Subtheme:
Pillories, Public Shaming,
and Punishment
Organizer: Mireille Pardon (Berea College)
While some scandals arose organically, others were purposefully imposed on an individual by the judicial system. Although many parts of medieval judicial practice occurred behind closed doors, the punishment of the body was performed publicly, and carefully staged penal rituals often included elements of public shaming through bodily display. The archetypical example of punitive shaming in European secular law is the pillory, where the condemned was fastened into stocks, tied to an upright pillar, or forced to stand on a platform in a well-frequented location for a set number of hours or days. Pillories, however, were far from the only type of judicial ritual that included elements of humiliation and exposure, nor was the concept of shame through bodily display limited to criminal justice. This sub-theme is interested in papers addressing any form of punitive public shaming or forced bodily display in the Middle Ages, whether material or metaphorical, legal or literary.
Scholarship on the more gruesome aspects of medieval justice has long emphasized how the punishment of the criminal body asserted the power of the state. The public nature of bodily punishment only enhanced such messaging. Bodily punishment and public shaming also served to Other the condemned, marking them as outside the community by publicizing their misdeeds. However, more recent scholarship has explored the potential for reconciliatory and penitential elements in medieval rituals of physical punishment. In the context of late medieval England, Sara Butler has argued for seeing “law as penitential process,” as bodily punishment could carry multiple meanings when read against the backdrop of the salvific power of pain in medieval culture. For the pillory specifically, scholars such as Bénédicte Sère and Jörg Wettlaufer have described it as a kind of “forced confession” where the shame of bodily display served to heal the soul through a forced penance.
Suspended between reconciliation and punishment and between religious ritual and state violence, the many manifestations of punitive shaming in medieval Europe provide an entry point into larger issues: the meanings and functions of judicial ritual, rising state power in the Middle Ages, the acceptability of bodily exposure in public spheres, the role of reputation in the law, understandings of shame in medieval culture, and gendered experiences of medieval justice. This sub-theme would welcome papers from any field or methodological approach and is interested in finding connections across different manifestations of punitive shaming and bodily display in medieval culture.
