Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary

The Performance of Difference

Frederika Elizabeth Bain

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501512957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts' assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. The book concludes by examining the afterlives of body parts, including relics and specimens exhibited for entertainment and education, contextualized by discussion of the resurrection body and its promise of bodily reintegration. Grounded in dramatic works, the study also incorporates a variety of genres from midwifery manuals to broadside ballads.

Chapter 1: The Symbolic Body and the Performance of Dismemberment

I am delyuerd fro thre temptacions

I shal blysse the fader the sone and the holy ghoost

and lord I shal confesse the with the thre chyldren

that thou sauedest fro the chymney of fyre

and Ihesu cryste I shal synge to thy name in the quere of marters.¹

This affirmation of faith and devotion is one of many uttered by saints throughout the Legenda aurea, the most popular hagiographical collection of the Middle Ages. Like most such speeches, it confidently anticipates the speaker’s entry into the community of martyrs. It references specific Christian themes: the Holy Trinity; the three temptations faced by Jesus in the wilderness; the three children or young men – Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – described in Daniel 1–3 as being saved by angelic intervention from execution in a fiery furnace. Its impetus, however, distinguishes it: it is one of almost thirty responses by St. James Intercisus to his serial dismemberment, each to a greater or lesser extent apposite to each particular cut. With its repeated evocation of threes, the quoted passage is his response to the cutting off of the third finger of his right hand.

Caxton’s translation tells that St. James “the marter” is a man of “noble lygnage / but more noble by his feyth / . . . borne in the regyon of perse.”² Brought up a Christian, he is led astray into the worshipping of “ydolles” by his friend the king of Persia, but then is brought to repentance by his virtuous mother and wife. When the king discovers his friend’s now-staunch Christianity, he accuses James of sorcerery and threatens him with punishments, most dramatically “that he shold be cut euery membre from other / for to fere,” or frighten, the people of the kingdom.³ In ordering this spectacle, the monarch thus intends to perform a specific meaning through the taking apart of James’s body: it is to be a terrible warning of the dangers of Christianity and a reminder of the might of the king.⁴ However, James thwarts this plan – or his hagiographers do in their recounting of the story – by explaining the Christian signification of each body part as it is dismembered, in his own performance of faith-inspired fortitude and alternative meaning-making.

A particularly vivid example of this impulse can be found in the Vita sancti Jacobi Intercisi’s account of James’s speech when one of his toes is cut off: “Gloria tibi Christe: quoniam humanam carnem ex uirgine dignatus es suscipere: et lancea latus tuum apertum est: unde sanguis nostrae redemptionis et aqua baptismatis: qui dignatus es pedis intingere in sanguine, conforta me domine” (Glory to you, O Christ, since you deigned to take up human flesh from the virgin. Then your side was opened with a lance, from which the blood of our redemption and the water of our baptism emanated. Comfort me, O Lord, who deigned to immerse me in the blood of [my] foot).⁵ Not only is the blood from the dismembered foot sanctified into a form of holy water; the torturer who has cut off the extremity is figured as akin to a priest, baptizing James in his own blood. Though far shorter, James’s utterance in the Legenda aurea at the same event, “the foot of Ihesu cryste was persyd / and blood yssued out,”⁶ similarly serves to remind the reader of the positive significations of pain and bloodshed when endured in the name of God, by connecting his own bodily dismemberment with Jesus’s Passion. The performance of meaning-making continues until all members are severed and James is finally beheaded, effectively cutting off his voice, though his hagiographers triumphantly continue and amplify his signifying in their accounts.

There are two other Sts. James, the Greater and the Less; to distinguish him from them, this James is called “Intercisus,” “the Dismembered” or simply “the Martyr.” So many saints underwent martyrdom, often through dismemberment, as to raise the question of why this saint is so distinguished in his name. It may be due to his particularly gory, or particularly extensive, bodily division, although there are far more gruesome and extended martyrdoms in the canon. More distinctive, however, is the especially signifying nature of his dismemberments, or rather the wealth of specific and apposite symbolic import placed upon them. His dismemberments make him a martyr not only in that they kill him, as all saints’ wounds eventually kill them, but also because they are so framed as to make his death specifically a holy Christian death, a martyrdom, and to serve as physical reminders of their own faith to the Christian community who consumes his story. They are some of the most consciously meaningful torments in the calendar of saints. St. James Intercisus may thus fitly be claimed as the patron saint of this study, which seeks to analyze represented dismemberments over the medieval and early modern periods as forms of bodily performance for symbolic purposes.

This chapter begins by tracing the concept of body symbolism, including foundational somatic metaphors in the medieval and early modern period. It defines the term body performance as it is used in this study as meaning enacted through the modification, both textual and physical, of the body. Such modifications include descriptions of the body that create signification through representation; bodies modified by God, for instance, may appear beautiful, ugly, or grotesque or monstrous, manifesting in physical form divine will or judgment. Among human-initiated modifications are both lesser forms of shaping or marking as well as the primary concern of this study, the extreme alterations caused by dismemberment. This discussion is concretized by readings of performance through bodily dismemberment in the medieval romance Eger and Grime, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

Metaphor and Modification

Much of the scholarly work describing how “the body was used” in medieval and early modern thought refers, explicitly or more often implicitly, to the conceptualized body. Idealized and essentially incorporeal, it acts as a fundamental organizing principle in the medieval and early modern imaginary, as reflected in textual genres from theology and statecraft to romance and poetry. An idea rather than a physical object, it is assumed to be self-explanatory and is rarely concretized through detail. It is the ideal towards which medical and midwifery texts aspire; their prescriptions and directions are aimed at the achievement, unattainable though it may be, of its idealized form and function. It is the conceptual body of which Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin speak in their introduction to Framing Medieval Bodies: “The body both produces knowledge and is shaped by it, both is determined by it and colludes with it.”⁷ The authors continue, “[B]oth external and internal, personal and public, life-giving and vulnerable, the body leads to alternative ways of establishing priorities, and perceiving the human person.”⁸ This critical bias towards discussion of the conceptual body is in large part a response to a similar tendency in medieval and early modern discourse. As David Hillman and Carla Mazzio maintain, in early modern England “the spatially imagined body was perhaps the most common vehicle for the making of social and cosmic metaphors.”⁹ Somatic metaphors implicitly position the idealized, intangible body as a text to be read for clues as to the appropriate formulation or governance of societies and institutions.

At the same time, the body was and is a material object as well as a concept, and it is its materiality that gives it such imaginative force. Humans tend to feel that we understand it, or at least that we experience it directly. We know what it is to have arms, legs, and a head; we know what it is to see, smell, hear; to eat and excrete; we know, whether by experience or by observation of those close to us, what it is to bear life and to give birth and to die. This identification begins at birth: the human face, even abstract representations of it, is the most enthralling focus for newborns.¹⁰ It is for these reasons that Elaine Scarry describes the physical body as “the realm that from the very start has compelling reality to the human mind.”¹¹ Figures of somatic symbolism, metaphor, and metonymy can never wholly displace the body’s material significance – not only because of the power of lived experience but also because such figurations frequently have concrete consequences for the physical bodies of those living in the culture that generates and is influenced by them. Body symbolisms determine the meanings that the physical body can be and has been used to perform; human as well as animal bodies have been described, decorated, molded, marked, cut, and killed in accordance with ideas about these bodies. For these reasons this study draws on sources at all points along the spectrum of facticity, from the represented “physical” selves of both fictional and historical characters, through the bodies of saints portrayed textually in their vitae and displayed materially in reliquaries, to the bodies of condemned criminals described in execution narratives and anatomical treatises and presented in the (preserved) flesh.

Embodiments

Most deployments of somatic metaphor utilize a general and idealized body to think about larger structures and institutions, both constructed and natural. Two especially common versions classify institutions, whether state or church, and land, especially agricultural and colonizable land, as conceptual bodies. The corpus politicum trope appears in classical writings, burgeons in the Middle Ages, and continues in use throughout the early modern period. Scholars have argued that during the latter period it begins to lose its vitality as a living metaphor and moves closer to a figure of speech,¹² though more recently Margaret Healy has pronounced herself “highly skeptical” of the idea that “body politic metaphors ceased to be a functional way of thinking social unity from the mid-seventeenth century.”¹³ John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1138), which “discusses the body politic in elaborate detail, even extravagant detail,”¹⁴ offers a representative employment of this trope:

The position of the head of the republic is occupied . . . by a prince subject only to God and to those who act in His place on earth . . . The place of the heart is occupied by the senate, from which proceeds the beginning of good and bad works. The duties of the ears, eyes and mouth are claimed by the judges and the governors of provinces. The hands coincide with officials and soldiers. Those who always assist the prince are comparable to the flanks. Treasurers and record keepers . . . resemble the shape of the stomach and intestines . . . the feet coincide with the peasants perpetually bound to the soil. ¹⁵

Here the hierarchy of the body parts superimposed on the political hierarchy presents “the universe, the world, the church, the state, and the individual . . . [as] repeating the same pattern of arrangement and therefore exhibiting precise correspondences.”¹⁶ As such it performs the argument that the power of those in authority is naturally – and therefore divinely – ordained.¹⁷

Not all the positions in the hierarchy remain stable throughout the many variations on this theme: the head may be the council, the heart the prince. Hale points out that hierarchy is not a necessary corollary of the body-of-state metaphor, differentiating a parallel strain of the figure that emphasizes, instead of a top-down order, the interdependence of the body’s parts. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (ca. 1608),¹⁸ the body metaphor expounded by the senator Menenius assigns the most powerful position, that of the senate, to the belly, arguing that while it may appear as though the stomach takes all while the other members do the work of finding and getting that which sustains it, without its ability to distribute this sustenance, the rest of the body withers and starves. Regardless of the somatic identity of the highest position, however, the story’s final argument is that all the parts of the body must work together. Hale maintains that the figure can be used to support either a “liberal” or a “conservative” political agenda; i.e., either a constitutional monarchy, in which the parliament was also given a voice in policy, or a pure monarchy, with its understanding that the monarch should have virtually unlimited power. The analogy can even be used to further “totalitarian ends.”¹⁹

Women authors’ deployments of the social-order-as-body trope, though less common, tend to emphasize interdependence over hierarchy. In the Letter Sent by the Maydens of London (1567), the maids describe themselves as members of a hybrid body, comprised of both themselves and their mistresses, so as to emphasize their indispensability as part of an interdependent system:

For as there are divers and sundry membres in the body, the least whereof the body may not well want or spare: and when any one of them is hurt or greved, the whole body suffreth smart therfore: Even so are we to you (good Mistresses) such as stande you in more steade, than some of the membres stande the body in, yea in as much steade we alone doe stande you in, as divers membres of the bo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Attending to Bodies
• Chapter 1: The Symbolic Body and the Performance of Dismemberment
• Chapter 2: Gendered Dismemberments
• Chapter 3: Animals of Dismemberment
• Chapter 4: The Anguish of the Dismemberer: Executioners and Others
• Chapter 5: Coda: After Dismemberment
• Index