Abstract
The historian who wishes to study feelings and their expression in the past must rely upon descriptions, be they written, painted, carved, or played on an instrument.1 But description, especially the description of feelings, is a literary device, crafted and constructed according to literary norms. Artistic descriptions may decree that people in pain writhe or remain motionless, scream or keep silent, tear out their hair or smile. What I study, therefore, is an artifact, not a phenomenon. Even had historians been given time machines to travel and, like anthropologists, observe the behavior of people in pain in the past, what we would observe would still be an artifact. Other than the theoretical primal scream, expressions of pain differ from culture to culture and from one context to another. The modes of behavior are deeply embedded—so much so that one cannot even discern the existence of a code. For instance, in the most banal of examples, a person sitting in a dentist’s chair may groan or complain or burst into tears.2 Besides the well-known codes of restraint, there are also codes of expression. Cultures allowing expressions of pain in certain situations also shape them according to specific codes, allowing some expressions and debarring others.
Examines the question of late medieval judicial discourse and its approach to torture. Torture is problematic in the Christian context, for it pertains to the martyrological tradition. Late medieval jurisprudential texts appropriate the vocabulary of late antique martyrologies, changing the meanings of the key terms to suit suspected criminals rather than saints, thus exonerating torture from the blame of untruth and violence.
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Notes
For anthropological literature on pain and behavior, see Mark Zborowski, People in Pain (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969), pp. 18–48;
Wulf Schiefenhövel, “Perception, Expression and Social Function of Pain,” Science in Context 8 (1995): 31–46;
Paul Ekman, “Biological and Cultural Contributions to Body and Facial Movement,” in The Anthropology of the Body, John Blacking, ed., ASA Monograph 15 (London: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 67–71;
Berthold B. Wolff and Sarah Langley, “Cultural Factors and the Response to Pain: A Review,” American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 404–501;
Weston LaBarre, “The Cultural Basis of Emotions and Gestures,” Journal of Personality 16 (1947–48): 49–68.
William M. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 139–55.
Mary T. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
Hippolyte Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1921), pp. 287–302.
The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Herbert Musurillo, ed. and trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 123–25.
See also Tertullian, De Pudicitia 22.6, “Christus in martyre est” in Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera, ed. E. Dekkers, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina [henceforth CCSL] 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), p. 1329.
Augustine, Epistola 154, in Sancti Aureli Augustini Hipponensis episcopi Epistulae, ed. Al. Goldbacher, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum [henceforth CSEL] 44 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1904), 3:395–427.
See also Edward Peters, “Destruction of the Flesh—Salvation of the Spirit: The Paradoxes of Torture in Medieval Christian Society,” in The Devil, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 131–48.
Prudentius, Peristephanon 1.11, in Aurelii Prudentii Clementis carmina, ed. I. Bergman, CSEL 61 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1926), pp. 97–111 (SS Emeterius and Chelidonius).
This phenomenon was usually attributed to the thirteenth century, with the influence of Beguine spirituality and St. Francis. I am indebted to Piroska Nagy’s pathbreaking Le don des larmes au moyen âge (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), for tracing emotional spirituality beyond St. Bernard to St. Peter Damian and his circle.
“Quanto enim inter se distant pertinacia et perseverantia, parsimonia et frugalitas, liberalitas et profusio, prudentia et calliditas, fortitudo et temeritas, cautela et timiditas?” Dialogus adversus Pelagianos, in S. Hieronymi presbyteri opera 3, ed. C. Moreschini, CCSL 80 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), p. 112.
“Velut si quis fortitudinem latronis et piratae et furis diripiat, infirmosque eos reddat prodest illis sua infirmitas.” S. Hieronymi presbyteri opera 1, Commentariorum in Sophoniam prophetam liber unus, ed. M. Adriaen, CSEL 76A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970), p. 671.
Augustinus, De civitate Dei 5.20, ed. E. Hoffmann, CSEL 40 (Vienna, 1899), pp. 254–55;
Gregorius Magnus, Moralia in Iob 3.12, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), pp. 127–28.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics, trans. C.I. Litzinger, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 2:687–97; Summa Theologiae, 2a–2ae, q. 124, a. 4.
Ambrosius Mediolanensis, Expositio in psalmi David CXVIII 10.28 et passim, ed. Michael Petschenig and Michaela Zelzer, CSEL 62 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1999); p. 220.
Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, ed. G.P. Maggioni (Firenze: SISMEL, 1998), Millennio medievale 6, Testi 3, pp. 174–79;
the English translation, The Golden Legend, trans. W.G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,: 1993), 1:105–08 is based on the old edition, Jacobi a Voragine Legenda Aurea vulgo historia lombardica dicta, ed. Theodore Graesse (Leipzig, 1850), pp. 113–20.
See, for example, “Vita vel passio Haimhrammi episcopi et martyris Ratisbonensis,” in Passiones vitaeque sanctorum, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SSRM 2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1896), pp. 477–91,
and Paul Fouracre, “Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography,” Past and Present 127 (1990): 3–38.
Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
For examples, Giles Constable, Attitudes Toward Self-Inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages (Brookline, MA: Public Lecture, 1982);
Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 209–11.
André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 1981), pp. 174–83;
Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 89–149;
Richard Kieckhefer, “Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male Saints,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 288–305;
Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 108–36;
Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 185–230.
The earliest mention of civil judicial torture appears in the letters of Hildebert of Lavardin (1056–1133) Patrologia Latina 171:cols. 277–78, and in twelfth-century Italian urban legislation. See Piero Fiorelli, La tortura giudiziaria nel diritto commune, 2 vols. (Milan: Giuffré, 1953–54), 1:117.
Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995) esp. pp. 104–23;
Brent D. Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christianity 4 (1996): 269–312;
Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Mario Sbriccoli, “‘Tormentum id est torquere mentem’: Processo inquisitorio e interrogatorio per tortura nell’Italia communale,” in La parola all’accusato, ed. Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1991), pp. 17–32.
Stephan Kuttner, Kanonistische Schuldlehre von Gratian bis auf die Dekretalen Gregors IX Studi e testi, 64 (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1935), pp. 301–13;
Johannes Fried, “Wille, Freiwilligkeit und Gestädnis um 1300,” Historisches Jahrbuch 105 (1985): 388–425.
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© 2006 Lawrence Besserman
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Cohen, E. (2006). Sacred, Secular, and Impure: The Contextuality of Sensations. In: Besserman, L. (eds) Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977274_8
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