Giving 'the Middle Ages' a bad name: blood punishments in the "Sachsenspiegel" and town lawbooks

• Autores: Madeline H. Caviness
• Localización: Studies in iconography, ISSN 0148-1029, Nº. 34, 2013, págs. 175-236
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The four famous law picture books of the "Sachsenspiegel" (A Mirror for the Saxons) have images of the violent corporal and capital punishments that have come to be regarded as "medieval", and even as common sights in medieval towns: head shearing, flogging, severing hands, hanging, breaking on the wheel, decapitation, and burning. These images are supplemented in this books with ordeals by the hot iron, water, and combat. The list resonates with dreadful practices in the present era of torture, known through the photographic documentation and the accounts of victims that are now available to us. This modern discourse may fuel the imagination when it encounters the verbal and visual allusions in these medieval manuscripts, despite extremely sparse representational codes that stop short of the spectacle of "real" human suffering, and the different purposes of modern torture and that of the medieval era. In this paper I analyze these verbal-visual expressions in the fourteenth-century "Sachsenspiegel" manuscripts and some more violent and extravagant images in two German books relating to town law in the context of changing attitudes toward such "blood punishments" on the part of the Christian church, and the illustrations' effect on the secular judiciary. The images are not as simple as they seem: I argue that the most brutal ones helped deter the adjudicators (Schöffen) from risking their souls by condemning a (possibly innocent) human being to maiming or death. Visual representations have the power to subvert the declarative statements of a legal text such as the "Sachsenspiegel".