..., and judicial beliefs, which were far from consistent. But judges by necessity were forced to read the bodies of the accused for hints of guilt or innocence in the difficult process of carrying out their trials. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 Francesco Casoni physical body and torture early...

... pagan rule attracts the atten- tion of worldly authorities, whose sexualized overtures she refuses. She is imprisoned and, when she persists, tortured.1 Yet the masculine violence of her oppressors inevitably falters before her inviolate body a miracle which prompts the onlookers to convert en masse...

... the extreme nature of his suffering, suggests that physical torment effects an ontological change in the martyr’s body. Brian’s torture, Allen’s narrative intimates, transforms his body from the ordinary to the superhuman. At one point, Brian even believes that he has the stigmata (sig. F6v...

... is one of closeness between child and mother and casts Christ as the saint’s nursing mother, his milk as the salvation that martyrdom brings. When Margaret replaces the torturer’s pain with milk and salvation, she underscores the ability of the maternal body to nurture, both physically...

... Stuttgart, two city guards were waiting at the Esslingen gate, led me off to the evildoers tower next to the executioner s house, took my clothes off, shore the hair off my head and entire body, dressed me in a white alb, began the torture, tied my lower legs with a rope and affixed it to the ground...

... the body’s limbs were tied, stretching it until the joints ripped asunder. Augustine’s metaphorical cor- relation between spiritual distention and physical torture invites readers to consider that spirit, like flesh, is sensible to extreme pain.12 It is uncertain, however, if the reader can...

.... What becomes for these poets the central subject of the Passion, then, is not the tortured body of Jesus but rather the ethical, intellectual, and finally emotional difficulty of 562 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 31.3 / 2001 accepting unequivocally the extravagant mercy achieved...

... become totally identified with the holy, carnal, very literal wars of the Old Testament and of contemporary England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Though Christ remains the Mediator of the God who tortured him, soul and body, on the cross as substitute for humanity, he now threatens, in Cromwell's vivid...

... governed by local political conditions. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 physical body crime and capital punishment early modern confraternities a Body Politics: The Criminal Body between Public and Private...

... of death. Her body is not buried. Her body never decays Mary’s reprieve from bodily corruption in the grave was partic- ularly appropriate for a virgin, because virgins were understood to have escaped bodily corruption of another sort — degradation by sexual inter- course. Thus, although...

... as torturer, he comes to undergo exemplary pain, pain that empowers: the union of Host and hand marks a sharing in the Passion, after which Jonathas speaks explicitly priestly language. In that union, part of Jonathas’s body is welded to Christ’s. The image of the severed hand is itself part of the con...

... redemption, or tran- scendence, was body-based, and on the other, the body required redemption, that is, it was physically and morally corrupt. The conundrum here, so aptly Zimmerman / Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary  573 expressed by Bernard, was that the Christian...

...- logue refers to a theological context that itself vacillates on the question of whether a physical body can visit the incorporeal space of purgatory. The Tractatus shows its first hesitations about the veracity of its story in the way that it positions the author in relationship to the pilgrim. The text...

... Friday.1 An instrument of torture turned sign of redemption, medieval explanations of its special status reflect upon how its very ordinary materiality was imbued with and transformed by sacred power, an issue at the center of this special issue. A passage from “The Exaltation of the Cross...

... Studies 38:3, Fall 2008 DOI 10.1215/10829636-2008-001  © 2008 by Duke University Press of diseased bodies, and on the ways in which the body as a physical entity “mattered greatly,” in Mary Lindemann’s phrase, to chroniclers of premod- ern disease. Although, as the title of this issue...

... to the social and economic status that he can offer the female. His body does not function as a sign, since his wealth and status are what interests her. By contrast, other courtly literature of Hrots- vit’s time employs descriptions of male physicality as a tool to achieve an impression of (feminized...

... is found on her “privities” (13). In contrast, Fian's body refuses to yield a devil's mark. When the king has him searched, no devil's mark can be found (“for the which hee was narrowly searched, but it coulde not in anie wise bee founde” [27]). Fian is then tortured: “His nailes upon all his fingers...

...), see Lebigre, Les Grands Jours d’Auvergne, 13. 5 From the dedicatory poem to Achilles de Harlay, president of the Parlement of Paris, in La Puce de Madame Des Roches (1583), n.p. 6 On judicial torture, see Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern...

... by Duke University Press rative of the Reformation as an agent of secularization: by placing so much pressure on the category of belief, reformers turned articles of faith into objects of critical reflection, thereby (through a torturous, bloody, and still unfinished historical process) creating...

... body of Christ. As David Aers has written, “The humiliated, tortured, whipped, nailed-down, pierced, dying but life-giving body of Christ, the very body literally present in the Eucharist—this body became the dominant icon of the late-medieval church and the devotion it cultivated and authorized.” 76...