The Body in Judicial Display: Gendered Spectacle and the Expansion of Corporal and Capital Punishment in Flanders, 1400–1520

My project tracks the expansion of corporal and capital punishment in late medieval Flemish cities, and how the role of gender in judicial ritual changed over time. Financial accounts from the office of the bailiff indicate that financial penalties decreased while bodily punishments, both corporal and capital, increased in late medieval Flanders. This trend follows what scholars have observed about the transition from fine-based judicial systems in medieval Europe towards the spectacular rituals of bodily punishment that characterized early modern European justice. However, the rise of bodily punishment was not independent of gender. Most obviously, gender affected execution in late medieval Europe because female bodies were executed using methods that concealed the body, namely burning at the stake and live burial.

Yet this anxiety surrounding the female body on display during execution did not translate to corporal punishments. Instead, shame-based corporal punishments that were based on the display of the accused rather than physically harming them were more common for female criminals than male criminals. In the specific context of Flanders, these punishments were procession on a cart, carrying heavy stones, placing hot metal on one’s back, or the pillory. The expansion of corporal punishments in the fifteenth century, particularly for low level criminal activity, affected female criminals initially before later being extending to male criminals.

To show how the gender of the criminal affected the punishment given, for both corporal and capital punishment, I will be sharing data gathered from Bruges, Ghent, and the Liberty of Bruges, 1400-1520. Bailiff accounts from this time period recorded all payments made to the executioner, thus giving a complete picture of what type of corporal and capital punishments were given. My poster will present this information in a mixture of charts and graphs. Graphs will display the rise of corporal and capital punishment during the fifteenth century, while charts will show the expansion of corporal punishment in terms of a greater range of crimes facing bodily punishment. A series of graphs for each of my jurisdictions will track these changes in terms of the gender of the condemned. Based on this data, I argue that the same anxiety surrounding the display of the female body during executions also had a notable effect on corporal punishments. For shame-based corporal punishment, the act of display had a greater punitive effect for women than for men, and therefore, was utilized over financial penalties more often. Though careful attention continued to be paid to concealing female bodies during executions, in the expansion of corporal punishment in Flemish cities 1400-1520, the female body played a staring role.