Martyr and Popular Conceptions of "Medieval Cruelty"

In October 10, 2003, five minutes of the film Martyr (The Death of Saint Eulalia) were screened to an audience of academics at the Siena Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies during its annual Interdisciplinary Conference.

This was the first public screening of the still in progress film. Ms. Marla Carlson gave a lecture based on the clip.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together aspects of "the popular" in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Periods with the ways modern artists and scholars imagine these eras in film, literature, painting, and sculpture. Points of focus might include the pre-Raphaelites; medieval popular religion; dramatic performance; the uses of medievalism; travel literature (early or modern medievalist); historical chronicals; transformations of legendary figures, such as Arthur or Robin Hood (then and/or now).

 Jac Avila, the producer/director of Martyr (The Death of St Eulalia) met Marla Carlson, who wrote the paper "Using Apollonia", presented in August 3, 2000 at the ATHE Conference in Washington D.C. on the panel, "Strategic Bodies: Pain, Accommodation, and Rebellion as Stage(d) Statements."
At that meeting Ms Carlson asked Avila if she could use a clip of the film in progress for the lecture she was preparing and she requested to see the entire film to elaborate her lecture.  Jac agreed to both.

The following is the text of the conference.

The Lecture "Popular Conceptions of "Medieval Cruelty"

When a character in Pulp Fiction threatens to "get medieval," writer/director Quentin Tarantino relies upon his audience to understand the equation "medieval = extremely violent," not to imagine the man singing Gregorian chant, reciting a courtly romance, or laboring with oxen and plow. The news media rely upon the same trope. Consider these recent examples from the New York Times: Somalia is described as "a throwback to medieval times" where "heavily armed warlords rule by brute force." An analyst argues that significant portions of Africa "slid back to the medieval age ... mainly because of the ravages of war." A book reviewer mentions "vicious, Medieval-style wars of siege and looting and rape ... in the former Yugoslavia." A front-page article in April described the Iraqi people as suffering "the most medieval of punishments at the hands of Saddam Hussein's henchmen." But no medieval methods of torture were mentioned: no racks, no thumbscrews, no backs broken by the wheel, no drawing and quartering,. The article did mention electrical shock, a method perfected by 20th-century American experts. Popular culture is in step with scholarly tradition.Writing The Autumn of the Middle Ages in 1919, Johannes Huizinga chose "The Violent Tenor of Life" as title for his first chapter. Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process takes the moody, unpredictable, and bloodthirsty knight as its point of departure: "wild, cruel, prone to violent outbreaks and abandoned to the joy of the moment."

But more recent publications by scholars such as Jody Enders, Daniel Baraz, Peter Geary, Richard Kaeuper, and Malcolm Vale suggest that medieval cruelty is perhaps a "distant mirror" for twentieth and twenty-first century cruelties. Vale points out that Huizinga wrote most of his manuscript before World War I began and published it just after the war. The sustained brutality of the twentieth century warrants a reassessment of this 19th-century construct, the "Middle Ages" (161). Kaeuper disagrees with the assertion that medieval people were particularly moody and unpredictable and suggests that medieval "literature shows a relentless concern with propagating highly formal behaviors ... within a distinct code." (33) He goes on to quote Dorothy L. Sayers: "The idea that a strong man should react to great calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin."

My work focuses on the performance of physical suffering, and today I'll be comparing medieval and 21st-century uses of the early Christian martyr's body in pain. For both the modern and medieval periods these martyrdoms are far in the past, but the modern interpreter tends to read through the medieval: as saints' lives were popularized in medieval Europe, certain features were selected and enhanced—even added to earlier accounts. The general trend in the later Middle Ages was to increase the number and violence of torments. As Sarah Kay points out, hundreds of saints' lives were adapted from Latin into Romance vernacular in medieval Europe, but not all saints were thus popularized. Mary of Egypt, with her "lurid sex-life prior to her repentance" was popular, as were martyrs, and especially virgin martyrs. Kay notes the potential in these vitae for "a kind of pious pornography", citing as an example Eulalia, the Spanish saint upon whom I will focus today. Kay says, "It is difficult not to be complicitous with the prurient sadism of these tales as we read them today." (5) My questions are the following:

(1) Would medieval consumers of virgin martyr tales have perceived what we might term "prurient sadism?" How might they have responded to the violence in such tales?

(2) Is complicity with sadism now the only possible response to the potentially erotic violence of these tales?

Disturbed by assessments that presume an equivalence between modern and medieval responses to spectacular suffering, and by the further presupposition that all readers, viewers, and spectators respond in the same way, regardless of personal history and circumstances of reception, I published an article a few years ago that focused on Fouquet's miniature of The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia to develop models for late-medieval spectator response to representations of the saint's body in pain. I'm going to rely upon certain premises, but won't argue for them today:

(1) one's subject position need not depend upon corresponding gender, class, race, or any other characteristic;

(2) contrast is a powerful motivation for taking on a vicarious subject position; and

(3) reception likely involves multiple modes of simultaneously identifying with and objectifying the body in pain

In August, filmmaker Jac Avila contacted me because he'd read my article in the course of research for a feature film about modern spectator response to the suffering of Saint Eulalia. I'm going to talk about her and about the ways in which she was represented in medieval Europe, and I'm going to show a scene from his film, which is still in post-production.
According to the fourth-century account by Prudentius, Eulalia was "descended from one of the best families in Spain" and distinguished herself "from infancy" by "an admirable sweetness of temper, modesty, and devotion, a great love of the holy state of virginity, and by her seriousness and contempt of dress, ornaments, diversions, and worldly company." In 304, when she was 12 (or in some accounts, 14), Eulalia took Diocletian's order that all persons must sacrifice to Roman gods as "a signal of battle" and purposely confronted the judge in Merida. His flattery and threats had no effect: she threw down the idol, trampled the sacrificial cake, and spat upon the judge. The executioners tore her sides with iron hooks "so as to leave the very bones bare." She called the torments "so many trophies of Christ." When lighted torches were applied to her breasts and sides, "nothing was heard from her mouth but thanksgivings." Her hair caught on fire, and when she died of asphyxiation, a white dove flew out of her mouth. The frightened executioners ran away and snow covered her body.

In ninth-century France, her story has not progressed very far from Prudentius: her death is now formulaic (beheading), but the only torment described is being thrown into the flames. Other versions of the story place her in Barcelona and add to her torments. A breviary from 15th-century Catalonia shows her crucified: I'm going to start the film now, because a page serves as frame holder for the film's credits.


The fresco at her cathedral in Barcelona from which the rest of these images are taken shows her beaten with rods, raked with hooks, doused with hot oil, crucified in the spread-eagle position, and finally crucified like Christ while being burned. Some elements of the standard virgin martyr narrative (as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne sets it out) are missing: there is no conflict with her family, no marriage or seduction attempt, and she is not beheaded. But like all the martyrs, she is articulate (her name means "well-spoken"), she actively seeks her martyrdom, and her torments demonstrate God's control over the world. Her vita is not particularly "feminine"—in fact, its similarity to that of male saints is striking.The medieval man or woman who encountered Eulalia in devotional imagery, her vita, or a dramatization would have understood that the saint "arranged the scenario and [had] ultimate control of it." In this, she seems to resemble the masochist in modern pornography. But this interpretive strategy makes modern assumptions about suffering. Esther Cohen traces three basic conceptions of pain within medieval Christianity:

1 The ability to tolerate pain, which had been cultivated by the Stoics, was given a Christian emphasis that reached its heyday during the high Middle Ages.

2 The ability to transcend pain entirely was introduced by early Christian martyr narratives, distinguishing them from Christ, whose suffering on the cross was the sign of his humanity. Thomas Aquinas refined the concept in the thirteenth century; henceforth, it was understood that saints were exempt from physical suffering. In this they resembled prelapsarian and heavenly beings, and were distinct from living human beings.

3 The ability to use pain for spiritual ends was entirely absent from Western culture until the twelfth century, when theologians began to take the view that the individual could begin to purge sins during life by voluntarily bearing pain in imitation of Christ and therefore lessen his or her suffering after death. Beginning in the thirteenth century, mystics increasingly sought to identify with the physical sensations of Christ as the "man of suffering." Devotional imagery "furnished a literalized space for the imagination's deployment." Spiritual guidebooks advocated a sort of imaginative exercise startlingly similar to the technique of "substitution" familiar to any twentieth-century Method actor: in meditating on the Passion, one was to imagine familiar people in the roles of Christ and other Passion "players," in order to fully enter into the experience.
A twelfth-century treatise recommended "that the meditator place himself as though actually present at the events, forming detailed pictures through the faculty of the imagination." The widespread desire to imitate Christ developed in tandem with the rise of inquisitional justice: Torture was carried out behind closed doors in order to produce a confession, which was followed by public sentencing and execution. Mitchell Merback argues that the practice of compassionate vision shaped the collective emotional experience of spectacular punishments. Merback argues for reading the late-medieval body in pain as a sign of the intersubjective bonds formed by empathy and suggests that the contemplation of suffering produced communitas. In other words, far from being a "world-destroying" force in Elaine Scarry's terms, the infliction of pain created a world.

But if the mystic seeks literally to emulate Christ's suffering, and the compassionate viewer seeks virtual emulation, what do either of them make of the martyr, who does not suffer? Representations of martyrdom simultaneously evoke an empathic pain response and an imaginary ability to transcend that response. I propose that the martyr activated an imaginary space for late-medieval culture structured by the tension between an impossible strength in virtue and ecstatic surrender to suffering.

As we look at this excerpt from Martyr (or The Death of Saint Eulalia), which seems to conflate the pain-free martyr with the suffering mystic, I pose the questions: Is this suffering useful? And who suffers?

As Sarah Kay suggests, saints lives functioned for medieval culture as "early examples of what, today, we would call Orientalism. They pit an enlightened Christian, harbinger of subsequent European culture against the despotic villainy of a pagan East" (13). I would argue that contemporary representations of medieval violence work in much the same way.

I propose that contemporary filmmakers generally turn to the medieval out of a nostalgia for the Orientalist tales that we no longer allow ourselves to tell—at least, not without controversy that might be unacceptable. The Oriental and the so-called primitive are dangerous "Others" against which to define ourselves, so we turn to the European Middle Ages for a ready supply of exotic barbarity. In some cases—as in this film—definition against the medieval also provides an opportunity to examine our investment in these sources of our own institutions and social structures. Jac Avila cast himself in the "pagan" role, but the narrative positions him as a pretend pagan. The saint simulator is in control, and he must pretend to torture her. She is the only character who does not suffer—in fact, she makes everyone around her suffer (in ways that I cannot fully reveal). They are the victims of her nostalgia.

The clip presented at the conference.