Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (review)

Valentin Groebner's new book follows on the heels of his imaginative study of urban gifts and bribery in the late medieval world, a work hailed for its originality and transdisciplinary commitments (Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, 2002). Groebner brings his novel insight to this new work on the visual culture of violence in late-medieval Europe. More compact than his first work, Defaced draws on the same rich urban records of the cities of southern Germany and the Swiss Confederacy that Groebner has previously mined.

The book opens with a meditation on a contemporary photograph of a mutilated corpse in Port-au-Prince Haiti, the author reflecting on what the photograph says about the unmaking of a person. This is not a typical way to begin a book on medieval history, and immediately the reader senses that Groebner is determined to write a different study. His query concerns violence in the late Middle Ages: how it was registered, imagined, perceived, and inscribed on the body. A generous scholar, Groebner does not openly criticize the substantial body of work on criminality and violence in the medieval or early modern era, except to take on two old masters, Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias, for positing that medieval society was rawer in its emotions than the modern world. He even references Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with its witty reference to the savage Middle Ages, as the popular incarnation of such a developmental scheme. Groebner departs from the social histories of urban violence popular in the 1970s and 1980s by discarding the implicit functionalism of the "crime and society" model. Moreover, much like Lyndal Roper's work on gender and witchcraft in Reformation Augsburg (Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe), Groebner is suspicious of recent literature on the history of the body — in this instance, the body pained or disfigured — that downplays the actual physical markers of violence. It is the registration of violence on the body, especially acts of disfigurement, that frames Groebner's work, not only for what such acts say about mutilation as a signature system but also for what they do to the audience who witnessed or worried about them.

Groebner pursues his topic in a series of short, punchy, and carefully orchestrated chapters. The chapters patch together archival, narrative, and visual sources from the late medieval era, with the occasional jolt of a contemporary reference, to chart the cultural declensions of violence and terror. He starts with means of identification in the medieval city — the civic, corporate, juridical, and individual profusion of signs by which concepts, groups, and peoples were described. He then evokes their counterpart: imaginary, unplaced enemies. To make his point, Groebner recounts the oft-told urban legend of the "night of murder" tale — a story in which a child stops a group of shadowy armed men who conspire to raid the city in the dark of night. The profusion of late medieval symbols of identification — pace Huizinga — and the order they promise had an imagined opposite in these shadowy and unnamed conspirators.

Groebner's next chapter shifts from the realm of the imaginaire to the gritty world of urban violence. His particular interest is the nose, and a series of well-chosen examples of its disfigurement or removal in domestic violence, vendettas, or street brawls. A severed nose is both an economical way to deform the whole human self and to mark it sexually, as Groebner demonstrates in a deft exploration of medical texts, popular literature, and theological exempla. To cut off a nose — as an angry cuckolded husband did against the wife of his wife's seducer in Nuremburg in 1520 — is to brutally disfigure and to inscribe the sexual crime. Groebner's concentration on bodily maiming prompts him to consider the great Ur-symbol of bodily suffering...