Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

Abstract

The human body is a container held together by a carefully constructed network of blood vessels, nerves, and ligaments, intertwined with a skele tal framework designed to shape and protect the delicate organs within, all wrapped neatly in a casing of skin. Any breaking of the skin through blunt or sharp-force trauma, any puncture or slash, laceration or abrasion, threatens the interior systems of the body. Wounds pierce and penetrate, permeate, and infect. Wounds allow access to the internal elements of the human body, revealing its vulnerabilities but also its strength and, in some cases, miraculous capacity to heal from even the most violent of injuries. Flesh can be wounded and knit back together by unguents, ointments, honey, sutures, plasters, bandages, and suppurations. A wound can indict, convict, acquit; wounds are legal entities, inflicted in the course of justice and injustice. They are adjudicated, measured, treated, compensated, and bound. They can also inspire, especially when a deity is defined in part by wounds carried after "death" to prove eternal life; when followers acquire those same wounds, they are deemed especially devout and holy. In the medieval world, wounds could be fatal or salvific; they represented the sacrifice of love-divine and earthly. They could be mutilating, proof of shame or valor. They could be the cause of lifelong admiration or endless poverty. They could bring temporary pain, quickly relieved by rest or alcohol, or lingering agony that ended only with death. They could be caused by all sorts of weapons-swung, thrust, or shot. They could be prevented by armor and treated by surgeons. They could end life or immortalize it. Wounds were not simply injuries to the body; rather, they were often signifiers of class or status, and many were dealt with and compensated based on social standing. Holy wounds (divine manifestations, self-inflicted, or barbaric punishment) opened the sanctified body up to interpretation as well as infiltration by the Holy Spirit. Wounds occurred in a variety of ways and in a variety of venues. Not all were inflicted with malice. Some were the product of chivalric jousting, dueling, or trials by combat. Writing about the spectacle of wounding in medieval images, Mitchell Merback explains: "Once a wound appears before our eyes, it is as if a fault line has opened up across the body's topography, one that threatens to tear open ever wider expanses of the body's hidden interior."1 Witnessing the wounded body in art and in punitive

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