Royer examines the changing ritual of execution across five centuries and discovers a shift both in practice and in the message that was sent to the population at large. She argues that what began as a show of retribution and revenge became a ceremonial portrayal of redemption as the political, religious and cultural landscape of England evolved.

Introduction: Setting up the Scaffold in Late Medieval and Early Modern England; Chapter 1 The Body in Space: Describing the Distribution of Dismembered Traitors in Late Medieval England; Chapter 2 The Case of the Missing Blood: Silence and the Semiotics of Judicial Violence; Chapter 3 From Augustine to Aquinas: Death, Time and the Body on the Scaffold; Chapter 4 Dressed for Dying: Contested Visions, Clothes and the Construction of Identity on the Scaffold in Early Modern England; Chapter 5 The Last Words of that 'Cunning Coiner' Henry Cuffe: Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Execution Narrative;