1st Edition

The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700

By Katherine Royer Copyright 2014
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    196 Pages
    by Routledge

    Royer examines the changing ritual of execution across five centuries and discovers a shift both in practice and in the message that was sent to the population at large. She argues that what began as a show of retribution and revenge became a ceremonial portrayal of redemption as the political, religious and cultural landscape of England evolved.

    Introduction: Setting up the Scaffold in Late Medieval and Early Modern England; Chapter 1 The Body in Space: Describing the Distribution of Dismembered Traitors in Late Medieval England; Chapter 2 The Case of the Missing Blood: Silence and the Semiotics of Judicial Violence; Chapter 3 From Augustine to Aquinas: Death, Time and the Body on the Scaffold; Chapter 4 Dressed for Dying: Contested Visions, Clothes and the Construction of Identity on the Scaffold in Early Modern England; Chapter 5 The Last Words of that ‘Cunning Coiner’ Henry Cuffe: Revisiting the Seventeenth-Century Execution Narrative;

    Biography

    Katherine Royer