"The Bloody Theatre of Europe". The Culture of Pain, Cruelty and Martyrdom in Early Modern Hungary

Abstract

Words like aggression, violence, and violent actions usually carry destructive meanings. People tend to forget their constructive culturally determined meanings. In spite of this, it can be argued that aggressive feelings, hatred, anger, verbal aggression, threatening behaviour, assault, inflicting pain, injuring or ritual killing of men, or the fighting of war are all part of our lives as much as feasts and rituals that bind communities together, or the command to love of different religious ideologies. In the 16th century there was a definitive turn in judging the body in public. It meant that public attention gradually turned from the corpse of Christ to the bodies of the thieves. The two thieves were brought down from their crosses, laid out on the dissecting table, or their bodies were torn apart during fights. Evil-doers became part of scientific cognition. The antisocial public enemy became a hero of the community in the popular literature and historic stories. The conserved and stuffed bodies of r...