This volume brings together essays that consider wounding and/or wound repair from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe.

Wounds were a potent signifier reaching across all aspects of life in Europe in the middle ages, and their representation, perception and treatment is the focus of this volume. Following a survey of the history of medical wound treatment in the middle ages, paired chapters explore key themes situating wounds within the context of religious belief, writing on medicine, status and identity, and surgical practice. The final chapter reviews the history of medieval wounding through the modern imagination. Adopting an innovative approach to the subject, this book will appeal to all those interested in how past societies regarded health, disease and healing and will improve knowledge of not only the practice of medicine in the past, but also of the ethical, religious and cultural dimensions structuring that practice.

A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality.

Essays exploring medieval castration, as reflected in archaeology, law, historical record, and literary motifs. Castration and castrati have always been facets of western culture, from myth and legend to law and theology, from eunuchs guarding harems to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century castrati singers. Metaphoric castration pervadesa number of medieval literary genres, particularly the Old French fabliaux - exchanges of power predicated upon the exchange or absence of sexual desire signified by genitalia - but the plain, literal act of castration and its implications are often overlooked. This collection explores this often taboo subject and its implications for cultural mores and custom in Western Europe, seeking to demystify and demythologize castration. Its subjects includearchaeological studies of eunuchs; historical accounts of castration in trials of combat; the mutilation of political rivals in medieval Wales; Anglo-Saxon and Frisian legal and literary examples of castration as punishment; castration as comedy in the Old French fabliaux; the prohibition against genital mutilation in hagiography; and early-modern anxieties about punitive castration enacted on the Elizabethan stage. The introduction reflects on these topics in the context of arguably the most well-known victim of castration in the middle ages, Abelard. LARISSA TRACY is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University. Contributors: Larissa Tracy, Kathryn Reusch, Shaun Tougher, Jack Collins, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Jay Paul Gates, Charlene M. Eska, Mary A. Valante, Anthony Adams, Mary E. Leech, Jed Chandler, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, Robert L.A. Clark, Karin Sellberg, LenaWånggren

Presents a detailed description of medieval medical treatments available during the Crusades.

The decapitation motif recurs in nearly all medieval and early modern genres, from saints' lives and epics to comedies and romances, yet decollation is often little regarded, save as a marker of humanity (that is, as the moment mortality exits) or inhumanity (that is, as the moment the supernatural enters). However, as a seat of reason, wisdom, and even the soul, the head has long been afforded a special place in the body politic, even when separated from its body proper. Capitalizing upon the enduring fascination with decapitation in European culture, this collection examines--through a variety of critical lenses--the recurring "roles/rolls" of severed human heads in the medieval and early modern imagination. Contributors are Nicola Masciandaro, Mark Faulkner, Jay Paul Gates, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Dwayne Coleman, Mary Leech, Tina Boyer, Renée Ward, Andrew Fleck, Thomas Herron, Thea Cervone, and Asa Simon Mittman. Preface by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

The practice and the representation of flaying in the middle ages and after are considered in this provocative collection.