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Chapter  Judicial Violence and Torture in the Carolingian Empire Patrick Geary Medieval scholars of judicial procedure, particularly those concerned with the Early Middle Ages, have in the past two generations brought enormous clarity to our understanding of how the operation of Frankish justice was deeply embedded within the context of Frankish society . A primary goal of this scholarship has been to demonstrate the pragmatic and ‘‘rational’’ nature of early medieval judicial procedure. In the immediate postwar period, scholars such as François Louis Ganshof studied Carolingian justice with an emphasis on rational institutional procedure and institutions.1 More recent scholarship, drawing on the processural school of legal studies, tends to present Carolingian justice as though it were primarily concerned with fines and financial settlements rather than with blood and torture.2 This is in marked contrast to the approach of legal historians in the first half of the twentieth century, who viewed early medieval justice as ‘‘arbitrary and irrational,’’ emphasizing such practices as the ordeal that threatened physical pain, mutilation, or death to those who underwent it.3 Physical violence in the early Middle Ages has not been neglected, but recent studies tend to focus on violence as though it existed outside and opposed to the formal apparatus of the courts. The emphasis has been on legal procedures as means of eliminating violence, specifically the feud, and keeping peace, rather than exploring the violence the Carolingian state itself exercised in the course of performing justice.4 As important as this corrective has been, however, as a result in recent decades virtually nothing has been written about the use of what might be generally termed judicial violence, that is, torture and corporal punishment inflicted to elicit confessions from those accused or to punish those convicted . Instead, recent scholarship has emphasized that such relatively pacific procedures as oath helping, the use of written evidence, and interro-  Patrick Geary gation of witnesses were integral to Frankish legal procedure. The result has been, as Barbara Rosenwein has suggested, that two generations of historians have developed an image of justice that might rightly be called irenic.5 A notable exception to this approach is Edward Peters’s Torture, a bold and important book that, in a concise treatment, traced the history of torture in Western judicial tradition to the twentieth century.6 Not surprisingly , the early Middle Ages is a period to which Peters devotes only a few pages in his powerful book: he is clearly after bigger game. At the time of its publication the book was one of those rare monographs by a professional medievalist that succeeded in reaching a wider audience, not only of scholars and students, but also of educated men and women concerned with the historical dimensions of an important, if somber, aspect of the judicial tradition . Recently and sadly, world attention has again been directed to the question of torture and judicial cruelty, not only in those many parts of the world where they never disappeared and continue to be an integral part of daily life, but also in Western democracies. To what extent American justice , with its death penalty, permits ‘‘cruel and unusual punishment’’ and whether the ongoing, transnational struggle against violent anti-Western terrorism requires incorporating torture have once more become publicly debated issues. And yet, while such debates about contemporary violent justice dominate headlines and although scholars are aware that torture and excruciating corporal punishment existed in early medieval judicial proceedings to some extent, medieval torture is generally said to have become common only in the thirteenth century. Robert Bartlett has perceptively discussed the reappearance of torture in the context of the decline of the ordeal and has emphasized that torture, when it reappeared in the High Middle Ages, was explicitly regarded as an alternative to the ordeal.7 In what follows, I would like to reconsider the Carolingian uses of judicial violence, including corporal punishment and torture employed to elicit confessions, to correct the image of Carolingian justice that has developed in recent decades. I also wish to put forth as a hypothesis that one might extend Bartlett’s thesis by suggesting that not only did the disappearance of the ordeal contribute to the increased use of judicial torture but also the ordeal may have replaced judicial torture in parts of post-Carolingian Europe. In spite of the relatively abundant extant records of Carolingian courts or placita, we know very little about the torture or physical punishment exercised in the course of...

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