Corporal Punishment in the Carolingian Empire 742-900
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STRATEGIES OF CORRECTION: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE 742-900. A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Maximilian Peter McComb May 2018 © 2018 Maximilian Peter McComb STRATEGIES OF CORRECTION: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, 742-900 Maximilian Peter McComb, Ph. D. Cornell University 2018 My dissertation is a political and cultural history of corporal punishment in the Carolingian empire. I examine the shape and significance of discourses and representations of corporal punishment across various modes of ecclesiastical, royal, and monastic governance. I contextualize these discourses within contemporary understandings of power as a shared moral ministry as explored by scholars like Mayke De Jong. Within this concept of political power as a shared ministry, I argue that Carolingian corporal punishment was a communicative, symbolic that use the body of the condemned to express authority in a concrete sense. Physical punishment both materialized abstract discourses abstract about the responsibilities and prerogatives of official authority and provided ruling elites with a means to make this power visible to and felt by non-elites. Drawing upon the work of penal historians and theorists like Michel Foucault, Guy Gelter, and Philip Smith, I understand physical punishment as a multivalent phenomenon which performs various social and cultural functions. Disciplinary violence and the punitive alteration of the body functioned as a public spectacle which indexes an offender’s transgressive otherness through her or his punished body while making visible and repairing a society’s normative boundaries. In the early Middle Ages, these punitive spectacles further drew upon close cultural associations between personal honor and parts of the human body such as the skin, hair, and face in order to conspicuously shame and humiliate. I further contend that in Carolingian thought and normative practice, the spectacular dimensions of corporal punishment were influenced by and at odds with contemporary understandings of punishment, drawn from religious and monastic discourses, as a personally curative and didactic phenomenon. I ultimately argue that the interactions and tensions between these two modes reveal a shared Carolingian punitive imaginary through which ruling elites conceived of ways in which power and authority could be physically felt and expressed through the bodies of offenders against the moral order they saw themselves as responsible for enforcing. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Maximilian McComb completed his BA in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. At Berkeley, he completed an undergraduate honors thesis in early medieval history under the supervision of Professor Geoffrey Koziol. He earned an MA in medieval history from Cornell university in 2014. In 2016, funded by the Theodor Ernst Mommsen fellowship, McComb worked as a visiting PhD researcher at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands. iv “Every visible, outward use of power – each command, each list and ranking, each ceremonial order, each public punishment, each use of an honorific or a term of derogation – is a symbolic gesture of domination that serves to manifest and reinforce a hierarchical order.” James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance “Do you know, Alexander Petrovitch, when I dream at night, I always dream that I am being flogged. I dream of nothing else.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the House of the Dead v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has benefitted greatly from the support, advice, suggestions, and criticisms of many people along the way. I would like to especially thank my advisor, Professor Oren Falk, in whose seminar on medieval violence the seeds of my dissertation began to grow. I also owe thanks to the other members of my committee, Professors Éric Rebillard and Benjamin Anderson, for incisive and invaluable criticisms and suggestions. All three of them have been consistently supportive, have known when to apply the lash, so to speak, and the project simply would not be without their support. Other current and former faculty and graduate students at Cornell have left their mark upon the project. From the Cornell History Department, I would like to thank Nicholas Bujalski, Joshua Savala, Kyle Harvey, Joseph Giacomelli, Ryan Edwards, Brian Rutledge, and Fritz Bartel, as well as Professors Holly Case, Duane Corpis, Paul Friedland, and Paul Hyams. I thank Jacob Nabel from the Cornell Classics Department as well. From the Cornell program of Medieval Studies, I would like to thank Samuel Barber, Kristen Strahle, Kaylin O’Dell, Hannah Byland, Ruth Mullett, Corinna Matlis, and Danielle Reid, as well as Professors Andy Galloway and Andrew Hicks. I must single out for special attention and thanks the fellow members of my ACLS dissertation writing group, “Everyday Forms of State Formation:” Mark Deets, Jackie Reynoso, and Tim Sorg. These three have consistently provided excellent feedback on the earliest and roughest of drafts, for which I am extremely grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Barb Donnell, the History Department graduate coordinator, for her support and assistance. The Theodor Ernst Mommsen fellowship allowed me to spend the Spring of 2016 as a visiting PhD student in the Universiteit Utrecht Department of History and Art History. I would like to thank the faculty at Utrecht for their support and advice: Professors Marco Mostert and Mayke de Jong, Drs. Rob Meens, Carine van Rhijn, and Janneke Raaijmakers. I would also like to thank the post-docs and PhD students from the Utrecht Medieval Studies program: Elaine Pereira Farrell, Erik Goosmann, Elisa Pallottini, and Jelle Visser. The hospitality they showed me was without equal and I recall with special fondness our regular lunchtime conversations in Drift 10. I would like to thank in particular Frances Murray from the University of Saint Andrews. I met Fran during my time in Utrecht and since then she has been consistent source of good advice and feedback on my chapter drafts. Further back along the road, I thank Professors Geoffrey Koziol and Maureen Miller from UC Berkeley for encouraging my undergraduate interests in medieval history and for their advice. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Mary and Greg, for their love and support all along the way. And last, but never least, I thank my partner, Angela McComb, for her patience, advice, and support. For all this, I owe her a debt that I have only begun to repay. Let me say to her for now: I love you and I could not have done this without you. Max McComb Ithaca, New York vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements v Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 Chapter I: Carolingian Ecclesiastical Discourses on Corporal Punishment 34 Chapter II: Corporal Punishment and the Carolingian Monastery 89 Chapter III: Corporal Punishment and Carolingian Royal Governance 156 Chapter IV: Miraculous Corporal Punishment 217 Conclusion 260 Appendix 1: Chapter 1 figures 270 Appendix 2: Capitulary sources for Chapter III 273 Appendix 3: Hagiographic sources for Chapter IV 275 Bibliography 276 vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AB: Annals of Saint-Bertin AF: Annals of Fulda AX: Annals of Xanten AASS: Acta Sanctorum CCCM: Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCM: Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum CCSL: Corpus Christianorum Series Latina CSEL: Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum MGH: Monumenta Germaniae Historica MGH Capit.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Capitula regum Francorum MGH Capit. N.S.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Capitula regum Francorum, Nova series MGH Conc.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Concilia MGH Epp.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae (in Quarto) MGH LL: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges (in Folio) MGH LL nat. Germ.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges nationum Germanicarum MGH Poet.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Poetae Latini medii aevi MGH SS: Monumena Germaniae Historica, Scriptores (in Folio) MGH Script. rer. Germ.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi MGH Script. rer. Merov.: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum PL: Patrologia Latina RB: Regula Benedicti RFA: Royal Frankish Annals viii INTRODUCTION CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE In 2015, Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina told a crowd in New Hampshire that her undergraduate studies in medieval history had prepared her to confront the Islamic State: “Every single one of the techniques that ISIS is using, the crucifixions, the beheadings, the burning alive, those were commonly used techniques in the Middle Ages. ISIS wants to take its territory back to the Middle Ages.”1 Fiorina’s conflation of the medieval past with modern Islamic extremism perfectly illustrates Guy Geltner’s point that observers tend to treat corporal punishment as a mark of “uncivilized” others, past and present.2 Fiorina’s comments were much criticized, not least by medievalists. Op-eds in the New York Times and the Guardian took her to task over several important points: the fact that medieval punishment was not as brutal, ubiquitous, or illogical as modernity imagines, that the Islamic State is not regressively medieval, but the consequence of modern geopolitics, and that the organization is adept at using modern mass media to recruit and spread its message.3 Medievalists commonly offer