Edmund’s body acquires its thin red neckline from the miraculous healing of his wounds; the absent marks on his body still require documentation, archiving, and finally remediation through adaptation in textual and visual accounts.
1 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 65–84. In other ways, however, bodily absence in the form of somatic loss can produce a powerful physical presence that is also an intensely mediated experience. The power of media is not only to transmit data but also to produce communicational affects of
physical and emotional response. In media, just as in everyday life, societies become ‘tuned’ to bodies of certain types.
2 Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Malden: Polity Press, 2012), p. 31. Whether it is medieval or modern, a mutilated body or one marked by somatic absence generates a profoundly mediated ‘spectacular image situation’, where one image, an ideation of an imagined, complete body, is substituted by another, the reality of the body marked in normate cultural expectation by absence.
3 Parikka, Media Archaeology, p. 24. See also: Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 114–33 at p. 122. The point above is not to claim that mutilated bodies, or those lacking limbs, are therefore essentially inferior; rather, it identifies the dominate cultural subject position as what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed the ‘normate’: ‘the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries’. See: Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 8. If this new bodily formation occurs violently, unnaturally, it only heightens the affective nature of this viewing experience. When medieval bodies are physically altered, usually through technological means, they can also become inflected bodies, the carriers of new information. Such inflection convenes physical bodies, violence, material tools, and other objects, and the cultural schemes by which those who encounter these modified bodies derive new information from them. Together, they function as a ‘soft assembly’, a notion borrowed from developmental psychology that considers how bodily, environmental, technological, and cultural mechanisms all come together to respond adaptively to a specific issue.
4 Andy Clark, Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 154. In new media, soft assemblies occur when disparate informational elements are temporarily assembled in response to a specific query, to allow users to find the answers they seek. In early medieval England, the alteration or mutilation of a body could produce bodies in such a soft-assemblage mode, where bodies circulating through medieval space encounter materiality external to their own, and the bodies modified through such encounters themselves produce information sought by the communities that in turn encounter them.
Old English law codes are full of body parts, but until recently, relatively little work had been done on what these law codes actually say about the body, beyond which injured parts are worth more, and why, or how the codes reveal an official policy that expands the mutilation of criminals in the century before the Norman Conquest.
5 However, see Capital and Corporal Punishment, ed. Gates and Marafioti for an important collection of recent scholarship in this area. On occasion, mutilation punishments in law codes have led critics to consider the mutilated body as readable itself, though in such cases early medieval bodies tend to then be transformed into a type of ‘text’ rather than be understood as a distinctive form of hybrid, somatic media in their own right, on the ground, and in the flesh.
6 For example, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Body and Law in Late Anglo–Saxon England’, Anglo–Saxon England 27 (1998): 209–32 and Mary P. Richards, ‘The Body as Text in Early Anglo–Saxon Law’, in Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Benjamin C. Withers and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003), pp. 97–115. Especially on the part of literary scholars, the instinct to textualise the body is understandable and valuable; at the same time it limits our conception of one potential media form by immediately remediating it, assigning one medium the identity of another. Or, in media studies terms, ‘the physiological should not merely be reduced to metaphor [but be taken as a part of] a media archaeology of embodiment’.
7 Parikka, Media Archaeology, p. 35. Bodies abound in early medieval English law codes, but mostly not as punitive objects to be mutilated. In the
wergild (literally, ‘man-payment’) codes, these laws instead enact a kind of inverse of mutilation, carefully itemizing and cataloguing every body part and assigning a compensatory value to it, e.g.:
[53]Gif þuman of aslæhð, XX scill.
[54]Gif ðuman nægl of weorðeþ, III scill gebete.
[55]Gif man scytefinger of aslæhð, VIIII scill gebete.
[56]Gif man middelfinger of aslæhð, IIII scill gebete.
[57]Gif man goldfinger of aslæhð, VI scill gebete.
[58]Gif man þone lytlan finger of aslæhð, XI scill gebete.
[[53] If a thumb be struck off, twenty shillings.
[54] If a thumb nail be taken off, three shillings paid.
[55] If the shooting [i.e. fore] finger be struck off, eight shillings paid.
[56] If the middle finger be struck off, four shillings paid.
[57] If the gold [i e. ring] finger be struck off, six shillings paid.
[58] If the little finger be struck off, eleven shillings paid].
8 Laws of Æthelberht, codes 53–58 (c. 600) [c. 1135]), in Lisi Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2002), p. 72.The point of
such a practice, and the
wergild in general, is not to use body parts as currency, which would, in effect trade an eye for an eye.
9 For an overview of the cultural function of wergild and its stability as a legal institution over the course of early medieval England, see: Braden Sides, ‘A Lifeʼs Worth: Reexamining Wergild in the Anglo-Saxon Royal Law Codes (c. 600–1035)’, The Expositor 15 (2007): 85–107, and Allen, ‘Compensation’. Rather, the idea is to stop body parts from being exchanged. In effect, the
wergild system combats revenge violence by taking one material that should not function as currency – the micro-corporeality of wounds – and substituting for it something that
should circulate, that is, actual money.
10 Cf. Allen, ‘Compensation’, p. 25, who argues for the evolution of the wergild system in tandem with that of a centralised and native fiscal policy and production of coinage, and similarly notes the ‘permeability among coin, commodity, and blood’. Quoting Georg Simmel, Allen notes: ‘the cultural logic of the wergild “not only makes money the measure of man, but it also makes man the measure of the value of money”’ (p. 20). In doing so,
wergild codes acknowledge mutilated body parts as possessing the capacity to circulate in society with meaning beyond the organically human. Such a Mattelartian communicative mode, however, where body parts circulate across a community as objects of exchange, precipitates a crisis of social disorder and destabilization (e.g
. feud and revenge), so the potential of the body part as media object must be pre-empted by the homologous compensatory and disciplining mechanism of financial currency.
11 See, however, Allen’s observations that in Ine’s law code, slaves and weapons can be substituted for coins, and that for slaves, sometimes their mutilation is the only possible compensation for sexual violence, once again folding bodies back into the somatic-material economy of justice (‘Compensation’, pp. 26–27).Though not common in early medieval English law codes, guidelines for mutilation did exist, and the particulars of when to mutilate a criminal contribute further to the broader media ecology in which early medieval English bodies participated. The earliest mention of mutilation in pre-Conquest law occurs in the late seventh-century laws of Ine.
12 Laws of Ine, (c. 690), in Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Felix Liebermann (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903), 1:96 and 104. See also: O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle’, p. 150.[18] Cierlisc mon gif he oft betygen wære, gif he æt siðestan sie gefongen, slea mon hond oððe fot.
[37] Se cirlisca mon, se ðe oft betygen wære ðiefðe, 7 þonne æt siðestan synnigne gefo in ceape oððe elles æt openre scylde , slea him mon hond of oððe fot.
[[18] If a commoner who has often been accused is at last seized, his hand or foot shall be cut off.
[37] If a commoner has often been accused of theft and is at last taken in guilt with property or openly in the crime, cut off his hand or foot].
As Allen observes of such legal mutilation, ‘in their partibility, hands do the job of coins’.
13 Allen, ‘Compensation’, p. 30. Mutilation enters into the early English law codes strictly
not as a method of repayment for life or goods lost, but rather, as violently condign and about ensuring that a criminal cannot continue to be a criminal through physical modification. But the act is not simply a punishment, a stopping. The mutilation modifies the criminal’s body, rendering it, like an inverse of Grendel’s mounted arm, as a body whose amputated, absented state then circulates carrying new and permanent meaning – a Derrideanesque trace of both absence and presence.
14 Explanations of Jacques Derrida’s poststructural concept of ‘absent presence’ are widely available online and elsewhere. Here is a serviceable one: ‘Absent Presence’, Oxford Reference (11 September 2021): https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095344811. In codes 18 and 37, the early legal mutilation of medieval bodies also closely relates to other networks of circulation. The body must be mutilated because the compensatory system of
wergild cannot apply. The criminality is ongoing (
se ðe oft betygen wære ðiefð), and so persistent in the community; its pervasion generates another pervasive social discourse, the frequent accusations of criminality that earlier could not be answered. Only by seizing (
gefongen) and then duratively marking the mobile, criminal body, the law code implies, can such unwanted social circuits be closed, where physical modification resolves and stops the criminal accusations that previously moved through the community, replacing them with the inflected, inflicted body as a mobile warning to discourage such activities.
In the law codes of later periods of pre-Conquest England, the desire to mark the body with a message of discipline develops into a concerted effort in the early English justice system to increase the number of punishments that include mutilation and other forms of physical punishments, and thereby join with a spiritual economy of somatic fragmentation. Mutilation and amputation here is not done to increase injury, but rather to decrease death sentences, as a merciful strategy of soul-saving.
15 O’Keefe, ‘Body and Law’; Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 125ff; and O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle’, p. 150. For studies promoting related theses about the spiritual designs of legal punishments see: Nicole Marafioti, ‘Earthly Justice and Spiritual Consequences: Judging and Punishing in the Old English Consolation of Philosophy’, in Capital and Corporal Punishment, ed. Gates and Marafioti, pp. 113–30, and Fruscione, ‘Beginnings and Legitimation’. Maiming, not killing, criminals provides them with an opportunity to rehabilitate and work towards redemption, as the guilty body is forced ‘to confess to its guilt as part of the process of salvation’.
16 O’Keefe, ‘Body and Law’, p. 217. Here the body performs its own communication – a somatic confession, in marked contrast to typically overt and oral modes of such expression, and one that produces a permanently marked body that continues to circulate its message among the community.
This spiritualised economy of somatic fragmentation and circulation is evident in an eleventh-century Latin and Old English excommunication formula for cursing individual parts of the body:
…awergoden beon heora hæfdon 7 on heora recgan;
awergoden beon heora eagan 7 heora earan;
awergode beon heora tungan 7 lippan;
awergode beon heora teð 7 heora þrotbollan;
awergoden beon heora sculdran 7 heora breost;
awergoden beon heora fet 7 scancan;
awergode beon heora beoh 7 eall heora inneweard.
[ … let their heads be cursed, and their necks; their eyes / be cursed, and their ears; their tongues and lips / be cursed; their teeth and their throats be cursed; / their shoulders and their torsos be cursed; their feet / and legs be cursed; their thighs and all their / insides be cursed.]
17 Elaine Treharne, ed., ‘A Unique Old English Formula for Excommunication from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303’, Anglo-Saxon England 24 (1995): 185–211.The excommunication formula provides ritual language for the damnation of each part of the excommunicate’s body: in succession from ‘top to toe’, the head, the back, the eyes, the ears, the tongue, the lips, the teeth, the throat, the shoulders, the breast, the shins, and the feet, and finally their ‘thighs’ (a common euphemism for genitalia), and all internal organs. When a person is damned to roam outside the social network of spirituality, they are exiled as a whole, but the parts of their body are individually cursed, catalogued as now theologically worthless within the compensatory secular system of the
wergild, now ‘cut off’ in a spiritual enactment of mutilation. Early medieval subjects would have understood the inverse relationship between spiritual and physical fragmentation; as Nicole Marafioti notes, the torture and decapitation of King Edmund by Vikings in the ninth century would for Abbo’s and Ælfric’s tenth- and eleventh-century readers, respectively, ‘have recalled the punishments for criminals and excommunicants’.
18 Marafioti, King’s Body, p. 185.A roughly contemporary law of mutilation, first recorded in the early tenth-century codes of King Æthelstan and found again in a late tenth-century code of King Æthelred also ties together the somatic, the social, the financial aspects of the early medieval English circulatory economy, but also by extension the spiritual. In Æthelræd’s formulation:
[5.3] Et constituerunt, monetarii cur manum perdant, et ponatur super ipsius monete fabricam.
[[5.3] And they have established that (false) moneyers should lose a hand, and it be placed over the workshop as a warning]
.19 Laws of Æthelred IV (c. 991–1002), edited in Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 1:234. For a thorough discussion of this code, its history and its variants, see: O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle’. See also: Allen, ‘Compensation’, pp. 31–32.Intriguing resonances of Grendel’s limb and its own post-punition architectural display aside,
20 John M. Hill, ‘The Sacrificial Synecdoche of Hands, Heads, and 74 Arms in Anglo-Saxon Heroic Poetry’, in Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Benjamin C. Withers and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003), pp. 116–37 at pp. 125–26, and O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle’, pp. 153–55. here again is a moment of systemic crisis of currency, this time literally about coins, where again the legal modes such as
wergild cannot defuse the situation, and instead the body must be permanently modified in response. The counterfeiting minter who is the subject of the above law cannot ‘pay’ for his crimes with shillings or
sceats. He has already sent false currency into society’s financial network, where it becomes difficult to contain – a monetary equivalent of the unanswered accusations that Ine’s older mutilation code was also designed to answer. Instead of
wergild, again, we see a more drastic, condign, and physical sentence. Like mutilations in Ine’s codes, the amputation of the moneyer’s hand attests to the close relationship of body parts, material objects and quantifiable information; as Allen notes, a handless person cannot grip a weapon – literally ‘bear arms’ – and is compromised in their ability to count or measure anything.
21 Allen, ‘Compensation’, p. 30. But unlike Ine’s code, this mutilation in Æthelred’s laws produces more than a mobile, corporeal message in circulation of the disfigured body. Rather, here it is the presence (not absence) of the mounted body part that also broadcasts information. As with Grendel’s arm, the bodily limb is transformed into a spectacle, a fixed and fleshy public broadcast in order to address the crime at hand.
22 O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle’, p. 151 specifically considers this law as enacting a form of public spectacle, albeit explicitly following the textualising impulses of O’Keefe (‘Body in Law’) and Richards (‘Body as Text’), and with a foundational framing of Foucault, describing the mutilated bodies as ‘excised pages intended to be read’. Like Grendel’s arm, the mounted appendage transmits several bits of information simultaneously: this mint was a place of false money, the counterfeiter was found out and punished, justice was enacted, and finally, that this detached hand should serve as a warning (
monete) for just how serious a crime compromising the early medieval English monetary system is.
Coins did not simply circulate with secular and financial information: for example, within decades after King Edmund’s death, King Alfred began the tradition of promoting the East Anglian martyr’s nascent cult through memorial coinage.
23 C. E. Blunt, ‘The St. Edmund Memorial Coinage’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 31 (1969): 234–53 at pp. 242, 253. See also: Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’, pp. 82–83. Several thousand of such coins still survive today, and evidence another substantial mode through which the somatic event of Edmund’s mutilation was able to circulate as media object.
24 Blunt, ‘Memorial Coinage’, p. 234. And if King Edmund’s healed corpse became the foundation of an architectural site of cultic worship, in Æthelred’s law a severed, mounted limb assembles with the counterfeiter’s building, creating a hybrid site of admonitory (
monete) and moral warning. Like Grendel’s arm in Heorot, this new, technologically inflected/inflicted somatic structure broadcasts a message of punishment, but, in late tenth-century theology also extends the opportunity for redemption and salvation both to the moneyer and others in their community.
25 However, see O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle’, pp. 160–61, who considers, inconclusively, that Wulfstan may have removed the condition of display from Cnut’s later version of the law because it was not necessary to help save the criminal’s soul. As Daniel O’Gorman notes, the landscape of early medieval England ‘was decorated with the relics of holy men and women, and in some ways these dismembered saintly bodies can be seen as the inverse of dismembered criminal ones’.
26 O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle’, p. 162.Of course, all of the bodies discussed in the case studies above come to us today as texts. In the writing of these bodies, they again are remediated, and now circulating not only materially, but textually. Here, the media ecology that the body participates in again widens its representational orbit, this time in the temporal. Textualizing the body, alive, dead, or otherwise curates, archives and therefore extends its existence into the present, more handily reaching larger audiences. But it is important that the textualised body not be understood as its only or dominant medieval form, eliding the underlying physical substrate in order to privilege the textual one. We should be careful when we ‘read’ the medieval body today. For too many modern subjects, the flesh made word may be one of the most persistent ways the body survives as information, but for early medieval England, it was rarely the most vital one.