Rituals and Spaces of Punishment: NetMAR at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (2023)

Rituals and Spaces of Punishment: NetMAR at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (2023)

By Michaela Pölzl (UNI BA)

The EU-funded project Network for Medieval Arts and Rituals (NetMAR), which will participate in the upcoming International Medieval Congress in Leeds (IMC, 03-06 July 2022), takes once again the opportunity to share with the NetMAR blog readers a preview of the four papers of its session that will be given by some of the project’s young researchers.

For this year, the IMC organising committee has chosen ‘Networks & Entanglements’ as the special thematic strand of the congress, aiming to invite medievalists to ‘analyse the webs of interaction and relations among individuals, groups, places, artefacts, or polities’. Networks, as formulated by the IMC committee, ‘emerge from, or are defined as, multifaceted interdependencies. They highlight linkages between the human and non-human sphere, akin to how medieval people perceived manifold connections between the macro- and the microcosm’. Entanglements, on the other hand, ‘is a term originally employed in studies of materiality to capture mutual dependencies between humans, artefacts, and sites in a fuzzier, but more flexible way. It has a key role in understanding complex connections, correlations, and relationships of diverse groups and cultures’ (https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2023/cfp-2023/).

Picking up these topics the NetMAR research team thought: Who could better reflect on networks and entanglements than an international network like NetMAR, which specialises in interdisciplinary exchange involving Byzantium and the Western Middle Ages? The proposed session will focus on the entanglements of spaces, artefacts, and personnel of ritual punishment.

Rituals and Spaces of Punishment in Medieval Culture
(Session 248, Monday 03 July 2022: 14.15-15.45, GMT+1)

The Byzantine and Western Middle Ages were familiar with public punishments. Those punishments often had a ritualistic character and came with a certain amount of staging. While punishments focused frequently on the physical disfigurement of the punished person, it was not uncommon that a wrongdoer’s submission to certain humiliating ceremonies in public was sufficient to undo their transgression of order. The interdisciplinary session sponsored by the international EU Horizon 2020 project NetMAR explores medieval rituals of bodily punishment and shame focusing on the spaces of their staging.

The paper entitled ‘The Ritual of Punishment in Frankish and Venetian Cyprus’ by Marina Ilia explores the law and penalties related to major crimes in Venetian Cyprus, focusing on the imposed penalties and ritualistic aspects of punishments. Using the Assises of Jerusalem as her main source, Ilia will show that these penalties were usually determined by the offenders’ crime, social class, and gender.

Andria Andreou’s paper ‘The Space of Punishment in Byzantine Passions and Miracle Tales’ will focus on public and private forms of punishment in hagiographical narratives. In Byzantine hagiography, punishment is a multifaceted concept that is almost always linked to a character’s ethical quality and faith. In Byzantine Passions, punishment mostly refers to the unjust treatment of a Christian martyr who is tortured on account of his/her faith and sometimes to the subsequent just and dreadful death of the pagan torturer which usually takes place towards the end of the account. In Collections of Miracles, on the other hand, punishment arises because of a character’s insult to the commemorated saint. Despite the generic and other differences between martyrdom accounts and miracle tales, bringing these two types of narratives in a constructive dialogue from the perspective of punishment could improve our understanding of hagiographical literature.

Sara Moure López’ paper ‘A Space for Divine Punishment: Babylon in the Visual and Textual Cultures of 13^th Century Castile’ concerns the image of Babylon, the accursed city, in Castilian visual culture. It will analyse the different visual strategies adopted in its representation and how they were put in dialogue with contemporary literature, thus nourishing the thirteenth-century Castilian imaginary on divine punishment. The study of how the city is articulated as an accursed space – visual and textual – will allow a better understanding of how these manifestations may have been perceived by their audiences – mainly female monastic communities that were closely linked to the royal family and were under its patronage. Taking these realities into consideration, one would wonder whether this space of divine punishment was transferred or evoked in the rituals and spaces of the monastic communities in question.

Punishment by pillory belonged to the degrading punishments of the Middle Ages, whereby delinquent individuals were put on public display to diminish their honour. In addition to the object of the pillory, the associated rituals engraved themselves in a lasting way in European collective memory.

Figure 1: Burning witches, with others held in Stocks (14th century)

This becomes visible in the metaphorical everyday vocabulary of many different European languages. Gerlinde Gangl’s paper ‘Languages of Shame – The Pillory and its Impact on Metaphorical Ways of Speaking’ will bring to the fore the aspects of the punishment ritual which have been preserved as so-called ‘linguistic relics’ in the form of metaphorical expressions in contemporary figurative vocabularies.

NetMAR blog readers are warmly invited to attend the NetMAR session on 03 July 2023 to learn more about the exciting research of NetMAR’s young scholars and to discuss their fascinating topics with them. The IMC 2023 will be a hybrid event; one could thus join the sessions at Leeds or online. More information about the IMC 2022 programme can be found at https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2023/programme/pdf/. For information on registration and conference fees, visit https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/register/.

We also extend a very warm welcome to everyone who wants to participate in the NetMAR reception, taking place on Monday, 03 July, at the premises of the International Medieval Congress. Learn more here: https://www.ucy.ac.cy/netmar/netmar-reception-at-imc-leeds-2023/

Session 248: Rituals and Spaces of Punishment in Medieval Culture

• Marina Ilia: ‘The Ritual of Punishment in Frankish and Venetian Cyprus’
• Andria Andreou: ‘The Space of Punishment in Byzantine Passions and Miracle Tales’
• Sara Moure López: ‘A Space for Divine Punishment: Babylon in the Visual and Textual Cultures of 13^th Century Castile’
• Gerlinde Gangl: ‘Languages of Shame – The Pillory and its Impact on Metaphorical Ways of Speaking’