Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination ed. by Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (review)

The title of Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey's edited collection of essays, Heads Will Roll, subtly nods at an influential predecessor on the subject of literary and cultural discourses of decapitation, Regina Janes's Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005). As the jocular titles of both books attest, Janes shares with Tracy and Massey (along with many of the contributors to this collection) a susceptibility to the lure of the pun and other forms of wordplay that ghoulish subjects of this kind seem to invite. The verbal games that scholars play with severed heads have their parallel in the beheading games and the jests and pranks with severed heads that feature in many narrative accounts of decapitation, particularly those dating from the medieval and early modern periods. Although rich in literary and cultural treatments of beheading, the Middle Ages are given little attention in Janes's study. Losing Our Heads opens with a broad (yet impressively documented) survey of beheading in practice and in fantasy from the Paleolithic period through to Greek, Roman, and Celtic traditions, but the bulk of her monograph is devoted to more narrowly defined issues and episodes in the history of beheading from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century. In the introduction to Heads Will Roll, Tracy and Massey allege that "most studies of decapitation skip the thousand years between the ancient world and the early modern" (7). A principal goal of their collection is to address the medieval lacuna in beheading studies.

By combining medieval and early modern materials, Heads Will Roll exemplifies the recent trend toward dissolving the boundaries that have traditionally segregated medieval from early modern literary studies. The essays engage with texts dating from as early as the tenth century (two lives of St. Edmund) and as late as the mid-seventeenth century (accounts of Sir Walter Raleigh's execution in 1618 that circulated for decades afterward), with Thea Cervone's study of the legendary traditions concerning the headless ghost of Anne Boleyn venturing into twenty-first-century popular culture. The collection ranges broadly not only in time but also in space and language: essays concentrating on textual evidence from Britain (Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Early Modern English) appear alongside essays dealing with continental subjects (Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's "Tale of Lisabetta," German epics of the Dietrich cycle).

Presumably in an effort to bring a sense of shape and cohesiveness to the collection, the editors have deployed several organizational strategies, including the grouping of the essays into four topics: execution and hagiography, continental narratives of punishment and othering, English romance and reality, and early modern practice and imagination. Two essays serve to introduce the collection: a standard introduction by the editors and a provocative meditation on the "impossibility" of beheading by Nicola Masciandaro, which explores the paradoxical dimensions to martyrological beheadings, particularly in the case of the originary beheading in Christian tradition, the decollation of John the Baptist. Masciandaro describes the prophet's beheading as "the impossible imitation of the inimitable that makes all other imitations possible, the very medium of their mimesis, the cephalic capital that constitutes the potentiality of sacred decollative repetition" (25). A summative essay by Asa Simon Mittman, "Answering the Call of the Severed Head," closes the collection. Mittman attributes the diversity of the preceding essays to the polyvalence of the head and of beheading in this period: "There is, in short, no such thing as 'the role' of the severed head in medieval and early modern culture. Rather, there is a great diversity of roles (speaking and non-speaking parts, alike) played by severed heads" (312). Throughout the book, contributors assiduously trace connections between their own work and that of their fellow contributors, with Masciandaro's piece serving as a frequently cited touchstone.

The range and diversity of the collection...