'A great effusion of blood' was a phrase used frequently throughout medieval Europe as shorthand to describe the effects of immoderate interpersonal violence. Yet the ambiguity of this phrase poses numerous problems for modern readers and scholars in interpreting violence in medieval society and culture and its effect on medieval people. Understanding medieval violence is made even more complex by the multiplicity of views that need to be reconciled: those of modern scholars regarding the psychology and comportment of medieval people, those of the medieval persons themselves as perpetrators or victims of violence, those of medieval writers describing the acts, and those of medieval readers, the audience for these accounts. Using historical records, artistic representation, and theoretical articulation, the contributors to this volume attempt to bring together these views and fashion a comprehensive understanding of medieval conceptions of violence. Exploring the issue from both historical and literary perspectives, the contributors examine violence in a broad variety of genres, places, and times, such as the Late Antique lives of the martyrs, Islamic historiography, Anglo-Saxon poetry and Norse sagas, canon law and chronicles, English and Scottish ballads, the criminal records of fifteenth-century Spain, and more. Taken together, the essays offer fresh ways of analysing medieval violence and its representations, and bring us closer to an understanding of how it was experienced by the people who lived it.
By Mark D. Meyerson; Oren Falk, and Daniel Thiery
Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction
Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk
PART I: VIOLENCE AND IDENTITY FORMATION
1 Violence and the Making of Wiglaf
John M. Hill
2 Defending Their Masters’ Honour: Slaves as Violent Offenders in Fifteenth-Century Valencia
Debra Blumenthal
3 The Murder of Pau de Sant Martí: Jews, Conversos, and the Feud in Fifteenth-Century Valencia
Mark D. Meyerson
4 Violence and the Sacred City: London, Gower, and the Rising of 1381
Eve Salisbury
5 Bystanders and Hearsayers First: Reassessing the Role of the Audience in Duelling
Oren Falk
6 Scottish National Heroes and the Limits of Violence
Anne Mckim
PART II: VIOLENCE AND THE TESTAMENT OF THE BODY
7 Seeing the Gendering of Violence: Female and Male Martyrs in the South English Legendary
Beth Crachiolo
8 Violence or Cruelty? An Intercultural Perspective
Daniel Baraz
9 Body as Champion of Church Authority and Sacred Place: The Murder of Thomas Becket
Dawn Marie Hayes
10 Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: Interrogating ‘Virtue’ through Violence
M.C. Bodden
11 Violence, the Queen’s Body, and the Medieval Body Politic
John Carmi Parsons
12 Violence in the Early Robin Hood Poems 268
Richard Firth Green
13 Canon Laws regarding Female Military Commanders up to the Time of Gratian: Some Texts and Their Historical Contexts
David Hay
Conclusion
Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk