Marla Carlson

Spectacle was vital to creating France as a nation, and physical pain was an important component of many different varieties of spectacle, including not only well-studied forms such as the saint play, judicial torture, and public execution, but also more amorphous social performances of suffering. In this paper, I evaluate the painful processions described by an anonymous bourgeois of Paris from 1405 to 1449 (1). A number of studies related to mine have been carried out during the last fifteen years. Esther Cohen has elucidated the role of public punishment in state formation; Jody Enders, the rhetoric it shared with the saint play; and Mitchell Merback, its relation to Passion iconography. These scholars refer widely to one another's work, and I depend upon them all (2). My project is closest to Enders'; however,

her approach to saint plays is more bound up with their verbal rhetoric, whereas I focus on spectator response to the

body in pain.

Before turning to my study examples, I will sketch out the legal construction of pain in the late Middle Ages, its spiritual construction, and the interdependence of the two. The cultural uses of pain had shifted during the later middle ages. Feudal society had been organized as a system of reciprocal, contractual relations, and the ritual framework for ordeal positioned its human participants as social equals. When no other resolution satisfied all parties to a dispute, God was asked to resolve it by means of a bodily sign (3). During the twelfth century, a criminal justice system based on inquisition rather than accusation appeared. Physical torment remained an important component of justice, but its purpose changed. Torture was inflicted to produce a confession, so that the body subserved the voice rather than being itself read for signs of truth. Unlike the bodily sign, however, the confession had to be judged. Because the judge who determined its truthfulness was set above the one being judged, and his judgment could in turn be superseded, torture can be seen to facilitate the development of a hierarchy of authority (4).

Cohen describes the transition from ordeal to torture as part of a broader transition from an oral and gestural culture to a literate culture. The ordeal was gradually replaced by the speech formula, a kind of verbal gesture wherein the proper form of the utterance was more significant than the intention behind it. By the late fourteenth century, the status of the word had changed to such an extent that confession, sentence, and pardon were valid only if they had been written down. A growing insistence on the validity of court records, which became the basis for subsequent rulings, gave more control to the judge, and advocates were needed to interpret between laymen and the judiciary. As the fifteenth century drew closer, lawyers and judges were increasingly professional, and neither the trial nor the torture that facilitated it were conducted in public (5).

Spectacular suffering was now reserved for sentencing and execution. While voluntary confession would (at least in theory) preclude torture, it would very likely be followed by public punishment, which (unlike public ordeal) presupposes subordination (6). The retribution exacted by individuals within feudal society was taken over by the newly organized state, a process that began in the twelfth century and had become fully established by the early sixteenth (7). In order for this system of justice to be effective, however, the public had to feel involved and adequately revenged (8). The church played a key role in casting the spectator as a participant in the execution of justice.

According to Cohen, there was no clear distinction between secular and religious rituals during the later Middle Ages, although the role of the clergy changed after 1215 (9). Among the many intimately connected changes codified by the Fourth Lateran Council were a prohibition against clerical participation in ordeal (which contributed to its demise) and annual confession and communion for all Christians (10). Prior to the sixth century, both confession and penance were public spectacles that could be undergone only once. The punishment for repeated sin was permanent expulsion from the Christian community. By the ninth century, the practice of private confession had become widespread and physical penance less severe. Then as the concept of expiation in Purgatory took hold, penitential pain took on a newly "medicinal" role as a treatment that restored the sinner to spiritual health and forestalled much greater suffering in the afterlife (11).

Late medieval penitential practices do not support the assumption that medieval people were less sensitive to pain, or that spiritual understanding enabled them to accept it calmly. Suffering was a part of daily life, but was viewed with horror. The miracle collections hold ample evidence that people feared surgical pain and sought the intervention of saints as an alternative. Although there was no very effective anesthesia, and many surgeons argued that the available soporifics were too dangerous to use, they sought to alleviate suffering. Pain was a guide to proper diagnosis, not a means of treatment, and the analgesic properties of plants had been known and cultivated since antiquity (12).

Cohen traces three basic conceptions of pain within medieval Christianity: impassivity, the ability to tolerate pain; impassibility, the ability to transcend pain entirely; and philopassianism, the positive valuation of pain (13). Impassivity had been cultivated by the Stoics, and later given a Christian emphasis that reached its heyday during the high Middle Ages. Pain itself was understood as an entirely negative and degrading phenomenon, associated (by virtue of its role as punishment for Eve's original sin) with those who labored--in other words, lower-class men and all women (except virgins). By the later Middle Ages, impassivity no longer served as a sign of nobility. Even kings cried out in pain, and showed other emotions as well (14). Impassibility was introduced by the early Christian martyrs--in contrast to Christ, whose suffering on the cross was the sign of his humanity. Thomas Aquinas refined the concept in the thirteenth century; henceforth, it was understood that saints were exempt from physical suffering (15). In this they resembled prelapsarian and heavenly beings, and were distinct from living human beings.

Cohen argues that a concept of spiritually useful pain was entirely absent from Western culture up through the early Middle Ages, and has roots in the twelfth and thirteenth century; therefore, no simple correlation with fourteenth-century plagues, wars, and famines can be maintained. In the twelfth century, theologians began to take the view that by voluntarily bearing pain in imitation of Christ, the individual could begin the purgation of sins during life, and therefore lessen his or her suffering after death. Cohen points out that pain was viewed as "useful, not pleasurable," and that this concept is thus "emphatically distinct from modern masochism." Beginning in the thirteenth century, mystics increasingly sought to identify with the physical sensations of Christ as the "man of suffering." As a component of affective spirituality, ordinary Christian laity cultivated "compassionate vision," a mode of response for which both the Virgin Mary and Saint Francis served as models (16). Mary's maternal love for Christ caused her to suffer with him, making her into a likeness of him. In the contemporary world, Francis conformed to Christ to such an extent that he experienced stigmata in 1224, and the then-novel phenomenon was made public when he died two years later (17).

In summary, a widespread desire to imitate Christ developed in tandem with the rise of inquisitional justice (18). Merback argues that the practice of compassionate vision also shaped the collective emotional experience of spectacular punishments, and that the execution of a repentant criminal provided a model for contemplation closely tied to Passion iconography (19). I will return to his argument after discussing some of the executions described by the Bourgeois. Given the extreme difficulty of sorting out "real" historical events from the conventions according to which they are recorded, however, I begin by asking why the text portrays things as it does (20). The Parisian people are its collective protagonist, and the journal prominently features their suffering in many guises. Prices and taxes are recorded in great detail, along with periodic food shortages. The impact of the Hundred Years War combined with struggles between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions within France is abundantly clear (21).

Like the quotidian suffering of law-abiding Parisians, spectacular executions support the implicitly polemical design of the text. As they illustrate the character of each successive government, they justify Parisian acquiescence to English rule from 1420-36, and at the same time establish steadfast loyalty to the French crown. First, during the troubled reign of Charles VI, processional suffering contributes to social order, while Armagnac rebels commit disorderly mayhem. Following this, there are some improvements under English rule, but the proper order of things is disrupted. Finally, during a gradual return to peace, Paris is left to fend for itself by Charles VII, who remains alienated from his nation's leading city. The Parisians are shown to support each ruler in succession, creating an overall portrait of citizens who desire the orderly rule of law without unbearable taxation.

To establish the norm against which all that follows can be compared, I include two of the many executions that create a picture of Charles VI surrounded by traitors, both within his very household and at a distance. Charles had become king at age 12, with his uncles as regents. As an adult he suffered from periodic madness, enabling the various uncles and other advisors to engage in a prolonged struggle for control of the government. Like many subsequent analysts, the Bourgeois blames French infighting for English successes. On 7 October 1409, Jean de Montaigu, Grand Master of the King's household, was arrested by the Provost of Paris, Pierre des Essarts. Implicated as an Armagnac partisan, he was

His body remained on the gallows for nearly three years (PJ 69). Two years after de Montaigu's execution, Colinet du Puiseulx "sold" the bridge to St. Cloud to the Armagnac confederates. After the Burgundian faction re-took that town, 12 November 1411,

These executions are typical for the period. The traitors are of the noble class and have betrayed King Charles VI and the Duke of Burgundy. The means of conveyance, the contrite pose, the clothing as a sign of identity (real or assumed),

the punishment, and the disposition of the corpse are all formulaic.

In contrast to the ceremonious execution of noble traitors by the Burgundian rulers of Paris, reports of Armagnac mayhem in the countryside are sprinkled through this portion of the journal. In the villages around St. Denis in 1411, for example, "they hanged people up by the thumbs or the feet, they killed or took for ransom, they raped women, and started fires" (PJ 55). Peace between the factions in August 1413 brought the Armagnacs into power in Paris and a temporary end to the executions. The bodies of those executed as traitors were taken down and buried in consecrated ground, to the consternation of the Bourgeois (PJ 80-81). In the case of Pierre des Essarts, who I will discuss later, the corpse had been hanging for less than two months.

The so-called peace also brought oppression, and the Bourgeois justifies riots in 1418 by describing an Armagnac plot to drown all the women of Paris in sacks. Those "confederates" not slaughtered by the mob were driven from Paris (PJ 112-19, 125-30). His final assessment of the riots is that the people "martyred more people than the ancient enemies of Christianity did. But their cruelty was not comparable, God knows, to that of the confederates, and that is why the people rose up against them" (PJ 125-26). (I must note that the Bourgeois casts no aspersions on the Dauphin, who escaped with his Armagnac supporters; therefore, the ground is left clear for reconciliation after his return as King Charles VII in 1937.)

Armagnac executions are a near inverse of those described in Paris and by 1420 explicitly justify the need to negotiate with the English (PJ 149-50). For a concentrated "Armagnac" flavor, consider the atrocities described on the occasion of the English conquest of Meaux in 1422. An incident in 1420 is offered as clear proof that the town's Armagnac tyrant, the Bastard of Vauru, was "a crueller man than ever Nero or anyone else was." He captured a young working man, tortured him, and demanded an unreasonable ransom from the man's pregnant wife. When she arrived late with the money, de Vauru "pitilessly drowned or hanged" several other peasants in front of the exhausted woman, took her money, and only then revealed that her husband had already been hanged. Because her outburst of grief annoyed the tyrant, he had her beaten and then dragged to the elm tree where he hung his victims.

The unpredictability of the event, along with the undeserving victim and the emphasis on her suffering, sharply distinguish the disorderly violence of the Armagnac faction from the ritualized executions carried out by the Burgundians. In addition, the relation between the nobility and the common people who witness their exercise of power could hardly be more different (22). One type of killing seems to create order; the other, to destroy it.

English rule appears to produce a kind of hybrid violence in Paris, adhering to the established ceremonial form but disrupted. In 1428, for example, an execution was botched by haste and upward social mobility:

The prisoner is not properly attired, has no trial, and is not allowed to confess. Moreover, he and the executioner suffer pain that is not a proper part of the punishment.

Parisians are shown to suffer at all times, but they are worse off when neither the English nor the Duke of Burgundy are in Paris to protect them. During most of the English period, the Bourgeois focuses on the progress of the war, and on hardships due both to natural disasters and to being cut off from the French countryside. As though they had behaved well up to this point, the depredations of English troops in the villages around Paris are described only immediately before the troops of King Charles (no longer referred to as the Dauphin) retake the city in 1436.

After this, ceremony is lost--perhaps because the nobility are no longer being executed. English prisoners brought from Pontoise present a "sad spectacle" in 1441 as they are taken back out of Paris, "coupled together two and two with very strong rope, just like hounds being led out to the hunt, and their captors riding tall horses which went very fast. The prisoners had no hoods, all bareheaded, each wearing some wretched rag, most often without shoes and hose--everything, in fact, had been taken from them but their underpants" (PJ 345). The prisoners who could not pay their ransom are drowned "with no more compunction than if they had been dogs" (PJ 346). The final executions mentioned by the Bourgeois (in 1449) are "beggars, thieves, and murderers who confessed, by torture or otherwise, that they had stolen children; they had put out the eyes of one, cut off others' legs, of others again the feet, and done many other dreadful things" (PJ 369) (23). Those who were formerly the "Armagnac confederates" are now the rightful French rulers, and they execute rightfully; however, the public ritual described thirty years earlier is now absent from the text.

Each of the executions that I have discussed concentrates and makes visible the social forces operating in Paris during three phases of a civil war. At the end of the war, France emerged as a nation unified under one king, whose power became absolute. Although the development of that power has been carefully studied, its foundation in performances of suffering during these unsettled years is less well understood. In order to establish their role in building that foundation, I will place these executions first among other performances of stability; next, among liminal rituals. I will then read stability and liminality against one another.

Throughout the Parisian Journal, the masses endure physical hardship in the hopes of producing a more stable kingdom. On notable occasions, their endurance is described as both voluntary and ritual. While Charles VI (with the Duke of Burgundy as the active agent) besieged Bourges in 1412, for example, the citizens of Paris supported him with a series of processions "arranged by common consent." The Bourgeois describes more than twenty of "the most touching processions that anyone had ever seen in living memory," reiterating many times that the people were barefoot and that each carried a candle. Relics were carried in some of the processions, the eucharist in some, various masses were sung, and the participation of various clergy is mentioned along with the tears and devotion of everyone involved (PJ 62).

Regular ceremonial processions held in accordance with the religious calendar were another sign of stability, and Guy Thompson argues that they helped to keep a propensity to riot in check during periods of unrest (24). The disruption of such processions was, then, a countersign. During periods of danger, for example, processions which normally led to a church outside the city gates were cut short, although the regular route was followed as far as possible. The Bourgeois describes a more subtle disruption. On 26 May 1427, the Duke of Bedford splashed mud on the procession to Montmartre as he rode in the opposite direction (PJ 213) (25). In general, however, the English appear to have made good political use of such processions. They celebrated the (fortuitous) birth of Henry VI on Christmas Eve in 1421, for example, and scheduled royal entrances for Advent Sunday (in 1420 for Henry V accompanied by Charles VI and the Duke of Burgundy after the Treaty of Troyes, and in 1431 for Henry VI) (26). To commemorate his victory in Normandy, Charles VII added secular elements to existing local festivals that paid homage to a number of different saints who worked anti-English miracles, but connections to the Anglo-Burgundian government had tainted both Paris and Saint Denis (27). In the Parisian Journal, all forces except the nobility appear to be working to normalize life after Paris is reunited with France, while both the rapacious nobility and real wolves continue to prey on the people in and around the city. Indeed, the suffering of Parisians seems to constitute the stable ground upon which governments rest.

The Bourgeois makes the same complaint against the royal entrance of Charles VII as he had against Henry VI: contrary to custom, no pardons were granted, and no alms were distributed (PJ 273-75, 319-21) (28). Cities in Northern Europe had begun to welcome the king with dramatic pageantry in the late fourteenth century. With a few exceptions, this happened only once in a king's reign (29). The Parisian royal entrance began outside the city, where the king was greeted by a procession of citizens dressed to make their identity and station apparent (as were those going to their execution). The procession entered Paris through the Saint Denis gate, where a pageant welcomed the king, and then moved to an entertainment organized by the Hôtel de Ville at the Ponceau Fountain. Next, the Confraternity of the Passion presented a pantomime or tableau vivant in front of the Hospital of the Trinity. The procession then passed through the Painters' Gate, where political harmony was the theme. As the king progressed through the commercial center of Paris, guild pageants were staged at stations including the Hospital of Saint Catherine, the Church of the Sepulcher, the Great Butchery of Paris, and the Châtelet (where the basoche, the law clerks' guild, took charge of the presentation) (30).

Fifteenth-century Parisian processions to the gallows often reversed the path used in royal entrances, both traveling along the rue Saint Denis (31). Prisoners were usually pulled in a cart or dragged on a hurdle rather than moving under their own power, and the procession included acts of contrition and public recantation. Cohen says that the typical criminal procession began at the prison, often moved to the site of the crime, and from there to the Place de Grève (for the beheading of a nobleman) or to a gibbet outside the city walls for a commoner's hanging. The nobleman's head also ended up on display at the gibbet, and his limbs might be displayed at the city gates--all of which were seen in incidents that I cited earlier (32).

Like a royal entrance, an execution is a rite of passage. Both king and criminal can be seen as "liminal" subjects; that is, they are between states, separated from society under a previous identity, but not yet reintegrated as that which they will become (33). The king and the city use the ritual procession to redefine their relationship, and variations in the ceremony during this period show what sorts of issues were at stake (34). Whereas the king is ceremonially recognized as such during the royal entry, the criminal is divested of all insignia of his social identity. Stripping, whipping and even mutilation all contribute to performative shame and loss of identity (35).

Until the late fourteenth century, criminals were denied confession and shriving, and the bodies were left under the gallows after prolonged hanging. The criminal was thus excluded from the Christian community even in the afterlife (36). By the end of the century, however, execution had become a ritual of expulsion and reincorporation. The change began with a struggle over clerical immunity. Two clerks who had been wrongly executed were reintegrated into the community with an inverse ceremony. The corpses were taken down from the gallows after hanging for many months, then taken in procession with the provost guilty of their death proclaiming his misdeed, and finally ceremoniously buried (37). The "post-mortem" reintegration first granted to these mistakenly executed clerics was gradually extended to all Christians, with the theme of Christ's death as a criminal among thieves as a prominent feature of efforts in favor of gallows confession. Eventually additional religious ceremonies of penitence were introduced, changing the character of the spectacle. Through confession and absolution, the criminal was rehumanized and reintegrated into the community for whom the "good death" was spiritually important. Confession at the foot of the gallows thus served as salvation for the criminal and as spectacular evidence of God's grace and power (38). But how might this evidence have served fifteenth-century Paris?

Spierenburg argues that public executions restored public order and made the power of the state visible. He ties them directly to the instability of the state, arguing that public punishments faded away as the modern nation-state grew more secure (39). Cohen points out that if public authority wants to use a set of symbols, it needs to be sure that they will be understood, and public punishment shared recognizable forms all over Europe. Thieves were hung and murderers beheaded. Total eradication of the body was a more severe penalty than its display; therefore, heretics, witches, and sodomites were burned, traitors were drowned, counterfeiters were supposed to be boiled, and those women who were not burned were buried alive (40). Those in power arranged the spectacles, and called upon crowds to witness and thereby legitimate their exercise of power.

But even if the means of death conformed to a clear symbolic code, the execution was a complex performative act. Cohen points out that its secular and spiritual messages often conflicted, and Merback identifies three competing narratives in "dynamic confrontation"--one constructed by secular authorities, another by the people, and a third by the Church (41). Chroniclers stress the importance of spectators--many of them--as an active component of the events. Public reaction was in fact variable, ranging from tears to bloodthirsty shouts, and was anticipated by the authorities who designed an execution--but not always correctly. The need for ceremonial reversal was surely not anticipated by those who executed the two clerks mentioned earlier. Last-minute reprieves and popular rescues were possible, adding a degree of suspense, and an unmarried man could be spared death at the gallows by a woman willing to marry him (42).

Nor was the performance itself always orderly. Enders argues that the executed prisoner sometimes refused to play his role, and that the spectators were upon occasion "forced to invent their own pathos when the victim failed to provide it." (43) She cites an execution described by the Bourgeois that will be my focus for the rest of this paper. Like the royal entry, the execution is a dialogue between multiple parties (or a polylogue) and the execution of the Provost of Paris, Pierre des Essarts, was clearly a forum for negotiating power relations. Des Essarts was implicated in an Armagnac conspiracy shortly before the "peace" of 1413. After several months' imprisonment,

So far, the description conforms to the typical formula for this period. The ending is orderly as well (with the exception of one vital detail which I will discuss shortly): "When he realized that he had got to die, he knelt down in front of the executioner, kissed a little silver figure that the executioner had round his neck, and forgave him his death very kindly. Thus was Pierre des Essarts beheaded and his body was taken to the gallows and hanged as high up as it would go" (PJ 74).

Given these portions of the text, one can easily see two forces at work. First, the authorities (who may have used torture to produce a secular confession) impose the punishment. Theirs is the power to inflict pain and to expel the traitor. Even before that, they had the power to decide who is a traitor. In this case, they have labelled as such the man in charge of Parisian security. Second, the church has the power to produce a spiritual confession during the execution spectacle, and thus to reintegrate the traitor. He still dies, but he returns to the Christian community, which is not clearly separable from the polity.

A third voice, that of the prisoner, is not always present in the records or in the analyses. Des Essarts is an exception. A remarkable coup is interposed between his formulaic pardon of the executioner and his death: "He asked all the lords that his deeds should not be proclaimed till after he was dead; this they agreed to." As Cohen amply demonstrates, the display of a prisoner's crimes was a preeminent component of the punishment ritual (44). That des Essarts retained an unusual power even in death is shown by this ability to exact concessions from those who executed him. Des Essarts was not fully shamed. Indeed, his very shamelessness is what I have thus far left out of the description. I have saved this portion of the text for last because it mixes his behavior together with that of the crowd. Like the secular authorities who condemn and the clerical, who absolve, des Essarts anticipates the response of spectators: "The astonishing thing was that he did nothing but laugh all the time from the moment he was tied to the hurdle till his death, just as he used to do in the time of his greatest majesty." The spectators, in turn, seem to carry out their customary performance with little regard for the event they see: "Most people thought his brain had turned, for everyone watching him was crying bitterly, weeping more miserably than you ever heard tell of for any man's death. And he laughed, he alone. He imagined that the people would prevent his death." Indeed, the Bourgeois has earlier mentioned that the Parisians loved des Essarts "because he defended the city so well" (PJ 52), and that "no Provost for a century past had been so well loved both by the King and by the people" (PJ 70).

Before considering the spectators, however, I want to look at the structure of this event as a text: (1) it begins with the formulaic means of conveyance, body position, significant clothing, and beheading; (2) the prisoner's inappropriate laughter is set in contrast to the crowd's appropriate misery; (3) the cause of the improper behavior is examined--that is, his enormous pride and bad faith; (4) realizing that he improperly assessed the people's attitude towards him, and that he will die, the prisoner performs the rituals of contrition that are expected of him; but (5) gets a final concession from the lords and (6) his death occurs according to custom. The people here--as throughout the journal--behave as they should, whereas both the powerful prisoner and the lords who have sentenced him go against form. Viewed as a historical incident, this execution seems to hold more than the two meanings suggested by Merback for the convict's suffering: as a "visible exemplum of despair" if he refused to confess and show remorse; or as an example of the "good death" if he made his peace with God and prayed for forgiveness (45). In conclusion, I will set out some possible meanings for the formulaic weeping of the crowd in contrast to the surprising behavior of the nobility.

Enders assumes that the spectators wept because they identified and commiserated with des Essarts. She argues that their behavior was based entirely upon their imaginary version of the event and was contradicted by the prisoner's actual behavior. As a result, this incident "undermines Foucault's appealing contention that the criminal on the scaffold attains moral dignity because spectators identify with him." (46) Certainly any dignity that he attained by this mechanism was spurious; however, des Essarts managed an unusual preservation of dignity by having his crimes read out only after his death. He appears to have retained the upper hand in orchestrating his own execution.

The spectators need not have cried out of identification and commiseration, however. Some of them must have known, as did the Bourgeois, that the Provost "intended to betray the town and deliver it into the hands of its enemies, to commit very great and dreadful murders, and to rob and pillage the good inhabitants of the good town of Paris who loved him so loyally. There was nothing he ordered that they would not do if they could" (47). Spectators might well have wept bitterly because they were betrayed by one in whom they had placed their trust--who had been, even worse, in charge of justice. They might have wept at the spectacle of a man they had loved refusing to repent and being therefore denied a good death. Furthermore, Armagnac sympathizers in the crowd--and there must have been some in Paris--might have cried to have been left more vulnerable to English attack by the execution of this Frenchman who had defended their city so well.

Spectators might also have felt reassured by playing their part in the ritual, even though the prisoner refused to play his. Merback argues for reading the late medieval body in pain as a sign of the intersubjective bonds formed by empathy, and suggests that the contemplation of suffering produced communitas. In other words, far from being a "world-destroying" force in Elaine Scarry's terms, the infliction of pain created a world (47). The dissolution of boundaries implied by the notion of communitas need not be accepted in order to explain the world-making force of spectacular suffering, however. The execution ritual simultaneously erases and reinforces social differentiation, just as ceremonial inversions both mock and support the given social order (48).

Whatever may have been the late medieval practice in contemplating devotional imagery, painful processions are different in that the "spectators" perform for one another, for the criminal, and for the authorities. Some spectators might have wept because they were expected to, regardless of their personal sympathies. Their performance created a world regardless of the feelings of individual spectator/participants. During a period when Paris was violently divided, the proper performance of the crowd at des Essarts' execution enhanced the appearance of unity. Perhaps at some moments the crowd was able to perform unity in the strict sense of performativity--that is, to bring it into being (49). I propose that it did so in the long run, in spite of the many violent reversals throughout this period.

As a ritual of expulsion, the execution confirms the boundaries of the community (50). When confession is added, the ritual also emphasizes integration and redemption. But the expulsion is not erased; rather, the criminal is excluded and reintegrated, and the community can imagine itself as both bounded and unified. In the end, reincorporation of the excluded criminal within the Christian community makes marginality and dissent less tenable for the secular community as well.

Notes

1. A Parisian Journal, ed. and trans. Janet Shirley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). Page references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text, with the notation PJ and I will refer to the author as "the Bourgeois." I also consulted the French edition, Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris 1405-1449, ed. Alexandre Tuetey (Paris: Champion, 1881).

2. See Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993); Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the

Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of

Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

3. See Talal Asad, "Notes on Body, Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual," Economy and Society 12.3 (1983): 294-95; Esther Cohen, "Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages," Science in

Context 8 (1995): 55. Complaints that the outcome was inherently ambiguous and open to manipulation by theparticipants were voiced by later writers arguing against ordeal, and should not be assumed to accurately reflect earlierviews. See Peter Brown, "Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change," Daedalus 104.2 (1975): 139, citing Petrus Cantor, Verbum abbreviatum, chap. 78; also cited and discussed by Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind:

Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215, rev'd ed. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987 [1982]), 18-19. I discuss trial by ordeal and early medieval martyr plays in "Impassive Bodies: Hrotsvit Stages Martyrdom," Theatre Journal 50.4 (December 1998): 473-87. See also Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 41-42;

Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 17-21. Up through the twelfth century, the normal accusatory judicial procedure made use of ordeal, a special kind of ritual performance by means of which a dramatic--and violent--gesture could demonstrate guilt or vindicate innocence. This included a pre-ordeal Mass, and the spectacle centered around the officiating priest rather than the person being tried. Ordeal requires a belief in immanent justice: that God is involved in the material world to such a degree that he will make the truth manifest in the human body. An ordeal could be vicarious, and the suspect was little more than a witness to his or her own guilt or innocence. Esther Cohen points out that participants could name champions to undergo an ordeal, because "the truth inhered in the ritual and in the human body in general, not specifically in the body of any given plaintiff or defendant." "Pain in the Later Middle Ages": 63, 55-56.

4. Asad: 298. Spierenburg points out that territorial principalities emerged during the same period as inquisitional justice. Spectacle, 2-4.

5. See Cohen, Crossroads, 67-71; Spierenburg, Spectacle, 8. For a parallel development towards textual authority in the process of canonization during the early thirteenth century, see André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45-51.

6. Spierenburg points out that subordination is what distinguishes punishment from vengeance or feud. Spectacle, 2-4.

7. Spierenburg, Spectacle, 12.

8. Merback, 132-37.

9. Cohen, Crossroads, 182-83. See also Merback, 19.

10. See Asad: 294-95, 321; Cohen, Crossroads, 56.

11. See Asad: 300-07. For the history of confession and penance, see also James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 152-69. For the usefulness of pain, see also Merback, 152-55. For purgatory, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

12. Cohen, "Pain the Later Middle Ages": 66-69; Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Guido Majno, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

13. The following summarizes Cohen, "Pain in the Later Middle Ages": 52-61.

14. Elizabeth Lalou points out that much more public weeping is reported in late medieval than in early modern texts. "Les Tortures dans Les Mystères: Théâtre et réalité" Medieval English Theatre 16 (1994): 41.

15. The conception of "living saints" developed around the same time. Until the late eleventh century, only those who had been martyred at least a century earlier were considered saints. See Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 21-25.

16. Cohen, Crossroads, 150. Representations of Christ up to this time most often depicted him as the ruler of the world, and the few early images of the crucifixion that exist do not portray his suffering. See Cohen, "Pain in the Later Middle Ages": 58; Merback, 57-66; Nigel Spivey, "Christ and the Art of Agony," History Today 49.8 (August 1999): [online edition, n.p.].

17. See Kleinberg, 146; Merback, 151. See also Karma Lochrie, "The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse," in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 117; Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 129-54.

18. Cohen, "Pain in the Later Middle Ages": 64.

19. Merback, 143-45, 152.

20. See Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 4, for a lucid discussion of the similar historiographic challenge presented by hagiography. I discuss the use of iconographic evidence in "Using Apollonia" at http://athe.drama.uga.edu/theorysite.html (presented at the meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in Washington, D.C., August 2000). An earlier version of this paper was read at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, July 1999, under the title "Erotic Response and the Saint Play."

21. For a historical overview of the period, see Jacques Le Goff, L’Etat et les Pouvoirs (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 127-80; C.T. Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300-c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 141-44 for a discussion of France and nationhood. See also David Nicholas, The Evolution of the Medieval World: Society, Government and Thought in Europe, 312-1500 (London: Longman, 1992), 399-499; J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Susan Reynolds, "The

Historiography of the Medieval State," in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997), 117-38; Claude Gauvard, "Le Royaume de France au XVe Siècle," in Art et Société en France au XVe Siècle, ed. Christiane Prigent (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1999), 21-30.

22. The extreme depravity of the violence described here calls to mind the crimes attributed to Gilles de Rais, the Marshal of France who fought for Charles VII alongside Jeanne D'Arc. See Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson (Los Angeles: Amok, 1991). I cannot even begin to weigh propaganda against fact, but the problem is fascinating.

23. The chaotic social performance of suffering can also serve to reinforce, by contrast, the well-ordered society. In late medieval dramas, beggars are objects for derision or comic relief. They use their infirmities--and suffering--as a means of livelihood, and the drama frames them in such a way as to mitigate against compassion. Legal records and chronicles show a concern with faking maladies and with mutilating children in order to train them as beggars. See Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 192-201; Lalou: 37-50.

24. Guy Llewelyn Thompson, Paris and Its People Under English Rule: the Anglo-Burgundian Regime, 1420-1436 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 195.

25. See Thompson, 182.

26. See Thompson, 179-98.

27. Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston, ed. Fredric L. Cheyette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 126-151.

28. See the discussion in Bryant, King and City, 25-27.

29. Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6, 11.

30. For a detailed discussion, see Lawrence M. Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1986). For the entry of Henry VI, see also Thompson, 199-205; Lawrence M. Bryant, "Configurations of the Community in Late Medieval Spectacles," in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3-33. See also Bernard Guenée and Françoise Lehoux, Les Entrées Royales Françaises de 1328 à 1515 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968).

31. See Esther Cohen, "Symbols of Culpability and the Universal Language of Justice: The Ritual of Public Executions in Late Medieval Europe," History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 409; Merback, 138.

32. Cohen, Crossroads, 187-90, citing Jacques Hillairet, Gibets, piloris et cachots de vieux Paris (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1956), 15-29, for places of execution in Paris.

33. For the execution as a liminal ritual, see Cohen, Crossroads, 79, citing Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York, 1978), 249-50. Cohen argues that the liminal offender, like the world-upside-down, strengthens and emphasizes hierarchy and order by providing an image of its opposite (79-83). For the relation of the royal entrance to coronation, see Bryant, King and City, 225 and passim. The Parisian entrance occurred after the coronation, except in the case of Henry VI's dual regency; however, even that entrance marked a change in the city's relationship to the new king.

34. Because of space considerations, I cannot go into these variations. Bryant, Kipling, and Thompson all discuss them at length. See also Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1984), 3-19.

35. See, for example, the execution in 1398 of two Augustinian monks who were brought to Paris to cure Charles VI, but were accused of having bewitched him. During the procession, they were invested with and then stripped of all accoutrements of identity, beginning with the clerical. Cohen, Crossroads, 184-86. Cohen points out that the mutilations were carried out quickly and were not ritualized (166), and argues against reading prurience into the stripping (97).

36. Cohen, Crossroads, 195.

37. Cohen, Crossroads, 183.

38. Cohen, Crossroads, 195-99. Merback argues that the good death of a murderer could, for the community, cancel out his victim's unprepared death (146).

39. Spierenburg, Spectacle, 200-07. See also Cohen, Crossroads, 182.

40. Cohen, Crossroads, 157, 160, 166, 191.

41. Cohen, Crossroads, 181-83; Merback, 132-37.

42. See Cohen, Crossroads, 193-94. See PJ 245, for an example.

43. Enders, Cruelty, 190.

44. The monks mentioned in note 35 not only confessed their misdeeds during their procession, but wore parchments upon which those crimes were inscribed. Cohen, Crossroads, 184-86.

45. Merback, 19-20.

46. Enders, Cruelty, 191, citing Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 59-64.

47. Merback, 19-20. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

48. Clifford Flanigan, "Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late Medieval Drama," in Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology, ed. Kathleen Ashley (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1990), 42-63.

49. See J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

50. For late medieval rituals of exclusion, see Jelle Koopmans, Le Théâtre des exclus au Moyen Age: hérétiques, sorcières et Marginaux (Paris: Imago, 1997).