Please be advised: the following contains discussion of violent scenes and deaths including executions in both a medieval and modern context. Out of respect for the reader, I have not included images aside from the heavily cropped cover image, which is a frequently used example of the practice I am discussing.
How many times have you, like myself, gone scrolling through the internet, or flipping through pages in a book for information on the construction of historical garments, and been faced with a graphic and/or disturbing image of a deceased or soon-to-be deceased person?
Perhaps they don’t have a head, maybe they’re dangling from a rope, sometimes they are knelt or standing in their last moments before a sword strike. In any case, it’s a disturbing image of violence, at times with visceral detail such as blood, and I for one, just can’t disconnect it from what it represents.
Where I live in Australia, we are a very death-sanitised culture, we are not as familiar as people elsewhere in terms of time, place and culture, with human viscera and the process of death in an explicit form. Unlike, for example, a 14th-century French person, I don’t regularly witness public executions.
And yet, when I see an image depicting a hanged man, I am painfully aware that this is a representation of a human being who has had their life taken from them in a violent and public manner, something which, make no mistake, still happens today, much more than you think it does.
It annoys me to no end to find images like this front and centre, with no reference to what they depict, no warning, at times displayed in their full, because the executioner has a nice pair of hose.
Many of us who re-create historic clothing, consider for example SCAdians, reenactors or hobbyists, by virtue of our re-creation need to divorce the garments from their original cultural context. We commodify and objectify representations of real-life material culture imbued with rich meanings we can barely scratch the surface of with even the most advanced scholarly inquiry. But I cannot condone the objectification and aestheticisation of images depicting horrible, violent incidents.
As a personal example: in my late teens to early twenties I dressed full vintage. Head to toe: powder, lipstick, stockings, girdle, as close to representative of 1940s and 1950s clothing as I could get with the resources available to me. And then I stopped. Why? I was watching a documentary about the Holocaust and found myself transfixed by a pair of shoes a victim was wearing – I want a pair like that, I thought to myself, before immediately realising how far my aestheticisation of such a horrific period in history had gone and stepping back to re-evaluate my entire perspective on the world.
This is not to say that by wearing 1940s clothing you place yourself as an admirer of the horror of that period in history – often the contrary is true, vintage afficionados may interpret the sartorial creativity of the 40s as a form of resilience in the face of profound trauma and pain. But if I was writing a book on 1940s footwear, I would not include a photograph of a hanged woman in Warsaw simply because she was wearing a nice pair of shoes. Nor would I be only referring to nothing but her shoes in an image descriptor. To do so would reduce her to an object, a mannequin, and strip her of not only her humanity, but the vital context of what happened to her and why.
So why do we do this for the medieval period?
Many of the individuals writing books, blogs and other materials on the subject of medieval clothing have not had personal experiences of violent death on as large a scale as was familiar to the average medieval peasant. Most of us thankfully have not witnessed a public hanging, quartering or beheading. But I worry that this creates a sort of carelessness, a disconnection even, from the reality of the images.
Perhaps frequent depictions, many of which are glorifying, of violence in media de-sensitise us, because, just as we watch Game of Thrones knowing it’s a fantasy world and these are actors and clever special effects not actual people dying, we look at manuscript images as abstract representations of a concept of death. It extends so far as the news cycle on our television, laptop, tablet or phone – the more gruesome images we see, the less we connect to them, and the greater our desensitisation. I argue that compassion fatigue is the greatest barrier to action for social good in our media-saturated world, and we need to combat it at every stage, including disconnection from the effects of violence and depictions thereof.
I’m a big advocate for staying sensitive. For feeling, and reacting, and learning from feelings and reactions, and not only managing, but learning from them.
And as such, I am aware that I am deeply emotionally affected by graphic and violent images slapped on to summaries, handouts, books and so on, particularly when they could easily be left out, in a nonchalant manner.
Now make no mistake, I am no wilting lily: I am an archaeologist, I come across a lot of human remains in my studies, and at times, my ability to engage with this material necessitates shutting off the emotional part of my brain. What I am having a visceral reaction to is not the violence itself, the grotesqueness on display, but the treatment of of it.
I do not, for example, take issue with the existence of a severed mummified human foot, but do take issue with its being displayed without warning atop the Arnotts Biscuit Tin it was found in (I hate Victorians so much), and next to a severed mummified human head, thereby reducing human remains to objects. (Shout out to the museum in question for listening to feedback like this and altering their display to be more respectful of both visitors and subject matter)
I do not take issue with, for example, the fact that a 13th century manuscript recounting the events of a war depicts men who have been hanged – that is a representation of the events the text describes which was considered valuable detail meriting a visual depiction. What sets me off is this image being used without context, warning or admission in a handout on the construction of braies.
It’s the blatant disregard for human life and violence, the willingness to set it aside in favour of aesthetic and the subsequent expectation that others should do the same – that is what I have a strong reaction to. And I know that I am not alone.
So why do we do it?
Why is it so commonplace to show a violent image in a nonchalant discussion of, for example, shift construction?
I’ve identified 3 major reasons:
- Contemporary familiarity with violence
Christianity, which had such a profound place at the core of medieval European society, has a thing for suffering. Many early followers of the religion died in horrific and at times, absurd ways, and saints are often depicted alongside the instruments used to take their lives from them, their peaceful coexistence with the instruments of torture and death conveying a sense of peace, as their pain was worthwhile in light of the promise of eternal life. To suffer an agonising death instead of renouncing one’s beliefs has long been considered a poignant demonstration of commitment in the Christian literary tradition.
And so, there’s a lot of pictures of people dying in horrible, awful ways in manuscripts. But beyond saints, the theme of violence permeates medieval imagery.
From public executions to disease outbreaks to horiffic accidents to battles to popular stories, death was a core part of the medieval mentality, very much a part of life. This does not make it any less awful, nor mean that medieval people were less affected by it, but is the main reason why it’s depicted so much – it was such a central pillar in their world. And with instances of violence forming key plot points or moments of character development in stories, Biblical or otherwise, they were often singled out for visual depiction in manuscripts and other artworks.
- The nature of clothing choice in regards to executions
It’s not just the common nature of violent imagery behind its use in clothing analysis. Sometimes, the most common images of particular items of clothing are in depictions of violence, namely, executions. I of course, am referring to undergarments.
Most images of medieval people show them fully clothed, and so undergarments are often relegated to highly specific circumstances, such as stories in which character is forced to undress, scenes of bathhouses, or public executions. But why the last example?
I have a theory.
If you know anything about the clothing and textiles of the medieval period, you know that they were extraordinarily expensive. Items of clothing were often passed down, gifted and reworked. If as a common medieval person you were aware that you were going to be killed at a set date and time and were faced with the matter of your clothing choice for such an occasion, you would probably not be wearing all of your layers. If you were to, you would guarantee that they would end up ruined, and you would leave your family, who may be in a different country, without the material and emotional wealth that your clothing could provide, alleviating financial stress or the bitter grief of never seeing a loved one again. Or, alternatively, your captors would take the clothing from you as it was expensive and could be re-used.
In so many images of executions, we see men wearing shirts, braies and hose, in other words, in a state of undress, and so, images of executions are frequently used as an illustrative tool when discussing such garments. But if you can substitute an image of a peasant working the fields in place of a potentially traumatising depiction of people being violently deprived of their single most valuable posession – their lives – I strongly recommend that you do.
- Access and/or licensing rights
Perhaps the image of an execution is the only open access or copyright free image you can find. I would nonetheless strongly encourage you to dig deeper and try to find alternatives, but sometimes it might be unavoidable. The best image you can find of a particular garment also, unfortunately, happens to be a depiction of a violent death.
In this case, I have a few suggestions
- Provide a content warning before depicting the image, being clear on what it depicts
- Address that the image depicts a violent incident, and justify your choice to still include it
- Crop the image to remove the context which makes it disturbing – if you are only looking at braies, do you need a full-length image of a public hanging?
- Stop and consider: what is more important – avoiding traumatising potential readers, or including the image? What do you value more? And is use of the image truly unavoidable?
In closing, I would like to make a plea to all the wonderfully talented and nerdy researchers of medieval clothing out there:
Please stop using unnecessary images of violence in discussion of historic clothing items.
In doing so you run the risk of disrespecting the context of the original image or text, re-traumatising a person who has directly experienced graphic violence, vicariously traumatising someone who has not, and demonstrating a lack of sensitivity, sensibility and humanity in favour of aestheticisation, commodification and objectification of clothing items.
I for one, do not think the latter should ever outweigh the former. And this, I conclude, is why I feel sick to my stomach when I come across such images in the specific context I have described. I have strong feelings, and am capable of emotionally connecting to people from a radically different culture to mine, a culture separated not just by location and religious identity, but by centuries of time, even if they only appear as abstract depictions in a manuscript.
I am unable to disconnect an image of a hanged man from the horrific reality of a public, state-imposed punitive death by strangulation, least of all for a nice pair of hose.
Kate
Picts or it Didn't Happen 
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