Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary: The Performance of Difference 9781501513237, 9781501517860

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
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
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Frederika Elizabeth Bain Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Gender, Performance, and Material Culture Series Editors Cristina León Alfar (Hunter College, CUNY, USA) Helen Ostovich (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada)

Frederika Elizabeth Bain

Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary The Performance of Difference

ISBN 978-1-5015-1786-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1323-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1295-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943429 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: © The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.638, fol. 16v. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements My first, and deeply heartfelt, thanks go to my graduate advisor, dissertation chair, and continued mentor Valerie Wayne, to whom I am beholden for her scholarship, generosity, and institutional acumen. I thank her for support through both my master’s and my PhD studies, as well as through the years since my graduation: for her excellent editorial skills, for her broad and deep knowledge of early modern literature and its criticism, and for the resources to which she has introduced me; in short, for helping to shape me as a scholar. I am also very grateful to her for initially suggesting that I send my manuscript to MIP for consideration and for her thoughtful and skillful help with the index. Many thanks to dissertation committee member Nell Altizer, now sadly gone, to whom I have owed a debt of gratitude since my undergraduate days and whose compassionate and clear-sighted attention improved any work she touched. I am grateful as well for her consistent gift for asking the questions that hit at the heart of the matter, whatever that matter might be. I owe many thanks as well to committee member Kathryn Hoffmann, who combines brilliant scholarship and incisive insight with the courage to say what needs to be said, and who prompted me to move in an entirely different direction, which turned out to be dismemberment, after reading an earlier dissertation prospectus on a different topic and pronouncing it utterly boring! I am also indebted to her for suggesting that it was time I turn my dissertation into a book and get it published. I am very thankful to two dissertation committee members, Judith Kellogg and Karen Jolly, for introducing me to the Middle Ages and generously allowing me to sit in on classes, as well as for their encouragement, important insights, and factual corrections in bringing the dissertation out of which this book developed to completion. I am especially grateful for Dr. Jolly’s discussion of the resurrection body. And it was in Dr. Kellogg’s class that I first considered the idea of dismemberment as a topic of study, for which I am deeply indebted to her. Great thanks as well to dissertation committee member Mark Heberle for his meticulous scholarship and his generous and careful reading, and for introducing me to the STC on microfilm, an invaluable resource before we had EEBO access! Much gratitude also goes to the late and much-missed Robert McHenry, who taught the first class focusing on early modern literature that I took, in which I discovered that I felt at home and happy in this time period. I am so grateful to present and past members of the MIP, De Gruyter, and Integra teams for their skill, professionalism, and great patience. Thanks go especially to Erika Gaffney, who advocated for the book from the beginning and saw it through to completion with not only consummate expertise but also a

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513237-202

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generosity beyond the call of duty. Thank you very much also to editor-in-chief Theresa Whitaker, content editor Michaela Göbels, Rebecca Straple-Sovers, and project manager David Jüngst. The anonymous readers of my manuscript added much to its final completeness and form with their helpful queries and suggestions. And I am indebted to the astonishing and erudite reading of Leofranc Holford-Strevens, who went far beyond copy-editing to make this book far more accurate and usable than it would have been without him. Any errors that may remain are, of course, entirely my responsibility. I owe so much to writing partner and dear friend April Ching, for her bravery in accepting drafts in all stages of incoherence and for the clear-sighted and kind criticism that has always improved them. I owe her as well for the tremendous amounts of work she did on the references and the index, which would certainly never have been completed without her kindness, as well as for support extending far beyond this book. I am deeply thankful to my parents, who, while originally dubious about the subject matter, nevertheless have wholeheartedly supported me with love and affection. I am grateful to my sister Kiko Doi for her meticulous and generous work on the references and my stepmother Lizabeth Ball for her intelligent discussion, love, and encouragement. Thanks also to Cynthia Chi-Doi for the magic pens she provided to keep me writing! Gratitude goes to the members of the Early Modern Forum, including Valerie Wayne, Elizabeth McCutcheon, Derek Higginbotham, Brenda Machosky, Matt Romaniello, Matt Lauzon, Mark Heberle, Urvashi Chakravarty, and the late Lew Andrews. They not only read several sections of the dissertation and/or the book manuscript and provided valuable feedback on them; they have also taught me so much through discussions and readings on a wide variety of topics. Great gratitude also to friend and religion scholar Jack Collins for translations and discussion of various passages of Hebrew and Greek relating to the pilegesh of Judges 19, and for tracking down and sending me articles and information beyond the call of friendship. I wish to thank the conveners, fellow presenters and seminar members, and audiences of several conference sessions and seminars at which I presented early versions of portions of these chapters, including the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on the “Non-Human Renaissance,” Durham University’s Medieval and Early Modern Student Association conference on “The Mutilated Body,” Oxford University’s Medieval Graduate conference on “Meat,” and Hull University’s conference on “Shakespeare and Early Modern Emotion.” I especially thank Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, organizers of the latter conference, for their helpful insights into the book chapter included in

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their edited collection that developed out of my presentation, which shares some material with Chapter 4 of this book. I am grateful to my former boss, Miles Hakoda, for his flexibility in allowing me to take time off to finish the dissertation from which this book arose and for arranging for assistance with my tasks at work – I have no doubt that I would still be writing had he not done so. Thanks also go to friend and co-worker Heidi Sakuma, who not only offered ideas and encouragement but also provided this assistance, freeing me to write. Above all else, my tremendous thanks and love to Chris Wrenn. He read the entire book at least twice, helping to shape my perspective, clarify my arguments, and refine my writing. He reminded me of the importance of compassion, courage, and balancing the academic with the natural world. His prodigious work in converting all of the citations from MLA to Chicago was a lifesaver, as was his enormous help on the index! His intellectual curiosity and conviction are inspirations, and his support in many areas has sustained me.

Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Attending to Bodies 1 The Presence of Bodies 2 (De)Humanizing 9 Time and Texts 14 The Subject(s) of Dismemberment

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Chapter 1: The Symbolic Body and the Performance of Dismemberment 19 Metaphor and Modification 21 Embodiments 23 “A head on headless Rome” 32 Body Performance 35 Reading and Writing (on) the Body 39 Fragmentations 49 Glossing Cuts 53 The Abstract(ed) Body 60 Chapter 2: Gendered Dismemberments 63 Rape, Adultery, and Sexual Shame 66 Reading and Resisting Rape 66 Rape unto Death 77 “Stuprum Chiron Demetrius” 82 Women’s Quarters 88 Privy Members and Penal Cuts 98 De-Sexing 98 Sins of the Castrator 105 Sinful and Spiritual Circumcisions 116 Looking Forward 125 Chapter 3: Animals of Dismemberment 127 The Hunt 130 The Noble Chase 130 “Woful hunting” and the “ill killed” Deer 137 Human Quarry 147 “The deer / That hath received some unrecuring wound” Metaphors of the Hunt 157

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Butchery 163 Meat-Makers and Misrule 165 Knights, Butchers, and Other Killers On the Other Side of the Line 183

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Chapter 4: The Anguish of the Dismemberer: Executioners and Others 185 Rightful and Wrongful Dismemberers 186 Executing Retribution: Private and Public Vengeance 198 Reading the Headsman 206 The Holiness of the Dismemberer 216 Chapter 5: Coda: After Dismemberment 221 The Afterlives of Body Parts 223 The Tangible Sacred 223 Relics of Infamy 228 The German Custom 231 “These two heads do seem to speak to me” Re-Membering and Resurrection 237 Bibliography Index

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Introduction: Attending to Bodies Manie times and in euery towne where I came, according as I was able, I made declaration of the contentes of the Bible; that therein was set foorth the true and onelie GOD, and his mightie woorkes, that therein was contayned the true doctrine of saluation through Christ, with manie particularities of Miracles and chiefe poyntes of religion . . . And although I told them the booke materially & of itself was not of anie such vertue, . . . but onely the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke ouer all their bodie with it; to shewe their hungrie desire of that knowledge which was spoken of. – A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia1

In the Brief and True Report (1588), an account of early contact between English visitors and the indigenous peoples of Roanoke Island, Thomas Hariot describes with bewilderment what he sees as the latter’s focus on the material at the expense of the spiritual. Instead of apprehending “the doctrine therein contained” in the Bible by listening to the travelers expound its message, they treat the book as a type of fetish, attempting to gain its benefits through physical contact.2 He approves of what he sees as the impetus behind their action, “their hungrie desire of that knowledge,” but assumes it will be impossible to fulfill if they do not abstract themselves from the material. The English travelers hope to dissuade the native people from concretizing their attempted assimilation of the miracles contained in the Bible, maintaining that spiritual import trumps physical object. At the same time, as Hariot earlier makes clear, it is precisely those technologically superior material objects displayed by the English, including “Mathematicall instruments, sea compasses, [and] . . . burning glasses,” that bring the native priests to a crisis of spiritual belief and thence to the beginnings of their conversion to Christianity.3 Despite Hariot’s denial, then, the passage serves as a reminder that so far from merely acting as a placeholder for meaning, the material plays an important, even essential part in creating meaning. As such it gestures towards a central concern of the present study: while I recognize that the body has often been used to signify outside or beyond itself, at the same time I argue that it also be acknowledged for its inherent signification, for the stubborn fact of its existence.

1 Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1588), 27. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 2 I am grateful to Christine Varnado for bringing this incident to my attention. 3 Hariot, Brief and True Report, 27. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513237-001

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The Presence of Bodies In the medieval and early modern periods as today, the body may be used as vehicle of many figures, material of many symbols. Throughout the following chapters I examine textual and visual representations of dismemberment in terms of their symbolic import, particularly their relation to conceptions of the human. Discussions of the animal–human boundary, monstrosity, gender, social class, and religious difference are related to the central subject of the alteration of the human body by fragmentation. I argue that dismemberment can be seen as falling at one end of a continuum of bodily alterations used to create meaning through the body or to manifest or concretize – that is, to perform – meaning assumed to inhere in it. Yet I acknowledge that dismemberment differs in kind as well as extent from other forms of alteration, negating the body’s much-praised unity, its God-given organization. If the body is divinely created in order to stand as a figure for larger systems such as the state, the land, the cosmos – a common understanding in the medieval and early modern periods – its dismembering has specific, though varied, symbolic valences. A single example is James VI and I’s warning in the Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) that for the health of the body politic, diseased members – traitorous subjects – may need to be amputated from the corpus politicum, an image that is found throughout discussions of political philosophy: “it may very well fall out that the head will be forced to garre cut off some rotten member . . . to keepe the rest of the body in integritie: but what state the body can be in, if the head . . . be cut off, I leaue it to the readers iudgement.”4 While much work has been done on the metaphors and symbolism surrounding the body in medieval and early modern England, including the figure of the corpus politicum illustrated here and discussed in chapter 1, relatively little attention has been given to the effects of these abstractions on the treatment of medieval and early modern bodies. In this book I not only examine metaphors created through bodily fragmentation; I also attempt, as possible, to acknowledge their physical effects, the ways physical bodies were treated as a consequence of beliefs about the body. It is important to note, though, that the relation is not so simple as cause and consequence. Rather, the movement is recursive: somatic metaphors may lead to physical acts that are then described in texts or that may inform textual characters’ bodies without a basis in physical action; these texts create new metaphors, or reify or alter existing ones,

4 James VI and I, Trew Law of Free Monarchies. Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 78.

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which may then provide the impetus for further physical acts. King James’s body-of-state metaphor reflects not only the centuries of use of this rhetorical figure but also the historical acts that were realizations of this idea, the instances of physical dismemberment of traitors in a specifically prescribed ritual designed as an enactment on their bodies of what must be done symbolically to the body politic to rid it of their taint. Likewise, it prefigures the further executions that took place after this writing whose ritual was influenced by this metaphor. An important influence on my analysis and approach throughout this study is Elaine Scarry’s landmark work The Body in Pain.5 Drawing on extensive study of patients’ and doctors’ writings and accounts of torture and warfare, Scarry admirably balances theoretical rigor with empathy, achieving the latter despite what she identifies as a foundational point, the basic unshareability of pain. Explaining that somatic pain is unshareable not only because it is difficult to express in coherent words but also because of the impossibility of feeling another’s physical pain in one’s own body,6 she then explores the political and other ramifications of this unshareability.7 Among these ramifications, she argues, are acts of torture and war, to which I would add the act of execution and other punitive markings and dismemberments. These acts she sees as only made possible by the injurers’ ability not to feel in their own bodies the pain they inflict upon others. Another consequence of humans’ inability to fully comprehend the pain of others, Scarry argues, is the possibility – even the inevitability – of reading meaning and symbolism into fragmented bodies.8 She explores the multipotent ways that representations and manifestations of injury have been used to create meaning, from narratives of state-building to biblical stories. Physical pain often negates, as Scarry and others who study it emphasize, the ability to move beyond its insistent somatic presence to an abstract contemplation of the significations of what has caused it. However, this limitation does not constrain those who perform and represent such signifying injuries,9 who are free to make whatever meaning they desire from the acts of bodily alteration they accomplish or observe. Such alternate meanings readily attach to the instances of bodily violation and partition because at the same time that the ability not to

5 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 6 Ibid., 5–11. 7 Ibid., 11–19 and throughout. 8 Ibid., 120–26 and throughout. 9 Ibid., 12.

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feel the pain inflicted allows the injurer or observer to create meanings from the injuries, a deep somative identification strengthens the effect of the meaning that is created.10 The inflictor or spectator may not feel physical pain, but she or he nonetheless feels, and apprehends. Scarry identifies the body as “the original site of reality,” arguing that “the visible and experienceable alteration of injury has a compelling and vivid reality because it resides in the human body.”11 That is, when the body is altered through injury, the way the world is mediated through the experience of one’s own and other’s bodies also alters. She explicates the process by which an assertion may be “juxtaposed to a body part that ‘demonstrates’ or ‘substantiates’ the truth of the assertion by itself having indisputable ‘substance’ that somehow is read as belonging to its counterpart”: looking at an injury, [i]t is as though the human mind, confronted by the open body itself . . . does not have the option of failing to perceive the reality that rushes unstoppably across his [sic] eyes or into his mind, yet the mind so flees from what it sees that it will with almost equal speed perform the countermovement of assigning the attribute to something else, especially if there is something else at hand ready to receive the rejected attribute, ready to act as its referent.12

In Scarry’s view the injured, opened body is a potent vehicle for meaning precisely because of its shocking and horrific impact: the very inability not to be viscerally affected by its presence leads to its freighting with additional and perhaps entirely alternate meaning as a way of avoiding apprehension of its primary meaning, the destruction of a fellow human being. This process Scarry refers to as “bodily translation.”13 Dismemberment, the most dislocative injury, may thus be among the most open to meaning. This can be seen vividly in the convicted traitor’s execution by drawing and quartering, discussed in greater detail in chapters 1 and 5. This multi-stage process involved a series of dismemberments, each detailed and often “read” for the edification of the condemned, the audience who watched the extended execution, and the reader of the descriptions. Not only do execution narratives and chronicle accounts often explain what each successive dismemberment or other punishment is intended to signify; the executioner or

10 Ibid., 125–26. 11 Ibid., 121. Emphasis in original. While “reality” may be a much-debated concept, Scarry uses it here in a relatively constrained manner, to refer to an individual’s experience of the world. 12 Ibid., 126. 13 Ibid.

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other official might also speak to the audience and to the condemned himself, expounding on the meaning of what was being done. For the latter, this explanation may have been of limited practical use. As William Slights points out, “Traitors were made to gaze upon their own corrupt hearts, yanked from their breasts by the executioner, but the next moment, they were dead.”14 In unspeakable agony and terror, and unable to live beyond a few seconds more, how much edification might the condemned have been assumed able to assimilate? Another purpose must have been at play in the repeated exegeses on fragmentation. Read in the context of Scarry’s theory, the insistence on signification during this ritual begins to feel like an urgent attempt to attach huge amounts of meaning to what has become, through the repeated openings and other violations of the body, a vertiginous meaning-space gaping to be filled. The mention of drawing and quartering leads readily to another foundational author on the subject of pain and punition, Michel Foucault, whose approach is almost diametrically opposed to Scarry’s. Foucault’s classic Discipline and Punish is nearly universally cited among discussions of punishment, torture, and execution, including those relating to the early modern and even the medieval period, although his emphasis is generally on later eras. Foucault argues that while during the ancien régime the state performed spectacular executions in order to demonstrate its power over individuals’ bodies, after the mid-eighteenth century punishment became hidden, while “[t]he body as the major target of penal repression disappeared.”15 His very emphasis on the use of physical punishment to point a lesson, one of the insights for which he is best known, illustrates his primary focus on the symbolism of the punishment. While I follow Foucault in his attention to the symbolic aspects of bodily partition, I look not only at punition but also at a variety of other sites of and impetuses for dismemberment. I argue as well that their symbolic meanings, while including reification of the power of the state, are by no means limited to this. Where I depart most from Foucault, however, is not in argument but in the attitude with which I attempt to approach the material. For Foucault, the symbolic almost entirely eclipses the physical. He does not discuss those who are punished beyond the moment of the execution or evince any empathy for them. He does not question why forms of punishment can be used to symbolize what they do or, as Scarry does, why they should symbolize anything. After detailing such torments as breaking on the wheel, which “prolong[s] the agony, . . . [and] 14 William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 100. 15 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 8.

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quartering, which carries pain almost to infinity,”16 he praises “[t]he very excess of violence employed” as “one of the elements of its glory.”17 It is possible, though not clear, that he is here ventriloquizing the supposed sentiments of the torturers. While it may overstate the case to argue, as Katherine Royer does, “Foucault revels in the violence on the scaffold,”18 it does not overstate it by much. He evinces no more empathy for the reader. He begins the book, with no mediation or discussion beyond the heading “Supplice” (“Torture”), with a sedulously detailed and graphic three-page description, drawn from several eye-witness accounts, of the torture and failed equine quartering of attempted regicide RobertFrançois Damiens in 1757. This is followed immediately by a quote of a page and a half detailing the rules for a French prison house written in 1838, after which Foucault comments, “We have, then, a public execution and a time-table . . . each define a certain penal style.”19 Damiens is mentioned only twice more throughout the book, in reference to certain physical details of his execution. He, and his minutely described agony, have been used for no other reason than to provide a point of comparison with a later “penal style,” while the reader has been made a perhaps unwilling and certainly unprepared witness to this agony for the same purpose. Due, perhaps, to the brilliance of Foucault’s analysis, his influence is seen in the attitude as well as the argument of other scholars in their discussions of execution and other forms of punition. In her recent monograph on execution narratives, Royer describes “many historians” as being “so distracted by what was done to the body on the scaffold that they have often failed to look closely at the history of the ritual.”20 While her book admirably addresses important gaps in the scholarship on the execution narrative, I would disagree that many scholars have been overly “distracted” by the body; I instead suggest that a focus on the spectacle and theatricality of representations of execution has often obscured, to a greater or lesser extent, the realization that such executions were performed on the physical bodies of human beings, as well as that many more bodies were dismembered outside of the context of spectacular execution, during formal or informal punition, war, and religious practice.

16 Ibid., 33. 17 Ibid., 34. 18 Katherine Royer, The English Execution Narrative 1200–1700 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 2. 19 Foucault, Discipline, 7. 20 Royer, English Execution Narrative, 1.

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Such considerations of the human and the body do appear in certain works in the burgeoning field of studies of punishment and violence. In his discussion of eighteenth-century British scaffold executions and the horrors they entailed, V. A. C. Gatrell recounts an epiphany he came to during his research: “Few historians have looked closely at it [the scaffold], and I soon understood why. People did not die neatly on it. Watched by thousands, they urinated, defecated, screamed, kicked, fainted, and choked as they died. I was nauseated to realize this obscenity.”21 It is this realization, he explains, that brought him to undertake the work he has done, to acknowledge those who have been executed. Gatrell is joined in his concern by a few other scholars such as Andrea McKenzie22 and Francis Barker. In a note in his essay “Treasures of Culture,” which includes carefully tabulated figures on hanging deaths and other executions in London and Middlesex from the late sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth century, Barker confesses the difficulty of researching and writing about this subject: [T]he process . . . was extremely unpleasant, and one that I found, moreover, morally and politically uneasy . . . it was only possible to do this work for short periods of time before the revulsion became too much. It was not possible to forget – which is what numbers often help us to do – that it is the untimely extinction of real lives which is enumerated in these figures.23

Gatrell and McKenzie work exclusively with historical sources in these monographs, and while Barker is a literary critic, the context of his comment is a discussion of historical occurrences. Scarry and Foucault, likewise, refer to historical – and, in Scarry’s case, relatively current – events. When discussing dismemberments presented as wholly fictional, however, the stance of the critic becomes more complicated. To assert that “executions were performed” and “bodies were dismembered” as statements of fact gestures towards a constellation of issues surrounding “reality,” not to mention the question of empathy for nonexistent people. This study looks at a broad range of texts falling at different points along the continuum of representation of and abstraction from the body, ranging from execution narratives and historical chronicle accounts that purport to have their genesis in “actual” events, through religious representations whose perceived “truth” varies according to the spiritual beliefs of their

21 V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vii. 22 Andrea McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs (London: Continuum, 2007). 23 Francis Barker, “Treasures of Culture: Titus Andronicus and Death by Hanging,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 248n23.

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audience, to medieval romance narratives that make little or no truth claim. It can be argued to some extent that questions of facticity are irrelevant: the representation has its own truth as a cultural text and is read and analyzed accordingly. However, with a subject such as dismemberment, in a study only made possible through the representations of broken and bloodied bodies, both generic and ethical considerations call for differing treatments of these sources. To say it does not matter whether bodies were “really” cut apart verges on the callous. Culturally important metaphors have physical repercussions, and it feels necessary to acknowledge how many bodies were injured and killed in the making of such metaphors and texts and to treat these bodies with respect and empathy. Though I have found no final resolution to this question, I attempt throughout this analysis to negotiate these sometimes-contradictory considerations. At the same time, it is vital to emphasize that dismemberment in the medieval and early modern period need not be negative in its signification. Scarry discusses wounds and bodily partition primarily in the context of punition, battlefield casualty, and accident, while Foucault focuses, as his title conveys, on punishment. However, dismemberment is represented in many contexts beyond these, from the translation of saints’ relics to the distributive burials of lay nobility. Such dismemberments may be coded as laudatory and holy, undergone by the saintly and the high born. They were performed for purposes that modern-day readers may not intuitively see as possible outcomes of bodily fragmentation, such as communion with the divine, demonstration of wealth and power, and connection with living intimates. The original impetus for this study was an attempt to understand what appeared to be the non-negative valence of a representation of bodily fragmentation, that of the “Levite’s wife” of Judges 19. A series of illustrations in the thirteenth-century Morgan Crusader Bible details her rape unto death by a mob in Gibeah and her subsequent cutting into pieces by her husband, who then sends her off, severally, to the leaders of the tribes of Israel to incite them to war. As I discuss in chapter 2, the illuminations make clear that this woman’s rape is coded as wrongful, and yet her dismemberment is not necessarily so coded. First begun as an exercise in examining cultural assumptions, the search for other medieval and then early modern representations of dismemberments that are coded as neutral or even positive eventually led to this book. Caroline Walker Bynum is one of relatively few scholars who have traced the possible positive significations of bodily fragmentation as they manifest through varying practices over an extended span of time. In The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, she shows that by the twelfth century “a new enthusiasm for bodily partition . . . was made possible by the confidence in ultimate victory over it . . . bodies were divided in order to bestow their power

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more widely.”24 She argues that “they were divided because they were crucial to, and therefore distributed, self”25 through their own distribution, though she also acknowledges the “ambivalence”26 surrounding the idea of fragmenting that self. In Wonderful Blood, Bynum points out that “the motifs of dismemberment in fifteenth-century devotion are often about access or wholeness, not partition,” while “the body parts of Christ and the saints . . . are synecdoches for the whole person – indeed, for the glorified person.”27 Dismemberment, she argues, so far from focusing upon the taking apart, the making un-whole, of a person, can as readily stand as a process by which the self is multiplied, every individual part manifesting the whole.

(De)Humanizing Whether positively or negatively coded, fictionalized or purportedly historical, the texts discussed throughout this study manifest a pervasive concern with meaning-making, and more specifically identity-making. A significant category of meaning-performance associated with dismemberment is that perennially fascinating subject, the defining of the human. Just as the category of the human is interrogated today by the existence of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmentive prostheses, in the medieval and early modern periods it is primarily defined in relation to animals, supernatural beings, and monstrous or othered races. That hybrid creatures and monstrous births could be considered the possible products of miscegenation between an animal and a human up through the seventeenth century illustrates that the category of humanness was not conceived at this time as fully separate and inviolate.28 The

24 Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 213. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 213–14. 27 Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 14. 28 For other discussions of the sometimes tenuous boundary between human and animal, see Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011) and Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For an analysis of dehumanizing representations as methods of naturalizing exploitation, subjection, or enmity, see Peter Burke, “Frontiers of the Monstrous: Perceiving National Characters in Early Modern Europe,” in Monstrous Bodies/ Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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concepts of inspiration – being filled with the Holy Spirit – or possession – being taken over from within by the Devil or his minions – also imply the understanding that one who seemed human on the outside might not be fully human within. But one of the most compelling indicators of humanity, then as now, is human appearance, including possession of all the parts usual to humans. Even cases of inspiration or possession tend to be represented as manifesting through or marking the human body: stigmata, incorruptibility, a fragrant odor may show the presence of the divine in the body of the saint, while traces of demonic presence may be demonstrated by an extra nipple or other devil’s mark, a lingering tail or paw showing the witch’s incomplete transfer back from her animal form. Any excess or lack, such as appears among the monstrous races identified in such texts as Pliny’s Natural History – the Blemmyae, with their missing heads; the Sciapods, with their single foot – denotes a deviation from the human. Bodily lack is coded as teratological when the missing body part has been deliberately removed as well as when it fails to grow naturally: the Amazons are represented as monstrous in part because they practice mastectomy. Theseus’s son Hippolytus, as he is described in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is torn apart by his horses after being accused of attempting to seduce his stepmother. The result, as he himself explains – after having been dismembered, resurrected, and deified – is that “[t]here did not whole remain / One peece of all my corse by which ye might discern as tho / What lump or part it was” (15:590–92).29 He has been fragmented beyond the point of having individual, signifying members; only “lumps” are left. The ontological ambiguity surrounding those who are dismembered is exploited in descriptions of spectacular executions to cast doubt on the humanness of the one dismembered: if he was willing to betray the state, can he be truly human? Is there something already fractured within him that the tearing apart makes manifest, an enactment on the flesh of what already exists in the spirit? The humanity of those mutilated might be questionable even if the dismemberment was not retributive. Discussing a fifteenth-century legal case brought by someone whose nose had been severed, Valentin Groebner quotes a bill of indictment that pronounces, “The face is the most noble part of a human being, . . . and a person becomes ganz ungestalt, completely disfigured, utterly hideous when his or her face is mutilated.”30 Groebner notes that the word “ungestalt” is also used to describe “the wounded

29 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2000). 30 Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York: Zone, 2004), 12.

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and the dead on late-medieval battlefields,” due to “the extreme violence that made humans formless and identification impossible.”31 Mutilation and dismemberment, then, cause their victims to lose that which is most human. This is not, however, always a negative. Saints, martyred in often dismembering ways, are portrayed with reverence and admiration as lacking essential body parts. Their dismemberment has opened the way for them to become, with God’s grace, other than – more than – human. The humanity of those who dismember may be questioned as well. Those required to cut apart either animals or people in the course of their professions, such as butchers or executioners, may be assumed to have had their human – empathetic – responses blunted, while stereotypically violent others, such as Saracens in accounts of the Crusades, may be represented as akin to wild beasts, devils, or monsters, ravening on and tearing apart human flesh. The ready availability of negative associations with dismembering practices therefore heightens the necessity of presenting bodily fragmentation that is meant to be coded as legitimate and just in the appropriate form. This form, I show, often involves the attribution of appropriate symbolic purpose to the partitioning, as well as the demonstration that understood identity categories are performed by the act. In this study each chapter examines different contexts within which making meaning and marking humanness through dismemberment are realized. Chapter 1 begins by looking at the widespread use of somatic metaphor, which relates the concept of the body to larger systems or institutions and which provides the context for examples throughout this book of the connection between body symbology and forms of dismemberment. This discussion is concretized in the first section of an analysis of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus that extends throughout the book. I then consider the concept of body performance, which I use in this study to denote a form of self- or other-fashioning that deploys the conceptual or physical body to manifest or illustrate specific meanings. The analysis then turns to the differing ways that descriptions of physical appearance and acts of physical alteration create meaning by performing in bodily form an individual’s spiritual nature, social class, or other attributes. The most extreme alterations, dismemberments, differ in kind as well as extent from other forms of alteration, even wounding, as I show in readings of the medieval romance Eger and Grime and John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge. Representations of dismemberment, particularly dismembering punishments, frequently include a commentary that puts into words what the fragmentation of the body enacts. The

31 Ibid.

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final section discusses the punishment of drawing and quartering as a form of spectacular performance that accessed, reified, and even shaped body symbolisms through both action and exegesis. Chapter 2 looks specifically at instances of dismemberment that vary in method or signification according to the gender of the one dismembered, and at dismemberments of gendered body parts: representations of castration and circumcision, descriptions of women being quartered by horses, and the pervasively assumed connection between dismemberment and rape. I argue that representations of rape frequently are coupled with those of other dismemberments in order to perform and make visible the sexual violation, as in the illustration in the Morgan Crusader Bible of the rape and dismemberment of the Levite’s wife in Judges 19 and the dismemberments attendant upon and performative of Lavinia’s sexual violation in Titus Andronicus. At the same time, I show that the corresponding punishments of bodily fragmentation ordered for rapists underscore the assumed connection between rape and gendered dismemberment as well as the potential for de-sexing understood to be inherent in both. A section on equine quartering reads three medieval texts, The Owl and the Nightingale, Arthur and Gorlagon, and the Roman de Silence, in relation to their deployment of this spectacular punishment in narratives that enact the shaming of the female characters. Circumcision and castration crystallize fears of the violations of the male body and also the Christian community assumed to be carried out by religious and ethnic others, as can be seen in Thomas Middleton’s city comedy The Roaring Girl and Philip Massinger’s Turk play The Renegado. In these representations of bodily fragmentation, I argue, the body is altered by means of its gendered parts in ways that emphasize, downplay, or even purport to reverse its gender. Chapter 3 considers two areas of human dismemberment of animals, butchering and hunting, in connection with representations of the dismemberment of humans. The partition of humans may recall the techniques used to take apart animals, wild or domestic, and such dismemberments may be represented as performances through the body, causing it to show forth the victim’s own animalistic tendencies, as appears in the Middle English Sir Eglamour and Sir Orfeo as well as Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, the Actaeon masque in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, and the butchery and hunting imagery in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI. Conversely, those representations may also serve to perform the animalism of the dismemberers: from associating too much with beasts and habitually killing animals, they are sometimes seen to have lost their full humanity, a lack they may manifest by dismembering humans with no more concern than they quarter beasts. Not only the animal–human boundary but also social class structures are policed through positive and negative representations of hunters and butchers and the varying expectations that they may also fragment human

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beings: though each kills and dismembers animals, the former are more often lauded for their activities, while the latter are denigrated, as the medieval romance Octovian Imperator shows. The arenas of human dismemberment toward which each is assumed to gravitate likewise differ: hunting is considered training for soldiers, while butchers may prove to be merely murderers. The chapter also includes the third portion of the analysis of Titus Andronicus, which discusses dismemberments in the play performed in the context of the hunt. In chapter 4, I look at questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, particularly retributive violence in the form of state-ordered execution, and how these categories relate to the formation of social, ethnic, and religious identity. I trace how the representation of dismemberment-prone racial/ethnic and religious others is used in the creation of an English identity, showing that an important component of this identity is the eschewing of “excessive” violence except for specific symbol-laden purposes. Contravening this standard frequently brings the humanity of these characters, as well as their national and religious identity, into question, as is illustrated in Richard Coer de Lion and Sir Gowther and in Johnson’s Most Famous History and Massinger’s Renegado. The chapter then examines representations of those who kill humans by judicial means, considering the infamy and dishonor associated with executioners and why such significations may be less pronounced in English texts. The discussion is grounded in representations of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and a reading of Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy. It ends by noting occasional depictions of mutilative violence against innocents as furthering God’s work, insofar as such violence is an integral component of martyrdom. Chapter 5 serves as a coda, discussing the aftermath of dismemberment. The first section, on the afterlives of body parts post-dismemberment, shows their use as repositories of meaning, including the ways they might be modified to create or enhance their signification. Arenas of such uses include manifestations of the relic cult, the distributive burial of the body parts of the nobility, and the display of the body parts of dismembered criminals after the execution for shaming or retributive purposes. This discussion is concretized by the final section of the analysis of Titus Andronicus, which reads the many signifying body parts of the play. In the conclusion to the chapter and the book, I discuss the concept of rememberment, or reattaching of body parts, and its relation to the doctrine of the resurrection body, showing that the very belief in reintegration might have been what allowed for the multiple significations of dismemberment.

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Introduction: Attending to Bodies

Time and Texts This study spans the period between the late eleventh century, which saw both the beginning of the Crusades and the conquest and reapportioning of England’s own territory, and the late seventeenth century, when the repercussions of the beheading of Charles I in 1649 had taken on renewed resonance after the reestablishment of the monarchy under his son Charles II. Hence it encompasses large portions of the medieval and early modern periods, spanning up to 700 years and, in England, some five languages: Latin; Anglo-Norman; and Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Political and religious changes are rife through these years, and the very borders of the country are in question and in flux. But these complications themselves contribute to the discussion, insofar as many forms and representations of dismemberment were used as ways to engage with and enact societal concerns and disruptions. There are important reasons for discussing these time periods in conjunction with each other, particularly in a study such as this. The continuity and divergence of religious traditions is a salient consideration, especially as so many occasions of dismemberment are connected with religious belief and practice. Notions of monarchy and the place of the nobility, which also inform practices and representations of bodily fragmentation, are helpful to trace over a longer span of time as well. “One of the merits of studying such a broad span of time,” John Appleby says in explaining the date range in his collection Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society ca. 1066–ca. 1600, “is the way in which it allows deep continuities to emerge.”32 Royer, whose monograph spans the years 1200 to 1700, explains that her choice of range is based on the particular events and changes in cultural thought that occur at its beginning and end.33 In the interests of uncovering both “deep continuities” and the time-, location-, and genre-specific differences in treatments of dismemberment, this book draws on both medieval and early modern texts as the bases for discussing each topic, with the disparities and similarities of their treatment noted. I analyze the ways the texts represent themes and tropes over time and discuss the historical contexts relevant to such similitude and divergence. Some texts are taken up in more than one chapter, while certain themes recur in different contexts and with different emphases over the course of the study. Middle English

32 John Appleby and Paul Dalton, eds. Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society ca. 1066–ca. 1600 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 5–6. 33 Royer, English Execution Narrative, 7–9.

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texts are quoted in the original, and modernizations or translations – my own, unless otherwise noted – are given as necessary. Latin and Anglo-Norman sources are quoted in the original, if that is relevant to the discussion, followed by a translation, either my own or that of a published modern edition. The Golden Legend, an immensely popular collection of saints’ lives that varies considerably as to content and wording in its multiple versions, is quoted in any of several editions depending on the subject matter contained in them: a modern translation by William Granger Ryan of the original Latin, hereafter referenced as the Golden Legend, and the 1483 and 1498 Middle English translations by William Caxton, identified as necessary. A considerable generic range is represented in this study as well. The texts discussed include drama, romance, hagiography, legends and stories, chronicles and other histories, polemics and sermons, travel narratives, medical and midwifery manuals, and cheap print ballads and accounts of contemporary events. Such a variety of materials offers a sense of the broad range of textual media that incorporated representations of dismemberment as well as the differing ways particular genres treated them. I also discuss a small selection of visual representations, primarily woodcuts and manuscript illustrations but a few larger-scale paintings as well. Though this study is primarily based in literary analysis, it began in response to an image, and it has been impossible not to acknowledge the importance of visual culture throughout the following chapters. Including images in the discussion also provides the opportunity to address an expanded and diversified audience, those who might not have read or listened to textual materials. This is an important factor, considering the limited literacy rates prevailing in England in the periods under study.34 Certain tropes appear more frequently in visual than in textual media, including aspects of the blood libel against the Jews, the reviling of the tormentors of Jesus, and the extreme damage done to Jesus’s body during his Passion. Other tropes appear

34 In Chapter 1 of Dido’s Daughters, Margaret Ferguson offers a nuanced discussion of the many ways literacy has been defined and of scholars’ ability or lack thereof to ascertain the relative levels of these various forms, but she summarizes that it is “accepted, if not uniformly interpreted, by all historians of literacy I have read [. . .that] the majority of the population of Europe between the fourth and the eighteenth centuries was unable to read or write alphabetically in any language.” Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003), 72. See also Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 55–68.

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less often or are wholly eclipsed in visual sources, such as the equine quartering of women and Christ’s often-discussed but never-pictured circumcision.35 Visual images not only may include different subject matter; they may also have a more visceral emotional impact than written descriptions. Citing Roger Bacon’s “awareness of the extent to which ocular experience fails to fully differentiate self and other by virtue of its enduring fleshliness,” Robert Mills points out that “medieval theories of vision themselves expressed the idea that acts of looking are also, in a sense, acts of sensory intercorporation.”36 Seeing an image or object feels intuitively like taking it into one’s body, in a way that reading or hearing text may not. This can be particularly noticeable with images of bodily fragmentation, which I have found over the course of my research to be much more difficult to look at than verbal descriptions with corresponding levels of detail. Although the generic range of this study is broad, the geographic range is narrow. The texts discussed are almost solely those of the British Isles, while continental practices and sources, usually given in footnotes, provide context and contrast. This is not only a means of limiting a very large corpus of material but, more importantly, is based on the contention that there are uniquely English deployments of these tropes that are used for particular reasons, including the creation of a national identity.37 The formulation of a national English identity in opposition to violent acts, which are imagined as performed only by others, is discussed further in chapters 2 and 4. England’s unique religious history also creates a strong effect on its literary and visual traditions, including their representations of bodily fragmentation.

The Subject(s) of Dismemberment Finally, the choice of the book’s subject matter may be worth addressing more fully. Regina Janes, author of Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and

35 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 54, 166. 36 Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion, 2005), 19. 37 Larissa Tracy makes a similar argument: while “[t]orture appears more frequently in English literary texts than in continental ones,” it often appears in contexts that condemn its use, characterizing the torturers as ethnically or racially distinct from the English and valorizing the English legal system for prohibiting the practice, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 134.

The Subject(s) of Dismemberment

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Culture, explicitly addresses in her preface her audience’s imagined reservations: “Why should anyone, especially nice people like you and me, be interested in a topic so repellent as beheadings?” She responds to this query with another: “Why should anyone, especially sophisticated people like you and me, regard so widespread a cultural practice as beheadings as repellent?”38 Her second question makes the valid assumption that “so widespread a cultural practice” is inherently deserving of study. The many and varied instances of decapitation in particular and dismemberment more generally imply that they have meant much to the many who have practiced them. Janes’s study covers a far greater geographic and temporal range than does the present one, but representations of dismemberment are certainly “widespread” throughout the medieval and early modern periods in England. God causes the eyes of St. Alban’s executioner to fall out of his head at the moment his axe stroke beheads the saint, so he will be unable to gloat over the dismemberment he has caused. Visionary Margery Kempe imagines herself chopped up into stew meat to succor suffering humanity. Enraged villagers castrate a Jewish man accused of adultery with a Christian woman. Richard the Lionheart decapitates Saracen prisoners and serves their boiled heads to their relatives at a banquet. Sejanus is torn apart by a mob, the members of which barter his body parts with each other. These are only a small sampling of the incidents that appear in the English literature and history of the eleventh through the seventeenth century. Numerous scholars have likewise acknowledged both the wealth of source material in this time period and the compelling nature of the subject matter, from studies on specific cultural practices such as female saints’ cutting off their noses to protect their virginity to broad overviews of the representation of suffering, from archaeological examinations of the bones of quartered criminals to literary analyses of the significations of amputation in the chansons de geste. However, the full answer to Janes’s first question, and by extension my own, is not adequately encapsulated in the second. Beheadings and other dismemberments are repellent, horrific, or tragic, even when they are coded as laudatory rather than punitive; and knowing that they occur with alarming regularity may make them more, not less, alarming. But at the same time, this in itself need not be a reason to avoid discussing them; it is only a reason to reflect thoughtfully on them, as I have tried to do, for the historical, cultural, and literary insights they offer and for the human communion that may be found.

38 Regina Janes, Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005), ix.

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

1 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea sanctorum, sive, Lombardica historia, trans. William Caxton (London, 1483), image 403. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. As Donna Trembinski shows in “Insensate Saints,” different versions of St. James the Martyr’s life, like other saints’ lives, show varying levels of meaning-making, from the lushly signifying Vita sancti Jacobi Intercisi (ca. tenth to eleventh century) to the later Liber epilogorum (1245–54) by the Dominican friar Bartholomew of Trent, which pares away the exposition on the dismemberments found in James’s earlier vitae in favor of less embellished accounts of torture. The Legenda aurea (1267–98; Caxton’s translation first 1483) falls between them in extent of explanatory exposition, but as it was far more influential than either of the others, it is primarily used in this discussion. Trembinski, “Insensate Saints: Contextualizing Non-Suffering in Early Dominican Legendaries,” Florilegium 23, no. 2 (2006). 2 de Voragine, Legenda aurea, 391. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513237-002

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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

3 4 5 6

Ibid., image 403. In this translation of the Legenda aurea, the book is foliated, not paginated. Ibid. Original quoted and translated in Trembinski, “Insensate Saints,” 132. de Voragine, Legenda aurea, 392.

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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 humaninitiated 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

7 Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds. Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 6.

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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.

8 Ibid., 7. 9 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1997), xii. 10 Michael C. Frank, Edward Vul, and Scott P. Johnson, “Development of Infant’s Attention to Faces During the First Year,” Cognition 110 (2009), 160. 11 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 125.

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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 midseventeenth 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

12 See Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) and David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (Berlin: Mouton, 1971). 13 Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (New York, New York: Palgrave, 2001), 4. 14 Hale, The Body Politic, 40. 15 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67. 16 Hale, The Body Politic, 97. 17 It has never been argued, to my knowledge, that observation of the body’s system of order led to the formulation of a system of government or a social construction.

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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 body altogether do stande the body in . . . we are to you very eyes, hands, feete & altogether.20

18 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Kastan (London: Arden, 1998, repr. 2001). 19 Paul Archambault, “The Analogy of the ‘Body’ in Renaissance Political Thought,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 29 (1967): 34. 20 A Letter Sent by the Maydens of London (London: Thomas Hacket, 1567), image 3. Early English Books Online. There is debate as to whether this letter was actually written by the maids, or whether it was created by an anonymous author – male or female – but presented as having been written by them as a way of giving the argument greater weight. However, it is worth noting that even if it were written by a single man rather than by a group of women, it

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In this passage there is no sense that what is higher, whether in physical or in social position, is more essential. The maids assert their importance and necessity, arguing that they are as indispensable to their mistresses as body members are to the body. Margaret Cavendish uses a similar somatic metaphor in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1668) to point out that all people and plants and animals are “the constitutive parts of nature, which are, as it were, the ingredients of which nature is made up as one entire self-moving body,”21 again muting the sense of hierarchy. Uses of the figure associated with women were not always egalitarian, however; representations of “the Elizabethan body politic,” which as Susanne Scholz argues were generally formulated with an eye to pleasing the queen, tend to present an extremely hierarchical, even grotesquely imbalanced, form of the figure, one in which “the head had absorbed the body.”22 A corollary to the idea of the body as social organizing principle is the use, particularly in the early modern period, of disease metaphors to show civic disruption.23 In many imagined diseases of the body of state, the tyrant is shown to be a sickness infecting the body politic, for which the cure is to rid the body of that sickness. At the same time, the infection figure could also be employed for conservative ends, placing any dissident against the monarchy in the role of diseased member, as in James VI and I’s Trew Law, discussed in the introduction. In the context of early modern transnational economies and mercantilism, Jonathan Gil Harris reads “the pathologization of foreign bodies as the enabling discursive condition for the globally connected nation state,”24 although he makes clear here and elsewhere that such “foreign,” diseased bodies are just as commonly English people who do not conform to accepted notions of Englishness, including witches, Catholics, and Jews. An associated argument often fostered by this metaphor is that diseased members must be amputated or cauterized to prevent infection from spreading to

was considered characteristic of the maids that they would employ such a rhetorical strategy. I am grateful to Urvashi Chakravarty for directing me to this source. 21 Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16. 22 Susanne Scholz, Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 5. 23 See especially Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 24 Harris, Sick Economies, 2.

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the rest of the body. Jacob Soll argues that in early modern France, the idea of the corpus politicum was employed and manipulated beginning in the sixteenth century by the royal doctors of France to create an entirely new mode of political thought. They “not only treated the king’s body, they also became royal counselors and suggested ways in which the king could treat the body of his kingdom,” thus “transform[ing] the ancient corporeal metaphor into tangible political policy.”25 In a relatively rare exception to the general critical silence surrounding the physical consequences of these abstract concepts, Soll points out that this physicalizing of the king’s spiritual body may have led to or at any rate made imaginable the literal royal and noble decapitations that were later carried out during the French Revolution. An important subset of the organizing principle of institution as body involves the organization of the Church, which more commonly shows a focus on the body members’ interdependence rather than their existence in strict hierarchy.26 This figure is generally traced to 1 Corinthians 12:12–27, which begins, “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one bodie: so also is Christ.” It concludes, “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it: or one member be honoured, all the members reioyce with it. Now yee are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”27 This trope is elaborated throughout early writings on the nature of the Church, as in the City of God. Augustine here explicates in detail the biblical passages referencing this figure, explaining the relation of “every single part” to “the whole body, which is made up of all its parts,”28 all subsumed in the “fullness” of Christ. In practice, the somatic metaphor of Christians as members of the body of the Church manifests through the Middle Ages not only in the emphasis on the inviolate body of the virgin martyr as a stand-in for the Church, as discussed in chapter 2, but also in a tendency on the part of the Church to regulate the (nonsexual as well as sexual) body-practices of its faithful with increasing stringency. This move toward regulation can be seen in the more frequent use of Rules to govern the physical as well as moral lives of monks and nuns and in the intensified institutional control over the bodily as well as spiritual practices of the

25 Jacob Soll, “Healing the Body Politic: French Royal Doctors, History, and the Birth of a Nation 1560–1634.” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 1260. 26 Hale, The Body Politic, 35–36. 27 Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the King James Version (1611). 28 Augustine of Hippo, Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine: The City of God, Books XVII–XXII, trans. Gerald G. Walsh and Daniel Honan (Baltimore: Catholic University of America Press, 1954, repr. 2008), 467.

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beguines after their inception as an independent movement. It also appears in the increased control over the collection, translation, display, and veneration of relics, as well as in the greater strictures, under Boniface VIII and his successors, against the previously accepted practice of bodily partition post-mortem, discussed in chapter 5. While corpus politicum and corpus ecclesiasticum metaphors do not usually specify the gender of that body, as an ideal form it is consistently assumed to be male. Augustine, in his discussion of Paul’s phrase “perfect manhood,” explicitly comments, Here we have a picture of “perfect manhood.” There is the “Head” and the “body” which consists of all its “members” which, in due time, are to reach the “fullness” and which, day by day, are added to the “body” while the Church is being “built up.” Hence the words: “Now you are the body of Christ, member for member.”29

He concedes, however, that “there is nothing to prevent us from applying to woman what is expressly stated of man, since ‘man’ often means ‘a human being.’”30 Gendered specifically female, in contrast, is the conceptualization of the physical space of a realm – whether agricultural land or potentially colonizable territory – as a body. A succinct example of the land-as-woman trope is Agrippa’s description of Caesar’s relations with Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “He plough’d her, and she cropp’d” (2.2.263).31 Here the male represents both technology, the plough, and that which will grow, the seed, while the female is the matrix – itself a common word for the womb by the mid-fifteenth century – in which the seed will germinate. This metaphor was widespread throughout the Anglophone medieval and early modern periods, as well as in numerous other cultures and time periods. Darby Lewes argues that such figures, which she terms somatopias, “might well be the Ur-metaphor, rooted in the earliest etiological myths that present the earth as a womb from which life sprang.”32 In English the idea of the earth-womb finds its most basic expression in the phrase “mother Earth,” one of the earliest examples of which occurs in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, at the death of Sansfoy: after his head is cut in two, he, “tumbling

29 Ibid., 466. 30 Ibid., 467. 31 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 32 Darby Lewes, Nudes from Nowhere: Utopian Sexual Landscapes (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 3.

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downe aliue, / With bloudy mouth his mother earth did kis, / Greeting his graue” (1.2.19.4–6).33 In a rare exploration of the ways metaphor can lead to concrete consequences, Annette Kolodny argues that the land’s being conceptualized as female in the writings of American settlers, colonists, and citizens from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries led directly to the exploitation of America’s natural resources and despoliation of its beauty into polluted industrial areas, through an extension of the sexist understanding of women as inherently exploitable. But the argument does not fully take into account the propagandistic component of the colonists’ writings, nor the impetus for that propaganda: when George Alsop writes in A Character of the Province of Mary-land (1666) of “Mary-Land drest in her green and fragrant Mantle of the Spring”34 as a female character “whose natural womb (by her plenty) maintains and preserves the several diversities of Animals that rangingly inhabit her Woods; as she doth otherwise generously fructifie this piece of Earth,”35 he is not naively indulging a sense of being at one with the maternal body so much as he is encouraging other English people to join him in this supposedly bountiful land or to provide the colonists with money and supplies. The urgent and continual need for provisions and goods only underscores how far from all-giving the land was to the early colonists. Although many of the American colonial writings conceptualize the land as mother, others partake of another common formulation, land as potential sexual partner. The propaganda was slanted towards what the writers believed would appeal to their English audience, as Kolodny points out: “their language also reinforced a particular mode of English response,” the desire to penetrate “virgin” territory.36 The very name “Virginia,” though paying tribute to the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, underscores this trope. Scholz traces the use of the ideal female body to think of politically demarcated land in terms of boundaries, colonies, territories, focusing particularly on the metaphor of virginity as a means of describing territory that is untouched (by Europeans). This is “countrey,” as she quotes

33 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche and C. Patrick O’Donnell (New York: Penguin, 1979). A significant proportion of the earliest English deployments of the phrase associate the womb with the grave, as in Titus Andronicus, discussed below, in which “the swallowing womb / Of this deep pit” in the earth is also “poor Bassianus’ grave” (2.3.239–40). 34 George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Mary-land (London, 1666), 3. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 35 Ibid., 2. 36 Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 11.

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Walter Raleigh’s description of Guiana, “that hath yet her maydenhead,”37 being undespoiled by European (male) colonizers. Benjamin Myers reads a similar theme of “male-driven conquest of the feminized landscape”38 in Spenser’s arguments for expansion into Ireland. Myers maintains, however, that “[s]uch a gendering seems little more than an accident of linguistic convention,”39 an assertion with which I disagree. Indeed, as Scholz argues, the somatic metaphor of body as land could serve an important political function: In its conjunction with images of the Queen’s virginity, it linked a fiction of continuity through time with an image of territorial integrity; it envisaged synchronic and diachronic stability in the image of the Queen’s inviolate body. Obviously the constitutive fiction drew on a concept of the human body as a microcosm of the larger universe: only if the body of the ruler could be metonymically linked to the universe could it symbolize divine order on earth.40

In relation to the description in Raleigh’s Discoverie of the natives as unable or unwilling to till the soil of their land, Scholz argues, “As the idea of husbandry is closely tied to the masculinist image of penetrating the female land in order to ‘inseminate’ it with European culture and civilization, the representation of the native population as unable to till the soil inherently signifies their incapability to rule the land in their own right.”41 Lewes likewise argues that such “imperial somatopias suggest that women somehow do not own their own bodies in exactly the same sense that native nonwhite peoples somehow do not own their own lands and cultures.”42 Luke Gernon’s A Discourse of Ireland (1620) makes use of a similar trope of land as female and ready to be entered in describing Ireland “in the lineaments of a naked woman,” which conceit he lauds as “a quaynt and genuine devise.”43 Gernon goes so far as to claim that “[t]his Nymph of Ireland” desires to be colonized/deflowered because she “is at all poynts like a yong wenche that hath the greene sicknes for want of occupying.”44 The country’s natural features are 37 Scholz, Body Narratives, 150. See Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Empire of Guiana, ed. Robert Hermann Schomburgk (London: Hakluyt Society, 1848). 38 Benjamin Myers, “Pro-War and Prothalamion: Queen, Colony, and Somatic Metaphor among Spenser’s Knights of the Maidenhead,” English Literary Renaissance 37 (2007), 216. 39 Ibid., 221. 40 Scholz, Body Narratives, 5. 41 Ibid., 156. 42 Lewes, Nudes from Nowhere, 3. 43 Luke Gernon, A Discourse of Ireland, 1620, ed. Caesar Litton Falkiner (CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts), 349. 44 Ibid. Greensickness was considered to be a medical condition of young girls, first referenced in 1547 (OED n.1) that could be remedied by marriage and sexual intercourse (as well as by eating more meat).

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used to further the comparison: “betwixt her leggs (for Ireland is full of havens), she hath an open harbor, but not much frequented.”45 It is a commonplace in British writings about Ireland, beginning with Giraldus Cambrensis’s History and Topography of Ireland (1188), that the Irish neglect to till the soil, but instead make use of animal products and harvest what grows naturally,46 with the implication that they do not deserve to have control of this land if they do not care for/exploit it in the way that the authors consider appropriate. The figure of so-called claimable land as woman awaiting deflowering works to naturalize England’s colonizing ventures in the same way that the figure of the state or church as body works to naturalize political or ecclesiastical institutions, framing these areas of human organization and endeavor as naturally and even divinely ordered. The negative qualities of lands that are not yet under or are imperfectly under colonial control are detailed in a scene in The Comedy of Errors (ca. 1589–94) in which the servingman Dromio describes Nell the kitchen maid’s body in terms of its imagined geographic features to grotesque, nationalistic, and misogynistic effect. The passage’s tone crosses into violence, as when Dromio, decrying Nell’s greasiness, suggests she is good for nothing but being set on fire, so that he may “make a lamp of her, and run from her by her own light” (3.2.97).47 Instead of doing this, however, he makes of her textualized body a different sort of illumination, using it to delineate his xenophobic view of other countries. Her body shape first suggests the metaphor to him: “she is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her” (3.2.116–17). His fellow servant Antipholus takes up the conceit, asking, “In what part of her body stands Ireland?” (118–19), and continues in this vein to draw out Dromio about other countries and their conventionalized negative features, including Scotland’s barrenness, Ireland’s bogginess, and Spain’s hot winds. Each country, moreover, is further denigrated by being associated with this explicitly unappealing woman: “America, the Indies” (136) boasts a bounty of gemstones, but these “gems” on Nell are boils and pustules. Beautiful England, with its white cliffs, cannot be seen in her grotesque body.48 Laura Tommaso makes the distinction between this and other, more positive characterizations of woman as land: “The land and the body are both spaces over which a dominion has been exercised”; depending on whether “they are controlled or ungoverned,

45 Ibid., 350. 46 Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, in The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. Thomas Wright (London: H. G. Bohn, 1863), 124–25. 47 William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Kent Cartwright (London: Arden, 2017). 48 Although Dromio’s native country is Italy, it is England thus distinguished as having the only positive features.

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they become a metaphor of order and peace in one case, or a symbol of promiscuity and irregularity in the other.”49 With its highly metaphoric valence, this passage, despite its misogynist tone, only secondarily serves to characterize Nell. More saliently, her body serves as the means by which Dromio denigrates the other countries; it is the material of his insult. A somewhat more appealing construction of woman as land can be seen in another of Shakespeare’s early works, Venus and Adonis (1593). In a self-blazoning attempt to entice Adonis, Venus describes her own body as a park, complete with hills and fountains, “Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, / Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough” (ll. 236–37).50 A description of a woman’s body in terms of topographical features in the voice of a female character is quite rare; land-as-woman, particularly land-as-sexual-woman, is overwhelmingly a trope not only directed toward a male audience but also employed by men. However, many aspects of Venus’s characterization in this poem are androgynous; she is gendered male in other ways, including her physical strength and modes of attempted sexual conquest.51 Her representation of her body as land is primarily positive, according with its aim of tempting Adonis to stay with her, within her “park.” Its positive features may stem from its being a landscape that is for the most part controlled, a park rather than a wilderness. Yet a park presupposes a park keeper, and who has brought this parkland under control is unanswered; Adonis, so far from being figured in the role of civilizing or controlling agent, usually assigned to men in examples of this trope, is instead imagined as a deer, enjoying but essentially trapped within the park.52 The lack of control allotted to Adonis is presented as one reason he rejects Venus’s advances, preferring as he does the role of hunter to that of prey.

49 Laura Tommaso, “Th’ receiving earth’: Shakespeare and the Land/Woman Trope,” Textus 18 (2005), 274. 50 William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, in Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine DuncanJones and H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Arden, 2007). 51 See Lisa Jardine, Valerie Traub, and Goran Stanivukovic on the characterization of Venus as androgynous in this work: Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Columbia University Press, 1989); Valerie Traub, “Desire and the Differences It Makes,” in Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama, ed. Catherine Belsey (New York: Routledge, 1992); Goran Stanivukovic, “Troping Desire in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies 33, no. 4 (1997). 52 The bestializing influence of women on men is a common theme, stretching back at least as far as the story of Circe and Odysseus in the Odyssey and referenced as well in Dromio’s quibble in Comedy: “she would have me as a beast – not that, I being a beast, she would have me” (3.2.83–84).

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“A head on headless Rome” If St. James Intercisus is the patron saint of this study, Titus Andronicus (ca. 1593) is unquestionably its iconic text. The play is informed throughout by the symbolic import and performative nature of its numerous dismemberments, through which it demonstrates that the fragmented body, whether in metaphor or in literary-literal flesh, inhabits a possibility-space that is not available to the body whole and unmodified, and that wounding and dismemberment thus allow for the creation of such a space. The play is discussed in each chapter of this book according to the focus of that chapter: this chapter analyzes its uses of somatic metaphor, the section in chapter 2 looks at the dismemberments that perform Lavinia’s rape, the portion in chapter 3 discusses the hunting imagery that frames the central dismemberments of the play, the section in chapter 4 focuses on the idea of mutilative revenge that permeates Titus Andronicus, and the portion in chapter 5 looks at its signifying body parts. Imagery of the body of state frames the play, appearing in its first and last scenes, but unlike in many conventional corpus politicum figures, neither image is of an organically formed body. Both instead invoke the dismembered/ re-membered body (politic), a not-unusual variant of the theme but one that is nonetheless peculiarly appropriate to this play, abounding as it does in severed body parts: hands, heads, limbs, and tongue. The action opens with an evocation of monstrous hybridity: when Marcus charges Titus to accept the proffered position as successor to the late emperor and “help to set a head on headless Rome” (1.1.189) Titus answers, “A better head her glorious body fits / Than his that shakes for age and feebleness” (190–91).53 In this figure, maleness combines with femaleness and vigor with weakness in a disquieting image that, as Gillian Kendall argues, “makes Rome, on the one hand, a Frankenstein’s monster, and Titus, on the other, a headless trunk.”54 Kendall concludes from this reading that Titus’s creation of such a rhetorical figure reveals his lack of control over his rhetoric,55 but it may be more accurate to say that it is performative of his misunderstanding of what develops as the play’s larger argument concerning the insufficiency of the organic corpus politicum metaphor. Titus’s grotesque figure appropriately illustrates what is first framed as a grotesquely inappropriate possibility: that a man not the natural heir, and one old enough

53 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995, rev. 2018). 54 Gillian Murray Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 3 (1989): 300. 55 Ibid.

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to have fathered more than twenty adult sons, should take on the task of governing Rome in place of the youthfully vigorous and legitimate blood-line heir, the emperor’s eldest son Saturninus. However, the events that follow Titus’s refusal and Saturninus’s ascension show that a blind insistence on the forms of strict succession may itself prove disastrous. Editor Jonathan Bate argues that the play resonates deeply with the contemporary question of succession, specifically the growing realization that England’s next monarch would not be an heir of Elizabeth’s body. He notes that the anxieties surrounding succession were also at issue in a highly publicized incident in 1579, the cutting off of the hands of John Stubbs and his publisher William Page for sedition. Katherine Rowe likewise sees the several significations of the word “hand” as erupting out of the texts of both Titus’s notorious quibbles (“O handle not the theme, to talk of hands” (3.2.29–30) . . .) and Stubbs’s scaffold speech, in which he begs the audience, “Pray for me, now that the moment of my calamity is at hand,”56 while Sid Ray shows that the pamphlet that so displeased Elizabeth specifically focused on the unlikelihood of her having any heirs of her body and questioned why in such a case she would choose to align herself so closely with France.57 In the last scene of the play Marcus returns to the body-of-state figure, inviting the Roman people to “let me teach you how to knit again / . . . / These broken limbs again into one body” (5.3.69–71). As in the beginning, the comparison evokes not the body natural but a constructed, or reconstructed, body composed of disparate parts. This imagined amalgamation into a unified body politic will be effected by the erasure of Titus’s and Saturninus’s errors in, respectively, declining and attempting to rule and the insistence of both on a body of state disproportionately controlled by the head. This erasure will be accomplished by Marcus’s and Lucius’s submission to the will of the people, which is evidenced by Marcus’s promise at 5.3.130–33 that the two will dash themselves headlong to the ground if the people so desire. They are not required to fulfill this promise; some form of head is still necessary on Rome’s “glorious body,” though it is to symbolize, in terms more familiar to Shakespeare’s milieu, a constitutional rather than a pure monarchy. The bloody events that have ensued during the play are figured as comprising a divagation from the Roman society’s appropriate course, the course on which it is again set by the end of the final act when the vox populi acclaims Lucius. Yet even with this resolution the body of state will lack organic unity: the 56 Katherine A. Rowe, “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.3 (Autumn 1994): 285. 57 Sid Ray, “Rape, I fear, was root of thy annoy: The Politics of Consent in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998).

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knitting together will take place under an emperor who is not the natural head of state, just as England’s next leader will not be the direct heir to Elizabeth. Ray identifies another instance of the body-of-state figure in Lavinia, reading her as a mulier politica and her dismemberments specifically as troping the fragmentation of the body politic. She argues that “themes of political consent, the right of the people to consent to the authority of the monarch, find expression in . . . [Lavinia’s] ravished and mutilated body,” violated without her consent.58 Ray expands on this theme: “Shakespeare, by demonstrating the ill effects on the individual female body of abrogated consent, subtly imparts the necessity of consent rituals for the collective social body.”59 Coppélia Kahn makes a similar but even stronger case for the association between Lavinia and the Roman body politic, arguing that in refusing to rule, per the will of the people, Titus sets in motion the events that bring about Lavinia’s rape, which itself illustrates on her body the dismembering effects of that which is done against one’s will.60 This argument is furthered by the play’s use of the land-as-body trope: not only is the state a body, albeit a dismembered and partially reconstructed one; so too is its physical geography. The area in which Tamora and Aaron tryst, which then becomes the scene of Lavinia’s rape by Chiron and Demetrius, takes on the characteristics of those who frequent it in both atmosphere and appearance. In its darkness it embodies Aaron, who may as aptly be describing his own person, with its moral and physical blackness, when he calls the clearing “shadowed from heaven’s eye” and thus “fitted by kind for rape and villainy” (1.1.630, 616). The pit in the clearing, where Bassianus’s murdered body is thrown and next to which Lavinia’s mutilation is revealed, is “loathsome” (2.2.176 and 2.2.193) and “abhorred” (2.2.98), adjectives that take on especial resonance in light of the further somatic metaphor that situates it as a violated vaginal area.61 Quintus asks, “What subtle hole is this, / Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers / Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood / As fresh as morning dew 58 Ray, “Rape, I fear,” 22. 59 Ibid., 30. 60 Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), 51. 61 The correspondence has been noted by numerous critics, among them Bate, 35–36; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 54–55; and Marion Wynne-Davies, “The Swallowing Womb: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 136 and passim. One important aspect of this imagery, however, tends to have been overlooked: while the despoliation of the earth is not uncommonly figured as rape (cf. the texts gathered in Kolodny’s Lay of the Land), it is very rare that the earth is represented as manifesting the rape of a person.

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distilled on flowers? / A very fatal place it seems to me” (2.2.198–201). The blood from Bassianus’s murder also calls to mind Lavinia’s hymeneal blood shed offstage.62 As is shown in chapter 2, the physical signs of rape are often displaced onto other regions of the body; here, the line between the characters and their natural surroundings is so blurred that the whole clearing bears witness to Lavinia’s violation. Not only is the pit, surrounded with “briers” like pubic hair, figured as a vaginal orifice; it is by extension the womb, recalling that most foundational somatic metaphor of the earth as birthing forth life.63 Called a “swallowing womb” by Quintus (2.2.239), it is in Martius’s words an “unhallowed and bloodstained hole” (2.2.210) and a “detested, dark, blood-drinking pit” (2.2.224).64 Here the earth-womb births forth a dead man, Bassianus’s corpse. Titus, when Lavinia has made known the rape to him, describes the area surrounding the hole as a place “[b]y nature made for murders and for rapes” (4.1.58), unwittingly echoing Aaron, and Marcus answers, “O, why should nature build so foul a den, / Unless the gods delight in tragedies?” (4.1.59–60). If the womb is a synecdoche for woman, then women – not only attuned to the natural versus the constructed and civilized but also possessed of the “hole” that invites violation – are framed as the inherent cause of tragedies.

Body Performance While rooted in somatic symbolisms, the concept of performing with bodies may require some discussion. It is employed most generally in this study to mean the use of the body, whether textual or physical, to illustrate or manifest specific meanings, a broad definition that incorporates several levels or types of performance. The most basic encompasses the manipulation of physical body parts, whether in the theater or in the streets. Holinshed’s Chronicles of England tells that during Wat Tyler’s uprising of 1381, the rebels “made sport”

62 There are indications, such as the fact that she and Bassianus have arisen early the morning after their wedding night, and that Tamora charges her sons to “deflower” Lavinia, that she may be understood to have been a virgin before her rape. Kahn notes the language of virginity but implicitly reads it as according with Tamora’s rhetorical strategy rather than as a reflection of Lavinia’s physical state (Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 54). 63 Tina Mohler additionally reads the pit as a rectum, or fundament, standing as a visual corollary to Bassianus’s metaphorical rape, his body’s penetration by the daggers of Chiron and Demetrius, Mohler, “‘What is thy body but a swallowing grave. . .?’: Desire Underground in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 24. 64 The womb’s “drinking,” or at any rate gathering in, of blood could be considered a necessary precondition of pregnancy.

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with the decapitated heads, placed on poles, of the Lord Chief Justice and the Prior of Bury St Edmunds, “as it were in token of the old friendship betwixt . . . [them], . . . making them sometime as it were to kisse, other whiles to sound in either others eare. After they had taken their pastime inough herewith, they set both the heads againe aloft vpon the pillorie.”65 Shakespeare adapts this action for a different uprising, Jack Cade’s rebellion, in 2 Henry VI, in which Lord Saye and Sir James Crowmer are beheaded and their heads placed on poles and carried through the streets. “Let them kiss one another,” Cade orders; “with these borne before us instead of maces will we ride through the streets, and at every corner have them kiss” (4.7.122, 126–28).66 He adds, alluding to one of his grievances against Saye, “Now part them again, lest they consult about the giving up of some more towns in France” (123–25). As Murat Öğütcü notes, “Shakespeare re-emphasised that the public execution of noblemen might be considered to be a mere performance that could be imitated by ineligible people, in parodic form.”67 In both the historical account and in Shakespeare’s revisioning, the group of rebels “performs” in a crude sense with the nobles’ dismembered body parts, using them like unwieldy stick puppets to enact playlets of affection and bad statesmanship and brandishing them instead of weapons to frighten the populace. This highly specific form of performance is not particularly common, in either historical or fictive representation, though it relates to other, less literally narrative, types of performing with body parts, such as that expressed in spectacular execution. Two more familiar levels of performance are potentially available in a scene in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 (ca. 1587) in which the great conqueror stands upon a “footstool” formed of the living but subjugated body of Bajazeth, one of the many emperors he has overthrown. “Stoop, villain, stoop, stoop,” Tamburlaine charges, “for so he bids / That may command thee piecemeal to be torn / Or scattered like the lofty cedar trees / Struck with the voice of thund’ring Jupiter” (4.2.22–25).68 Bajazeth resists, they argue, and Tamburlaine prevails, stepping onto the vanquished king to reach his throne. 65 Raphael Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles, beginning at duke William the Norman, . . . (London, 1586/7), 434. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. The story appears also in Holinshed’s The firste [laste] volume of the chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, . . . (London, 1577), 1030. 66 William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Thomas Nelson, 1999). 67 Murat Öğütcü, “Public Execution and Justice on/off the Elizabethan Stage: Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy,” Mediterranean Journal of Humanities 6, no. 2 (2016), 367. 68 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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When this scene is played onstage it showcases, like almost all enacted drama, actors who use their bodies to literally perform its action. Both speak, perhaps gesticulate; one crouches to the ground and the other steps on his back. Though the present study does not have the scope to pursue this aspect of performance extensively,69 invaluable work has been done on the physical level of performance in the medieval and early modern periods, including the ways actors might use their own or others’ bodies for characterization and narrative effects.70 In Tamburlaine’s speech, dismemberment is threatened without being enacted, but the theater is an important site of illusory presentations of bodily fragmentation, from the comic-horror passages in Cycle plays in which Jesus’s tormentors squabble over how best to execute him; through fabliau-inflected scenes as in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, where Faustus’s leg is pulled off by the Horse-courser and then magically regrows; to the multitudinous stagings of mutilative vengeance in Jacobean revenge tragedy. Another level of bodily performance in the confrontation between Marlowe’s two emperors, whether on the stage or on the page, concerns the literary-literal embodiment of power relations that the characters perform. While indeed it is occasionally helpful to have something to step up on – that is, it may be necessary to have a footstool – to choose for this purpose the body of another human partakes of a transparent symbolism involving humiliation and unequal power relations. Employing both their bodies, Tamburlaine performs Bajazeth’s subjection by using the defeated emperor as though he were an inanimate object.71 While this meaning is also made abundantly and repeatedly clear in the dialogue, as when Tamburlaine further emphasizes his mastery over Bajazeth by

69 It may be noted in passing, however, that the limitations of the physical stage and the physical body are more salient in Tamburlaine than in most other plays contemporary owing to its huge scope of action, as are examples of the ways these limitations can be surmounted by sheer rhetorical power. 70 Several scholars discuss theatrical staging specifically as it relates to bodily fragmentation, including its enactment through stage properties and stage business as well as the theater’s influence on other spectacles of dismemberment such as executions for treason. See Jody Enders, “The Spectacle of the Scaffolding: Rape and the Violent Foundations of Medieval Theatre Studies,” Theatre Journal 56, no. 2 (May 2004), and The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Margaret Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); and Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). 71 Similarly, in Part 2 he performs a similar denigration by using two other deposed kings to pull his carriage as though they were horses, bits jammed into their mouths and their backs scourged by a whip.

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verbally threatening him with bodily fragmentation, the body performance is so effective that in some senses words are not necessary here. As Aaron Kunin observes, while making a slightly different point, “[T]hat Tamburlaine is talking at all is somewhat gratuitous. The entire exchange could be replaced by a short stage direction: ‘Bajazeth kneels before the throne. Tamburlaine steps on his back and climbs into the seat.’”72 Both the scene in Tamburlaine and those in Holinshed and Shakespeare are displays of victory over and subjugation of opponents, but while this is a common valence in body performance it is by no means the only one; rather, the import may vary depending on the identity of the one who performs and the one whose body is used to perform, as well as to what uses the body is put. The sense of body performance that encompasses these several manifestations may be described as a form of self- or other-fashioning, albeit more expanded, along the lines of that propounded by Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt uses the terms performance, enactment, and staging to describe the ways courtiers and nobles in the early modern period constructed and displayed their personae for an audience of their peers. In his discussion of More’s History of King Richard III (1557), he quotes a passage arguing that the powerful are able to compel those around them to witness or participate in performances that the latter know do not reflect “reality” but to which they nevertheless accede because of the physical consequences of refusal: they said that these matters be king’s games, as it were stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds. In which poor men be but the lookers-on. And they that wise be will meddle no farther. For they that sometime step up and play with them, when they cannot play their parts, they disorder the play and do themselves no good.73

Greenblatt glosses this passage: “To try to break through the fiction is dangerous – one can have one’s head broken. . . . On the one hand, the great have the means to enforce their elaborate, theatrical ceremonies of pride; on the other, those ceremonies are usually performed, ominously, on scaffolds.”74 Here the performance of power can easily shade into physical, even mortal, consequences for those caught up in it.

72 Aaron Kunin, “Marlowe’s Footstools,” in This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature, ed. Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 73. 73 Quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 2005), 13. 74 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 14.

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The idea has important implications for this book, one of the aims of which is to trace forms and meanings of bodily performance, particularly dismemberment, to show that concepts of the idealized body have practical consequences for the treatment of physical bodies. At the same time, the way body performance is used here extends beyond the speech, writing, dress, and movement that are Greenblatt’s focus as well as beyond the period in which he argues such performances come into being: encompassing the shaping, altering, and fragmenting of one’s own body or that of another to create the desired import, it appears in the medieval as well as the early modern period. Both historically and literarily, human bodies are and have been used for a variety of purposes, and an overwhelming majority of these are symbolically inflected, yet this symbolic import may go far beyond the display of power to manifest, or be intended to manifest, a wide range of meanings from intimations of base or divine nature to high honor or shame.

Reading and Writing (on) the Body Portrayals of a character’s physical form that through written description make an argument about her or his nature may be called textual body performances. Nobility, depravity, inspiration, possession may all be conveyed through physical description; even in word-pictures of historical personages, what the reader receives is often less an account of their “actual” appearance and more a sense of their spiritual, social, or intellectual traits as manifested through the author’s description of their appearance. While medieval thinkers may be conflicted about the dangers and opportunities of physical beauty,75 almost universally those with positive moral characteristics are depicted as beautiful and handsome and villains as ugly and deformed, a bias so common that it has often been taken for granted. The body may be represented or read as altered by Nature or God – essentially synonymous in this context, though religious aspects may be muted or emphasized – so as to manifest an outward appearance that accords with a person’s true self. In Richard Johnson’s Most Famous History of the Seauen Champions of Christendome (1596), St. George is marked from birth with the emblems that will come to be associated with him: “Upon his brest nature had picturde the liuely forme of a Dragon, vpon his right hand

75 See Corinne Saunders, “Beauty, Virtue, and Danger in Medieval English Romance,” in The Recovery of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine, ed. Corinne Saunders, Jane Macnaughton, and David Fuller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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a bloody Crosse, and on his left leg a golden garter.”76 Likewise, numerous medieval and early modern romances situate the true identity of characters stolen away or lost in infancy in markings on their bodies that associate them with nobility or royalty. While any body might serve as an example of God’s grand design, individual bodies are represented as performances of God’s individual and specific grace or judgment, as expressed through alterations in their bodily structure, conformation, or integrity. Particularly overt examples of the body divinely altered appear in descriptions of the corpses of mystics, holy men and women, and saints, who frequently manifest an altered physical appearance or functionality that is proof of their unique nature: incorruptibility, a sweet fragrance, the exuding of holy oil. The vitae of some mystics and saints tell of small stones with religious significance that were found in their organs; in search of these, “the bodies of putative saints were sometimes torn open after death to look for signs of sanctity in the viscera.”77 These could also be discovered by their fellow monks and nuns in the course of embalming, as when Clare of Montefalco’s heart yielded to her fellow nuns “a cross or the image of the crucified Christ.”78 In the hearts of St. Margherita and St. Chiara were discovered tiny stones relating to the Crucifixion, thus making “literal and material the metaphor of the birth of Christ in the heart.”79 These stones were understood to have been created and placed in the saints’ bodies by God to teach his lessons, reminding observers of sacred subjects such as the Passion and signaling the holiness of the one in whom they were found. The bodies of the living might also be represented as displaying somatic variations as especial signs of God’s favor or grace. Female mystics were especially prone to manifest their spirituality through their flesh, a trend that rose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.80 Their vitae may describe them as crying unceasingly, without volition, as in the Life of Christina Mirabilis and the Book of Margery Kempe. Their bodies, as their hagiographers tell, were also able to withstand unharmed acts that should have killed them: jumping into

76 Richard Johnson, The Most Famous History of the Seauen Champions of Christendome (London, 1596), 5. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 77 Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 323. 78 Ibid. 79 Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006), 68. 80 Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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cauldrons of boiling water or tying themselves to millstones to be dragged under a freezing river. The mystics might develop an acute sensitivity to smell or be unable to eat anything but the wafer of the Eucharist. Commonly they are described as marked with stigmata, wounds in the places on their bodies where Jesus was pierced by nails at his crucifixion. These physical manifestations verify for observers, and equally for readers of their Lives, the truth of the mystics’ and their biographers’ claims to communion with the divine, acting as signs that these people have been set apart for a spiritual purpose. Their bodies are used in performances of spiritual truths – whether by God, as their hagiographers implicitly or explicitly claim, or at the least by the authors themselves. In comparison, criminals and other morally repugnant characters are frequently represented as ugly, misshapen, or monstrous. In manuscript illustrations of Jesus’s Passion his tormentors are physically repellent, such as the leering, piggish characters shown scourging him in the Ramsey Psalter. As discussed in chapter 4, the appearance of executioners is also frequently represented as hideous and grotesque, reflecting the revulsion many felt toward them. The repeated descriptions of King Richard III’s bodily monstrosities, including a grotesquely extended gestation, full set of teeth at birth, and hunched back and withered arm, are presented as indications of his radical unfitness for kingship in such Tudor apologias as More’s History of King Richard III81 and Shakespeare’s Richard III (ca. 1593–94).82 The description of these abnormalities, whether or not they actually existed, is in turn used to justify detractors’ opposition to him on grounds far removed from his physical shape.83 Likewise, the extended title of Thomas Lodge’s Famous, True and Historicall Life of Robert Second Duke of Normandy (1591) makes clear that the duke, “surnamed for his monstrous birth and behauiour, Robin the Diuell,”’ is so called due as much to his appearance at birth – implicitly an omen of future calamity – as to his “dissolute life.”84 Sired by Satan, Robin likewise is born with a full set of

81 Thomas More, The History of King Richard III, ed. George M. Logan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 82 William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James Siemon (London: Arden, 2009). 83 The recent discovery of a skeleton identified as Richard’s shows that he was affected by scoliosis, though researchers speculate that the visual impact of this deformity would have been slight, and his record in battle argues that he was by no means physically impaired by whatever somatic irregularities he had. See Jo Appleby, Piers D. Mitchell, Claire Robinson, Alison Brough, Guy Rutty, Russell A. Harris, David Thompson, and Bruno Morgan, “The Scoliosis of Richard III, Last Plantagenet King of England: Diagnosis and Clinical Significance,” Lancet 383 (May 31, 2014). 84 Thomas Lodge, The Famous, True, and Historicall Life of Robert Second Duke of Normandy (London, 1591). Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online.

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teeth, which he uses, in an incident that recalls the medieval romance of Sir Gowther, to bite off the nipples of his nurse and the nose of a lady who kisses him in the cradle.85 These instances can be read as examples not of physiology as destiny but of God, in his omniscience, shaping individuals’ bodies to make visible their future moral culpability and his divine judgment. Perhaps the most overt – and numerous – representations of divine modification are accounts of monstrous births, which often figure and are even explicitly described as signs from God of his anger at the sins not of the infant but of the parents or community. Hence the often-repeated etymology of “monster,” as deriving from monstrare, to demonstrate, and monere, to warn, is appropriate to the use of these represented monsters.86 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s brilliant essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” presents the widely adopted argument that monsters serve as markers of societal borders and delimiters of appropriate behavior,87 a trope that is active in medieval literature from chronicle accounts to travel and romances. In The King of Tars,88 a Middle English tail-rhyme romance ca. 1330, a faceless, limbless, formless “lump” is born to the Saracen king of the title and his secretly Christian wife. The lump-child is revealed to have been so born precisely to rebuke and rectify the sinful miscegenation of his parents: upon his mother’s praying to God and thus converting her husband to her faith, the infant is transformed into a normal and handsome shape. Not only this, but the newly Christianized king’s skin color changes from black to white, performing his own recuperation from supposed sin.89

85 Sir Gowther, in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 5. 86 Important critical work on the reading of monsters and monstrous births includes that by Dudley Wilson, Alan Bates, and Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan Landes. See Wilson, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1993); Bates, Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); Lunger Knoppers and Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 87 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 88 The King of Tars: Edited. from the Auchinleck MS, Advocates 19.2.1, ed. Judith Perryman. Middle English Texts 12 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980). 89 For helpful discussions of the racial and religious implications of this change, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Cord Whitaker, “Black Metaphors in the King of Tars,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112, no. 2 (April 2013).

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Descriptions of monstrous and signifying infants are more widespread in the early modern period, appearing not only in popular literature such as broadside ballads and pamphlets but also in sermons, letters, medical manuals, plays, and historical accounts. Julie Crawford gestures toward the idea of performance through textual modification, commenting, “I suspect that some original determinations of deformed and stillborn births as ‘monstrous’ were based on perceptions of their mothers’ sins rather than on the actual forms of the births themselves.”90 She also argues that in the early modern imaginary such infant monsters “themselves are texts: their bodies are transparent to the crimes they punish, and they render the private beliefs and behaviors of early modern men and women spectacularly legible.”91 Accounts and descriptions of monsters were employed particularly by religious reformers, among others, as general condemnations of sin, to bring their readers to a fuller sense of their own fallen state and engender in them repentance.92 One example among many is the pamphlet God’s Handy-worke in Wonders (1615), which not only avers that in God’s “hand it lyes to make a . . . beautifull body, or a monstrous, and to fashion thee or me as ugly”;93 it also tells the story of a child born deformed to a sinful mother, teaching that “Gods owne fingers shall crush the loynes in the wombe, and set his markes of fearefull divine vengeance, on the brest of an unborne Babe, to turne it into a Monster . . . [for] revenge and punishment for some extraordinary sinnes in the Parents.”94 It was accepted, of course, that God was able to perform with human bodies in other ways beyond the alteration of their appearance; a particularly physical, literal exploration of the theme appears in Bernard of Clairvaux’s exegesis on the Song of Songs (1135–53). In the series of sermons in which he discusses the injunction “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth,” Bernard describes God as able to move individuals for his own purposes, insofar as all human beings are essentially members of God’s body to be deployed as necessary. First asking, in the person of a doubting auditor, whether God may indeed be said to have lips with which to kiss, not to mention a face, or hands and feet, he then answers by citing biblical passages that indicate that God must have “a mouth

90 Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 76. 91 Ibid., 3. Foucault suggests that punishment should be “transparent to the crime it punishes,” Discipline, 105, a concept Crawford implicitly connects with the punishment of the revealingly altered body, Marvelous Protestantism, 1. 92 Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism, 73–74. 93 Gods Handy-Worke in Wonders Miraculously Shewen vpon Two Women, Lately Deliuered of Two Monsters (London, 1615), img. 5. 94 Ibid.

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by which ‘he teaches men knowledge’ . . . a hand with which ‘he provides for all living creatures,’ and . . . feet for which the earth is a footstool.”95 These he uses as proof positive of the physicality of God, though he clarifies, “I allow of course that God does not have these members by his nature, they represent certain modes of our encounter with him.” He continues, [T]here are boundless and countless achievements that he carries through by means of his subject creatures, whether corporeal or spiritual, but he uses them as master rather than as suppliant. For example, he now employs my tongue for his purpose of instructing you, when he could certainly impart the same knowledge directly with greater facility on his part and more pleasure for you.96

Bernard concludes, “[W]hat need has [God], I ask, for a body of his own when to his least desire all bodies, both in heaven and on earth, are equally obedient? A body of his own would be superfluous to one for whom none exists outside his sway.”97 In his formulation, God uses people’s bodies to perform, for their edification, his awe-inspiring power, an understanding often tacitly accepted though rarely so explicitly stated. Human beings as well were understood and even expected to enact social or spiritual significance through the body’s modification, whether by causing its parts to manifest certain meanings or by accessing and harnessing the significations already understood to inhere in them. Such performances, which use the body as the raw material of meaning, are not inherently acts of power and subjugation, though they are often so in practice. Rather, a wide range of physical modifications is advised, mandated, and described as being enacted, from the ability of clothing to change its wearer’s religion, social status, and even genitally manifested gender, which is considered briefly in chapter 2, to more radical examples of physical alteration such as cutting and marking, including surgery and punitive branding and clipping.98 95 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 5, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 2, On the Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971), 23. 96 Ibid., 30. 97 Ibid., 31. 98 It is beyond the scope of this work to treat another important area of physical modification by human means, the regulation of the humors by diet and action, but some essential studies of humoral theory that explicitly or implicitly touch on this form of alteration are Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and the chapter on “The Humoral-Paracelsan Body” in Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease.

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A particularly contested question of non-fragmenting physical shaping concerns the power midwives are represented as having over gender expression. Not only is the assigning of one specific sex to hermaphrodites often recommended as a duty of the midwife, but in the Examination of Mens Wits (1594), Juan Huarte also explains the way she can help to ensure that male children rather than female may be engendered, an outcome that anyone desiring “the comfort of hauing wise children” must wish.99 The midwife also has the duty of cutting the umbilical cord, the length of which left attached to the umbilicus is assumed by some authors to determine the length of both the “privities” and the tongue. Jacques Guillemeau offers a succinct account of the belief in Childbirth or, The Happy Deliuerie of Women (1612): Some do obserue, that the Nauell must be tyed longer, or shorter, according to the difference of the sexe, allowing more measure to the males: because this length doth make their tongue, and priuie membres the longer: whereby they may both speake the plainer, and be more seruiceable to Ladies. And that by tying it short, and almost close to the belly in females, their tongue is lesse free, and their naturall part more straite: And to speake the truth, the Gossips commonly say merrily to the Midwife; if it be a boy, Make him good measure; but if it be a wench, Tye it short.100

Length and mobility are prized in men, for pleasing discourse and pleasure in bed; tightness and quietness in women, to bridle their assumed unruly sexuality and garrulity. Thomas Lupton does caution that, as “the member of generatio[n] doth followe the proporcion of the Nauell string . . . if it be tyed to short in a Wenche, it maye be a hynderaunce to her in bringing forth her chylde,” though this appears not in a manual of midwifery but in a collection of superstitions, wonders, prodigies, and helpful hints.101 In her 1671 Midwives Book Jane Sharpe discusses the question of cutting the navel string at some length, explaining, “A midwives skill is seen much if she can perform this rightly,”102 though she concedes that “in

99 Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. R. C. Esquire (London, 1594), 287. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. The six steps necessary to ensure a boy child, which the midwife must explain to the prospective mother, include eating “meats hot and drie” rather than vegetables like “lettice,” exercising before conception, and lying on her right side after intercourse. 100 Jacques Guillemeau, Child-birth Or, The Happy Deliuerie of Vvomen (London, 1612), 99. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 101 Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things, of Sundry Sortes (London, 1579), 11. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 102 Jane Sharpe, The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 164.

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what place this string must be cut, Midwives and Physicians can scarce agree.”103 She offers the opinion of “Antients” such as medical doctor Antonius Mizaldus (1510–18) and anatomist Adrianus Spigelius (1578–1625) on the matter104 but does not make a final determination. However, Thomas Raynalde, in the highly influential midwifery manual the Birth of Mankind (1545), not only subscribes to the doctrine that the length of the navel string directly corresponds to that of the tongue, if only in “a man child,” but also teaches that many other things can be learned “by marking of the child’s navel,” such as whether the child will grow to be barren or fruitful.105 The physical mechanism by which this shortening or lengthening is assumed to take place is not explained at all in any of these or other sources. The process that would have to take place would run approximately as follows: the umbilical cord would be assumed to be rooted in the tip of the tongue, running its length internally to the base of the tongue and thence proceeding in some fashion through the body to the inner umbilicus. It would be assumed to have a second root at the tip of the penis, or at some point around the vulva, thence proceeding in a like manner up through the body to the navel, with the addition that in females the cord must first encircle the vulva. The two cords would then meet, entwine, and issue out of the umbilicus in the twisted-looking umbilical cord. Rooted in this manner, the twined cords could be, if desired, pulled out to their fullest extent, thus puckering short the organs where they originated, the tongue and the privy members, in the same way that the waistband of a skirt can be formed into gathers by pulling an elastic strip through it. Conversely, by “cutting long,” or leaving extra cord available, the organs could be left with enough slack to allow them to grow to their fullest possible extent. But no hint of such a process or an understanding appears in the early modern manuals, a lacuna at odds with their fairly detailed descriptions of other processes relating to gestation and birth. Midwifery manuals such as Sharpe’s are as anatomically accurate as any medical treatises of their time, for the most part operating at a level far more technical than their discussion of the navel string. The anatomy and physiology of the umbilical cord itself, and its connection to the placenta, or “secondine,” are described in these manuals in some depth, though the descriptions do not correspond in all particulars to present-day scientific understanding. An explanation may be lacking because the logic by which the length of the cut string determines the length of two

103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 165. 105 Thomas Raynalde, Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 154.

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unrelated members is not a solely physiological nor anatomical logic; nor is the cutting a precisely symbolic act, being at least partially grounded in physiology in terms of both its action and its context. Rather, it is a logic by which the performance of a physical action initiates a physical outcome . . . by means of a symbolic process. And as will be shown below, this is a very similar logic to that by which many performances of dismemberment are assumed to function. Other instances of physical modification include the midwife’s presumed ability and even obligation to mold the child’s body immediately after birth. This practice is referenced in a temporally and generically wide range of materials. Giraldus Cambrensis references it as early as 1188 in his History and Topography of Ireland, where he notes with surprise and disapproval that the “wild Irish” do not so mold their children: [A]lmost all is left to nature. They are not placed in cradles, or swathed, nor are their tender limbs either formented by constant bathings, or adjusted with art. For the midwives make no use of warm water, nor raise their noses, nor depress the face, nor stretch the legs; but nature alone, with very slight aids from art, disposes and adjusts the limbs to which she has given birth just as she pleases.106

A similar belief appears in thirteenth-century Trotula manuscripts, which not only call for the length of the privy member to be adjusted by means of the umbilical cord but also direct that the neonate’s forehead, nose, and limbs be straightened.107 It is also referenced by Louise Bourgeois Boursier in the Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged (1663), which instructs the midwife to close up the fontanel in the infant’s head through gentle pressure and pinch its nose into shape, though she urges caution to those “that think that they can shape the head and nose of a child as if it were of wax.”108 François Mariceau, who in The Diseases of Women With Child, and in Child-Bed (1672) scoffs at the idea that cutting the navel string has any effect whatever on the size of the tongue or genitals, nonetheless recommends swaddling the newborn with legs straight and closely bound, so as to fit “him” to walk upright, “else he would tend to crawl on all four, like other animals do.”109

106 Giraldus, History and Topography, 122. 107 The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 83. 108 Louise Bourgeois Boursier, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged (London, 1663), 119–20. Early English Books Online. 109 François Mariceau, The Diseases of Women with Child, and in Child-Bed (London, 1672), 362. Early English Books Online. The distinction between the human and “other animals,” and the immeasurable superiority of the former over the latter, is a common preoccupation of

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The belief in not only the ability but also the duty of the midwife to mold a child after birth argues that every cultivated person’s body was assumed to have been more or less altered, in a performance of civilizedness differentiating English children from those of ethnic others who would instead leave their infants just as Nature made them. It performs the child’s cultured and cultivated nature, her or his fitness to enter as a member into the ranks of the appropriately modified human. Thus, if the body was presumed to be the mirror of God’s design, it was not the natural body; it was always already the body shaped by the civilizing impulse. In the same way that a garden – with its acts of planting, digging up, cutting down, pruning, and shaping – imposes a culturally desirable shape on the natural growth of plants, the midwife’s modification marks through the body of the infant a similar disinclination to accept the natural form as it develops. Both manifest an understanding that artifice and techne, in the form of human shaping and the knowledge that prompts it, are superior to the slackness and incapability shown in letting things grow naturally, just as the trope of virgin land in need of being “ploughed” implies that human husbandry is necessary to shape the land to its fullest potential. After infancy, physical modifications of the human body are primarily described in the context of punition. Unlike more extensive measures of modification such as dismemberment, which had the added punitive effects of causing loss of function if not also of life, the punishment of branding was specifically designed to alter the body in order to perform the person’s altered status. Legal commentator William Blackstone, who dismisses branding as “no punishment at all (or next to none . . .),”110 points out in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1753) that in the time of Henry VIII it was used as a mark of signification: “learned laymen” who had escaped execution by claiming benefit of clergy were branded to keep them from being able to so escape a second time.111 It was also used to mark recidivists after other punishments had failed in the appropriate corrective effect; Edward VI stipulated that anyone fighting with weapons in a church or churchyard was to have an ear cut off, or, “having no ears, be branded with the letter F [for felon] in his cheek.”112 Most of branding’s other significations are no more positive: several texts associate it with the identification of ancient Roman slaves, while Robert Greene’s Second Part

midwifery manuals, serving as justification for the focus on a subject, women’s physiology and health, that the author may fear will be condemned as lascivious or effeminate. 110 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 4 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1903), 297. 111 Ibid., 294–95. 112 Ibid., 107.

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of Conny-Catching (1592) explains that horses might also be “branded or eare markt.”113 It was commonly used as a mark of heresy (along with “bor[ing] in the ears”), according to John Whitgift in The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition,114 although conversely it might have a positive religious connotation, at least metaphorically: in such texts as William Perkins’s A Case of Conscience (1592), God and Jesus are described as branding the elect to signal their favored status.115

Fragmentations The most extreme bodily modification, dismemberment permanently alters the shape and conformation of the body. Aside from circumcision, some types of castration, and isolated cases of self-mutilation done for non-punitive purposes, all of which are related to gender and discussed in chapter 2, dismemberments premortem almost always were performed as punishments, though post-mortem dismemberment had a wider range of signification. Bodily fragmentation has a special import, both because of its ability to individuate particular body parts – to make them more portable and deployable and to shape them into particular forms – and because of its heightened, often mortal, stakes.116 This latter consideration accords with Scarry’s contention that the acute discomfort felt in observing the rupture of another’s body engenders in spectators the necessity of assigning it a symbolic meaning to displace the too-raw reality. Dismemberment is shown to be categorically different from other types of wounding in the medieval romance of Eger and Grime (ca. 1450), in which the severed finger of the hero, by its absence, serves as the outward and visible illustration of unworthiness, performing his shame and concomitant lack of manhood. The Lady Winglayne, who has vowed to marry only a man who has never been defeated in battle, is betrothed to the knight Eger, who fulfills this

113 Robert Greene, A Notable Discovery of Coosnage: The Second Part of Conny-Catching (London, 1592), 13. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 114 John Whitgift, The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition against the Replie of T.C (London, 1574), 318. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 115 William Perkins, A Case of Conscience the Greatest that Ever Was (London, 1592), 46. Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online. 116 Caroline Walker Bynum, discussing the rise of torture at the turn of the fourteenth century, comments, “The fact that torturers (who were permitted to squeeze, twist, and stretch in excruciating ways) were forbidden to effect bodily division suggests that it was highly charged,” Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1992), 323–24n19.

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condition although he lacks money and lands. On an expedition to a far country, he is vanquished by an unknown knight later identified as the invincible Sir Gray-steele, who cuts off one of Eger’s fingers; as subsequent events show, this form of dismemberment is an especial penchant of Gray-steele’s. Deeply mortified to have undergone this loss, Eger laments to his sworn brother Sir Grime that he wishes he had been like other knights who “‘haue biddn att home, / & saued their bodyes forth of shame, / & kepeed their manhood faire & cleane!’” (have stayed at home and saved their bodies from shame and kept their manhood spotless, ll. 79–81).117 He adds, “I am hurt & wounded sore, / & manhood is lost for euer-more’” (ll. 83–84).118 His subsequent narration underscores the sense that his permanent loss of manhood inheres in the absence of his finger rather than in his other wounds or bruises. As he describes his first meeting with the female physician Lady Loosepaine, in the course of treating his wounds she takes off his gloves to wash his hands and uncovers his lack: . . . when shee saw my right hand bare, alas! my shame is much the more! the gloue was whole, the hand was nomen, therby shee might well see I was ouercomen; & shee perceiued that I thought shame; therfore shee would not aske me my name.” (ll. 253–58)

Nomen has a large constellation of meanings relating to taking, plundering, and cutting off – essentially ravished – and Eger here magnifies his loss to include the whole hand rather than simply the missing finger.119 His other wounds are shown to be amenable to healing: a green potion given to him by Loosepaine effects a temporary cure, and she explains that they will be fully healed if his lady continues these ministrations. In contrast, the missing finger continues to signify defeat and shame in Eger’s narration: although he undergoes the other injuries while actively fighting, he only admits to having lost the finger when, having battled till all his weapons are broken, he swoons from pain and exhaustion and awakens to discover it gone. This cut is seemingly not something a man may admit to having brooked while conscious. Not only the

117 Eger and Grime: An Early English Romance, ed. John Hales and Frederick Furnivall (London: N. Trübner & Co, 1867). 118 This edition marks expanded contractions using italics. 119 Willard Rusch, “The Male Body and the corps morcelé in Eger and Grime,” paper delivered at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (May 1994), 5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318440833.

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knight but also Winglayne believes he has lost all honor and manhood along with his finger: disdainfully, and with “words . . . both strange & dry,” she implies that he cravenly chose to surrender the finger to avoid being killed: “‘he gaue up a ffingar to let him gange [go], / the next time he will offer vp the whole hand’” (ll. 450, 455–58). The lost finger, therefore, is initially framed as an irreparable sign of Eger’s inadequacy, whether it is considered a manifestation in the (absent) flesh of a previously unsuspected lack or whether his manhood, previously intact, is understood to have vanished along with the finger. Such symbolic freight might seem to require the restoration of the physical digit to achieve any positive outcome; however, in the poem’s economy fingers turn out to be to some extent fungible. Grime concocts a plan by which Eger can regain, if not his own lost member, then one of Gray-steele’s, and with it his love’s favor. While Eger is too wounded to prosecute a second confrontation, Grime rides off disguised as him, promising, “‘I shall feitch Gray-steele’s right hand, / Or I shall leaue another finger in that Land’” (ll. 535–36). It is understood that possession of this other set of fingers will operate upon Eger’s and Winglayne’s view of his manhood in the same way that his own intact digit would, granting him a figurative regeneration through the mirroring dismemberment of the original dismemberer. Like the cutting of the navel string, the logic by which this works is one in which physical alteration of the body is understood to effect an unrelated physical change by means of a symbolic process. Such a process is also discovered to have been at play in Gray-steele’s own practices of dismemberment. After Grime defeats him and brings back his hand in triumph, it is revealed to have undergone physical changes owing to its previous owner’s habit of cutting off fingers: it bears “fingars more then other three” hands (l. 1182), having become “super-digitated.”120 Every finger he cut off a defeated opponent has somehow been appended to his own hand. While a similar adhesion probably does not take place for Eger – the severed hand is not described as cleaving to his own wrist – his possession of the hand and Winglayne’s (false) belief that he has dismembered it from his former conqueror are enough to restore the lady’s previous admiration for Eger, despite his probable remaining amputation. After the return with the severed hand, Eger’s dismemberment is not mentioned again; since it only matters because of the meaning made of it, its physical trace disappears from the text when that meaning is vacated. Dismemberments that only matter, or that matter differently, because of their appended meaning are characteristic of legends of saints. Many narratives

120 Rusch, “The Male Body,” 3.

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of their torments and executions emphasize that although their torturers and dismemberers perform these actions in order to create specific meaning of the saints’ fragmented bodies, the divinely sustained saints are able to offer an alternate narrative, so that the bodily modifications instead show forth the glory of God, Christianity, and martyrdom. The execution of St. James Intercisus, discussed above, is a particularly marked example of this rhetorical move. The tortures and techniques of execution are often stressed to show the barbarity of non-Christians in ordering such torments, or to underscore the pain and suffering the martyrs underwent for their faith, or conversely, as Trembinski shows, to demonstrate God’s favor through protection of the saint from what should have been unspeakable pain. So important is symbolic mutilation to the understanding of the saints’ lives that occasionally instances of emblematic dismemberment appear in later versions of legends that did not feature them originally, as occurs in the story and iconography of St. Erasmus. The saint is originally described in his vitae as having been martyred by a variety of tortures such as being beaten, thrown into a pit of vipers, and force-fed molten pitch. Later editions of the Legend record as one of his miracles that during a storm, lightning struck directly next to him as he was praying, leaving him entirely unharmed. After this sailors, fearing storms at sea, took him as their patron saint, and subsequently his iconography came to include a windlass, such as was used to wind up the ship’s cables, in acknowledgement of these faithful.121 Still later in the history of his representation, by the early fifteenth century, the windlass had begun to suggest an additional form of dismemberment to his depicters, as shown in a fifteenth-century alabaster devotional tablet. Caxton’s 1498 translation of the Golden Legend records the new torment: “And they leyd thys holy martyr under þe wyndace all naked vpon a table, and kut him vpon hys bely: and wounde out hys guttys or bowels of hys blessyd body” (and they laid this holy martyr under the windlass all naked upon a table, and cut him upon his belly, and wound out his guts or bowels of his blessed body).122 Perhaps unsurprisingly, later in his legend he also becomes the saint of abdominal pain. This recursive textual and visual history illustrates the ways a saint’s martyrdom could become increasingly associated with dismembering tortures, a movement that Trembinski has traced in other hagiographic representations.123 Tracy likewise shows that many of the

121 Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence, and Martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 89–90. 122 Jacobus de Voragine, Here begynneth the legende in latyn legenda aurea, trans. William Caxton (London, 1498), fol. 398, img. 450. Early English Books Online. 123 Trembinski, “Insensate Saints,” 128.

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especially gory torments recorded in the Gilte Legende and other collections of vitae reflect not the practices contemporaneous with the saints’ lives but the punishments extant when the collections were written,124 arguing for later additions to their stories.

Glossing Cuts John Marston’s tragedy Antonio’s Revenge (ca. 1600), a meditation on the disastrous consequences of thwarted love, jealousy, and over-identification with the bodies of others, continually emphasizes the symbolic importance and specific meanings of body parts and dismemberment performed for reasons beyond its physical consequences. Commonly considered one of the bloodiest of the Jacobean revenge tragedies, the play has garnered negative critical reception for its extreme violence.125 Yet it nonetheless performs only a relatively small portion of the mutilations that its characters threaten, theorize, and fantasize; it contains far more discussion of dismemberment than enactment of it, in keeping with the play’s emphasis on framing, not simply presenting, bodily fragmentation. The action of the play takes up where its much lighter prequel, the comedy Antonio and Mellida (ca. 1599), leaves off, with the betrothal of Mellida to Antonio. But Antonio’s Revenge immediately reveals that the consent of Mellida’s father Piero to the marriage had been deceitful, part of a deep-laid plan of revenge. Piero hates Antonio’s father Andrugio for (decades before) having married Maria, Antonio’s mother, whom Piero still vainly desires. Not satisfied with murdering Andrugio at the start of the play, Piero then takes extreme measures to prevent the marriage, plotting to kill Antonio and figuring his own sinless daughter Mellida as a whore in a complicated deception. Antonio in turn must revenge his father’s death – and Mellida’s as well, when she eventually dies of grief amidst the bloodshed and calumny. He achieves his vengeance first by killing, dismembering, and cooking Julio, Piero’s young son, and then by pulling out Piero’s tongue, serving him Julio’s limbs in a dish, and finally killing him.

124 Larissa Tracy, “Torture Narrative: The Imposition of Medieval Method on Early Christian Texts,” Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004), 45. 125 Georgia Brown terms it “disgusting,” rife with “sensationalism, and . . . unstable, some would say incoherent, morality,” “Disgusting John Marston: Sensationalism and the Limits of a Post-Modern Marston,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 4, no. 2 (2005), 121. Raymond Rice comments that it “has long been recognized as one of the darkest visions of Elizabethan culture,” “Cannibalism and the Act of Revenge in Tudor-Stuart Drama,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 44.2 (Spring 2004), 308.

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Much of the play’s somatic symbolism centers on the relationship between parent and child and how the former inheres in the latter. It assumes a sense of bodily unity between these relatives that persists throughout their lives, such that the parent’s “part” may symbolically remain an element of the child’s body long after the acts of generation and birth. Maria tells her son Antonio that she hugs his murdered father by hugging him: “Part of him thus I clip, my dear, dear joy” (1.2.169).126 Piero, considering whether to confide his sins to his friend Pandulfo, asks himself, “Is he all, all man? / Hath he no part of mother in him, ha? / No lickerish womanish inquisitiveness?” (2.1.97–99).127 In constructing a tableau that will seem to implicate Antonio in plotting to shame Mellida, Piero instructs his servant Strozzo to (falsely) confess “that Antonio bribed thee to defame / Her maiden honour, on inveterate hate / Unto my blood” (2.2.181–83); that is, Antonio is imagined as paying Strozzo to rape Piero himself through the body of his daughter. The pervasive rhetoric surrounding somatic partition comes to fruition in the third act, when Antonio stabs Julio to death, and culminates in the fifth act in the serving of Julio’s hacked body in a dish to his own father. The play’s imagined dismemberments repeatedly raise the question of whether it is possible to divide out the parent’s part of a body from the child’s.128 In his disingenuous performances of rage at his daughter Mellida’s supposed sexual looseness, Piero imagines her situated within, yet separable from, his own body: “Were she as near my heart / As is my liver I would rend her off” (1.2.230–31), and “Were Mellida mine eye, with such a blemish / Of most loathed looseness, I would scratch it out” (4.1.79–80). However, Piero himself shows at the end of the play that body parts may unequivocally signify and embody a particular individual when he recognizes Julio’s limbs after they have been cut up and cooked.

126 John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge: The Malcontent and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 127 The OED defines “lickerish” as (2b. gen. and fig.) “Eagerly desirous, longing, greedy” or (3) “Lecherous, lustful.” 128 The early modern belief that the growing fetus was nourished by and perhaps entirely formed from blood while in the womb, and then continued to be nourished by blood concocted into the pure white of breast milk after birth, leads intuitively to the understanding that a child’s physical body as well as emotional and mental temperament was constructed solely or primarily out of the substance of the parent’s bodies. Wet-nurses were also thought to be able to contribute to the physical and/or temperamental make-up of an infant by contributing their own blood/milk. The midwife Jane Sharpe, in discussing why children may or may not look like their parents, argues that “the likeness proceeds commonly from matter; and because the female usually brings more matter than the male [to the act of generation], more children are like the mother than the father,” The Midwives Book, 120; other authors reverse the proportion.

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When Antonio presents the dish to him at 5.3.81, the stage direction instructs, “Piero seems to condole his son.” (He can do little more than “seem” to communicate, having already had his tongue torn out.) Unlike the many theoretically indeterminate body parts that litter the play, once one of the much-discussed dismemberments takes place, these are distinguishable specifically as Julio’s. Antonio himself claims no desire to kill Julio, only that portion of Piero in his son’s body, to cut him out of his son: “O that I knew which joint, which side, which limb / Were father all and had no mother in’t, / That I might rip it vein by vein and carve revenge / In bleeding rases! But since ’tis mixed together, / Have at adventure, pell-mell, no reverse!” (3.2.164–68) he shouts, stabbing the young boy. Afterwards, underscoring the compartmentalization in his mind that finds expression in his desire for corresponding compartmentalization of lineage and the physical parceling out of body parts, he croons, . . . Come, pretty, tender child, It is not thee I hate, not thee I kill. Thy father’s blood that flows within thy veins Is it I loathe, is that revenge must suck. I love thy soul; and were thy heart lapped up In any flesh but in Piero’s blood, I would thus kiss it;

“but being his, thus, thus, / And thus I’ll punch it” he concludes, enacting this violence (3.2.177–84). Antonio understands that he cannot literally cut Piero out of Julio yet in some regard believes that coupling his dismemberment with the narration of his intended reason for it is essentially equivalent to doing so. A body can be cut apart, the play suggests, but the hacked pieces do not always inherently speak their desired meaning. As in Tamburlaine’s confrontation with Bajazeth, such exegeses illustrate that body performances are seen as only partially or contingently signifying in and of themselves; they must be given meaning through words. Yet at the same time the words alone are insufficient; they must be concretized in the body. Dismemberment combined with explanatory commentary into a performance of meaning reaches its height in the spectacles of drawing, hanging, and quartering that began in the late thirteenth century. This was a punishment reserved almost exclusively for men accused of high treason, and one whose symbolic nature is readily legible: as the accused traitors had attempted to tear apart the body of the state, so would their own bodies be cut or torn apart.129

129 Men is used advisedly; hanging and quartering was a form of execution reserved in England almost solely for males, as is discussed in chapter 2.

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It was comprised of a constellation of actions that usually included being dragged behind a horse to the gallows, hanged, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, decapitated, and finally cut into four pieces. The lengthy quotes that Foucault reproduces at the beginning of Discipline and Punish make it clear that this was an excruciatingly painful as well as a highly symbolic way to die. This agony must have been intensely evident to the spectators as well, despite conventions that mandated fortitude on the part of the condemned at execution. As Scarry has argued, realization of the pain of others may often be inspired more readily by the sight of the object that caused the pain than by that person’s expression of anguish,130 and the elaborate array of tortures that make up drawing and quartering is replete with objects – the hurdle, the scaffold, knives, flames, the axe – that clearly convey the agony they can cause. However, just as different cultures and time periods have different conceptions of the body, so may they have different conceptions of pain and accord it different levels of aversiveness. It may be read as purification and purgation of the criminal’s soul rather than as vengeance,131 while martyrs, owing to God’s grace, are often represented as not feeling it at all.132 Regardless of the amount of physical anguish and the level of aversiveness understood by the audience and orchestrators of the spectacle, pain was neither the only nor the main aim of this compound punishment. As Blackstone notes, there were other methods of torture and execution “to the full as terrible to sensation,”133 such as burning at the stake, that did not result in dismemberment. Drawing, hanging, and quartering is shown as having a symbolic significance equally as important as its physical torturousness. It performs the unnaturalness of the traitor’s act, illustrating in small what it is feared would have happened to the corpus politicum had he succeeded. It disintegrates the body of one who is thereby shown not to be integrated within himself, or with his community, or

130 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 15–16. 131 Esther Cohen, “Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages,” Science in Context 8.1 (Spring 1995). 132 Trembinski, “Insensate Saints.” 133 Blackstone, Commentaries, 66. Though Blackstone was referring to contemporary practices which were at least a century after the end of the time period on which I am focusing, I would contend that burning at the stake had been “to the full as terrible to sensation” previously as it was in the mid-eighteenth century, and perhaps even more so, owing to the lessperfected technologies of immolation that might lead to the condemned victim’s merely being singed for hours, as is described repeatedly in execution narratives. In reference to burning, it is also worth noting that Bynum comments, though not in relation to this passage, that burning was, essentially, “reduction to the smallest possible particles” (Resurrection, 324) and therefore, presumably, could be employed as the ultimate form of dismemberment.

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with God’s design, if he could have attempted such a rupture. And it ostracizes him from the company of the civilized by making it impossible for his body ever again to manifest the unity and divine order that the human form whole and unbroken conveys and embodies. That pain was not its only nor even its primary purpose is made clear by the fact that in the first decades of its use in England, drawing and quartering was performed only on the bodies of those who had already been executed, usually by hanging. The ritual attained what would become its final form over time: in 1283 “Edward I added disembowelling, burning, beheading, and quartering” to the usual drawing and hanging in the execution of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, probably the first man to suffer the full array of punishments while alive.134 Even after quartering had begun to be wrought on the living, it continued to be enacted postmortem on others, such as Roger of Mowbray in 1320. In the late-fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum, John of Fordun recounts that Roger, accused of treason, died before he could be brought to trial, but his dead body was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be drawn, hanged, and beheaded, though the sentence was later commuted.135 The sentence of quartering, pre- as well as post-mortem, was often amended to simple beheading,136 which again demonstrates that the impulse behind condemning traitors to this punishment had at least as much to do with its symbolic significance as with the desire for the person’s body to be so treated. In descriptions of executions, an often-stated reason for the extraction, detaching, display, and annihilation of body parts is the obliteration of those agents that had caused the treason. This principle is illustrated in small in the cutting off of John Stubbs’s hand in 1579, on the grounds that this member had been used to pen a seditious pamphlet decrying Queen Elizabeth’s proposed

134 Mary Lewis, “A Traitor’s Death?” Antiquity (2008), 117. 135 John of Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. William Forbes Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871). See also George Neilson, “Drawing, Hanging, and Quartering,” Notes and Queries 7, no. 12 (1891): 130–31. Neilson also notes that coincidentally a descendant of Roger’s, Francis Mowbray, was himself hanged and quartered post-mortem in 1603 for conspiring against James VI and I, Trial by Combat (New York: Macmillan, 1891), 311–12. 136 Mills reviews recent studies showing that capital punishment did not take place as often as modern-day readers may believe, nor as often as it is threatened or prescribed in medieval legal documents. He references Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442, 50 and 117–30, in which Philippa Maddern estimates that two felons were executed per year per county in East Anglia during this time, and Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348, pp. 44 and 56–57, in which Barbara Hanawalt gives similarly low numbers for this time period. J. B. Post, in “Faces of Crime in Late Medieval England,” History Today 38 (1988), also discusses the frequent mitigation of sentences in English court practices.

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marriage to the Duke of Anjou. On a larger scale, Pierre de Langtoft’s earlyfourteenth-century description of William Wallace’s 1305 execution by drawing, hanging, quartering, and burning describes the various body parts to be destroyed as seats and actors-out of his treasonous impulses, in a rhetorical move common to descriptions of spectacular execution.137 The account of Dafydd ap Gruffydd’s execution in the Annales de Dunstaplia (ca. 1297) lists the protracted series of tortures in conjunction with the rationale for each: David per totum barnagium Angliae quatuor judicia suscepit in hunc modum 1. Quia proditor fuit domini regis, qui eum militem fecerat; tractus est equis lento passu ad locum suspendii. / 2. Quia homicidium fecerat Fulconis Trigald, et aliorum nobilium Angliae; suspensus est vivus. / 3. Quia illud fecit tempore Dominicae Passionis; propter blasphemiam viscera ejus incendio sunt cremata. / 4. Quia in pluribus locis Angliae mortem domini regis fuerat machinatus; membratim est partitus, et per climata Angliae ad terrorem malignantium destinatus.138

In his extensive study of The Law of Treason in England in the Late Middle Ages, John Bellamy paraphrases this list: Because David was a betrayer of the king, who had made him a knight, he was to be drawn at the horse’s tail to the place of his hanging. This . . . was the hall-mark of treason. Because he had killed Fulk Trigald and other English noblemen, he was to be hanged alive; because he had committed the murders at Easter he was to be disembowelled and his entrails burned. Finally, because he had plotted the king’s death in several different parts of the realm his body was to be quartered and limbs dispatched to where they could act as a warning for others.139

Although much of this reasoning presented as rational, on closer inspection it is essentially symbolic. The repeated “quia” (because) sets up a logically causative structure, but the articles do not always include concrete reasons as to why each crime should necessarily lead to its appointed punishment. Some clauses make more pragmatic sense, as “Quia in pluribus locis Angliae mortem domini regis fuerat machinatus; membratim est partitus, et per climata Angliae ad terrorem malignantium destinatus” (Because he had devised the death of the king in many parts of England, he was dissected limb from limb and sent to the regions of England to terrify evildoers): that is, presumably his fellow conspirators will

137 Pierre de Langtoft, Chronicle, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright (London: Longmans, 1868), 362–63. 138 Annales prioratus de Dunstaplia, ed. Henry Richards Luard, in Annales Monastici, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 294. 139 John Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26.

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see them in these various places and be dissuaded from further plotting. Others have a more imagistic or intuitive logic, as “Quia illud fecit tempore Dominicae Passionis; propter blasphemiam viscera ejus incendio sunt cremata” (Because he did it at the time of the Passion of the Lord, on account of his blasphemy his entrails were burned in fire): the treason was plotted during the time that all Christians should be focused primarily on the sufferings of Jesus, not on attempting to overthrow the rule of the king, who could be seen as God’s viceroy on earth. In continental Europe, burning was used as a punishment for heresy, akin to blasphemy, possibly to simulate the flames of Hell, by the mid-twelfth century, though the punishment was not codified in English law until 1401. Here, specifically to obliterate the parts of body in which this evil had been brewed, the viscera are burned, rendered into infinitesimally small pieces. Even after the actions to be implemented in the ritual of drawing and quartering had been generally established, exposition on their significations continued to grow throughout the early modern period. The elements of the execution of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 are described as comprising “an ordinary punishment,” but the meanings given to them are far more elaborate than in earlier accounts: He shall have his judgment to be drawn to the place of execution from his prison as being not worthy any more to tread upon the face of the earth whereof he was made: also for that he hath been retrograde to nature, therefore is he drawn backward at a horse-tail. And whereas God hath made the head of man the highest and most supreme part . . . he must be drawn with his head declining downward, and lying so near the ground as may be, being thought unfit to take benefit of the common air. For which cause also he shall be strangled, being hanged up by the neck between heaven and earth, as deemed unworthy of both, or either . . . His bowels and inlay’d parts taken out and burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible treason. After, to have his head cut off, which had imagined the mischief. And lastly his body to be quartered, and the quarters set up in some high and eminent place, to the view and detestation of men, and to become a prey for the fowls of the air.140

If the punishments comprise a void that must be filled with meaning, then such meaning-making reaches what is perhaps its apex in this extensive exegesis on the execution ritual.

140 William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Collection of State Trials, vol. 2, ed. Thomas Howell (London: R. Bagshaw, 1809), 184.

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The Abstract(ed) Body Both physical alteration and its verbal description are used to perform meaning through bodies. It is not surprising, then, that there is such a long tradition of body as text or that textual and physical modification of the body have been so intertwined in this discussion. Writing is a form of abstracting, a system in which one thing stands for another, but the first abstraction may have been the ability to make meaning from the body. To “abstract” meant, by the mid-fifteenth century, “to take away, extract, or remove (something)” (OED v. trans. 1a) and by the end of the sixteenth “to formulate (an idea, concept, etc.) by isolating the intrinsic properties of something or common characteristics of a number of diverse things” (v. trans. 5a). A word that first referred to the removal of a part then came also to refer to the creation of a larger and more general concept. Similarly, cutting up the body into parts amplified rather than diminished its effects. As Bynum explains, the body part may stand as a synecdoche for the whole body, just as the person becomes the embodiment of a larger concept. A relic stands for the saint, and the saint her- or himself stands for or contains the grace of God. The body of the quartered criminal concretizes the treasonous thoughts of the criminal, and tearing apart the body obliterates the thoughts as well as what are assumed to be their physical places of origin. If each part stands for a whole, taking apart the body could multiply whatever signifying possibilities it possessed. It was also a way to spread its meaning through space and time. Sending the quarters of the executed into distant reaches of the kingdom allowed the body parts to signify to far more people than would otherwise have been possible. Temporally, even the most elaborate punitive spectacle could not be dragged out for more than two or three days, but the body parts, once removed, might be made to signify for far longer. Heads put on stakes on London Bridge might be boiled in wine and spices to delay putrefaction and were sometimes encased in iron gibbet cages to keep them from falling apart too quickly. They were intended to continue to signify for as long as possible, sometimes years. Words similarly multiply signifying possibilities, and writing down those words multiplies them further. The written bodies discussed here have been modified verbally; some texts describe bodies modified physically as well, but even in these, that physical alteration is then textually modified. Such textual modification amplifies the signifying properties of the body in the same way that physical modification does. St. James Intercisus verbalizes and magnifies the meaning being made of his body as it is made, and his hagiographers likewise make altered and expanded meaning of the incident. And like the distribution of body parts, writing makes experiences available to others distant in time and space from the original incident: a written description of an execution

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made the symbolic aspects of the execution known to far more people than would have been able to crowd around the executioner’s block, at the time and for centuries afterward. Not only are bodies endlessly “used” to think with, but thoughts could and can also be changed by physically changing bodies. As Scarry argues, “It is precisely because political learning is . . . deeply embodied that the alteration of the political configuration of a country, continent, or hemisphere so often appears to require the alteration of human bodies.”141 And as this chapter has shown, medieval and early modern representations of the alteration of human bodies, particularly by means of their division, appear as both a way to perform meaning and as the consequence of ideas of meaning: the action of bodily modification, whether textual or physical, was both symptom and cause.

141 Scarry, Body, 112.

Chapter 2: Gendered Dismemberments Violence is pervasive throughout the Bible. Nonetheless, the selection bias of the biblical scenes depicted in the thirteenth-century Morgan Crusader Bible, MS M. 638,1 disproportionately favors public and private bloodshed. Also known as the Maciejowski or the Picture Bible, this large, beautiful, and vibrantly illustrated codex consists primarily of images, supplemented by later-added textual inscriptions. And these scenes of battle, self-defense, and vengeance, limned in clear, bright colors by an illustrator possessed of artistic talent and sensitivity, have a vividness often exceeding that of the original stories. One such series of images concerns the woman identified in the Bible only as the pilegesh, the Levite’s wife/concubine who is raped and killed in Judges 19 (Figure 1).2 In the central image of the series she lies curled on a table, naked, on her face an expression of quiet sadness at odds with the violence being done to her. A huge gash in her side almost bisects her, allowing her intestines to cascade out. An arm lies on the floor; a leg is falling to join it. Bloody rivulets writhe from every cut. One man wields a large sword over his head, preparing for another cut, his face distressed but resolute; another points worriedly at the wound. Directly next to the table, within the same panel but later in time, a third man carries off an arm and another cradles, surprisingly gently, her head, the same look of quiet sadness still on her face. Like Lavinia’s in Titus Andronicus, the pilegesh’s dismemberment is the indirect result of having been raped, in this instance perhaps to death. The incidents leading to her partition, pictured in sharp detail and with marked empathy, are discussed further below. But as the first portion of this chapter shows, the pilegesh’s story is only one example among many, albeit dramatic, of the conjunction between rape and dismemberment assumed and represented in medieval and early modern English texts and visual images. As Pascale Aebischer argues of Lavinia, her “hand- and tongue-amputations do write ‘rape’ onto her body through a metonymical displacement of her wound (making the implicit explicit

1 Morgan Crusader Bible. MS M.638 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum). 2 Pilegesh is the original Hebrew designation for the woman, meaning a concubine or secondary wife with a specific legal status almost equal to that of the primary wife, often taken by alreadymarried men for the sake of childbearing; Hagar, who bore Ishmael, was Abraham’s pilegesh. Following Alice Bach, “Rereading the Body Politic: Women, Violence, and Judges 21,” in Judges: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), I use this term rather than choosing among inexact English translations. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513237-003

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Figure 1: The Levite dismembers the pilegesh in the Morgan Crusader Bible. © The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.638, fol. 16v. Purchased by J. P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1916.

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elsewhere).”3 In such representations, the fragmentation often attendant upon sexual assault, or used as a punishment for it, may have a practical purpose within the narrative but shows an equally strong symbolic impetus: the cuts make manifest, in visible, demonstrable form, the de-sexing assumed to be suffered by the raped woman. Such de-sexing is represented as being caused to a greater or lesser extent by the rape and thus as requisite to be written on the woman’s body as a sign of her altered status and state, or used on the man’s as an appropriate parallel penalty. The conjunction between rape and fragmentation is only one example of dismemberments predicated on gender. After a discussion of this connection, the chapter turns to representations of women quartered by horses for sexual infidelity, showing that the significations of women’s and men’s dead and divided bodies differ in ways that lead to differing narrative uses of this trope. Unlike men’s quarters, which continue to signify shame after death and are thus used both physically and textually for specific rhetorical purposes, women’s dismembered bodies often lose signification at the point of death and disappear from the text with their fragmentation, with shame inhering far more strongly in their living bodies. Continuing the theme of shame performed on or through the body, the chapter moves to medieval and early modern English interpretations of castration, showing not only that penal castration writes desexing on the body in a manner analogous to a woman’s rape but also that the fear of castration by ethnic and religious others is often a concretization of the larger fears of religious and economic engulfment that periodically flared up throughout the history of European and English relations with the Middle East. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ambiguous significations of circumcision, which serves as a marker of both debased and exalted otherness through its connection on the one hand to the assumed bloodthirstiness of Jews and on the other to Jesus’s first sacramental bloodshed. Each instance of gendered dismemberment performs a modification of the body’s gendered parts in ways that work to emphasize, downplay, or even reverse its represented gender in accordance with the author’s or artist’s larger argument.

3 Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 27.

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Rape, Adultery, and Sexual Shame Reading and Resisting Rape At the most basic level, because rape was primarily understood in medieval and early modern legal thought as being perpetrated on a virgin, it was considered literally to involve the tearing (off) of a body part, as in Rufinus’s late twelfth-century coupling of raptus (rape) with ruptus (torn or split) in his description of a raped woman.4 Rape litigation, in theory and practice, has a complicated history. Corinne Saunders notes that in the Middle Ages “English rape law is characterised by a complex pattern of development that builds on its Anglo-Saxon heritage, but reflects as well Norman influences”;5 elsewhere she discerns “a distinctively English cultural perspective on rape . . . despite the influence of Roman law and Continental thought.”6 One of the most persistent complications is the often-noted difficulty of defining the key term. Neither of the two Latin words generally used for the act in legal discourse, stuprum and raptus, corresponds precisely to the modern understanding of the word rape as forcible intercourse without the consent of one of the parties, though both terms are sometimes used to signify what today would be called rape. Raptus is concerned primarily with abduction, with or without the consent of the woman, and does not necessarily directly relate to sexual activity, thus including what might nowadays be seen as elopement and kidnapping as well as rape. Stuprum, by contrast, refers to any illicit sexual activity, again with or without consent, including rape but also adultery and homosexual intercourse. There was also little consensus on the appropriate punishment for the crime. Penalties for rape, as for other crimes, vary from one ruler to another, from comparatively lenient to draconian, through much of the Middle Ages, making it difficult to show a trend, though the early modern period is more stable in this regard. Two main categories of punition exist, monetary compensation and bodily injury, including death, though neither appears in isolation. Systems of monetary compensation drive Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Welsh, and the various Germanic law codes, the leges barbarorum, or laws of the barbarians, which themselves influence later English law.7

4 Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 81. 5 Corinne Saunders, “The Medieval Law of Rape,” Kings College Law Journal 11, no. 1 (2000): 48. 6 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, 76. 7 Katherine Fischer Drew, editor and translator of The Laws of the Salian Franks (Pactus legis Salicae) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), offers a useful discussion of the origin and practical application of these law codes.

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The influence of the Norman legal system led to an increased emphasis on physical punishment, though the possibility had existed in earlier laws as well.8 Both categories of punishment are prescribed for rape, and these punishments provide evidence of varying attitudes towards the crime. In general the laws tend to reflect an assumption that women are devalued by being raped, sometimes to the point that their entire worth is negated. Saunders notes that in the early medieval laws of Aethelberht and Alfred, “[involuntary] loss of virginity was equated with death, a theme that will resurface repeatedly in the history of rape,”9 though even the rape of non-virgins is often represented as equivalent to their death. In medieval Irish law, the rape of a woman required the same payment to her family as would have been demanded had she been killed.10 Throughout a range of legal writings a raped woman is frequently characterized as socially dead, due to the loss of her gendered social role. Kim Solga argues that after the First and Second Statutes of Westminster (1275 and 1285), which “enshrined rape as a property crime committed against a family or household head . . . her violated body became little more than a cipher for her family’s place in the social economy.”11 If a maiden, a raped woman was no longer marriageable, unless at certain times and in certain places to her rapist himself; if a wife, kinship ties contracted through her were strained or broken. Nor could she be depended upon for heirs of her husband’s body: for instance, the Lex Salica stipulates that the rape of a woman of childbearing age is punishable with a fine three times that demanded if the woman was past childbearing, for this reason.12 Patricia Cholakian confirms that in medieval law a rape survivor was seen as “a potential carrier of alien seed,”13 while Randy Phillis argues of Shakespeare’s Lucrece that one of the reasons she chose to end her life is because “she could no longer perform her

8 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment; Roger Groot, “The Crime of Rape temp. Richard I and John,” Journal of Legal History 9 (1988). 9 Saunders, “The Medieval Law of Rape,” 26. 10 Charlene Eska, “‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources,” in Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 171. 11 Kim Solga, Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 8. 12 Jay Paul Gates, “The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject,” in Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 141. 13 Patricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 13.

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primary function of bearing Collatine’s children and continuing his bloodlines.”14 A rape survivor was frequently deemed unable to fulfill her social functions as a woman, and few if any social functions apart from those gendered female existed: in both the medieval and early modern period women’s value was “determined by their sexual roles . . . as maid, widow, or wife. The absence of any other classification in medieval instruction manuals . . . implies that sexual roles . . . identified women within the patriarchal social system.”15 An example can be seen in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, where Marian denies being “maid, widow, nor wife,” leading the Duke to conclude, “Why you are nothing then.”16 The gendered nature of the loss assumed to be suffered by women who have been raped can also be inferred from the physical punishments for rapists resulting in dismemberment. Castration, in particular, shows a parallel gender significance that is discussed later in this chapter. However, the clearest indication of the social death assumed to result from rape is the corresponding punishment of physical death for the rapist, which according to the thirteenth-century legal historian Henry de Bracton was in effect prior to the coming of William the Conqueror.17 It was mandated again in 1285 by the Second Statute of Westminster and stayed in effect, with few exceptions, up through the mid-nineteenth century. The most extreme example of punitive mutilation and death may be the Devastation, or Wüstung, prescribed in various Germanic law codes as a response to certain heinous crimes, including rape;18 one code, the Middle Saxon Sachsenspiegel (1220), prescribes it solely for rape.19 The Wüstung calls for the dismemberment by beheading not only of the criminal but also of any witnesses to the crime, human and animal, insofar as they are all presumed to carry the guilt of having refrained

14 Randy Phillis, “The Stained Blood of Rape: Elizabethan Medical Thought and Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” in Shakespeare’s Theories of Blood, Character, and Class: A Festschrift in Honor of David Shelley Berkeley, ed. Peter C. Rollins and Alan Smith (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 128. 15 Robin L. Bott, “‘O, Keep Me From Their Worse Than Killing Lust’: Ideologies of Rape and Mutilation in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 190–91. 16 Quoted in Bott, “O Keep Me,” 191. 17 Henry de Bracton, Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, ed. George E. Woodbine, trans. Samuel E. Thorne, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 2:414–15. 18 Diane Wolfthal gives a full discussion of the treatment of rape in Germanic law codes, particularly the Sachsenspiegel, in Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 100–7. 19 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 105.

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from helping the victim – or at least, in the case of animals, not having created a loud noise to bring aid to the scene.20 The house in which the rape took place is likewise to be burned down, for its walls shielded the terrible deed and kept the victim’s ordeal from being seen.21 As with most other punishments prescribed for rape, the Wüstung was rarely enacted, though it is recorded as occurring at least occasionally.22 If and when it was, though, it could just as easily have rebounded against the victim of the attack, in that it might as well have been the house in which she lived that was burned, the animals on which her family’s food and economy depended that were slaughtered. In symbolic terms, this possibility is further evidence of the unconcern for a raped woman’s life after the assault, showing that it would in some very real ways be assumed to be over. In practical terms, the possibility that the extreme penalty might backlash against them may have acted as one more deterrent to women’s accusing their attackers.23 There were many such deterrents. Except in times of warfare, rape tended to be treated as stuprum – that is, like other forms of illicit intercourse, as a blemish on the woman’s moral or spiritual character rather than as an offense committed against her24 – though the larger scale of attacks during wartime sometimes led to a lessening of the blame tacitly or explicitly placed on the victim. Not only the definition of terms but also the determination of mental state was at issue: even in the designations of rape in which (lack of) consent was inherent, a key question was how consent was to be determined – or how lack of consent was to be proven. This latter was overwhelmingly important if women were to be able to defend themselves against charges of immorality, let alone attempt to prosecute their attackers. And as will be seen, it is the making visible, the performing, of this lack of consent that largely shapes representations of rape. Jody Enders and Solga have drawn parallels between, respectively, the medieval and the early modern rape survivor’s complaint and contemporaneous theatrical performance,25 noting that both demanded costuming, props, and an explicitly defined

20 The Saxon Mirror: A Sachsenspiegel of the Fourteenth Century, ed. and trans. Maria Dobozy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 117. 21 Ibid. 22 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 104. 23 Translator Maria Dobozy also raises this concern, The Saxon Mirror, 229n2–3. 24 Saunders, “The Medieval Law of Rape,” 21–22. 25 It may be noted that in some, though not all, depictions of rape victims, the visual cues denoting lack of consent are similar to those denoting a loose woman or prostitute, and that even if this were not the case, an image of a woman with her dress slipping from her shoulders or pulled up to her waist might easily have been seen as sexually titillating. I am grateful

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script.26 While law codes vary as to the punishment to be meted out to rapists, they are more consistent as to the evidence of rape needed to convict: the woman must look raped, displaying with “hue and cry” the physical evidences of her assault: torn clothes, loose and disarranged hair, bodily marks that indicate her unceasing struggle; she must illustrate physically the tearing and rending that are the spiritual and social consequences of sexual violation. Undoubtedly, however, the best evidence of having been raped was the physical death of the victim, frequently assumed in Roman and patristic sources and those influenced by them, from Livy to Albertus Magnus and beyond, as a corollary to her social death. The rending of her raped body – preferably at her own hands – is figured as the surest way of proving her unviolated chastity. The classical example of this bias is Lucretia’s heroic defense of her chastity followed by her blameless suicide, recounted in numerous sources beginning with Livy’s history of Rome and perhaps best known in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece.27 Lucretia is frequently presented as an example of the manner in which a truly blameless woman should behave, both before and after the attack: vigorously defending her chastity, making the hue and cry, and then erasing herself, with her shame, from the scene: “‘My honour I’ll bequeath unto the knife / That wounds my body so dishonoured. / . . . / For in my death I murder shameful scorn’” (ll. 1184–89).28 As Carolyn Sale argues, the story of Lucrece “construct[s] . . . the violated female body as the text of the woman’s shame, a text which can be expunged only by destroying the medium upon which it is written.”29 The bias in favor of death for the rape victim is so great that, as many critics have noted, the Philomela and Tereus story that forms one of the bases of Titus Andronicus, in which the raped woman survives her violation, is

to April Ching for this observation. Unbound hair in an adult woman was also widely considered provocative, the reason it was generally bound, especially for married women. 26 Jody Enders, “The Spectacle of the Scaffolding,” Theatre Journal 56 no. 2 (May 2004): 176; Kim Solga, “Rape’s Metatheatrical Return: Rehearsing Sexual Violence among the Early Moderns,” Theatre Journal 58 no. 1 (March 2006): 58–59. 27 Not surprisingly many of the critical discussions of rape center on the stories of Lucrece/ Lucretia and Titus Andronicus’s Lavinia, both of whom are discussed throughout this chapter. An overview of criticism relating to Lavinia is given later in the chapter at the discussion of Titus Andronicus. 28 William Shakespeare, Rape of Lucrece, in Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine DuncanJones and H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Arden, 2007). 29 Carolyn Sale, “Representing Lavinia: The (In)Significance of Women’s Consent in Legal Discourses of Rape and Ravishment and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” in Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature: Essays Honoring Paul Jorgensen, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 21.

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supplanted in Act 5 of the play by Livy’s story of Virginia, whose father Virginius kills her either to prevent her sexual assault or after it takes place to uphold her own and his honor.30 Even Augustine, who shows comparative leniency towards rape victims in his opposition to their killing themselves, and who opposes the lauding of Lucretia’s suicide, makes it implicitly clear that there are few alternatives to death. In The City of God he charges the rape survivor to consider stringently whether she is wholly blameless in the situation, cautioning that it may be difficult to feel no pleasure from what is an inherently pleasurable act.31 If she truly finds herself to be innocent in the matter, he urges her to continue living her previously virtuous life with no sense of having been stained or besmirched, for “[t]he body is not holy because its members are unimpaired, or because they are untouched, for they can through any accident suffer injury and violence.”32 That is, she may still consider herself spiritually inviolate even if a portion of her physical body, such as her hymen, is no longer intact. There is, however, some question as to what sort of life might be possible after rape even for an entirely innocent victim. Proving that she had indeed been innocent might take some time; Augustine counsels raped nuns to continue living blamelessly until they can without doubt be shown to have been entirely innocent of wrongdoing, at which point they may be readmitted into their religious community, but he does not discuss how long this will take nor how the traumatized woman, thrust from her cloister, is to survive during this period of trial. Jane Schulenburg, discussing a similar stance taken by Pope Leo I, also acknowledges “[t]he difficult, if not intolerable, position in which these violated female religious found themselves.”33 She further notes Leo’s “insistent repetition that women were not to be blamed for their own victimization[, which] seems to be directed against an underlying assumption of their basic guilt and complicity in the act.”34 In the thirteenth century, Albertus Magnus follows Augustine in his view of rape but protests still more strongly that purity of spirit is more important than integrity of body; he argues that a virgin raped against her will should consider

30 Mary Laughlin Fawcett, Cyril Belvis, and Bott, among others, all discuss this move towards the Virginia story: Fawcett, “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus Andronicus,” ELH 50.2 (Summer 1983); Belvis, “Violent Language and Its Female Site in Titus Andronicus,” Lumina 22.1 (2011); Bott, “‘O, Keep Me.’” 31 Augustine: The City of God, Books XVII–XXII, trans. Walsh and Honan, 46. 32 Ibid., 48. 33 Jane Tibbets Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 133. 34 Ibid.

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herself still a virgin, for the tearing of her hymen entirely without her volition during sexual assault is of no more significance to her chastity than if she had accidentally fallen on and cut herself with a sword in that area. Even he, though, finds it very likely that the body would have felt some involuntary pleasure in the act, entirely negating that purity.35 Saunders concludes that the implicit consensus, among both patristic writers and later hagiographers, is that it is safest to portray a woman who is to be coded as virtuous as not ultimately having been raped, in accordance with the “notion that God would protect from rape those he valued most.”36 The subgenre of the virgin martyr narrative, which amply fulfills this desideratum, represents an increasingly large proportion of saints’ lives in the late Middle Ages and into the beginning of the early modern period in collections such as the Legenda aurea, the South English Legendary, and Bokenham’s Legends of Holy Women. While the vast majority of the vitae do not find it necessary to show the saints as protected by God from the myriad other tortures that beset them, rape remains in a unique category, in part because of recurrent concerns about involuntary pleasure and consent; it is far less risky for representations to moot these questions entirely. Certainly in hagiographic accounts, virgin saints are never ultimately raped, though they are unceasingly menaced by sexual assault; Karen Winstead notes the pervasive dissonance of the virgin martyr who “serenely expresses the common piety that she will remain chaste in the eyes of God, regardless of what happens to her body” yet never is called upon to endure the effects of sexual violation.37 However, even the threat of rape marks the female saint’s body with visible signs, and it ultimately leads to her death. Among the many and frequent dismemberments in saints’ vitae, those most associated with this menace relate to sexual identity and its negation. A significant form of rape-related fragmentation is mastectomy: Agatha, Barbara, and Eulalia, among other saints, are described as having their breasts cut off with pliers or swords, and Agatha in particular is often pictured holding her severed breasts on a platter or at the moment of having them torn off. The breast-severing stands in for the threatened rape as a visible, demonstrable gendered dismemberment; as Kathleen Kelly argues, “rape is ‘represented’ in hagiography through a rhetoric of silence, if not displacement

35 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, 98–99. 36 Ibid., 99. 37 Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 8.

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and substitution.”38 The cutting away of these visibly female parts replaces the vaginal violation that must not happen but that hovers behind the representation.39 A rarer rape-associated dismemberment, nasal mutilation, partakes of a less explicit but very real sexual symbolism. A number of virgin saints, having dedicated their lives to Christ and chastity, cut off their noses to dissuade would-be rapists or even bridegrooms from desiring them.40 The Lessons of the Office of St. Eusebia recounts that in the eighth century the abbess St. Eusebia convinced forty nuns to join her in cutting off their noses to guard against rape by the Saracen invaders who have been marauding nearby.41 They were debatably successful in their plan: they were not raped, though all were killed. St. Ebba instigated a similar response at Coldingham Priory in defense against Vikings, according to the thirteenth-century chronicle of Roger of Wendover.42 Three hundred nuns of the Spanish convent of St. Florentine are said to have performed similar defensive nasal mutilations.43 In 1158, when St. Oda emulates the earlier martyrs’ examples, the threat to her chastity is personal, involving a single individual who desires to marry, not rape her. In Philip of Harvengt’s Life of Oda, the hagiographer makes a conscious and determined case for her inclusion amongst the ranks of martyrs based on her insistence upon chastity and her nasal dismemberment, despite the fact that she is not killed by a would-be rapist but instead, years later, by disease.44 Kelly comments as well that the fact that Oda does not die defending her virginity “seems to disturb the Abbott’s sense of order.”45 The need he sees to argue this point explicitly underscores the uncertainty felt about a woman who was not killed defending her chastity against assault.

38 Kathleen Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 43. 39 The rape in Titus Andronicus, though consummated, partakes of a similar displacement. The stage direction describing Lavinia’s return to the stage after her rape itemizes two violations that can be shown, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and one that is more difficult to present, that she has been “ravished.” Paster argues of this incident, “In a precise and wholly conventional metonymic replacement of mouth for vagina, the blood flowing from Lavinia’s mutilated mouth stands for the vaginal wound that cannot be staged or represented”; Body Embarrassed, 98. 40 A full discussion of this phenomenon is given by Schulenburg in Forgetful of Their Sex, Chapter 3, on whose descriptions of these sources much of this section depends. 41 Cited in Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex, 145. 42 Ibid., 146. 43 Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex, 147. 44 Lynsey Robertson, “Philip of Harvengt’s Life of the Blessed Virgin Oda,” Journal of Medieval History 36 no. 1 (2010): 57. 45 Kelly, Performing Virginity, 58.

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A face with its nose cut off would appear horribly mutilated. But in all these cases but the last, the would-be rapists who are so horrified by the sight of these women that they immediately cease their attempts at sexual assault are characterized as barbarian invaders, violent and presumably inured to bloodshed, as indeed they often prove by killing the women. Why, then, is cutting off the nose so successful a deterrent against rape? Valentin Groebner and Sander Gilman both argue that in general, facial disfigurement negated the personhood of the one upon whom it was performed,46 though in these cases the nuns’ personhood would not necessarily have been a concern of the assailants. Schulenburg suggests simply that it was the beauty of their faces that made these women attractive to the men, so the attempted rapists would not have desired to have sex with a woman who was so disfigured.47 This argument, however, not only promulgates the problematic view of rape as an uncontrollable response to beauty; it also assumes that any other method of disfiguring the face or otherwise lessening its beauty not involving the nose would have worked equally well, that it is essentially coincidental that all these instances involved the nose. There do exist in hagiographic literature other self-disfigurements in the name of chastity, including St. Lucy’s cutting out of her eyes. However, there is a specifically deterrent symbolism inherent in both the nose and its lack, especially with regard to women. Saints’ iconography in large part relates to their characteristic torments, such as Agatha’s severed breasts, mentioned above; the images thus function as easily assimilated mnemonics for the martyrs’ passion and example. In hagiographic descriptions, both the torture and the saints’ reactions to it are intended to have public and didactic functions. The moment of death is protracted in many accounts, God allowing the saint to survive greater and greater arrays of otherwise lethal torments before she finally dies so that each may instruct and inspire the audience. However, nose-severing and severed noses are not generally considered to be instructive or indicative of God’s grace. Groebner finds no saints who are shown iconographically as noseless or holding a detached nose,48 though two Byzantine male saints’ legends include nasal mutilation, St. George Limnaiotes, whose nose was slit, and Paul of Kaioumas, whose nose was cut off.49 And while there are saints specifically

46 Groebner, Defaced, 12; Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xx. 47 Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex, 173. 48 Groebner, Defaced, 77. 49 Patricia Skinner, “The Gendered Nose and Its Lack: ‘Medieval’ Nose-Cutting and Its Modern Manifestations,” Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 63n34.

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concerned with the ailments of most body parts, usually becoming associated with these parts after having been martyred in a way that emphasized them, like St. Erasmus with gastric distress, a search reveals no patron saint of nasal problems. The Life of the Blessed Oda recounts that Oda, perhaps assuming she would be sainted and wanting to provide a relic, catches and saves in a silver basin the blood that streams from her face after she amputates her nose50 – but she does not preserve the nose itself. Even Eusebia, Oda, and the other saints who cut off their noses are not, for the most part, visually portrayed as noseless.51 The reason for the lack of nasal imagery in saints’ iconography may be that the nose is frequently characterized as sexual, even obscene. Mikhail Bakhtin categorizes the nose as grotesque in its relation to the lower bodily stratum,52 while Groebner reads nose-cutting as figurative castration, arguing that “the nose points downwards,”53 despite his acknowledgement that it was a particularly female punishment. Jürgen Frembgen demonstrates that the nose has sexual, primarily pejorative meanings over a broad range of cultures, geographical areas, and time periods, based on its phallic shape, its vagina-like openings, and its orgasm-like explosive discharge.54 The cutting off of the nose was often a punishment for sexual misconduct, usually adultery or prostitution, and it was one almost exclusively directed at women. Nose-cutting was used to punish women’s adultery by several Native American tribes, the Anglo-Saxons, the Middle Assyrians, and a few groups in the Caucasus; strengthening the nose’s association with the genitals, punitive nose-cutting for a female adulterer was frequently coupled with castration for her partner,55 implying parallel signification between the nose and the genitals. Female adulterers in parts of Mexico

50 Lynsey Robertson, “Life of the Blessed Virgin Oda,” 57. 51 Schulenburg references a now-noseless stone effigy in Marseilles that according to local legend may have been a representation of St. Eusebia, but she points out that the figure may actually have been of a man and that the nose may simply have been worn away, Forgetful of Their Sex, 170. 52 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 316. 53 Groebner, Defaced, 73. 54 Jürgen Frembgen, “Honour, Shame, and Bodily Mutilation: Cutting Off the Nose among Tribal Societies in Pakistan,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 16, no. 3 (November 2006): 243–45. 55 Fritz Mezger, “The Origin of a Specific Rule on Adultery in the Germanic Laws,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 68, no. 3 (Jul.–Sept. 1948): 145.

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and ancient Egypt were also punished in this way, while in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, “adulteresses, men who seduced married women, homosexuals, and prostitutes” all had their noses cut off or their nostrils slit.56 The prostitute Oholibah is warned in Ezekiel 23:25 that she and other lewd women will have their noses cut off if they persist in their “lustful ways,”57 and rebellious nuns in the convent of St. Radegund were similarly treated.58 Schulenburg confirms that in medieval Europe the punishment “often seems to have been gender-specific. That is, it was exacted as a chastisement directed specifically toward women who had dared to transgress the laws – especially regulations of sexual behavior.”59 Finally, the loss of the nose as punishment for female sexual misconduct also appears in Marie de France’s late-twelfth-century lai of Bisclavret, in which a werewolf, forced to remain in his animal state by his faithless wife and her lover, bites off the nose of his wife both as punishment and as a marker of her betrayal; after this incident, the girl children she bears are likewise born noseless.60 In short, noselessness, primarily for women but also for some men, particularly those who did not show proper allegiance to masculine norms, could be seen as a sign of sexual shame, evidence of having been punished for a sexrelated transgression. The loss of the nose signifies, particularly for women, having had too much or the wrong kind of sex: adulterous, commercial, or otherwise illicit sex. Virgins who cut off their own noses thus took on the appearance of women who had been punished for being sexually overactive, making them perhaps less appealing as targets.61 And even in the works that serve to

56 Frembgen, “Honour, Shame, and Bodily Mutilation,” 245. 57 Skinner, “The Gendered Nose,” 49–50. 58 Ibid., 49. 59 Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex, 149. 60 Marie de France, Bisclavret, in The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin, 1999), 68–72. A well-researched and well-argued blog post by Karl Steel summarizes much of the scholarship on noselessness in the context of this lai. Steel, “Got Your Nose: Bisclavret Defaces His Wife,” In the Middle, June 13, 2012, http://www. inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/06/got-your-nose-bisclavret-defaces-his.html. 61 One additional late medieval and early modern signification of noselessness not mentioned by the critics cited above is its connection with syphilis. In its latter stages, the disease eats away at the soft tissue and cartilage of the nose, leading to the characteristic “saddle nose deformity,” as it is described in modern usage. The loss of the nose thus would have a doubly shaming connotation, implying the possible presence of this sexually transmitted disease as well as the possibility of sexual punishment. The first major outbreak of syphilis is thought to have occurred in the late fifteenth century; see Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “Early Modern Syphilis,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1.2 (Oct. 1990); Jonathan Gil Harris “(Po)X Marks the Spot: How to ‘Read’ ‘Early Modern’ ‘Syphilis’ in Three Ladies of London,” in Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Patrick Siena

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praise and exalt these saints, there hovers over their mutilation the inescapable stigma of their having been considered, at least initially, temptations to rape.

Rape unto Death Consummated rape and its shame, and the far more extensive dismemberment attendant upon it, are central to the story of the Levite’s pilegesh in Judges 19 whose image opens this chapter. A number of medieval exegeses read the pilegesh, the victim of these atrocities, as being rightly punished for her sexually transgressive behavior. In the biblical text, the nameless woman leaves the Levite after a disagreement between the two, arising either because she has been sexually unfaithful or because she has become angry with him.62 She takes refuge in her father’s house, whereupon her husband goes after her “to be reconciled with her, and to speak kindly to her”63 and is received very hospitably by her father. When she agrees to return with him, on their return trip they stay overnight in Gibeah (“Gabaa” in the Douay-Rheims text). No one will offer them shelter, for the people of this town have turned their faces from the ways of God, until finally an old man originally from Ephraim, like the Levite, offers them hospitality. As host and visitors sit to eat, a crowd of the “sons of Belial” knocks on the door and demands that the old man bring out the man visiting him that they may “abuse” him, consistently understood in the biblical commentaries on this incident to refer to rape. The old man refuses, offering his own virgin daughter

(Toronto: CRRS, 2005), 111. The disease was assumed to have been brought over to Europe from the Americas with Columbus’s return voyage, though it has also been argued to have existed in Europe centuries earlier. Soon after the appearance of the disease, as Harris notes in his discussion of how syphilis was “read” in early modern Europe, its physical tokens had become social stigmata, “(Po)X Marks the Spot,” 116. 62 Several critics have noted the dissonance between the Hebrew and Syriac manuscript traditions of the Bible, which “claim that ‘his concubine played the harlot’ against the Levite, while some Greek and Old Latin variants maintain that ‘his concubine became angry with him’” (Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 66). Susanne Scholz traces the difference to a textual crux in the Hebrew, where the choice between two similar-looking letters means the difference between “fornicate” and “become angry,” Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 142. 63 The text used as the basis for the illustrations is the Latin Vulgate (725 CE); I quote in this section from its Douay-Rheims translation, of which the Old Testament portion was originally published in 1609.

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and the pilegesh of his guest to the crowd instead.64 Although the addition of the virgin daughter to the original offer initially seems to moot the question of blame or just retribution raised by playing the harlot as opposed to becoming angry, ultimately only the pilegesh is brought forth; only she undergoes the rape. It is the Levite himself who pulls her to the door. The men “abuse” her all night long, a series of violent events encapsulated in this single word in the text, and at dawn she collapses at the door of the house where she had been staying. The Levite finds her stretched out there, and, (perhaps) discovering that she is dead,65 he hoists her up on the back of an ass and takes her home. There he cuts “the body of his wife with her bones in twelve parts” and sends a piece to each of the leaders of the tribes of Israel, a sign to them of the sinful ways of the Gibeaites. Asked in Judges 20 for an explanation of his corporeal missive by its recipients, he tells them the people of the town had first threatened to slay – not rape – him, then did rape her, and she died. The leaders agree that this is an outrage, and they prepare for and fight a mighty battle to avenge it. The battle takes an entire chapter to relate, far longer than the few lines that detail the pilegesh’s defilement and death. She is not mentioned again. The pilegesh’s rape is read as at least partially justified in more than a few later condemnatory interpretations of the passage.66 In his Postils (first printed in 1471), Nicholas of Lyra figures her as an adulteress who either eloped with her lover or was banished by the Levite.67 This strand of criticism derives from the common understanding that having been raped serves as a concretization of the potential for sexual misconduct, realized or unrealized before that point,

64 As is often noted, the scene to this point parallels that of Lot and his angelic visitors in Sodom described in Genesis 19, though the alternates offered by Lot, his two virgin daughters, are not ultimately given up to the mob. 65 The Greek and Latin make a change sympathetic to the pilegesh – or defensive of the Levite – from the Hebrew on the question of whether the pilegesh is dead before being cut into parts. The Hebrew does not make it clear that she is, saying only that the Levite called to her but she did not answer, whereupon he took up her body, but the Greek and Latin both add the clause that he saw that she was dead, apparently wanting to reassure their readers that the Levite, who is supposed to be coded positively, would not divide into pieces a still-living woman, whether or not she had been gang-raped. 66 John Thompson’s masterly overview of the commentary on this incident from the earliest Jewish exegesis through sixteenth-century Christian interpretations shows that while there is relatively little patristic discussion of the passage in comparison with the similar incident in Genesis 19, somewhat more medieval commentary exists, evincing varying levels of condemnation. John L. Thompson, Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 67 Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 202.

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in the raped woman and that both the assault and the sexualized dismemberment often attendant upon it perform as well as rightly punish this bent towards immorality. (The shame associated with having served as a temptation to rape is also probably the reason the Levite does not admit that the men of Gibeah first demanded to rape him.) It seems clear, however, in both the biblical text and the commentary, that unlike the instances of breast and nasal mutilation in saints’ vitae and iconography, the pilegesh’s dismemberment has little or nothing to do with her as a positive or negative character, let alone with her possible culpability for the rape or her sexual shame. She is dismembered that her body may be made a message; and for each recipient to receive the message that she is, she must be rendered into the appropriate number of pieces. She is dismembered because the leaders of the tribes of Israel number twelve, and live in far-flung areas. Her body parts are essentially fungible; there is nothing intrinsically symbolic or message-worthy about one rather than another. They signify that a woman has died; they are proof of her death, and, secondarily, they stand for the wrong done – not primarily to her, but to the man whose “property” she is, the Levite. Yet even this intended meaning requires the Levite’s verbal explanation; her recipients cannot read her disjointed body parts alone as indicative of the violence, sexual or otherwise, that marked her last hours and her end. Above all, her parts are not intended, nor are they received, as indications that the pilegesh’s husband has done wrongly in so dismembering her. The leaders who receive her cry out in horror, but what horrifies them is not made explicitly clear.68 Twelfth-century commentator Rupert of Deutz questions, “‘What could be more foul, or more criminal, or more cruel, than what is reported here?’”; but as John Thompson points out, the dismemberment is not the subject of his outrage: “Rupert has in mind the whole event, with the Levite and his wife appearing as dual victims, at best; one looks in vain for any reproach directed at the Levite.”69 The impetus for the battle is by no means her being cut into pieces; it may be her gang-rape, but in light of the fact that the battle itself as recounted in Genesis 21 occasions the abduction and forcible marriage – not described as rape – of two hundred virgins of neighboring Shiloh, any outrage sparked by her rape only seems to exist insofar as the assault negatively affects the Levite.

68 Cheryl Exeum does argue that the sequence of events narrated shows that their reaction is to the dismemberment, J. Cheryl Exeum, Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives (Valley Forge: Trinity, 1993), 187. 69 Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 199.

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The version of Judges 19 in the Crusader Bible offers an interpretation relatively sympathetic to the pilegesh, made possible in part by the codex’s format. Except for its extensive notations in Latin, Persian, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew, MS M. 638 contains only pictures, and the size and scope of the manuscript made it possible to incorporate numerous scenes rarely illustrated.70 The lack of a biblical text accompanying the pictures might well lead a viewer to comprehend the stories as they are shown, not as they are recounted in the Bible – something particularly true of the story of Judges 19, which according to C. Griffith Mann is not a commonly illustrated episode and thus might have been less well known. The illuminators, or the patron for whom the manuscript was commissioned – most likely Louis IX71 – would have chosen to emphasize some aspects and downplay others; though Mann praises the illustrators’ “fidelity to the letter of the biblical text”72 throughout the codex, he also notes that “the painters appear to function as interpreters of the text they illustrated”73 rather than adhering to the letter of the original stories. For example, he speculates that “the Morgan painters appropriated the Betrayal imagery [discussed below] because the biblical text provides only a cursory description of the Levite episode and because the subjects of the two events were related.”74 The Morgan manuscript illustrations of this episode, filling the lower right of fol. 15v and all of fol. 16r and 16v, adhere to the biblical story of Judges 19 in many respects but also show striking differences. In the original story the pilegesh is occluded almost to the point of absence. She is more than anything the means by which events happen: the Levite takes a journey; the sinfulness of Gibeah is disclosed; the Levite is dishonored; he sends a message; the tribes of Israel prepare for and wage war. The emphasis differs in the illustrations, which afford her far more prominence; as Diane Wolfthal points out, “the victim is here the focus of the illuminations.”75 It is clear that she is unwilling to go with her rapists; “in the molestation scene . . . she is noticeably distressed,” while “Even in death . . . her downturned mouth and puckered brow express her grief.”76 Someone apprehending the story entirely through the pictures

70 C. Griffith Mann, “Picturing the Bible in the Thirteenth Century,” in The Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan Library’s Medieval Picture Bible, ed. William Noel and Daniel Weiss (London: Third Millennium, 2002), 39. 71 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 37. 72 Mann, “Picturing the Bible in the Thirteenth Century,” 57. 73 Ibid., 41. 74 Ibid., 48. 75 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 39. 76 Ibid., 38.

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would see the pilegesh as far more important than she appears in biblical versions, and there is far more scope to empathize with her situation. This is the case even among other illustrated sequences, in part because of the greater detail given here. In some of the few illuminated bibles moralisées that present the same story, Wolfthal notes, the narrative moves directly from the rape scene through the intact dead body to the war that follows, without picturing the dismemberment. The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Bible moralisée, which shows the fragmentation, does so in a way that radically undercuts the pilegesh’s humanity; her severed body parts are flat, bloodless, like paper cutouts.77 The artistic style throughout this bible is far less naturalistic than in the Morgan Bible, but even so the change between the pilegesh alive/whole and dead/dismembered is one of drastic flattening. Nonetheless even these illustrations show far more concern for the pilegesh’s pain than the biblical story – or the exegetical commentary of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Bible, which dehumanizes her completely by figuring her as an allegorical representation of Philosophy, brought from the pagans to Jerome and Augustine.78 The Morgan illuminations, with their emphasis on the pilegesh’s personhood and suffering, make it clear that she neither wants to be nor, in the view of the illustrator, should be raped. The act is portrayed in accordance with common medieval rape iconography, one man grasping her wrist in a sign of power79 while she is held about the waist and her breast is fondled; other men threaten her with weapons. This scene is particularly evocative iconographically, Mann argues, in that the positioning of the pilegesh among her rapists is modeled directly on that of Jesus’s body amongst his tormentors and betrayers in such devotional objects as the Walters ivory carving.80 Wolfthal also sees representations of the betrayed Jesus among his torturers echoed in the grouping in this image.81 This similarity evinces, and must have been intended to evoke, empathy for the pilegesh akin to that felt for Jesus’s suffering human form during his Passion, as well as anger at her rapists like that felt towards Jesus’s tormenters. Despite contemporary condemnations of the pilegesh, here she is shown as deserving of sympathy.

77 Bible Moralisée Vienna, Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod Vind 2554, ed. and trans. Gerald B. Guest (London: Harvey Miller, 1995), 105. 78 Ibid. 79 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 41. 80 Mann, “Picturing the Bible in the Thirteenth Century,” 47. 81 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 39.

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Yet despite the empathy evinced for her rape, there is no unambiguous sign in the illustrations coding her dismemberment as morally wrong. In the climactic image in the sequence described at the beginning of this chapter, in which the husband wields a sword over her corpse, one bystander points in distress at her body, but compared to the crowds shown following her dead, raped body as it is borne on the ass, and the armies pictured flocking in revenge against Gibeah in the battle scene, his is a lone gesture, and one not specifically marked as disapproving the act of fragmentation. When the pilegesh is cut up after being raped to death, the rape is marked as demonstrating the uncivilized and ungodly manners of the Gibeaites in dishonoring the Levite and despoiling his property, but the dismemberment is only marked as demonstrating, or making (more) visible, the rape and despoiling. It is little more than an outward and physical confirmation or performance of what is represented as having already happened, the fragmentation of her personhood and the nullification of her utility to the Levite, and therefore is without separate negative connotation; the blame is shown as resting on those who rape her, not the one who demonstrates, makes manifest, that act. And the pilegesh, whether or not she has been physically killed by the rape, has suffered social and spiritual death from it, and what happens to her body afterwards, in the view of both the text and the illustrations, does not matter.

“Stuprum Chiron Demetrius” A better-known conjunction of sexual assault and dismemberment, and one equally concerned with the destruction of a man’s property in the person of the raped woman, is visited upon Lavinia in Titus Andronicus.82 In his retelling and overreaching of the tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses concerning Procne, her sister Philomel, and Philomel’s rapist Tereus, Shakespeare creates a protagonist raped by two men, rather than just one, and has them not only cut out her tongue but also sever her hands. The amplification of the dismemberment is neither the only nor the most evident change from the source text, although it is the one marked as a divergence within the play itself, as a circumstance making it even less likely Lavinia will be able to identify her attackers: “Fair Philomela, why she but lost her tongue, / . . . / A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, / And he hath cut those pretty fingers off” (2.3.38–42). The dismemberments concretize the multiple absences occasioned by the rape: Lavinia’s

82 Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate.

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stolen chastity, her lack of agency, and the loss of any role available to her – except the final role, which they also prefigure, of entire bodily dissolution in death.83 The doubled dismemberment performs the greater shattering caused by the two rapes through a greater truncation and concomitant greater disability. However, although Lavinia’s physical dismemberment, which occurs pre- rather than post-mortem, is figured throughout the remainder of the play as her primary obstacle, her death is caused by the rape – or, rather, by Titus’s reaction to it. Unlike the Ovidian story, which allows the raped Philomel to participate fully in her revenge on Tereus and then survive the ordeal, albeit transformed into a bird, Titus Andronicus negates Lavinia’s agency almost entirely, a negation again manifested in her physical lack.84 Every act in which Lavinia is involved throughout the course of the revenge, from writing her attackers’ names and crime – “stuprum Chiron Demetrius” (4.1.78) – to holding the bowl that catches their blood when they are decapitated, is done at the behest of one of her elder male relatives. Sale argues that she does attempt agency in turning over the leaves in the Ovid, though she “cannot establish or maintain any interpretive control over the text that Titus appropriates from her and inscribes into brass . . . and thus cannot keep Titus from making her pay the price for the discourse of shame within which he situates her body.”85 She points out that even what has been taken to be an act of agency, her writing in the sand, is taken over by Titus: “Having ‘wrest[ed] an alphabet’ from Lavinia’s signs and gestures, an alphabet that provides him with what he considers to be the essential information – the name of the crime and the names of her rapists – Titus loses all further interest in Lavinia herself.”86 This argument recalls Barbara Baines’s comment that although the prosecuting of rape is “very much ‘between men,’” nevertheless “[r]ape can be known by the law only through the mediating word of the woman.”87 Sale concludes, “In the process, the several acts of violence perpetrated upon Lavinia are reduced to a single issue, the crime of rape. The

83 This bodily illustration is also a concern in Aebischer’s Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies, which discusses the ways violence, particularly sexual violence, writes and can be written on the body, as well as the ways it can and cannot be written on the page. 84 Karen Robertson also argues that both Lavinia’s pain and her vengeance are taken over by Titus, creating a lack of agency not found in the source story. Karen Robertson, “Rape and the Appropriation of Progne’s Revenge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, or ‘Who Cooks the Thyestean Banquet?’” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 85 Sale, “Representing Lavinia,” 20–21. 86 Ibid., 19. 87 Barbara J. Baines, “Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation,” ELH 65 no. 1 (Spring 1998), 72, 91.

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suggestion is that only rape is actionable, and that it is actionable because it is a property crime against the men related to Lavinia”;88 it is for this reason that it is made manifest in her body’s dismemberment. Lavinia not only is denied agency and is not permitted by Titus to survive her attack; both her dismemberment and her rape are also shown to disqualify her from the status of fully human, a state that is performed by her dismemberments. When Lucius says of her, “Ay me, this object kills me” (3.1.65), he signals this disqualification, this objectifying, as well as participating in the near-universal interpretation of her wounds as problematic primarily because of how they affect the men around her. Marcus likewise says of her to Titus, “This was thy daughter” (3.1.63), signaling that she is now something other. A daughter is female; a daughter is implicitly human; and a daughter of Titus, chosen by though not wedded to the emperor-elect Saturninus, is by virtue of her parentage an esteemed member of her society and one with a significant place in its web of political alliances. All these things change once Lavinia is raped, and her dismemberment makes their absence explicit. She is no longer seen as fully human, as in the eyes of her nephew, whom she terrifies; she is no longer seen as fully female, in that she is now an object neither of desire nor of sexual commerce. And she is no longer a daughter Titus can claim with any degree of pride or even equanimity. As Coppélia Kahn argues, “For Titus, Lavinia’s worth resides in her exchange value as a virgin daughter. In a larger sense, she is symbolically important to Roman patriarchy . . .. Both her exchange value and her symbolic value are nullified several times over by what is done to her.”89 While in answer to Marcus’s identification Titus reverses the negation, “Why, Marcus, so she is” his daughter (3.1.64), she is not one he can stand to have for long, a negation he performs by stabbing her in Act 5. Her shame redounds onto him, as he argues implicitly in relating himself to Virginius. In Livy’s account, Virginius kills his daughter before she is raped, arguing that “[h]is daughter’s life would have been dearer to him than his own if she had been allowed to live in freedom and chastity. But . . . he had thought it better to lose a child to death than to outrage.”90 Robin Bott, discussing the assumed soiling contamination of rape in relation to Lavinia’s death, argues that in this play, as in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale, “the female subject is reduced to

88 Sale, “Representing Lavinia,”19. 89 Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 49. 90 Livy, The History of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. Valerie M. Warrior (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006), 223, emphasis added. See Karen Bamford, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 64, for an important overview of variations on Lucretia’s and Virginia’s stories, including Titus Andronicus.

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the status of a mutilated body part or some dangerously contaminated flesh that may infect the father, making the destruction of the raped woman not only permissible, but also highly desirable.”91 Here Titus expunges it by expunging her, as its carrier, before it can fully infect him. But Lavinia does not die quickly enough for Titus. She resists his suggestion that she attempt to kill herself by holding a knife in her mouth and positioning it to press into her breast (3.2.16–17), a resistance that is a possible though ambiguous sign of (negative) agency. Sale reads this as an act of will: “It is surely significant that Lavinia does not kill herself – despite the fact that she receives not one but two marked suggestions” that she do so.92 In the wake of this resistance, the deprivation of honor that Titus identifies as stemming from the rape, which can only be redressed by the death of the victim as well as the attackers, then finds its illustration in his own body once he loses a hand. In his speech to Marcus, “O handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (3.2.29–30), it may be overshadowed by the grisly pun that Titus does still have one hand; his assertion that he has none betokens his extreme identification with his daughter’s dishonored body. He likewise associates his hands with the service he has done to Rome, which now has been negated through his own shaming; he reads the loss of his hand as manifesting his lost honor (3.1.73–81). And so in the end Titus kills her himself, justifying his action as a way not only to restore her honor but also to end his suffering, which he has emphasized at such length throughout the play: “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee; / And, with thy shame, thy father’s sorrow die” (5.3.45–46). As Karen Bamford comments, “Titus’s words underline his appropriation of her pain: Her shame is his suffering and he has had enough.” But as she also argues, in reference to the veil Lavinia wears at her final entrance that symbolically conceals her shame, “so Titus, in killing her, metaphorically blots out the stain of her rape.”93 What is figured as the surcease of his sorrow is also an attempt to purify the stain upon his honor resulting from having a raped daughter who has survived her attack. Implicit in his agreement with Saturninus’s judgment, “the girl should not survive her shame” (5.3.40), and his own immediate dismissal of the killing, “it now is done” (5.3.50), is the understanding that it is not precisely having a daughter who was raped that is at issue; it is the continued survival of this raped daughter, this physical embodiment of shame.

91 Bott, “‘O, Keep Me,’” 190. 92 Sale, “Representing Lavinia,” 21. 93 Bamford, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage, 65.

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Lavinia and the pilegesh both illustrate instances in which dismemberment is a consequence of rape, insofar as it makes the assault – either on the female character or on her male relatives – more fully visible as well as because the rape has so negated the person- and womanhood of its victim that her subsequent fragmentation and death are represented as logical corollaries. Medieval and early modern literary sources recurrently assume the death of the rape victim; law codes often call for the death or mutilation of the perpetrator; but legal records provide evidence that neither of these usually came to pass. At least a portion of women survived to bring suit against their attackers, and even when they did, men were rarely punished. As Saunders explains, the Anglo-Saxon law codes have been shown to be “to a great extent a literary phenomenon: there is no evidence for their use in judicial proceedings.”94 In England between the years 1194 – the first year for which eyre rolls are available – and 1216, ninety-five cases of rape were brought before the court by personal appeal. Of these, not a single one led to a conviction, let alone punishment, which at that time was castration.95 Roger Groot suggests that a reason for this inaction was that while in theory the crime was considered liable to be tried in a public forum, in practice litigators tended to see it as a private matter, one perhaps not suitable for resolution by a public body.96 Of the many cases that were dismissed before judgment, he speculates that a significant portion were dismissed in response to reparations being given by the alleged rapist to the complainant’s family; this assumption is based in large part on what he reads as the not-uncommon disparity between the social standings of the former and the latter, who were probably more vulnerable to attack due to poverty and/or other powerlessness. This lack, or at least paucity, of convictions and punishments continues to hold true for later time periods. Although a small number of men were convicted of rape in England over the thirteenth century, none were castrated, despite that punishment being mandated for the crime.97 Garthine Walker estimates that in early modern England “there were in the region of one guilty verdict for every eight to ten trials, which in turn were a small proportion of initial accusations.”98

94 Saunders, “The Medieval Law of Rape,” 22. 95 Groot, “The Crime of Rape, 324. 96 Ibid., 324, 333–34. 97 Ruth Kittel, “Rape in Thirteenth-Century England: A Study of the Common-Law Courts,” in Women and the Law: The Social Historical Perspective, vol. 2., ed. D. Kelly Weisberg (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1982), 108–10. 98 Garthine Walker, “Rape, Acquittal, and Culpability in Popular Crime Reports in England, 1670–1750,” Past and Present 220 (Aug. 2013): 115–16.

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Other historians have argued that the continued striking paucity of convictions stemmed from the difficulty of proving rape and the likelihood that juries would not have considered themselves fit to judge such intimate or technical matters as lack of consent, or from the possibility that they hesitated to convict when conviction would lead to a sentence that, as with other crimes with capital or mutilative penalties, they did not want to impose. While the difficulty of proving consent and the disinclination to condemn one of their peers to death doubtless had some effect of lowering conviction rates, both of these issues related to other types of crimes as well, and yet convictions in non-rape cases often did occur at greater rates than those for rape. Law codes are public, showing an understanding that social order in many venues requires respect for both personal choice and for property values; however, individual law cases are essentially far more private and may be concomitantly influenced by private concerns. Rape trial statistics thus stand in opposition to what may be termed the legal codes’ theoretical treatment of rape, showing not only women surviving rape but also alleged rapists consistently escaping punishment for a crime commonly represented as heinous. Solga and Baines have discussed the repeated “effacement”99 of rape in the medieval and early modern period, even in what are ostensibly representations of this very act, and Solga argues compellingly that this very trope of effacement worked against the telling of rape that was a prescribed component of its attempted prosecution.100 Certainly, the constraints against bringing suit would have deterred many who were raped. By English law, a woman was required to go, first immediately and by 1285 within forty days, with “hue and cry” to a group of respectable men and describe the details of her attack; however, the very silence that it was tacitly assumed should surround rape figured this telling as a simultaneous indictment of the woman as not chaste or respectable enough to keep silent about such obscenity. Walker argues that in the early modern period, “For women, available discourses about sex . . . were confessional and implicatory. Responsibility for sex, and the blame and dishonour that went with it, was feminised.”101 In short, she adds, “there was no popular language of sexual nonconsent upon which women could draw.”102 Solga argues more strongly that

99 Baines, “Effacing Rape,” 69. 100 Solga, Violence against Women, 9. 101 Garthine Walker, “Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England,” Gender & History 10, no. 1 (April 1998): 5. 102 Ibid., 8.

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“simply to speak out against rape implied a woman’s loss of sexual innocence, which could potentially signify her complicity in the act.”103 It is possible that the (invariably male) jurors, consciously or unconsciously, were led to assume by the very fact that these women had survived and were able to describe the attack that they had not truly been raped, or to believe based on the many demonizing representations of rapists that the neighbor standing before them could not be the monster he was accused of being. For at the same time that literary depictions of rape-associated dismemberment concretize social attitudes towards bodily integrity, they may have created an assumption that such physical shattering was a necessary component of rape, with its corollary conclusion that a woman not fragmented in this way had simply not been raped.

Women’s Quarters If there is some question as to whether women should be able to survive the shame of rape, there is very little disagreement that they should not survive another form of sexual shame, one in which their guilt is far more clearly figured, that of consensual sexual infidelity. Both in representations of women as adulterers and in the far greater number of depictions of wrongly accused though faithful wives, the husbands who believe themselves, erroneously or correctly, to have been betrayed punish or attempt to punish their wives by a variety of fatal or potentially fatal methods including banishing them, strangling them, burning them alive, throwing them from the tops of towers, and cutting out their hearts. This section discusses a subset of representations of punishment for female unfaithfulness, namely equine quartering: the rending of the body by means of four horses, each tied to a limb and driven in different directions. This doom is distinctive for its particular penal significations and for its differing literary treatments relating to women and men. I first look at the narrative uses of men’s and women’s quartering and then consider the place of this punishment in three medieval texts, The Owl and the Nightingale, the Roman de Silence, and Arthur and Gorlagon. As discussed further in chapters 1 and 5, drawing and quartering was a punishment historically almost always mandated for men only, and almost always performed, when it was performed, as a penalty for treason. Specifically equine quartering is rare but recurrent in historical or quasi-historical accounts spanning at least a dozen centuries, though it is much more prevalent in overtly

103 Solga, Violence against Women, 9.

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fictional sources – unsurprisingly, as it was doubtless easier to rip people apart with horses on paper than in the flesh. Perhaps the most familiar depiction of (attempted) equine quartering is that of the execution of would-be regicide Robert-François Damiens quoted at the beginning of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,104 of which a hideous feature is that the operation is ultimately unsuccessful as originally planned: the horses are unable to tear the prisoner apart, and the executioners resort to cutting his tendons. The male traitor’s body, both during and after being quartered, is highly evident in accounts of such an event, acting as an important focus of the narrative. This is clear in the passage describing the tearing apart by horses of Ganelon in the Chanson de Roland: Que Guenes moerget par merveillus ahan. Quatre destrers funt amener avant, Puis si li lient e les piez e les mains. Li cheval sun orgoillus e currant, Quatre serjanz les acoeillent devant Devers un ewe ki est en mi un camp. Guenes est turnet a perdicïun grant: Trestuit si nerf mult li sunt estendant E tuit li membre de sun cors derumpant, Sur l’erbe verte en espant li cler sanc. Guenes est mort cume fel recreant, Hom ki traïst altre nen est dreiz qu’il s’en vant.105 (ll. 3963–74) (Ganelon’s death by torture is decreed. / So to this end they order up four steeds, / And bind him to them by the hands and the feet. / High-mettled stallions they are, exceeding fleet; / Four sergeants take them and urge them at full speed / Towards a mare running loose in a field.106 / Ganelon’s torment is fearful and extreme, / For all his sinews are racked from head to heel, / His every limb wrenched from the sockets clean; / His blood runs bright upon the grassy green. / Ganelon’s dead – so perish all his breed!)107 (ll. 3963–73)

The description is sensuous, almost luxuriant, with its strong and mettlesome horses, its stretching and bursting sinews, the bright clear blood shining on the green grass. Depending on the reading of the contested word, it even includes a hint of sexual titillation, in the four stallions attempting to pursue the mare. In

104 Foucault, Discipline. 105 Gerard J. Brault, The Song of Roland: An Analytical Edition, vol. 2 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), 2:242. 106 Translator Dorothy Sayers notes at “mare,” at l. 3968, that it is derived from “reading with Léon Gautier ewe