LARISSA TRACY. Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity.

Abstract

The premise of this book is to challenge the assumption of ‘the prevalence of torture and judicial brutality in medieval society’, epitomized by popular gruesome images of ‘the rack, the strappado, the gridiron, the wheel’ (p. 1). Tracy’s call for a revisionist perspective will come as no surprise to medievalists, accustomed to making such apologies for their period; however, the alacrity with which the word ‘medieval’ appears in condemnations of present-day instances of torture suggests this is an argument that still needs to be made. The first chapter considers the violence inflicted on the bodies of saints, in the South English Legendary, the Legenda Aurea and the Gilte Legende. It asserts that orthodox examples of resistance to torture ironically served as models for defiance of authority by heterodox sectarians (an argument that has interesting repercussions for the later discussion of Foxe’s appropriation of the hagiographic genre for the Protestant martyrs).