sehepunkte 24 (2024), Nr. 9

Isabelle d'Artagnan: Le pilori au Moyen Âge dans l'espace français

The goal of this interesting book is to write the history of the pillory in France from the first evidence of its documented use in the twelfth century as one of an array of shaming punishments until the end of the Middle Ages. The author brings considerable methodological sophistication to the task.

In Part One, she carefully maps the spread of the punishment from the extreme north (the county of Flanders and the French jurisdictions abutting it) into Normandy and the southwest, under Plantagenet influence, the royal domain and central France more generally, and then into Champagne and the Rhone valley.

Having established the chronology and geography of the punishment, she also addresses a number of related issues, including terminology. 'Pillory' was not orthographically stable, and there is no consensus on its etymology or even on whether it was first coined as a word in Latin or a Romance or Germanic vernacular. She cautiously offers some suggestions, but the question will probably remain open. She shows how various scholars have often considered many other words, like échelles (English, stocks), to be synonyms with pillory when in fact they pertain to different forms of punishment. The actual structure of the pillory, with its pole, was quite distinctive and differentiated it from other shaming punishments. The author's attention to the material aspects of the pillory and her meticulous dissection of the terminological morass allows her to be precise about the correlation between crime and punishment in medieval legal discourse and practice.

There are many other fascinating aspects of the history of the pillory that the author discusses in Part One. What is perhaps most intriguing is her treatment of the symbology of the pillory. It is a complicated issue. At different periods of time, particularly early in the history of its use, the pillory reflected the community's power, ownership or jurisdiction in the market place, where it stood, and where it projected a claim to high but not capital justice. Later 'owners' of pillories were often individual lords, and the creation of these sites of punishment with their distinctive poles could project feudal claims to jurisdictional superiority, which may help explain the fact that a town was supposed to have only one pillory. Even the height of the pole could contribute to the jurisdictional claim. And so on.

Part Two, profoundly informed by historical anthropology, goes into detail about the public rituals of humiliation associated with punishment at the pillory, including the prisoner's initial departure from the jail to the pillory in a charrette or cart, a word that will evoke images from Chrétien de Troyes's Knight of the Cart. Town criers summoned and informed the crowds. The author describes at length the varied and degrading humiliation of the bodies of those condemned to the pillory - and, of course, what most readers associate with the punishment, the nasty refuse thrown at the victims. Stones, it seems, were, however, forbidden, lest the prisoner die, for punishment at the pillory was not intended to impose capital justice, execution. The book actually opens with a vignette describing royal officials who, at the king's command, dressed up as ordinary townsmen and violated this restriction in order to execute a traitorous cleric during the Hundred Years War, but this was an exceptional breach of protocol.

The final section of the book, Part Three, goes off in different directions. The first half or so largely constitutes a taxonomy of the crimes that came to be associated with the punishment of the pillory. I think it is fair to say that these crimes, like slander, show that there was a strong medieval tendency to make the punishment fit the crime symbolically. Since slanderers, for example, by definition shamed their victims publicly, they deserved public shaming themselves. There is, however, a class dimension to all of this, as the author shows in the second half of Part Three. The social profile ("sociography" is her term) of those sent to the pillory in the period under study shows that nobles, with only a few exceptions, were largely immune from this punishment.

There is much more to be gleaned from this extraordinary book. The author deserves the unconditional praise of her colleagues for such a thorough and thoroughly absorbing study.