Suspended Animation

Truly interdisciplinary work is not as common as medievalists would like to think it is. Mills here provides an example that integrates literature and art history, and has a good deal to say to historians of culture as well. This is not a study of punishment as practice, but of the ‘medieval penal imaginary’, the ways people wrote about and depicted punishment. Mills begins from the popular view of the middle ages as a particularly gory time, especially in terms of justice, a time in which people ‘got medieval’. His response to this view is not so much to deny its accuracy as to show how things were actually much more complicated. Addressing the modern view of the medieval, of course, requires explicit comparisons to the modern, and some of the modern references work better than others. It would be strange today to discuss how medieval uses of torture compare to those in the modern West without mentioning Abu Ghraib, but the discussion of ‘Strange Fruit’ and lynching in the American South, in the chapter on hanging, seems a bit forced

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Literature · Medieval history · Medieval Literature · Medievalism · Middle Ages · Pleasure · Political science · Punishment (psychology · Sociology · Torture · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Psychology · Social Psychology