Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages

HEAD

On the very fringes of the known medieval world lived a tribe of men with no head. Not that this seemed to bother them. They were neither deaf nor dumb nor blind. Only, their faces were sunken into their chests. Their eyes, noses and mouths protruded from their sternum, and their ears were set frontally, just proud of their armpits.

The Blemmyae, as this race were known, first appeared in the writings of Roman authors, who thought of them as part of a larger group of supposedly monstrous peoples dwelling at the north-eastern edges of the vast, mostly unrecorded continent of Africa. Medieval authors were equally enchanted by them, and throughout the course of the Middle Ages layers of detail were added to the Blemmyae’s mythic ethnography. An Old English manuscript from around the year 1000 describes them as gigantically large: eahta fota lange ond eahta fota brade, ‘eight feet tall and eight feet broad’. Later, in the twelfth century, theological authors discussed the Blemmyae’s supposedly monstrous diet, deciding they were cannibals who gorged on misguided wanderers. And by the 1400s a series of romanticised, roaming histories of Alexander the Great described an encounter between the ancient emperor and the misfigured tribe, noting that the Blemmyae’s beards sprouted from their groins and could grow down as far as their ankles.

8. One of the Blemmyae, a headless African race, illustrated in the Rutland Psalter, a decorated prayerbook made in England around 1260.

By this period, the hulking forms of the Blemmyae not only populated the texts of medieval works but were also visualised in their margins. Maps in particular – documents which in the Middle Ages were often concerned with plotting history and myth just as much as an accurate cartography – showed the headless figures clustered around the north African coastline with a number of their monstrous fellows. The Panotii, who had ears so large they wrapped around the body like a coat. The Cynocephali, who had human torsos but the heads of barking dogs. The Sciopodes, who were endowed with a single enormous foot, designed at once to carry them hopping at speed and to offer shade from the desert sun by lying on their backs and hanging it over their heads like a stately parasol. The comic particularities of these different types of almost-men meant that they were often inserted playfully into the vibrant illustrated margins of contemporary books at all sorts of junctures, sometimes even set against each other in monstrous combat. Beneath the bottom lines of one English prayerbook now in the British Library, a Blemmya faces off against another winged grotesque that perches in the curlicue base of an illuminated border. Clutching cross-bow and club, he gestures at his colourful opponent while wearing nothing but a loincloth and a quiver of arrows, his bemused but realistic facial features set firmly into his torso.

We are left to wonder whether perfectly sensible medieval people really believed that such a different and strange race of men actually existed. In a world with no means of mass communication, where cross-continental travel was both expensive and dangerous, who was to know what lurked at the world’s periphery? In the absence of proof, many would indeed have seen these figures as rather fanciful. Yet others may well have taken the popular ancient sources and contemporary tales of far-flung exotic travel at face value, a perfectly sensible explanation of the wider globe. Even today, with modern migration and technology, our knowledge can similarly blur at the brink: the little green men that some think we will encounter beyond the bounds of our solar system are governed not by scientific truth but by the same very human impulses that formed these monstrous medieval races. The Blemmyae, then, sit at an intersection between medieval bodily fact and bodily fiction, giving us a glimpse less into the realities of pre-modern Africa than into the imaginations of everyday folk, their aspirations, their fantasies, their fears.

These monsters also reflected broader medieval ideas of what a ‘normal’ body should be. Set them, for instance, against the way that the bodies of human men and women were described by the famous fourteenth-century Italian physician Mondino dei Liuzzi. Mondino was the first major medieval author to write in any detail about human dissection, a practice that at the time was not yet part of mainstream medico-scientific discovery. In 1316, while teaching at the University of Bologna, he finished his Anothomia, a book outlining various anatomical theories drawn from classical Greek, Roman and Arabic sources and which was to become a much-copied medical stalwart for more than a century after his death. ‘We ought to know’, he wrote, ‘in what ways man differs from the brutes’:

Man, we note, is of upright stature … for the human body is wrought of matter which is ethereal and airy, and is the lightest among all the animals. Thus it ever strives upward … he has a most perfect form which he shares with the angels and the intelligences that rule the Universe. Thus all his senses of right are in the upper part of his body … He is upright so that he may understand.

Mondino is here expressing perfectly two fundamental medieval bodily concepts. First, he argues that mankind’s greatest strength is their upwardness, their posturing verticality. Through their two-legged, distinctly skyward-pointing body they literally oversee the rest of the animal kingdom. Other medical authors built on this idea by ranking the body’s zones, from its grotty bottom to its sublime peak, all of which we will encounter in chapters to come. Lowest and basest was the fourth zone, containing the taboo organs of the genitals and anus. Third were the machinations of the stomach: important but still with a troubling tendency to grumble and belch without control. Second came the chest, container of various vital organs, including the all-important heart. But chief among the body was the primary sphere of the head, whose brain and multitude of keen sensory organs made certain mankind’s place as king of the medieval cosmos. Following this climactic, upward way of thinking, we can see why the location of the Blemmyae’s faces mattered so much in medieval minds. Set into their chests, rather than proudly atop the pinnacle of a head, the tribe were marked out as distinctly unhuman: monstrous, physically inferior creatures, robbed of the body’s primary quarter.

The second important quality Mondino describes – man’s ‘perfect form’ – casts even greater aspersions on monstrous bodies. Reflecting the dominant religious mindset of Europe at the time, Mondino is here following to the letter the biblical narrative of Creation, in which Adam was crafted from the earth in the image of God himself. Mankind was a bodily reflection of the all-knowing Almighty. This perfect body, shared ‘with the Angels’ as Mondino puts it, was therefore also the model of a morally and spiritually good body. So by looking so totally different from normal men the Blemmyae were both anatomically incorrect and ethically questionable. Sure enough, medieval authors were keen to emphasise the deplorable lives of these imagined fringe races, their ungodly physicality given as the reason for their violent warring tendencies and their lack of behavioural understanding. To have no head revealed more than anything a deep-seated and particularly un-Christian streak of sinfulness.

Brains

Stavesacre

Pellitory Root

Sage Leaves

Hyssop Leaves

Betony

Ginger

Black Pepper

Long Mustard Seed

Nutmeg Galangal

Cloves

Cubebs

Alum

Liquorice Power

Grind them all up and keep until needed.

Mix with vinegar. Gargle.

This fourteenth-century English recipe is a typical medieval medical medley, a concoction of pungent roots, herbs and spices that its author claimed could cure any form of headache and ‘cleanse the brain itself’. What precisely this meant is unclear. The ingredients together might have addressed particular humoral imbalances in the head or perhaps acted as a stimulant to kick the mind into gear. Either way, although medieval people knew little of its actual workings, the brain was considered one of the most important organs in the body, responsible for governing both human intellect and motion.

Neither of these functions, however, was considered to result from the coordinated action of the body’s organs. The nuances of the nervous, digestive and circulatory systems were only to be fully explored and explained through technological leaps in later centuries. Instead, actions and emanations such as movement, thought and memory were believed to be governed by an individual’s soul. This was, at least in part, the abstract, spiritual force we still associate with the word now, but classical writers had also spoken of the soul dwelling far more literally within the body, enacting different aspects of an individual’s will in a more sentient manner. Plato, writing in the fourth century BCE, was among the first to advocate with particular vigour that the most vital, rational aspect of this animating soul was housed in the brain. This was taken up by subsequent thinkers, from the highly popular Roman physician Galen (c.129–216) to the influential compiler and medical scholar Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (c.980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna. Later medieval authors concurred, too, that the brain was a cognitive centre, the primary organ of intellect and reasoning.

An image from a thirteenth-century encyclopedia now in Cambridge’s University Library – painted at almost precisely the same time as the Blemmya battling in the English prayerbook’s margins – shows the brain in action. It is a simplified figure of the type sometimes included in complicated theoretical texts. Rather than a realistic, textured lump of grey matter, inside the head of a bearded bust we see a scheme of interlinked lines and circles mapped in black and red ink, guiding the reader through the brain’s busy make-up. This is an image less interested in presenting the object of the brain than in picturing the processes of thought itself, which in the Middle Ages was theorised as an operation occurring across a series of the organ’s sections or ‘cells’.

9. A man’s head, complete with a diagrammatic outline of his brain, from a trilingual encyclopedia made in mid-thirteenth-century England.

The first stage of this thought was prompted by the networks of nerves known to run to and from the brain and which suggested that it was responsible for receiving and processing information from the body’s sensory extremes. This interpretative function was assigned to two initial cells of the organ, diagrammed here in the encyclopedia by its two left-most circles linked by red lines to the eyes. The first cell, labelled as the sensus communis, literally ‘common sense’, was where the body’s communal sensory information was gathered together. This was carried to the brain by a substance known as pneuma or spiritus, an ineffably light, animating spirit linked to the soul and which ran throughout the brain and body like sentient hydraulics. The second cell, labelled ymaginatio, turned this abstract knowledge into tangible thought. Its name is drawn from the Old French word ymage, in turn derived from the Latin imago – which might translate as image, but also a likeness, idea, echo or ghost – the same word also at the core of our modern concept of the ‘imagination’. Images were the building blocks of medieval thought, and these two processes brought them into tangible being within the brain, formed from the body’s sensory data. Two further stages completed the process of understanding by further refining and then storing the thoughts already gathered and realised by the sensus communis and ymaginatio. Sprouting from the second circular cell are two more functions: cogitativa, the power of the brain to cogitate or turn sensed images into concepts, and estimativa, our estimation, turning images and concepts into judgements upon which we might act. Finally, at the back of the head, is a cell marked memorativa, the memory. Believed to be the softest and most impressionable part of the brain, it was here that thoughts would be literally stamped or imprinted, the ultimate repository of this entire elaborate scheme.

Together, this series of shapes presents a route map that allowed medieval writers to elaborate the many complex systems of their brains, from sense and thought to action and recollection. Images like the Cambridge head presented an abstract yet inventive sketch for understanding the processual nuances of the mind. And they also provided a framework for the mental system that contemporary physicians could use to theorise why the brain failed or fell short. Intellectual difficulties were most often viewed in the context of age, gender or constitution, and the quality of an individual’s intelligence was thought to hinge on the speed with which the brain’s liquid-like ideas travelled across its cells. As the Syrian scientist Qusta ibn Luqa (c.820–912/13) suggested, the brain substance of brilliant minds passed smoothly and fluidly at lightning pace, whereas a natural thickening of thoughts caused an inherent mental sluggishness in children, ‘idiots’ and women.

Medieval doctors also keenly recorded the details of more serious mental imbalance. If a patient was suffering from a chronic acceleration of the mind, evidenced in sleep deprivation or an extreme mania, they might recommend various calming measures: medicines made up of soporific plants, massage or the removal of the patient to a quiet atmosphere with calming sounds, running water and softly chiming bells. Speech played a vital part in such diagnoses. The prolific Catalan physician Arnau de Vilanova (c.1240–1311) recorded some of the disorders his patients disclosed to him in conversation, from simple yet exhaustingly repetitive anxieties over eating or falling to more complex bodily dysmorphias – one involving elephant tusks sprouting from the mouth – and even crippling fears of heavy rain or that the end of the world was imminent. Patients’ words were used as a key augur of the extent of their mental misfortune, but on the other hand, a silent patient could be just as worrisome. Under-activity in the brain’s cells was thought to result in motionlessness or a fully blown catatonic state. These symptoms might be combated through stimulants and shock treatment that ranged from the eccentric to the absurd. The French physician Bernard de Gordon (c.1258–1318) recommended shouting, playing trumpets and bells, plucking the patient’s chest hairs and placing a sow and piglets in front of the patient’s face to squeal loudly. Needless to say, these treatments were unlikely to have been effective. For all their talk of cells and animating spiritus, medieval doctors admitted that they were largely helpless in such cases. Yet it is hard to deny the sophisticated internal logic at work in these early approaches to the brain. It is, after all, an organ whose workings modern science is still some distance from fully explaining.

Madness and Baldness

Beyond the anecdotes of doctors like Arnau and Bernard, the real ities of actually living with mental illness in the Middle Ages are hard to unpick. Desperately few accurate or prolonged descriptions survive of medieval people living with chronic mental conditions, and such patients are only really encountered through quite biased accounts, often prone to distortion. The record of a sermon delivered by the Spanish priest Joan Gilabert Jofré in 1409, for instance, evocatively describes his native Valencia as having a host of madmen on its streets: what he called ‘poor frantics causing damage to many persons’. Yet Jofré here is not really suggesting that caricatured, aggressive lunatics were regularly roaming around and attacking victims. Far more often it was the disabled themselves who were robbed or mistreated on the streets of medieval cities. Instead, this was a colourful rhetorical exaggeration designed to underline a simple point: safeguarding the mad was a model for safeguarding the entire community. Jofré’s sermon in fact drew important support for a hospital in Valencia that was finished a year later, in 1410, perhaps the earliest medieval institution built with a particular focus on psychiatric care.

Less positive accounts of madness surface in the twists and turns of contemporary politics. The case of King Charles VI of France (1368–1422) is one of the most famous records of mental illness to survive from the Middle Ages, his prolonged bouts of instability quickly becoming the stuff of legend. One particularly vivid incident is said to have occurred in August 1392, as the king was riding with his entourage through the shady forests just outside Le Mans. Some say a pauper threw himself in front of the king’s horse to beg for alms, others simply that a squire let a spear slip to the ground with a loud clang. Either way, the shock seems to have thrown the king into a semi-conscious, violent rage. For over an hour he attacked his close friends, kinsmen and servants, swinging at them with his sword and killing five before being restrained and falling into a deep coma. When he came round, only three days later, Charles wept to hear what he had done. The king’s condition worsened over the next decade, and contemporary historians note him forgetting family members, insisting on running until completely exhausted, throwing furniture around his palaces and trying to break symbols of his coats of arms wherever he saw them. At one point the accounts devastatingly record that he became convinced that his body was formed of fragile glass, obliging him to stand resolutely still and to forbid anyone to touch him for fear he would shatter into thousands of pieces. This chronicling of Charles’s slide into illness was not, however, intended as an accurate historical casebook sympathising with the failing medical realities of his mind. The real concern of these writers seems to have been explaining the serious political turmoil that ignited in France as a result of Charles’s mental state and which rendered the country unstable for a generation. But we do know that many professionals were enlisted to help relieve the royal brain of its burdens. Physicians intervened with prescriptions of rest and medicaments, while clerics looked to higher powers for Charles’s salvation through prayer, sending tiny wax effigies of him to miracle-working pilgrimage shrines in the hope of a cure for both king and country.

10. Layla and Majnun fainting at their final meeting, in a copy of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsa (). The image is included in an illustrated miscellany made in Shiraz between 1410 and 1411 for Jalal al-Din Iskandar ibn ‘Umar Shaykh, who at the time ruled over much of Iran.

Layla and the wandering Majnun’s love remains unfulfilled until their heart broken deaths years later, able only to snatch the occasional meeting to exchange verses chastely from a distance. One of these poetic encounters, the last time the lovers see each other alive, is captured in sparse but dramatic detail by the illustrator of a luxurious album of poetry made between 1410 and 1411 for Iskandar Sultan, the governor of Shiraz. In a rectangular window framed by the diagonal lines of the poem’s text, the two lovers have fainted at the sight of each other amid the tents. Their bodies are withered and floating, the flowing cloth of their elaborate garments billowing out as they fall to the desert floor. The wild beasts that Majnun has befriended in his isolation protect the couple, while his elderly attendant bends over the body of Layla and uses a pointed metal container to apply a remedy to her face, a herbal treatment in the same tradition as the revivifying ointments recommended by Bernard de Gordon. Love, the poem suggests, could transform from acute mental imbalance into an actual physical illness. In other images of Majnun, this fully realised lovesickness has caused his body to waste dramatically. He is pictured hopeless and emaciated, his constant pining rendering him a skeletal hermit.

Insanity was thought to be evident in the body in this way. In fact, a person’s mental state could be reflected in all things, from the expression of the face to the quality of the skin. Common among contemporary biographers and medics alike was the practice of physiognomy, the idea that physical stature or facial features could act as a shorthand for intelligence, nobility or more negative character flaws of the mind. Hair, in particular, held a prominent place in the medical compendia that circulated throughout the later Middle Ages and was endowed with just this ability to indicate certain characteristics of the person beneath. Majnun is described as having a shaggy and unkempt mop, his wild locks a sure-fire sign of his crazed disposition. But simply having red hair could be thought of as suggesting a quickness to temper. Thick or knotted hair came with an inherent brutishness. And a lank, sparse blonde could indicate deviousness or deception. Such hirsute distinctions were clearly in the mind of Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400) when introducing the corrupt character of his pilgrimaging Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales:

This Pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex,
But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex
By ounces henge his lokkes that he hadde
And therwith he his shuldres overspradde
But thynne it lay by colpons oon and oon

This pardoner had hair as yellow as wax,
But smooth it hung, as does a bundle of flax.
In small pieces hung these locks that he had,
And over his shoulders it spread,
But thin it lay in strands all one by one.

The Pardoner’s cloying, straggly hair confirms his effeminateness but also presages an unscrupulous personality, a clue that any knowledgeable reader would recognise. Sure enough, we later learn that he is willing to preach hypocritically and irreverently falsify papal papers, abusing the duped faithful for profit. If only they had looked more closely at the clues hiding under his hat.

This seemingly arbitrary connection between character and hair was in part due to the process by which hair was believed to grow from the head. Medical writers theorised that as certain humoral fumes left the body through pores in the skin they condensed, forming small individual hairs that protruded from the surface. No such strands could grow where these membranous gaps were few and far between – the thicker skin of the palms or the soles of the feet – but where the pores had space to breathe, hair could grow much more plentifully. Heat was also thought to be congenial for hair growth, and, given that hot air rises, it was seen as only natural that the top of the head should sprout the thickest, bushiest locks. According to humoral theory, men had hotter bodies than women, and so it also made sense that they were the hairier sex, although this same heat was in danger of drying out their pores completely, leaving them more prone to baldness.

A lack of hair on the heads of women, on the other hand, was seen as deeply unnatural. Standards of beauty in the Middle Ages varied dramatically from place to place and across the centuries, but in their definitions of good looks medieval authors often repeatedly turned to certain key tropes: the whiteness of the skin and redness of the lips, a thin waist and small breasts. At times a large, long forehead seems to have been fashionable, with women plucking their eyebrows and the peak of their hairline to exaggerate its size. Predictably, contemporary moralists were not happy with such seeming vanity, but a group of recipes found in the Trotula – a popular medieval compendium of women’s medicine probably gathered in Salerno in the twelfth century – lists a variety of cosmetic treatments to improve the hair. Its smell could be helped by washing it with cloves, or it could be thickened with warm saltwater. Colouring with a cornucopia of natural ingredients is also suggested: walnut oil, vinegar-cooked myrtleberry flower, ants’ eggs with yellow sulphide, or honey-infused white wine. Initiating such a transformation, however, was no simple make-over. Through the physiognomic lens of the day it had the power to affect the way others perceived the very temperament of your inner person, chaste or louche, beautiful or ugly, sane or mad.

Beheadings

If the head was the locus of human rationality, sanity and personhood, it is unsurprising that a vivid means of social control in the Middle Ages was to chop it off. The novels of nineteenth-century neo-Gothic writers like Walter Scott were set in a fantastical medieval Europe where such executions were glamorous and ten a penny. But beheadings were far less frequent in the medieval period than the brutality of most histories written since would have us believe. Death by hanging, with its comparatively unbloody results, was one of many more typical and tolerable forms of punishment. So when beheadings did occur, we have to see them as an act of deep symbolism, able to function at once as violent judgement and potent sign. They were as much a continued threat to the living as social recompense for the dead.

Political thinkers often bound together conceptions of the body with conceptions of the state. The Englishman John of Salisbury (c.1115–1180) was one of several authors to espouse the idea of the Body Politic, a corporeal metaphor for society with individuated functioning parts. Peasants, Salisbury wrote, were presented as the feet of this state-body, toiling over the soil in service of its upper members. Registrars and treasurers formed the stomach, busily digesting the state’s bureaucracy and finances. The active knights of the realm were the state’s arms and hands, the government its beating heart, and the judges its eyes and tongue, seeing and speaking justice. But above them all was the king or prince, literally the ‘Head of State’, with dominion over all these bodily peoples just as the head reigned over the body. Like the human form, this Body Politic functioned successfully only when its constituent parts worked together as a cohesive whole. Should the treasurers become greedy and overfeed its stomach, the system might become bloated with corruption. Likewise, if judges too regularly turned a blind eye or peasants refused to keep the state moving forward, this metaphorical body would begin to atrophy and, eventually, collapse dead.

Occasionally, medieval people decided that it was high time the entire structure was prematurely decapitated. Unsatisfied with the rule of the thirteenth-century English king Edward I, leaders of the long-discontented provinces of Wales sought to remove him and instate themselves to rule atop the country’s shoulders. In 1282 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, then Prince of Wales, put paid to a thin treaty of peace that had papered over the two regions’ political fractiousness and waged a series of military campaigns against Edward’s forces. But things did not go according to plan for the Welsh. In a decisive skirmish on 11 December, Llywelyn’s forces were overcome and he was separated from his men, surrounded and killed. In a horridly poetic extension of the metaphor that so defined the rebellion in the first place, the English then took Llywelyn’s body and beheaded it. His transgressions against the Body Politic were made as visible as possible. The severed head was sent to King Edward in London, where it was mockingly crowned in a wreath of ivy before being paraded through the streets and set onto a spike on the walls of the Tower of London. Despite the stereotype, this was not simply a random dismemberment meted out at the whim of a megalomaniacal ruler. Rather, this was a calculated act designed to perpetuate certain myths of rule and power. The message was made clear and painfully public: cross the king at your peril. The very reason that such flamboyant and fantastical beheadings haunt fictional medieval tales so often is precisely because the few that actually did take place were doing their job, propagandising for the crown and governing by threat.

Images also helped to spread this fear of a potentially vengeful state. Decorated editions of political chronicles were often laced with complementary depictions of extreme violence. The Chroniques, an early account of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France written by the historian Jean Froissart (c.1337–1404), often contained luxurious illuminations depicting the fates of various double-crossing characters on both sides of the conflict. Take Olivier de Clisson, a Breton aristocrat who made the mistake of siding with the English. He was captured and decapitated by the French, his headless body humiliatingly strung up outside the city gates of Paris for all to see. The image in Froissart’s book is no less of a warning. Olivier is shown blindfolded and dressed in white, poised to follow several others whose slumped, headless bodies already sit at the foot of the scaffold before him, gushing blood. Perpetually suspended in his last, dramatic moment, it would not be hard for readers to imagine themselves in his situation, prompted to think carefully about their own dealings with a state that could so easily end life with nothing more than the swipe of a sharp sword.

Set alongside such gory instances of violent retribution, mercy became an equally powerful tool in a medieval government’s arsenal. In 1285, only three years after Llywelyn’s execution, an inhabitant of Norwich named Walter Eghe was caught in possession of stolen goods and sentenced by a jury to hang, but upon being cut down from the gallows he was somehow found to still be alive. Claiming his survival as an act of God, Eghe fled to the city’s cathedral, where he sought official sanctuary from the law. Visiting the city some months later, King Edward – the same ruler whom it would be so easy to caricature by his ruthless command to wreath Llywelyn’s bodiless head in ivy – took the case as an opportunity to show his royal beneficence. He officially pardoned Eghe of his crimes and decreed he should be protected from serving further penance, demonstrating his power to preserve life just as he could inflict death. Medieval rulers had little need for the inflexibilities of regulated conviction enforced equally across entire populations through the rigours of objective justice. The ability to hold the lives of wrong doers in their hands was an extremely effective and self-affirming way to govern. Such punishments formed a campaign of propaganda that threatened with one hand and offered salvation with the other, the eloquent spectre of losing one’s head a persuasive way of keeping citizens in check.

11. The beheading of Olivier de Clisson, from an illustrated copy of Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, made for the Flemish courtier Louis de Gruuthuse in Bruges around 1475.

The Saintly Caput

One group of medieval individuals had a proven capacity to bear such extreme bodily punishment unflinchingly, able to transform whipping, the slashing of skin, dismemberment, burning, drowning, even the drastic act of beheading, into propaganda for their own cause. These were the saints, ancient and contemporary religious figures who had led exceptionally virtuous lives and often undergone torturous persecution for their faith. Officially elevated from the ranks of mere martyrs by the Church, they were firmly enshrined in the hierarchy of the faithful, their stories constantly told and retold as part of the tapestry of medieval daily life.

Theoretically, the saints had already achieved one of the fundamental goals of religious worship sought by all medieval Christians. Upon their deaths, rather than following the normal operations of Christian salvation and patiently awaiting the lengthy limbo of Purgatory or facing the disgraceful torments of Hell, their overwhelming piety and ultimate devotion saw these canonised individuals assumed immediately to Heaven. There they dwelt directly alongside God, functioning as the most potent of intermediaries for people still on earth. Addressing one’s prayers to these idealised intercessors, perhaps also via physical contact with the residual relics they left behind – either their former possessions or actual skin and bones – assured the most direct route to the beneficent mechanics of the divine. These figures were lynchpins of Christian society, known and venerated by rich and poor alike.

We hear about the saints mainly through their much-replicated written narratives, a literary genre known as their vitae, their ‘lives’. Starting as small accumulations of blessed tales surrounding a particular individual’s early cult, over the period of decades or centuries these biographies were embellished and expanded to encompass extensive stories of a saint’s time on earth, as well as diverse lists of their superhuman, miraculous feats and accounts of their pious deaths. Much importance was placed on these final martyred moments, especially the degrees of torment a saint could tolerate in the name of the Christian cause. By the end of the Middle Ages, particularly in German-speaking areas of central and eastern Europe, a logic had cemented itself whereby the more extreme and horrible a saint’s martyrdom, the more impressive and devoted was their saintly patience in enduring it. Across panel paintings and manuscript pages, sculpted altarpieces and metalwork miniatures, a saint’s body could undergo all manner of horrendous and bloody tortures. These images may seem gruesome, obsessive even. But look at the faces of these saints and we see their punishments borne with a calm, dignified, even smiling disposition. They appear anaesthetised by the prophetic knowledge of what this violent demise will earn them in the eternal afterlife.

These ritualised deaths were so prized by their followers that they often came to define the saint in question. The medieval vita of Apollonia, a Roman martyr of the third century, recounts that the saint was put to death by burning at the stake, but not before a beating that saw all of her teeth broken or, in some accounts, violently torn from her gums. This grim end gave the saint something of a devotional speciality in the eyes of the faithful, who happily enshrined her as the patron saint of dentistry. And upon seeing a robed figure in a church clutching a pair pincers in her hand, a well-versed Christian viewer would know it immediately to be Apollonia, the instrument used to pull out her teeth reworked as her identifying symbol. A man with a rock lodged in his head would similarly become Saint Stephen, stoned to death in first-century Jerusalem. Another, with no eyeballs, could be Saint Lucy, blinded and martyred in third-century Sicily. A woman holding a wheel was identified as Saint Catherine, a fourth-century princess from Alexandria who was sentenced to death by being bound to a cartwheel and bludgeoned. Saints and the objects of their martyrdom were totally intertwined, forming a morbid religious shorthand used when depicting their holy ranks, lined up amid the heavenly clouds.

So busy was the constant evocation of the saints as the protectors of medieval people that the detail of their lives could become blurred into myth in just the same manner as the headless Blemmyae. Narratives and attributes did not always need to match directly. The image of a delicate young woman stretched violently across the spokes of a wheel seems to have caught medieval imaginations and become Catherine’s famed attribute even though, if we follow the narrative of her vita, the great cartwheel in fact cracked beneath her heavenly body, proving her divine favour. Catherine’s executioners were instead forced to turn to the most final of all punishments and behead her. But even this dramatic act was not enough to defeat some saints. Saint Denis, the third-century bishop of Paris, was beheaded on the city’s highest hill, modern-day Montmartre, literally the ‘mount of martyrs’. Yet, according to medieval accounts, as soon as Denis’s severed head hit the ground, his headless body simply rose up and grasped it. Carrying the head, he walked a full six miles north before finally collapsing at the site of what would become a church and eventually a cathedral, named in his honour. These animated headless saints are known as cephalophores, ‘head bearers’, seemingly reanimated by the sheer will of their heavenly devotion. And just as important as their miraculous wandering was the speech that could amazingly continue to flow from their disconnected mouths. As Denis walked the last leg of this journey, his disembodied head continued all the while to preach, bringing a host of converts to the Christian cause in his final, revivified moments.

Controlling the remains of these severed heads was particularly important for religious authorities. Such relics grew to become deeply fetishised objects at the cornerstone of the cult of saints, able at once to bring spiritual succour to the faithful and potentially lucrative funds to the Church in the form of charitable donations. The New Testament narrative of the biblical protomartyr John the Baptist, for instance, records the complicated story of his death, decapitated for his faith at the behest of Herodias, wife of Herod, the ruler of Galilee. John’s head was triumphantly presented on a platter, and this unforgettable decollation enshrined the caput, as it was known in Latin, as a potent symbol of the Baptist. By the Middle Ages John’s intact cranium had gathered many supposed resting places. Some clerics claimed it lay in the Great Mosque at Damascus, where a shrine was still kept to it on the former site of a grand Byzantine church. Others thought it was the property of Amiens Cathedral in northern France, where a version of the relic had been taken after the Fourth Crusade of 1204 and set into an enormous golden reliquary. But regardless of which relic one saw as the most authentic, interaction with John’s head was fundamental for the medieval Christian faithful, offering a unique sense of heavenly communion by coming face to face with the saint himself.

12. A Johannisschüssel, the decapitated head of John the Baptist on a platter. The oak head was carved by the artist Dries Holthuys in Xanten, Germany, around 1500. Its lustreware majolica plate comes from the Valencia region and was made half a century or so earlier.

So strong was the power of John’s head that even communities without direct access to John’s saintly skull sought to venerate it, not directly through relics but vicariously through the skill of medieval artisans. In many northern European towns sculptors were commissioned to create Johannisschüsseln, evocative likenesses of the Baptist’s severed features. One such piece, made for the cathedral of Xanten in the west German Rhineland, is typical of this tradition, bringing to mind the Levantine surroundings of John’s decapitation by setting a sculpted wooden head onto an exotic Moorish plate, fusing the saint’s likeness with an authentically Middle Eastern ceramic form. These were deeply revered objects that activated many ideas associated with the medieval head, from execution to memory to morality, elaborate spiritual stage props that extended the awe-inspiring presence of the Baptist into people’s everyday existence. They were placed on cathedral altars, carried about the town during religious processions and used as a stand-in for the real thing in religious plays, complete with streaming artificial blood. People even prayed to them for relief from head-related ailments like headache and throatache, forging a literal link between the saint’s suffering caput and their own. In so doing the sculptures, in a strange sort of way, were reaching at something beyond even the pained figure of Saint John: they recalled the head’s place as the powerful summit of the medieval body, at once medical and mindful, punitive and peaceful.

13. Two of a set of six tapestries of a young woman, a lion and a unicorn depicting the senses of taste, smell, sound (top), sight (bottom) and touch, all made in Flanders towards the end of the fifteenth century.