Abstract
During a civil conflict in 1411, the citizens of Paris watch as a group of traitors are loaded into a cart, wooden crosses clasped in their bound hands. The cart travels its ceremonial route to the scaffold, where the prisoners are stripped and beheaded. Their heads are stuck up on spears, their bodies hung on the gallows in sacks. The leader is dismembered and each of his limbs displayed over one of the city’s gates. Parisians listen to the news brought by travelers: in the surrounding countryside, the opposing faction kills, rapes, holds for ransom, starts fires, and hangs its enemies by the thumbs or feet. Devout citizens meditate upon images in their books of hours: a young man shot full of arrows, another roasted on a grill; a young woman bound to an inclined plank while her teeth are yanked out, another bound to a pillar while her breast is hacked off. From time to time, they crowd into a specially built, open-air theatre: citizens playing Roman soldiers flog three men stretched out on planks and later use the latest in theatrical slight-of-hand to roast one of them on a grill, rake him with hooks, shut him up in a furnace, and cut off his head.
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Notes
As noted by Malcom Vale, “Aristocratic Violence: Trial by Battle in the Later Middle Ages,” in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2000), 159.
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© 2010 Marla Carlson
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Carlson, M. (2010). Introduction. In: Performing Bodies in Pain. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111486_1
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