Author: Larissa Tracy
Though those that are betray’d Do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor stands in worse case of woe.William Shakespeare, CymbelineIII.iv.85–87.
The willingness to betray one’s country, one’s people, one’s family—to commit treason and foreswear loyalty to one entity by giving it to another—is a difficult concept for many people to comprehend. Yet, societies have grappled with treason for centuries; the motivations, implications, and consequences are rarely clear cut and are often subjective. If the institutions of power are corrupt, is treason an act of betrayal or an act of loyalty to the greater good? F.W. Maitland argues for this ambiguity, explaining that as long as treason can also be understood as “infidelity,” there is still the possibility of honorable men justifiably rebelling against a king, for “if a lord persistently refuses justice to his man, the tie of fealty is broken, the man may openly defy his lord and, having done so, may make war on him.”1 History has seen many rebels who argued that their cause was just, that their betrayal was valid and necessary. Some, like Scottish hero William Wallace, rebelled for political autonomy against what was, in his view, an oppressive and occupying force; others, like Benedict Arnold, turned for financial gain and to redress personal grievance against authorities in the American colonial government. Treason is weighed and measured, and its definition depends partly on its outcome: If it succeeds, it is revolution; if it fails, it is treason. In each case, the perspective of betrayal depends on the side: One man’s traitor is another man’s hero.
Accusations of treason have become common currency in the current political discourse. During the 2016 American Presidential election, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made several claims that her opponent, Donald J. Trump, was committing treason in his dealings with Russia, in his violent campaign rhetoric, and in his conflicts of interest. Trump, who eventually won the majority in the Electoral College and was inaugurated in January 2017, responded by levying unsubstantiated (and later debunked) charges of treason against Clinton for a variety of alleged crimes, including the mishandling of classified information and conflicts of interest within the charitable Clinton Foundation. The allegations of untoward election tampering by foreign powers, and Trump’s alleged connection to them, are still being investigated by various institutions of the American government, including a Senate Select Committee and Special Counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.2 As more and more information comes to light regarding the Trump campaign’s, and now the Trump administration’s, connections to members of the Russian government—specifically regarding interference in the American election and media by Russia and other hostile actors to influence the election in favor of Trump—as well as foreign business interests that are contrary to American foreign policy interests, the specter of treason hangs over the United States and the entire political process.3After a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 16, 2018—in which Putin acknowledged that he wanted Trump to win the presidential election, gave orders to facilitate that outcome, and Trump denied the findings of the American Justice Department—twelve Russian agents were indicted for directly interfering in the 2016 election, and the cries of treason became much louder.4 The force of such an accusation—betraying one’s country and giving aid to its enemies—has had a profound impact on popular perceptions of modern democracy at this moment. These questions have reverberated around the world.
As a concept, treason has evolved over time, shaped by the needs of each society and community. Thus, the idea and the definition of treason evolved as well. According to U.S. statute written shortly after World War II: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”5 But Article 3, section 3 of the American Constitution declares that
Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.6
The American legal definition of treason has its roots in the medieval precedent set down in English law, especially the Statutes of Treason (1351–52), the first official attempt to define the offense.7 But in the Middle Ages, treason was not narrowly defined as the betrayal of a lord, chieftain, or king; rather, it encompassed numerous forms of treachery. Adultery was classified as treason, not only when the cuckolded party was king, but when a wife betrayed her lord and husband (though it never seems to have worked the other way around). Coupled with acts of adultery and treason, shame was often a defining feature of betrayal, in a legal as well as a social sense. Shame could be a factor in accusations as well as in the prosecution of treason or other crimes. A person’s reputation counted for or against their legal standing; a person of ill-repute was susceptible to legal jeopardy and more likely to be found guilty.8 Treason, and the betrayal and shame associated with such an act, preoccupied medieval European governments as they consolidated power in the figure of powerful monarchs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and as those powerful kings attempted to maintain and retain that power through the early modern period. But as Barbara Hanawalt points out, the attitude of medieval people towards the rebellious and unlawful was far from entirely negative.9 Outlaw tales and stories of clever female resistance “show an enjoyment in hierarchical inversions.”10 By trying to insist that treason should be defined as any challenge to the king’s sovereignty, the law came into conflict with deeply-held traditional ideas about the nature of social order.11 And yet, despite its prominence in medieval thought, political philosophy, law, and literature, few studies focus specifically on treason and its interdisciplinary significance in the medieval European context. Usually, treason is part of larger discussions on crime or society, or it is examined through a narrow legal or literary lens focused on a limited geographical space. This volume seeks to investigate the ways in which treason, particularly in relation to acts of betrayal, adultery, and shame, was perpetrated, imagined, and adjudicated in the broad scope of medieval western Europe, crossing boundaries of law, literature, language, and time, and shaping ideas of cultural identity. Treason, in all its variable definitions, reveals social anxieties about the stability of a community and the fragility of its authorities and social networks.
At this particular political moment, historical perspectives on treason become increasingly relevant. The Oxford English Dictionary defines treason as “the action of betraying a person, etc., betrayal of trust, treachery,” from the Middle English use of the word.12 Legally, treason is the “violation by a subject of allegiance to the sovereign or to the State, esp. by attempting or plotting to kill or overthrow the sovereign or overthrow the Government.”13Historically, petty treason is defined as “murder of a person, esp. a master or husband, thought to be owed allegiance.”14That last definition has been passed down from the Middle Ages, but the perception of treason varied widely throughout medieval societies.
Many studies of medieval treason begin with Maitland’s comment regarding English law, that treason “is a crime which has a vague circumference and more than one centre.”15 According to Maitland, treason was a crime connected to plotting, scheming, and treachery—the crime of Judas that lands him in the deepest circle of Dante’s Hell to be gnawed upon by Satan himself.16 In The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages, one of the most comprehensive examinations of the English legal tradition regarding treason, John Bellamy traces the development of the law of treason in England from the Roman and Germanic legal precedents, beginning with the very first recognizable reference to treason in the laws of Alfred (c. 893).17 He also points out that early medieval continental law collections like the Visigothic Breviarium Alaricanum[Breviary of Alaric] (506), the Burgundian Lex Romana, known as Papian (dated after 517), the Leges Alammanorum (from the eighth to the twelfth centuries), and the Leges Baiuvariorum (c. 756) showed the greatest debt to Roman laws regarding treason, though, despite a “fleeting appearance in the capitularies of Charlemagne, it did not figure significantly in law again until the revival of classical learning in the twelfth century.”18 Lisi Oliver touches briefly on that brief appearance in Frankish law, noting that there were three hearings from treason in the court record up to 814, the year of Charlemagne’s death, and that the majority of cases involved homicide.19 During the twelfth-century revival of classical learning and the introduction of Roman law into secular and ecclesiastical judicial process, the concept of treason was refined. Knowledge of Roman law added the idea of maiestas and the crime of lese-majesty in Middle English (lèse-majesté in French); as W.R.J. Barron writes, “the mutual interdependence of leader and followers which informed the Germanic idea of kingship gave way to a more absolute authority modelled on imperial lines, and the definition of treason, high and petty, became more concrete and comprehensive.”20 What began as a breach of trust [treubruch] by a man against his lord in the Germanic sense was transformed, with the adoption of the Roman idea of a crime of maiestas, into an insult to those with public authority.21 As Bellamy explains, nearly all the Roman ideas regarding treason reappeared in the laws of the European states in the later Middle Ages, as did interpretations of those ideas.22
In Policraticus (late 1150s), the first comprehensive medieval treatise on political theory, John Salisbury constructs an image of the political structure of a nation as a human body with the divinely appointed ruler at its head.23 John’s vision reinforces a rigid feudal system in which social groups should not aspire to rise above their station; however, the upper portions were obligated to treat the lower ones with respect, for they sustained the rest of the society.24 As Danielle Westerhof explains, in John’s vision of society, cooperation and mutual respect are equally essential for maintaining a harmonious collective, “so that whatever happens to one part of the body will have a potentially detrimental effect on the rest of the organism.”25 As such, John lists a number of crimes that could cause disruptions within this symbiotic structure, but treason is described as one of the worst of those. Found in Roman law, and repeated in English medieval legal texts like Glanvill (c. 1180) and Bracton (c. 1220), treason (crimen majestatis) “encompasses anything from contemplating regicide to fleeing from battles; helping the enemies of the realm with money, military supplies, or information; and inciting rebellion (Lib. VI, Cap. 25).”26 John also equates treason with sacrilege because both crimes “contain a decidedly moral dimension (dishonesty, secrecy, apostasy) and both indicate the spiritual death of the perpetrator: by committing treason or sacrilege, the perpetrator acts against the greater good of the collective and is therefore no longer of use (Lib. VI, Cap. 25).”27 Thus, treason not only affects the ruler but the whole of society and is a serious threat to public security.28 While it often focused on the betrayal of the lord, king, or country, treason also manifested in multiple forms throughout the medieval and early modern periods: Rebellious lords, disloyal subjects, religious heretics, unrepentant converts, and unfaithful queens. Treason was adjudicated and punished differently at certain times and in specific communities; often the shame of treason lingered long after the immediate act, and public reputation could be used against a suspect in a legal case. Most accounts of treachery survive either in historical chronicles or literary works in which treason is a concept shared among medieval societies, shaped by changes in secular and canon law, and influenced by periods of war, civil strife, and religious upheaval. Whether confined to a specific moment in time or a particular geographical or linguistic space, these texts form an important basis for piecing together the lens through which we can create our mosaic of treason in the broader scope of medieval and early modern Europe.
The word treason comes from Latin traditio(n): “The giving up, surrender, or betrayal of something or someone.”29While Latin has several words for the same concept— insidias [treachery], seditio[sedition], conspiratio [conspiracy], or proditio [treason]—the word treasonmainly comes via Old French: traison; Anglo-Norman: traisun; and Middle English: treisǒun. In Middle English, particularly, treason meant many things:
treisǒun (n.)
Disloyalty, faithlessness, culpable indifference to sacred obligations or allegiance, variously manifested as: (a) treachery to one’s king, country, sworn ally, etc., esp. contriving the defeat or death thereof; also, failure to protect or defend one to whom one owes such protection or allegiance; (b) treachery to one’s kin, esp. contriving the death, exile, or imprisonment of a relative; betrayal of or infidelity to one’s spouse or betrothed; (c) faithlessness to religious vows, obligations, or ideals.
(a) Falseness, deceitfulness, hypocrisy, usu. accompanied by treacherous behavior or injurious actions; ~ colour, duplicity; (b) the military use of subterfuge; the use of unfair tactics in combat; also, suborned treachery.
(a) Law. The specific charge for offenses against the Crown or the State defined as treasonous in 1350–51, high treason; also, an offense legally defined as treasonous; heigh ~; (b) any of several sins involving faithlessness or duplicity and given the name of treason; also person.
(a) An act of treachery, a traitorous act, a betrayal of someone to whom one owes loyalty; (b) an underhanded trick, a deception; a plot intended to injure a trusting or an innocent victim.
With diminished force: (a) a generally opprobrious quality or mode of behavior associated with evil or deceptive persons; malice, hostility; (b) a dishonorable or despicable act; a display of unseemly behavior; wickedness, evildoing; (c) in exclamations: an acknowledgement of imminent danger not necessarily involving betrayal; a general cry of alarm or distress.30
As such, English medieval literary texts often incorporate competing and even contradictory concepts of treason and betrayal.
In the thirteenth century, the basis of treason was still the betrayal of trust, which was socially rather than legally defined.31 The multiplicities of understanding make it necessary to investigate and interrogate the ways in which medieval governments, kings, clergy, and common people interpreted acts of betrayal, disloyalty, and treachery. Treason is the “most fundamental of felonies” that “struck at the roots of feudal society through a complex of crimes.”32 As Barron explains, treason was the basis of legal felony from the thirteenth century on, in both England and on the Continent: “betrayal of trust by an attack upon the security of the state, its administrative or economic validity, or the legitimacy of the succession—whether directed against the king or some lesser liege lord, and the law made no absolute distinction between high and petty treason.”33 A subject who turned against his lord or his king was a traitor; a family member who showed disloyalty in deceiving another was treacherous; a queen who committed adultery also committed treason; an unfaithful non-royal wife committed petty treason against her marital lord; a Christian who rejected his or her faith to convert to another betrayed God; murderers were also often charged as traitors. As Barron points out, the legal definition of treason changed from age to age while the underlying moral concept did not.34
1 Punishing Traitors
Frequently, the moral outrage at acts of treason, or sympathy with heroic rebels who resisted a tyrannical regime, was expressed in depictions of punishment. Punishing traitors was a means of broadcasting the severity of the crime, of proclaiming it publicly, and displaying it in an exertion of uncontested power. Treason was most clearly distinguished from other serious crimes by the punishment inflicted on the guilty35—usually a capital sentence of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, or, in the case of nobility, simply being beheaded. Women were generally condemned to be burnt at the stake, as is the case with Guinevere in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and the stanzaic Morte Arthur (though she is rescued by Lancelot). According to Barron, the moral failing inherent in the traitor’s breach of troth put him beyond the reach of mercy or compassion, and so execution methods might vary at the whim of the sovereign or judge, with local usage, or the sex of the traitor.36 In his comprehensive discussion of legal precedence in the context of the Chanson de Roland (hereafter the Roland),Emmanuel Mickel aptly points out that the treatment of traitors escalated in severity in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the thirteenth century, the long-held view in France that the king is sovereign (rex in regno suo princeps est) begins to have a telling effect on the perspective regarding treason, though the last Capetian kings did not prosecute treason vigorously and the harsh treatment of prisoners in England began much earlier.37 But there is a pronounced increase in the punishment of traitors in France, including the implementation of dragging, hanging, beheading, quartering, and mutilating during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453).38 Punishing traitors (as well as murderers, heretics, and other serious criminals) was often made into a spectacle, a visual performance to deter others from engaging in treachery or betrayal, and to send a “strong signal of justice in action.”39Anthony Musson explains that “the gathering of crowds of ordinary people to watch and cheer at the gruesome fate of traitors was itself redolent both of the attitude of awe, respect and fear which the Crown wished to inculcate and the way in which the public at large could be attracted by or drawn into such events.”40 As Westerhof explains, “the body of the traitor came to represent the corrupted body social while at the same time being a corruption to be expelled from it during the process of the public execution[.] … for executions to be politically meaningful, they would have to be couched in terms understood by those for whom executions were staged.”41 The magnitude of the crime demanded exemplary punishment—drawing, hanging, emasculation, disemboweling, beheading, and quartering in various combinations, and, in rare exceptions, flaying alive.42
The most common form of executing traitors was hanging, drawing, and quartering, though there is a lively debate on the order in which that sentence was carried out and in what form. Drawing could refer to equine quartering, where the subject is ripped apart by horses, like Ganelon in the Roland discussed by Ana Grinberg here, or it could refer to the practice of dragging the condemned to the gallows, either tied to the tie of a horse or on a hurdle drawn by a horse.43 Mickel provides numerous examples of traitors being hanged, drawn, and quartered (some by horses) in the thirteenth century, including the Welsh chieftain Rhys-ap-Meredith who was dragged and hanged in 1292, and Thomas de Turbeville who was torn asunder by horses in 1295.44 But Roger Dahood effectively explains that drawe, in the context of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, means being dragged by horses to the place of execution.45 This may not seem as brutal as being torn asunder by horses like Ganelon. Criminals were often dragged to the gallows. But as it is, equine dragging, “though its harshness is perhaps not quite so evident to the modern imagination as the harshness of equine quartering, is harsh indeed.”46 Both historical and literary accounts record gruesome, cruel, and degrading punishments for traitors, both suspected and convicted, though the most inventive methods seem largely confined to fiction. As Barron writes, the traitor must always die, but in the later Middle Ages “the horror aroused by his crime was expressed in prolonged and complicated forms of execution.”47
Kings were often eager to extract more prolonged, more gruesome punishments from traitors because they could only die one death, and if they could not inflict additional physical punishments, then they would extract a moral punishment that might include humiliation or slander post mortem. 48 As Barron writes, “the moral itemization of the penalty for treason was quite conscious; often, perhaps, politically motivated.”49 After his defeat and death at the battle of Evesham in 1265, the body of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, the Anglo-French noble who opposed Henry III, was mutilated. His testicles and his head were presented to the wife of Roger de Mortimer, one of the king’s supporters.50 In 1326, for supposedly corrupting King Edward II and turning his affections away from his wife (among other crimes), Edward’s favorite Hugh Despenser was subjected to a traitor’s death, similar to that of William Wallace. The illuminated version of Jean Froissart’s Chroniclespreserved in Paris, BnF, Fr MS 2643, fol.11, includes a graphic illumination of Hugh Despenser being publicly disemboweled and castrated which takes up a quarter of the left-hand column. The text reads:
When he had been tied up, his [penis and his testicles] were first cut off, because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the King, and this is why the King had driven away the Queen on his suggestion. When his [penis and testicles] had been cut off they were thrown into the fire to burn, and afterwards his heart was torn from his body and thrown into the fire because he was a false-hearted traitor, who by his treasonable advice and promptings had led the King to bring shame and misfortune upon his kingdom. …51
Lee Patterson cautions against taking Froissart entirely at his word, pointing out that in later medieval England, castration as a punishment for any kind of crime was “very rare, if not entirely absent,” and that while Froissart reports the castration of Hugh Despenser, “this is no more historically verifiable than the claim that Edward was himself killed by having a hot poker inserted in his anus.”52 But the public spectacle of the traitor’s death was still used to reaffirm the political structures that were threatened by acts of rebellion.
The execution of William Wallace in 1305 for treason in his guerilla enterprise against English rule in Scotland embodied this spectacle of punishment that included castration. Wallace was hanged until partially strangled, taken down, emasculated, eviscerated, and finally beheaded. The corpse was then quartered, his head placed on a pike on London Bridge, and the four sections of his body sent “to four towns in Scotland as warning as rebellion.”53 The castration of convicted traitors reinforces the genetic claim of the monarch to the throne.54 Royal inheritance is based on masculine propagation, and those who trespass against that royal lineage must be wiped out. Literal emasculation becomes a symbolic neutering of an opposing line, cut off to insure no further rebellion or revenge. According to Martin Irvine, some “courts sought to control the application of the penalty,” which meant that it was rarely carried out.55 At the same time, other cultures considered that “[a] nobleman’s genitals were signifiers of his gender and being male was a prerequisite for the warrior status he claimed,” so castration might be more apt,56 at least in medieval Scotland, where being lenient suggested royal weakness, as Iain MacInnes explains in this volume.57 Execution in these instances is not enough, and the “injured sovereignty” resorts to mutilation as a further attempt to reconstitute what Elaine Scarry calls the “wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power.”58Ultimately, of course, the mutilation of William Wallace did not quell the rebellious spirit of Scotland, and if nothing else, the added injury of their leader being castrated may well have galvanized the Scottish nobles into further rebellion against Edward I, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 and resulting in England’s defeat. Equally spectacular, but even more rare, the flaying of prisoners—even traitors—was an exceptional penalty, despite its frequent appearance in literature; however, the “varied thematic use made of it to express abhorrence of treason” illustrates the significance which treason had for the Middle Ages.59 The worst crime deserved the worst punishment, and both historical and literary accounts record the varied social response to it.
2 Treason in the Literary Imagination
Treason was a felony—as much a social as a legal violation, rooted in the viciousness of character—applied equally to acts of infidelity against God and to breaches in the chivalric code.60 Acts of treason were often litigated in poems, epics, and chansons de geste wherein treason lurked within the confines of the court or threatened society from without. The spectacular, but generally apocryphal, punishments meted out to traitors in the literary corpus signals the elevated place of treason in the concerns of medieval audiences. For Dante, treachery is the most heinous crime: his traitors are eternally trapped in ice, contorted as their loyalties were distorted, and the three worst traitors—Brutus, Cassius, and Judas—suffer in the maws of Satan himself.61 As Megan Leitch explains, specifically in the romances of the fifteenth-century English Wars of the Roses, “[t]heir treasons and treacheries are horizontal as well as hierarchical, and they apply the language of the narrower institutional idea of treason to this wider set of transgressions to intensify their instructive condemnations.”62 In his discussion of treason in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Barron applies the legal definitions of treason to the wooing and hunting scenes in the poem. He argues that Gawain’s act of sexual treason, in kissing the host’s wife, is a breach of trust and the detailed butchery of the deer is a metaphor for the complex execution of traitors: “To contemporary imaginations, the atmosphere of ordered ceremonial calm might suggest the formal solemnity surrounding the public execution of some great nobleman found guilty of treason.”63Many of the chapters in this volume explore the intricacies of social and legal treason in terms of religious and chivalric identity (Claussen, Domínguez, Grinberg, Shockro, Sposato), as well as the social implications of treachery within the chivalric community (Boyer, Classen, Ridley Elmes, Matyushina, Tracy). Just as the romances of the Wars of the Roses “bear witness to a cultural imaginary particularly invested in secular ethics and legal procedures,”64 so to do literary texts across the spectrum of medieval languages and contexts give testimony regarding treason in its various forms, including adultery, and the shame that accompanies such accusations and betrayals.
This volume seeks to investigate the nature of treason in medieval and early modern society in both practice and representation—its consequences, its lasting effects, and its impression on societies and social standing. The chapters in this volume address treason, treachery, betrayal, and the shameful consequences of such betrayal in law, literature, and history, from across the span of the medieval period and into the early modern period in varying regions of medieval Europe. The volume is arranged in three interdisciplinary parts: The Politics of Treason; Religious Treason and Heresy; and Treasonous Love: Adultery and Shame. The first part looks specifically at the political manifestations and implications in a range of sources, beginning with Old English literature and material culture and progressing through medieval Scottish accounts of war. The second focuses on the symbiotic relationship between faith and fidelity—how loyalty figured into debates regarding heresy and how treachery manifests in a variety of religious discourses, often blending with chivalric literature. Finally, the last section deals with adultery as a form of treason, both in literary and historical cases, where queens are unfaithful to royal husbands, or where lovers experience betrayal at the hands of those they trust.
Familial treachery had far reaching consequences both historically and politically; feuds erupted between kin groups, relatives betrayed one another for political power, and kings were overthrown by their cousins and brothers. In the earliest English epic, Beowulf, treason often sparks blood feuds, leading to long periods of betrayal and distrust. In the first essay in Section One, Frank Battaglia examines the complicated sequence in Beowulf that brings Wiglaf’s sword to the hero’s aid in his final battle against the dragon; hybridized Germanic principles of loyalty and absolutism provide the historical and social backdrop for this assessment. Analyzing the thread of betrayals that undermines kinship avowals in a transcendent endorsement of an emerging political principle, Battaglia juxtaposes the literary sequences with material evidence of sword finds, artifacts that were often passed down through acts of treason, concluding that the sword symbolizes the potential ferocity of overthrow and feud. Next, focusing her essay on the relationship between uncle and nephew, Sarah J. Sprouse considers the lament of Gerald of Wales, who bemoans the treachery of his nephew and that of the world in his early thirteenth-century Speculum Duorum [A Mirror of Two Men], as a mode of Boethian consolation. Gerald’s treatise indicts his nephew’s behavior based on his own sense of breach of trust, grounded in his thwarted political and religious ambitions.
Such political ambitions often led to unrestrained violence and dishonorable behavior, especially among the warrior classes. In his essay, Peter Sposato looks at the way in which chivalric literature, specifically that of Florence and Tuscany in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, operated on a reform theme that equated treason with dishonor. He argues that knights were presented with contradictory currents of thought: the veritable deluge of praise for violence committed in the defense or assertion of honor and the subtler reform messages intended to temper those violent excesses. By portraying dishonor as a form of treason, these romances did not deter knights from violence, but encouraged them to engage in it honorably. Similarly, Samuel Claussen analyzes royal responses to treason in chronicle accounts, juxtaposed with chivalric literary narratives in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Castile, which discouraged knightly or noble treason against the king. His discussion is set within the context of the new Trastámara Dynasty, founded by King Enrique II (r. 1366–1379), which was born out of a treasonous rebellion and quickly became focused on rooting out treason itself.
It was important for monarchs to deal swiftly and often brutally with traitors, lest their crimes inspire others. Historical rebellions, like the revolt of 1381 in England, threatened to undermine monarchies and, very often, revealed the cracks within the political power structure. Iain A. MacInnes examines the “violent” paradigm in medieval Scotland that ensured that non-lethal and non-violent responses to rebellion were portrayed negatively as examples of royal weakness. Punishments in the form of fines, forfeiture, or submission were seen as powerlessness on the part of monarchs rather than as acts of clemency or kingly magnanimity. Weak kings left themselves open to renewed acts of betrayal and continuous rebellion.
Section Two considers the religious ramifications of treason and the ways in which accusations of heresy were often bound together with acts of betrayal. Daniel Thomas begins with a reexamination of the Old English poem Genesis B, situating the rebellion of Lucifer within the political milieu of early medieval England and the power-sharing Carolingian elite on the Continent. He argues that the similarities between Genesis B and the realities of behavior among the Carolingian elite, which was often treasonous and transgressed ties of loyalty, suggest a potential source for the Old English poem. Turning to Old English hagiographical sources in Latin, Sally Shockro draws connections between treachery and martyrdom that reinforce the Christian message of most saints’ lives while criticizing the political failings of weak kings, most specifically Bede’s account of St. Edwin, Felix’s vita of St. Guthlac, and the tradition surrounding the death of King Edward the Martyr. Treason, adultery, and heresy are bound up together in the thirteenth-century epic, Morant und Galie, discussed by Tina Boyer, in which Charlemagne’s queen (Galie) is falsely accused by an enemy within the court who violates various Christian taboos and is the real traitor. Ana Grinberg follows Boyer’s analysis of German Charlemagne romances by looking at the French Cycle du roi and the Anglo-Norman Roland. In her discussion of the Roland, and the French Fierabras and Gui de Bourgogne, Grinberg examines the complex relationships within families wherein nephews and nieces betray their uncles (who are usually kings) and vice versa in generational strife, Christians betray their religious compatriots, and Saracens betray their lineage and their faith through conversion.
Accusations of treason were also levied among Christians, particularly in the period following the Reformation. As early as the fourteenth century, heterodox movements, like the Lollards, were branded as traitors. By 1423, Lollardy was grouped with treason and felony: “Fear of heresy became entangled with the fear of revolt, crime, and attacks on the hierarchical nature of medieval society.”65Here, Freddy C. Domínguez considers the polemical strategies of English Catholics who were labelled traitors, rather than heretics, during the reign of Elizabeth I. As he writes, “Catholic responses to, and engagements with, accusations of treason show the concept was far from self-evident and was subject to manipulations guided by a range of rhetorical and political concerns.”66 As Elizabeth sought to control the narrative regarding Catholic plots, Catholics, in turn, responded with their own accusations.
Treason often struck very close to home, especially within royal households in which a queen’s adultery against her husband became a crime against the state. Section Three examines the ramifications of adultery, betrayal, and shame within political and social structures. Throughout the Middle Ages, queens were accused of treason both legitimately (when they actually had
affairs) and illegitimately (where it was a political weapon to discredit either the king or his heirs). The litany of royal women who committed adultery against their royal spouse is rather long, though not all the accusations were valid. The bodies of queens were often the subject of public scrutiny, particularly when the question of legal succession was involved. Queen Margaret of Anjou was often the subject of adulterous rumors.67 Isabella of France was a known adulteress, though there is a striking lack of contemporary tales of her behavior.68 As Joanna Laynesmith explains in reference to late medieval England, “tales of adulterous queens had political implications with which no king would want to associate himself: Implications of failed kingship and collapsing regimes as well as the more obvious issue of illegitimate succession.”69
The complicated historical reality of adultery and treason was often arbitrated in literary sources, particularly in the Arthurian tradition. The famed (or infamous) affair between Guinevere and Lancelot, or, in the earlier sources, Guinevere and Mordred, offered a cautionary tale to medieval audiences across medieval Europe who retold their story over and over. In Canto V of Inferno, Dante forgives the treasonous aspect of Paolo and Franscesa’s affair but notes that it all started as they were reading a book about Guinevere and Lancelot: “‘Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto / di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; / soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto’” [“One day, to pass the time in pleasure, / we read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him. / We were alone, without the least misgiving”].70Dante, like many other authors, cast Lancelot and Guinevere as sympathetic actors, while also acknowledging the profound impact their example had on ideas of love, adultery, and treason.
Sexual deception often accompanied other themes in literary sources: love, marriage, wealth, travel, political conflicts, and war, as well as treason. In his essay, Albrecht Classen surveys the Arthurian tradition in the late medieval and early modern German verse romances and prose novels, particularly in Königin Sibille by Countess Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken (1437), Thüring von Ringoltingen’s Melusine(1456), and the anonymous Malagis (c. 1460). Classen draws parallels between these works and examines the ways in which treason intersects with married life at the highest political level. In her chapter on unfaithful women at King Arthur’s court, Inna Matyushina continues the discussion started in Classen’s chapter with particular attention to the late-twelfth century French Le Lai du cort mantel and the thirteenth century Old Norse rendering of this poem into the prose Mǫttuls saga or Skikkju saga. In these texts, the chastity of the various noble women of Arthur’s court is tested by a magical object (usually a mantel) that grows shorter or longer, revealing the adultery and treachery of most of the women. Matyushina argues that the version in Mǫttuls saga not only condemns the unfaithful women but also casts doubt on the reputations of the knights themselves.
Similarly, Malory’s Morte Darthur(completed 1469–70; published 1485), the culmination of the Arthurian tradition in England, suggests that treason, murder, and adultery flourishes in Camelot because of the weaknesses within the system. As Melissa Ridley Elmes explains in her essay, “Guinevere’s feast brings the community together to collectively witness a murder that reveals the treachery that threatens its core, and the individual responses of knight, king, and queen to this event showcase the limitations of law or custom to deal effectively with it. Malory employs the feast as a crucible of treason, which Camelot fails.”71 As Ridley Elmes argues, Malory is less concerned with the adultery of Guinevere and Lancelot than the familial and chivalric treachery lurking within Camelot, which plays out most spectacularly at feasts hosted by the queen. The Arthurian court provides a backdrop for anxieties of royal stability, honor, duty, and loyalty, and, as such, often gives vent to fears of female infidelity among noble women.
However, accusations of treason against adulterous wives were not only levied at queens, in whose bodies rested the future of the nation. The wives of common men could also be accused of treason, though more regularly “petit” or “petty” treason, as Dianne Berg explains in her chapter on sixteenth-century chronicles and plays, specifically Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women (composed c. 1590, published 1599). While these texts offer a voyeuristic glimpse of wifely violence—where mariticide is classified, not only as murder, but as “petty” treason—they ultimately serve a conservative social agenda. By casting women who murder their husbands as traitors, these plays reinforce the idea of women as subjects, as subordinates, even within their own home.
Frequently, the accusation and adjudication of treason were tied to the public perception of guilt as much as to the actual evidence of guilt. Fama or “reputation” played a significant role in the way in which traitors were portrayed in the variety of surviving records and circulating literatures. Fama plays a central role as evidence with “strong probative value.”72But the fama of a crime could inspire “rumors about the possible author of the deed,”73 which were enough to spark the public imagination. In the context of English legal tradition, publica fama exists when two or more reputable people testify that a suspect is widely believed to be guilty, or capable of being guilty, of a crime, and it can be used as probable cause to charge someone with a crime.74 According to F.R.P. Akehurst, “having a good reputation might make it easier for a person to prevail in a lawsuit,” while having a bad reputation could stand as evidence against the suspect.75 These distinctions of having a good or bad reputation governed the legal existence of most medieval people—common and noble.
As such, when someone was accused of a crime, their fama could be used as either evidence for or against them. This is the case in the Arthurian tradition, in which Guinevere’s reputation precedes her, and in the test of chastity endured by other women of the Arthurian and Carolingian courts. In later novels like Madeleine de Scudéry’s 10-volume roman-fleuve, Clélie: Histoire romaine (1654–1660), and La Princesse de Clèves (1678), attributed to Madame de La Fayette, shame becomes a literal map within the text to follow the heroine’s development. In her essay here, Susan Small uses the Carte de Tendre (a model of amorous cartography) and other seventeenth-century maps of imaginary spaces as a blueprint and an overlay for tracing the sentimental journey in La Princesse de Clèves, in which the heroine’s amour d’inclination leads to shame, suffering, and death.
Thus, crimes of treachery, adultery, and betrayal are also intertwined with questions of shame and reputation. In the conclusion, I bring these threads together in an analysis of adultery amounting to treason from the most prominent of recent visualizations of medieval treachery: the HBO series Game of Thrones. From Cersei’s “walk of shame,” to the historical “walk” of Jane Shore, mistress to Edward IV of England, to laws regarding the punishment for average adulterers and the laws governing treason, and finally to the literary argument of Arthurian poets in the stanzaic Morte Arthure (hereafter sMA)and the alliterative Mort Arthure (hereafter aMA), I bring these pieces into conversation with each other. Ultimately, though the genre, time, and chronology changes, treason is a constant fear within society. Whether it is between individuals, within families, within ruling classes, against a nation, against a king, against a husband, or against God, treason and its attendant stigmas, specifically adultery, betrayal, and shame, have the capacity to destroy the very fabric of society.
In the course of medieval and early modern history, amid social conflict, civil war, religious strife, economic inequity, dynastic contests, and religious and racial intolerance and violence, the potential for treason in its various forms was pronounced, but it is not only a medieval phenomenon. Treason cannot be relegated to the mists of time as though modern societies are immune to betrayal. The current cries of treason on the American political stage and within the debate over the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (Brexit), belie that fact.76Treason, betrayal, adultery, and shame have always been present, reaching into the past and surely (and unfortunately) well into the future.
Ultimately, treason is the highest crime, but it can be experienced at all levels of life. It is not simply the act of providing comfort and aid to enemies in war, nor is it always an act of treachery against a king or state. Treason is the betrayal of trust; it is an insidious act that undermines the stability of families, communities, and societies; it eats away at the fiber of social relationships and causes us to question the very nature of our interactions with our rulers, with our institutions, and with each other. Ultimately, this collection seeks to place the complex issue of treason within the context of human interactions and emotions, as well as legal and political structures, tracking the trajectory of treason through the western medieval world and into the early modern period. Thus, the individual articles often share sources and have tried to communicate with each other as much as possible. We have, therefore, compiled a select bibliography of secondary texts, which focuses on the various aspects of treason. Because treason in its various forms crosses all boundaries, it is necessary to look at treachery in the medieval period and its continuity into the early modern era as a series of pictures, traversing geographical borders to piece together how pre-modern cultures responded to treason in law and imagined it in fiction. Understanding the historical forms of treason, its multifarious permutations and interpretations, offers insight into the persistence of treachery and disloyalty in modern society and the many ways in which trust is betrayed.
F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968; reprt. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 2010), 2:505, qtd. in Stephen D. White, “The Ambiguity of Treason in Anglo-Norman-French Law, c. 1150–c. 1250,” in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter, 89–102 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 90. According to White, John Gilliham and Matthew Strickland “demolish” Maitland’s position that “there was once a universally recognized right to levy war against a king who denied justice to his men” (91). However, J.G. Bellamy explains that “before the thirteenth century many a ruler recognized a subject had the right to disobey him: tacitly this understanding was included in every act of homage. It was even argued that a man wronged by his king had a duty, after offering formal defiance [diffidatio], to seek justice through rebellion.” The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 10.
This is an ongoing issue and has been the subject of hundreds of news articles since June 2016. See: Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, “Russian American lobbyist was present at Trump Jr.’s meeting with Kremlin-connected lawyer,” The Washington Post (July, 14 2017); Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef, “FBI Suspects Russia Hacked DNC; U.S. Officials Say It Was to Elect Donald Trump,” The Daily Beast (25 July 2016).
Editorial Board, “Trump just colluded with Russia. Openly,” Washington Post(July 16, 2018): <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-just-put-russia-first/2018/07/16/8391f9aa-8914-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html?utm_term=.d71883e590ee> (accessed July 16, 2018); Dan Balz, “The moment called for Trump to stand up for America. He chose to bow,” Washington Post (July 16, 2018): <https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-a-jaw-dropping-news-conference-what-does-america-first-really-mean/2018/07/16/2b728b12-892e-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html?utm_term=.d30fbe25e01a> (accessed July 16, 2018).
Philip Rucker, Anton Troianovski, and Seung Min Kim, “Trump doubts U.S. intelligence after Putin denies election interference by Russia,” Washington Post (July 16, 2018): <https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ahead-of-putin-summit-trump-faults-us-stupidity-for-poor-relations-with-russia/2018/07/16/297f671c-88c0-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html?utm_term=.e8ec6f142a93> (accessed July 16, 2018); Stephen Colbert, monologue, “Treason’s Greetings,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (July 16, 2018): <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yh5eG-FBzM>; The New York Daily News (July 16, 2018): <https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/16/1781133/-The-New-York-Daily-News-Cover?detail=emaildkre>; David Smith, “Trump ‘Treasonous’ after Siding with Putin on Election Meddling,” The Guardian (July 16, 2018): <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/16/trump-finds-putin-denial-of-election-meddling-powerful> (accessed July 16, 2018); John O. Brennan on Twitter @JohnBrennan (July 16, 2018); Eric Boehlert, “Trump believes Putin’s ‘Strong and Powerful’ Denial over US Intelligence,” ShareBlue Media, (July 16, 2018): <https://shareblue.com/trump-putin-denial-over-us-intelligence/> (accessed July 16, 2018); Eric Boehlert, “Trump Winks at Putin, Ignores Questions on Russian Election Hijacking,” ShareBlue Media (July 16, 2018): <https://shareblue.com/trump-putin-helsinki-summit-opening-remarks-election-hijacking/> (accessed July 16, 2018); Jack Holmes, “Donald Trump’s Press Conference with Vladimir Putin Was Among the Most Disgraceful Moments,”Esquire.com (July 16, 2018): <https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22164229/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-press-conference-disgrace/> (accessed July 16, 2018).
18 U.S. Code § 2381—Treason (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(2)(J), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148). <https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381> (accessed 12 Feb. 2017). My emphasis.
United States Constitution.<https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii> (accessed Feb. 12, 2017). My emphasis. The phrase “no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood,” refers to the inability of an attainted person (someone convicted of treason) to either inherit property or pass property down to their heirs or descendants. This was a facet of English law that the U.S. Constitution changes here to the lifetime of the attainted person. See: <https://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art3frag62_user.html> and <https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Corruption+of+Blood> (accessed Aug. 5, 2018).
Matthew Lockwood, “From Treason to Homicide: Changing Conceptions of the Law of Petty Treason in Early Modern England,” Journal of Legal History 34 (2013): 34 and Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 207. See also: Barbara Hanawalt, “Violent Death in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century England,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (1976): 297–320 at 299.
See: Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Hanawalt, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’, 14.
Hanawalt, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’, 14.
Green, A Crisis of Truth, 207.
“treason,” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2:3337.
“treason,” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2:3337.
“treason,” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2:3337.
Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, 2:503. Qtd. in Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 1, and White, “The Ambiguity of Treason,” 89.
Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, 2:503 and n. 4, at 504–8. See: Dante Aligheri, Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 34.631.61–3.
Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 1–2.
Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 3.
Lisi Oliver, The Body Legal in Barbarian Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 55.
W.R.J. Barron, “The Penalties for Treason in Medieval Life and Literature,” Journal of Medieval History7.2 (1981): 187–202 at 188. See also: Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 1–3.
Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 1.
Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 2–3.
Danielle Westerhof, “Amputating the Traitor: Healing the Social Body in Public Executions for Treason in Late Medieval England,” in The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross, 177–92 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013), 179.
Westerhof, “Amputating the Traitor,” 179.
Westerhof, “Amputating the Traitor,” 179.
John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. and trans. C.J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), cited in Westerhof, “Amputating the Traitor,” 181.
Westerhof, “Amputating the Traitor,” 181.
Westerhof, “Amputating the Traitor,” 181.
“tradition,” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2:3317.
“treisǒun,” The Middle English Dictionary, online: <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&type=orths&q1=traisoun&rgxp=constrained> (accessed July 17, 2017).
Barron, “The Penalties for Treason,” 188; Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 10–11.
Barron, “The Penalties for Treason,” 187.
Barron, “The Penalties for Treason,” 187; Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 12.
Barron, “Penalties for Treason,” 188.
Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 20.
W.R.J. Barron, Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Sir Gawain Reconsidered(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 36–7. Barron explains that women might be burnt alive “to avoid the indecent exposure of their bodies in public” (37).
Emanuel J. Mickel, Ganelon, Treason, and the ‘Chanson de Roland’(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 145–6.
Mickel, Ganelon, Treason, 145–6.
Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 19.
Musson, Medieval Law in Context, 19.
Westerhof, “Amputating the Traitor,” 178.
Barron, “The Penalties for Treason,” 187 and Trawthe and Treason, 37–8. Barron lists several historical incidents when flaying was threatened and a few when it was actually carried out. See also: Bellamy, The Law of Treason, 13. On the frequency (or lack) of flaying as a judicial punishment, see: Larissa Tracy, ed., Flaying in the Pre-modern World: Practice and Representation(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017).
See my extended discussion on equine quartering and being drawn by horses to the place of execution in Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), esp. 90–6; 179–81.
Mickel, Ganelon, Treason, 147.
Roger Dahood discusses the nature of this punishment at length, reviewing each of the possibilities for defining drawe, concluding that it means dragging along the ground rather than equine dismemberment or quartering. See: “The Punishment of the Jews, Hugh of Lincoln, and the Question of Satire in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Viator 36 (2005): 465–91 at 466–9. He writes that the definition allows three interpretations of the Prioress’s word: “wild horses dragged the Jews without a vehicle, dragged them in a cart, or dragged them on a sledge. If the Prioress meant drawing the Jews on a cart or sledge, the point might be only to ensure before hanging the kind of public humiliation […] Lancelot risks for Guinevere’s sake in Chrétien’s and later Malory’s Knight of the Cart” (469–70). This interpretation is logical because in order for them to be hanged, there must be an intact body—they are drawn to the place of execution by horses and then hanged. However, Mickel explains that the treatment of Jews suspected of crimes was often synonymous with the punishment of traitors. He gives the example of four Jews accused of circumcising a youth “and other atrocities,” who were torn asunder by horses and later hanged, and says that religious offences often seemed to be regarded as similar to cases of treason. (See: Ganelon, Treason, 147 n. 300).
Dahood, “The Punishment of the Jews,” 470.
Barron, “Penalties for Treason,” 189.
Barron, “Penalties for Treason,” 189, 190. See also: Emily J. Hutchison, “Defamation, a Murder More Foul?: The ‘Second Murder’ of Louis, Duke of Orleans (d. 1407) Reconsidered,” in Medieval and Early Modern Murder, ed. Larissa Tracy, 254–80 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018) and Jolanta N. Komornicka, “Treacherous Murder: Language and Meaning in French Murder Trials,” in Medieval and Early Modern Murder, ed. Tracy, 96–114.
Barron, “Penalties for Treason,” 190.
J.R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 344.
Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 44. Brereton translates “le vit & les / couillons” as “private parts,” but the manuscript is much more specific that his penis and testicles are cut off. Jean Froissart, Chronicles, BnF Fr MS 2643, fol.11: Quant it fut / ainsi loye on lui coupa tout / premierement le vit & les / couillons pour tant quil / estoit heretique & sodomite/ ainsi quo[d] disoit mesmen[er]it du roy. Et pour ce auoit/ le roy dechassee la royne de / lui & par son ennorteme[n]t. / Quant le vit & les couil/lons furent de lui coupez on / les getta ou feu pour ardoir. / Et apres lui fut le aieur / coupe hor[es] du ventre et gette/ ou feu pour tant q’[i]l estoit / [fol.11v] fauvo & traytre de cuer et que/ par traytre conseil & ennortement le roy. My transcription.
Lee Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies,” Speculum76.3 (July 2001): 638–80 at 659.
Timothy S. Jones, Outlawry in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 48. According to Pollock and Maitland, Wallace was “drawn for treason, hanged for robbery and homicide, disemboweled for sacrilege, beheaded as an outlaw and quartered for diverse depredations.” See: Pollock Maitland, The History of English Law, 501 n.1; quoted in Barron, “Penalties for Treason,” 189–90.
See: Larissa Tracy, ed., Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), esp. 19–21.
Martin Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculinization,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, 87–106 (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 88.
Klaus van Eickels, “Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England,” in Violence, Vulnerability & Embodiment: Gender and History, ed. Shani D’Cruze and Anupama Rao, 94–108 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 103.
Iain A. MacInnes, “A somewhat too cruel vengeance was taken for the blood of the slain’: Royal Punishment of Rebels, Traitors, and Political Enemies in Medieval Scotland, c. 1100–c. 1250” in this volume.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 27.
Barron, “The Penalties for Treason,” 187.
Barron, “The Penalties for Treason,” 188.
Dante, Inferno, 34.631.61–9.
Megan G. Leitch, Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 57.
Barron, Trawthe and Treason, 50. Barron also compares the struggle with the boar to trial by combat (61), and the killing of the fox to flaying by mob violence (73–4).
Leitch, Romancing Treason, 57.
Hanawalt, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’, 13.
Freddy C. Domínguez, “Traitors Respond: English Catholic Polemical Strategies against Accusations of Treason at the End of the Sixteenth Century,” 251.
Joanna Laynesmith, “Telling Tales of Adulterous Queens in Medieval England,” in Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Words, ed. Lynette Mitchell and Charles Melville, 195–214 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 195.
Laynesmith, “Telling Tales of Adulterous Queens,” 195–6.
Laynesmith, “Telling Tales of Adulterous Queens,” 198.
Dante, Inferno, 5.99.127–9.
Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Treason and the Feast in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” 321.
Massimo Vallerani, Medieval Public Justice, trans. Sarah Rubin Blanshei (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 56–57.
Vallerani, Medieval Public Justice, 57.
Henry Ansgar Kelly, ”Inquisition, Public Fame and Confession: General Rules and English Practice,” in The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England, ed. Mary C. Flannery and Katie L. Walter, 8–29 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 11. See also: Larissa Tracy, ”Wounded Bodies: Kingship, National Identity, and Illegitimate Torture in the English Arthurian Tradition,” Arthurian Literature 32 (2015): 1–29.
F.R.P. Akehurst, “Name, Reputation, and Notoriety in French Customary Law,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, 75–94 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 80.
Both sides of the Brexit debate have deployed accusations of treason against the other, and many have questioned whether the term is appropriate. Stephen Poole, “Are Donald Trump and Theresa May really committing treason?” The Guardian (July 17, 2018): <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/shortcuts/2018/jul/17/are-donald-trump-and-theresa-may-really-committing-treason> (accessed Aug. 5, 2018); David Maddox, “Brexit Betrayal: ‘Extremist Remainers RISKING UK’s Future Should be Hit with TREASON ACT,’”The Daily Express (July 25, 2018): <https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/994196/brexit-news-remain-treason-act-theresa-may-david-campbell-bannerman> (accessed Aug. 5, 2018). It should be noted that, according to Andrew B.R. Elliott, The Daily Express is right-wing publication linked to white supremacy. Medievalism, Politics, and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), 17–8.
