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Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.2.2.0272

2161-2196

Margaret Owens,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

The title of Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey's edited collection of essays, Heads Will Roll, subtly nods at an influential predecessor on the subject of literary and cultural discourses of decapitation, Regina Janes's Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005). As the jocular titles of both books attest, Janes shares with Tracy and Massey (along with many of the contributors to this collection) a susceptibility to the lure of the pun and other forms of wordplay that ghoulish subjects of this kind seem to invite. The verbal games that scholars play with severed heads have their parallel in the beheading games and the jests and pranks with severed heads that feature in many narrative accounts of decapitation, particularly those dating from the medieval and early modern periods. Although rich in literary and cultural treatments of beheading, the Middle Ages are given little attention in Janes's study. Losing Our Heads opens with a broad (yet impressively documented) survey of beheading in practice and in fantasy from the Paleolithic period through to Greek, Roman, and Celtic traditions, but the bulk of her monograph is devoted to more narrowly defined issues and episodes in the history of beheading from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century. In the introduction to Heads Will Roll, Tracy and Massey allege that “most studies of decapitation skip the thousand years between the ancient world and the early modern” (7). A principal goal of their collection is to address the medieval lacuna in beheading studies.By combining medieval and early modern materials, Heads Will Roll exemplifies the recent trend toward dissolving the boundaries that have traditionally segregated medieval from early modern literary studies. The essays engage with texts dating from as early as the tenth century (two lives of St. Edmund) and as late as the mid-seventeenth century (accounts of Sir Walter Raleigh's execution in 1618 that circulated for decades afterward), with Thea Cervone's study of the legendary traditions concerning the headless ghost of Anne Boleyn venturing into twenty-first-century popular culture. The collection ranges broadly not only in time but also in space and language: essays concentrating on textual evidence from Britain (Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Early Modern English) appear alongside essays dealing with continental subjects (Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's “Tale of Lisabetta,” German epics of the Dietrich cycle).Presumably in an effort to bring a sense of shape and cohesiveness to the collection, the editors have deployed several organizational strategies, including the grouping of the essays into four topics: execution and hagiography, continental narratives of punishment and othering, English romance and reality, and early modern practice and imagination. Two essays serve to introduce the collection: a standard introduction by the editors and a provocative meditation on the “impossibility” of beheading by Nicola Masciandaro, which explores the paradoxical dimensions to martyrological beheadings, particularly in the case of the originary beheading in Christian tradition, the decollation of John the Baptist. Masciandaro describes the prophet's beheading as “the impossible imitation of the inimitable that makes all other imitations possible, the very medium of their mimesis, the cephalic capital that constitutes the potentiality of sacred decollative repetition” (25). A summative essay by Asa Simon Mittman, “Answering the Call of the Severed Head,” closes the collection. Mittman attributes the diversity of the preceding essays to the polyvalence of the head and of beheading in this period: “There is, in short, no such thing as ‘the role’ of the severed head in medieval and early modern culture. Rather, there is a great diversity of roles (speaking and non-speaking parts, alike) played by severed heads” (312). Throughout the book, contributors assiduously trace connections between their own work and that of their fellow contributors, with Masciandaro's piece serving as a frequently cited touchstone.The range and diversity of the collection pose as strengths when distinct configurations of the beheading trope are brought into illuminating conjunctions. For instance, the figure of the cephalophoric saint whose severed body parts remain animate after decapitation (the subject of Mark Faulkner's essay on St. Edmund) bears some intriguing affinities with the magical beheadings and reheadings that appear in the Arthurian romance tradition (the subject of Larissa's essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur). Cervone makes a case for regarding Anne Boleyn as “England's only cephalophoric Protestant saint” on the grounds that “her ghost legend remains irrepressibly vocal” (310).When Vikings murdered St. Edmund, his severed head spoke from its hidden burial place in order to ensure that the head and body might be reunited. In a sense, the legend of St. Edmund looms as the leitmotif of this collection as contributors return again and again to the notion that the severed head speaks volumes, that its voice refuses to be suppressed. Undeniably, the severed head speaks in the texts examined in this collection, but I am not persuaded that the head's voice is as intelligible or coherent as the contributors tend to assume. Indeed, the severed head does not play a consistently central role in the essays; in some cases, the significance of the head is buried under a burden of scholarly detail relating to textual, linguistic, and historical issues. At times, the head seems beside the point, relegated to the margins, disembodied or occluded. A case in point is Christine F. Cooper-Rompato's essay on references to hagiographic decollation in The Book of Margery Kempe. While Kempe, at various points in her biography, contemplates forms of physical torment and martyrdom that she would willingly suffer in order to bear witness to her faith, including being drawn on a hurdle, beheaded with an axe, or burned in a fire, the closest she comes to undergoing decapitation involves an accident in which a stone and beam fall on her head and back as she kneels in prayer in a church. Kempe admits that beheading appeals to her because she assumes that it offers a relatively painless route to martyrdom. Though she imagines a martyr's death for herself, that prospect dissipates once she receives reassurance from Christ that she will never suffer a violent death.In contrast to the relatively tenuous presence of the decapitation in The Book of Margery Kempe, the severed head in Boccaccio's “Tale of Lisabetta” poses as an emphatically material object. Within the narrative frame of this text, decapitation is an event, not a mere fantasy. In this tragic story of thwarted love, Lisabetta secretly mourns her lover, murdered by her brothers, by severing his head from his corpse and then concealing the head in a pot of basil. Watered by Lisabetta's tears of grief, the basil plant flourishes atop the skull, creating, as Mary E. Leech explains in her intriguing analysis of the story, a bizarre emblem of life in death, a monstrous mockery of pregnancy in which the severed head serves as phallic agent: “Lisabetta creates a fertilized womb outside of herself with the symbolic penis of her dead lover, and nourishes their ‘child’ with her tears” (130).Leech is one of the few contributors to draw on psychoanalytic frameworks in this collection, and even in her essay psychoanalytic discourse plays a relatively limited role. The avoidance of psychoanalytic theory in this collection is remarkable given the extent to which Freud and the post-Freudians staked out fantasies of dismemberment and beheading as foundational to their discipline. It seems that the contributors have taken to heart Janes's admonitions against the unqualified acceptance of the Freudian formula that equates decapitation with castration. In Losing Our Heads, Janes emphasizes that beheading signifies very differently from castration: in penal codes, beheading is often a privilege, a sign of high status, while castration is always defamatory. If Janes were to turn to the medieval and early modern texts examined in Heads Will Roll, she might find it more difficult to make a case for isolating decapitation from castration. Surely, the beheading feats performed in the medieval romance tradition by young knights eager to prove their manhood may be understood as versions of castration. Beheading as a rite of passage for the young knight—a convention explored by Renée Ward in an essay on the Middle English romance Octavian Imperator, Tina Boyer in an essay on the German Dietrich cycle, and Larissa Tracy on the Arthurian tradition—simply cries out for readings that take into account the Oedipal implications of this form of violence.In some texts, the severed head's associations with sexuality are too conspicuous to be ignored. For instance, an adulterous wife is forced by her werewolf husband to kiss the embalmed severed head of her lover, served on a platter at the banquet table, in the fourteenth-century Latin tale of Arthur and Gorlagon, the subject of Jeff Massey's essay. In this impressive essay, Massey draws on manuscript evidence to argue that the text may have been designed for performance, specifically as a meta-theatrical interlude at a banquet. He speculates that the banquet scene in the story might have been dramatized as entertainment in a real-life banquet setting, in which case an edible centerpiece (a sugar skull, perhaps) might have served as the severed head displayed on a platter.In Arthur and Gorlagon, as in a number of the texts featured in this collection, beheading is implicated in the elision of boundaries between human and animal, or human and supernatural. What emerges from such boundary crossings is either miracle or monstrosity. It is telling that Tracy and Massey should have enlisted Jeffrey J. Cohen, one of the leading scholars of medieval monsters, to write the preface. Cohen underlines the peculiar affinity between beheading and monstrosity: “Decapitation is surely a kind of monstrosity, the becoming-monstrous of the human through fragmentation, through the reduction of embodied identity from five limbs and torso to a luminal object, an uncanny thing” (ix). The essays in this collection highlight the value of taking into account the realm of the fantastic in our readings of the cultural significance of beheading. To limit the frame of reference to judicial codes and regimes of punishment, the Foucauldian territory of the scaffold and the guillotine, is to neglect a valuable archive of material, as the contributors to Heads Will Roll compellingly demonstrate.