The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

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Summary: Theology, Art, Medieval Studies & Criminal Justice converge
Review: This book is learned yet readable, of interest to scholars in a range of fields and disciplines. As one whose interest is death in Christian religious reflection and devotion, I found it fascinating to learn the connections between capital punishments as people actually witnessed them ("witnessed" is the right word- these were religious events as well as legal ones!) and the way the 2 thieves were portrayed in art intended to enhance devotional practice and imagination. Where is the viewer in the scenes of Calvary? The author answers this and many other questions, relating these to penitential practice, and the way bodies in pain were compassionately experienced during the heyday of pre-Reformation Europe. I recommend this book highly to scholars, but it makes grisly reading and leads us to question our own sensibilities and tolerance for different kinds of bodily display.

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Summary: A few words from the author
Review: Why are the doors of America's prisons suddenly swinging open and catering to our most base, voyeuristic impulses? How soon will it be before television cameras are allowed to move freely through the facilities of our nation's death-houses and bring us, live, into the death-chambers themselves? Will the current uncertainties about the "fairness" of capital punishment bring a halt to this process, or will America's proclivity to have "rough justice" done soon translate into a desire to SEE justice done, done before our eyes and in our living rooms? Will we soon see a new form of public execution--the criminal's death as media spectacle?

As an art historian who has always felt restless asking purely art-historical questions, I have long been fascinated by the notion that vision itself has a history, and that our capacities for visual experience are opened--but also disciplined--by the kinds of sights available to us. This book is about one kind of sight, the sight of violent death, seen and experienced within the context of the rituals of criminal justice in the Middle Ages. The visual material I've drawn together for this book is not, however, the same as that traditionally used by criminologists and legal historians to "illustrate" the history of capital punishment. Rather, my principle subject is the iconography of the Passion of Christ and its centrepiece, the scene of the Crucifixion. In the later Middle Ages (roughly 1300 until the German Reformation), northern European painters expanded the scenography of the Crucifixion with a riotous cast of characters, some with biblical credentials, others as pure invention. Somewhere between these two extremes were the figures of the Good Thief, Dysmas, and the Bad Thief, Gestas, who hang in hideous abjection, crucified, on either side of Christ. While both suffer horrible tortures--their limbs are often shattered and twisted around the cross-beams--one is redeemed, to join Jesus in Paradise, the other is damned eternally (see Luke 23). And painters visualized this difference in a stunning variety of ways (to see for yourself, go to the "See Larger Photo" cue next to the book's cover above, point and click).

Throughout the book I ask the question: what kind of sight did the spectacle of each antithetical character's death constitute for medieval viewers? Was this all just gratuitous violence, used only to attract the curiosity of people with a penchant for violence? Or did it serve another purpose, one commensurate with the larger purposes of religious imagery and indoctrination at this time?

As you can easily guess, I opt for the latter, and more complex, explanation--but I match it with another question, one that relates the experience of looking at the pain and suffering of another person in the fictionalized space of the religious image, and the lived experience of the seeing the same kind of sight in the public theatre of criminal justice. Rituals of punishment in the Middle Ages were carefully staged spectacles, one in which the authorities and the spectators, the executioner, the confessor and the victim all had special parts to play. Authorities hoped to impress upon spectators the majesty of the law; the church drew from the lamentable end of this "poor sinner" lessons about proper moral conduct; spectators hoped to see the criminal die a "good" (that is, confessed and shriven) Christian death; and the executioner did his tremulous best to carry out the sentence skillfully, or risk the fury of the populace, who saw mistakes and mishaps as ill-omens to be avenged. In its heydey (the later fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries), the medieval paradigm of criminal justice provided an opportunity for witnessing good and bad deaths, simple hangings, ceremonial decapitations, and the most horrific of all penalties, breaking with the wheel.

At the center of my book is the observation that many later medieval artists used the crucifixion of the Good Thief and the Bad Thief as a kind of screen, upon which they might project something of their experience as spectators in the theatre of public punishments. In particular, I find some shocking similarities between the bodily distortions imposed upon the Two Thieves in Passion imagery, and the medieval procedure for breaking with the wheel. Thus my title. There is a little discussion in the book about the procedures for both the medieval punishments and their ancient counterparts (archaeologists have a pretty clear picture of how the Romans must have crucified Jesus). But I hoped to make this book something more than an exercise in ghoulish antiquarianism, in stomaching the atrocious imagery of ages past or tracking obscure motifs through 1000 years of Christian art. Rather, by studying systems of punishment, to paraphrase the sociologist Emile Durkheim, we gain a privileged access into the deep structure of a society, and come to grasp its hidden, sometimes terrifying logic. How the history of visuality has played into the rise and fall of our own civilization's systems of punishment, and thus its regimes of domination, is my real subject. At the end of the book you'll see why.