteenth-century criminal codifications in turn yielded a convenient niche for the medieval practice of cruentation. What laypeople clearly still viewed as a kind of divine intervention, most sixteenth-century jurists instead perceived as a valuable, constitutive indicator of proof. In other words, while earlier courts had treated the bleeding corpse as either a means of resolving disputed guilt (an Entscheidungsmittel ) or as proof itself (a Beweismittel ), sixteenth- and seventeenth-century jurists saw the psychologically-charged bier test as another form of enhanced interrogation, offering one more indicator of guilt or innocence. As a sole decider of guilt, cruentation had no standing among jurists; as part of a cumulative process of establishing proof, however, it could continue to play a role.

Most commonly, sixteenth-century jurists addressed whether an instance of apparent cruentation might be considered a magnum indicium of guilt, justifying torture, an indicium remotum, requiring other supplemental proof (indicium ad inquirendum), or no indicator at all (indicium falsum). Most Italian, French, and German jurists before 1550 agreed that such bleeding should be considered a major indicator, also known as an indicium perfectum, although they differed on whether the cause was natural or supernatural.¹⁵ The Neapolitan Matteo d’Afflitto (d. 1510), for instance, considered cruentation the result of divine intervention, while the Cypriot Hieronymus Maggius (d. 1572) believed that the murderer gave special power to the blood of the victim, and the Bourges jurist Nicolas Boerius (1469–1539) thought that the enmity between two spirits triggered the effusion. Marcus Antonius Blancus (Marcantonio Bianchi; 1498–1548), displayed more profound skepticism about the validity of cruentation itself, but was in a distinct minority among legal experts.¹⁶

The legal role was thus consistently an ambiguous one, neither officially endorsed nor prohibited by most jurists or codes before the modern era. Neither the Carolina, nor its predecessor the Bambergensis, mentions cruentation at all—a significant omission considering other popular practices that were specifically condemned.¹⁷ Yet it was clearly practiced widely, and not just in German lands.¹⁸ Sometimes, as in the case of Hans Spiess, the ritual was requested by accused parties eager to clear their names, functioning as a kind of “purification oath” (Reinigungseid ) before witnesses—and usually without it backfiring so spectacularly as it did for Spiess. On other occasions, suspected murderers were forced to undergo the ritual against their wills, sometimes successfully exonerating themselves and other times confessing in the face of apparent bleeding or movement by the cadaver. During the seventeenth century, cruentation’s reinforcement of popular consensus made it an especially compelling weapon against accused witches. The famous trials of the English witch Jennet Preston of Pendle (1612) and the Scottish witch Christine Wilson of Dalkeith (1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword: a reflection on Merry Wiesner-Hanks
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The body and manifestations of gender
• Part II: Women between reform, subversion, and self-determination
• Part III: Gendered dynamics of displacement, migration, and conflict
• Afterword: looking backwards and forward
• Index