Abstract
Capital punishment is a historical universal—it has been practised at some point in the history of virtually all known societies and places. That is not to say, however, that it is a historical constant—the use, form, function and meaning of execution has varied greatly across different historical contexts.1 This is likewise true for an important— although relatively neglected—aspect of capital punishment: the fate of the criminal body after execution. The treatment and understanding of the criminal corpse has differed across time and place, but it has always been a potent force and throughout its history it has been harnessed for the ends of state power, medical science and criminal justice, amongst many other things. By examining execution and the executed body across a wide temporal and geographical span, this collection of essays provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment, and in the process it seeks to add considerable detail to our knowledge of penal practice in early modern Europe, and to allow us to rethink some of the most commonly cited drivers of penal practice and change.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Notes
Randall McGowen and Daniel Gordon, ‘Introduction’, Historical Reflexions/ Réflexions Historiques 29 (2003), 190.
J. A. Sharpe, Judicial Punishment in England (London, 1990), p. 28; Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities (London, 1979).
Esther Cohen, ‘”To Die a Criminal for the Public Good”: The Execution Ritual in Late Medieval Paris’, in Bernard S. Bachrach and David Nicholas (eds), Law, Custom and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of Bruce Lyon (Kalamazoo, 1990), p. 299; Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden, 1993), pp. 181–201.
J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (2nd edn, London, 1999), pp. 90–2. A similar pattern is identified by Philip Jenkins, ‘From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England’, Criminal Justice History 7 (1986), 52, 56, 61.
Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996), p. 42.
Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering. Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 149–52.
Katherine Royer, ‘The Body in Parts: Reading the Execution Ritual in Late Medieval England’, Historical Reflexions/Réflexions Historiques 29 (2003), 319–39; Danielle Westerhof, ‘Amputating the Traitor: Healing the Social Body in Public Executions for Treason in Late Medieval England’, in Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross (eds), The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture (Toronto, 2013), pp. 177–92.
Katherine Royer, The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700 (London, 2014), Ch. 1.
David Garland, ‘Modes of Capital Punishment: The Death Penalty in Historical Perspective’, in David Garland, Michael Meranze and Randall McGowen (eds), America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present (New York, 2011), p. 36.
Pieter Spierenburg, ‘The Body and the State: Early Modern Europe’, in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford, 1995), p. 50.
Albert Hartshorne, Hanging in Chains (London, 1891).
Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford, 2012), pp. 60–5, 89, 102, 109.
John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981), p. 372; Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, p. 73.
Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Harvard, 2002), p. 72.
J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 528–9; King, ‘Hanging not Punishment Enough’ Ward, Print Culture, Crime and Justice, p. 158.
Steven Wilf, ‘Anatomy and Punishment in Late Eighteenth-Century New York’, Journal of Social History 22 (1989), 515–6.
Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London, 1988).
Peter Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons’, in Douglas Hay et al. (eds), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975), pp. 102–6.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1977).
David Garland, ‘The Problem of the Body in Modern State Punishment’, Social Research: An International Quarterly 78 (2011), 779–80.
Simon Devereaux, ‘Recasting the Theatre of Execution: The Abolition of the Tyburn Ritual’, Past and Present 202 (2009), 127–74.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
This chapter is published under an open access license. Please check the 'Copyright Information' section either on this page or in the PDF for details of this license and what re-use is permitted. If your intended use exceeds what is permitted by the license or if you are unable to locate the licence and re-use information, please contact the Rights and Permissions team.
Copyright information
© 2015 Richard Ward
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ward, R. (2015). Introduction. In: Ward, R. (eds) A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse. Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137444011_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137444011_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55234-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44401-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)