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Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (review)

larissa tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. x, 326. isbn: 978-1-84-384288-0. $95.This book works with the premise that national identities are founded, in part, on the disavowal of torture as a legitimate means of extracting truth and maintaining order. Introducing her argument with a reference to President Obama's declaration, in February 2009, that 'The United States does not torture' (p. 2), Larissa Tracy discovers, in medieval and early modern literature, a series of analogous statements about judicial and extrajudicial violence. These disclaimers, the author submits, reflect a greater ambivalence toward torture on the part of medieval cultures than modern scholarship and popular culture commonly suppose. Even if, in reality, the societies that produced such texts were sometimes implicated in legitimizing violence, literary depictions tell a different story, situating torture as a practice of the 'Other' or the 'Other within.'Tracy bases her thesis on an impressive array of sources, ranging from hagiography, romance, and epic through to saga and fabliau; working with material in Old French, Middle English, Middle Dutch, Old Norse/Icelandic, and Latin, she also turns, in the final chapter, to depictions of torture by sixteenth-century English poets and playwrights. The selection includes a number of Arthurian texts-notably the thirteenth-century Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein and the fourteenth-century Latin romance Arthur and Gorlagon-as well as taking in several of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.After reviewing the role played by representations of brutality in constructions of national identity, the Introduction directs attention to modern misconceptions of medieval attitudes to torture. Proposing that we resist the tendency simply to treat literature of the period as a reflection of judicial realities or of a medieval mind-set bent on violence, Tracy sets out also to highlight those episodes where torture is subjected to a more critical attitude. Turning, in Chapter One, to representations of torture in Middle English hagiography-namely the martyrdom legends collated in the South English Legendary and the Gilte Legende-the author speculates that these narratives may, perhaps unintentionally, have 'inspired a certain amount of heterodoxy' (39). Since, as she points out, English texts generally up the ante when it comes to representing the saints' gruesome torments compared to their Latin analogues, the evangelizing aims of vernacular hagiography may ultimately have backfired against the Church in whose name it originally circulated. Displacing acts of violence onto pagan and emphatically non-English perpetrators, the inquisitors who, from the thirteenth-century in some parts of Europe, were tasked with rooting out heresy would increasingly, Tracy ventures, have seemed like the pagan judges of hagiographic legend.This discussion is followed, in Chapter Two, by an engagement with torture in the 'Continental' imagination, exemplified principally by the Chanson de Roland (in which Ganelon's grisly execution by equine quartering is treated as an instance of an Anglo-Norman readership struggling to forge a new identity grounded in English law) and Roman van Walewein (which displaces torture geographically to far-away India, but may be responding to the encroaching effects of French legal practice in contemporary Flanders). Motifs such as evisceration and hamstringing, as featured periodically in Icelandic saga, are shown to serve comparable functions. As discussed in Chapter Three, these depictions contribute to efforts to reinvent Icelandic identity as courtly, Christianized, and law-abiding, thereby negotiating Norwegian influences in the present as well as countering perceptions of a violent Viking past. …