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Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages
From the fourteenth century on, the artifacts of Western visual culture became increasingly violent. Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, devilish doppelgängers of the violence made real people nameless exemplars of formless, hideous horror. In Defaced , the historian Valentin Groebner provides a highly sophisticated historical, cultural, and political model for understanding how late-medieval images and narratives of “indescribable” violence functioned.
Early modern images formed part of a complex, often contested, system of visualizing extreme violence, as Groebner reveals in a series of political, military, religious, sexual, and theatrical microhistories. Intended to convey the anguish of real pain and terror to spectators, violent visual representations made people see disfigured faces as mirrors of sexual deviance, invisible enemies as barbarian fiends, and soldiers as bloodthirsty conspirators wreaking havoc on nocturnal streets.
Yet not every spectator saw the same thing when viewing these terrifying images. Whom did one see when looking at an image of violence? What effect did such images have on spectators? How could one distinguish illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, “just,” and sanctioned use of force? Addressing these issues, Groebner not only calls into question contemporary habits of thinking about early modern visual culture; he also pushes his readers to rethink how they look at images of brutality in a world of increasing violence.
Early modern images formed part of a complex, often contested, system of visualizing extreme violence, as Groebner reveals in a series of political, military, religious, sexual, and theatrical microhistories. Intended to convey the anguish of real pain and terror to spectators, violent visual representations made people see disfigured faces as mirrors of sexual deviance, invisible enemies as barbarian fiends, and soldiers as bloodthirsty conspirators wreaking havoc on nocturnal streets.
Yet not every spectator saw the same thing when viewing these terrifying images. Whom did one see when looking at an image of violence? What effect did such images have on spectators? How could one distinguish illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, “just,” and sanctioned use of force? Addressing these issues, Groebner not only calls into question contemporary habits of thinking about early modern visual culture; he also pushes his readers to rethink how they look at images of brutality in a world of increasing violence.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 23, 2018
Security. “Is it the opposite of violence?”
January 21, 2008
Valentin Groebner writes about identity in the early modern period - 15th-17th centuries. For Groebner, however, identity is used not simply in its postmodern sense, as the sense of self crafted collectively and felt individuall - what we understand in, for example, "identity politics."
While his book certainly touches on this sense of identity, it also starts with something much more fundamental: how did people understand a sense of self, and more importantly, how could they prove this self to others? In our era of ubiquitous proof and marks of self, it is easy to forget how difficult it must have been to prove oneself in an era before photography, biometrics, IDs, and other official proof of self. Groebner's most recent book - which I haven't gotten round to yet - follows this theme, furnishing a history of the development of IDs, passports and other official documentation, produced by both established ecclesiastical and nascent state institutions.
"Defaced" seems like it might be a side-project of the longer work on passports. Groebner looks at violence in the early modern period, especially violence done to the face, or violence carried out by or upon the faceless. For example, one section examines violence done to people's faces in disputes over honor, and uses courts cases to determine the amount of money to be paid for doing violence to various types and parts of faces - lordly and plebeian, female and male, child and adult, nose and mouth, etc. Another chapters looks at anonymous nighttime violence, by masked and disguised parties, in the Alps of Switzerland and Italy.
Overall, a fascinating book, well-written, and with the occasional aside that links these earlier concerns over the face, identity and violence to our own modern era.
While his book certainly touches on this sense of identity, it also starts with something much more fundamental: how did people understand a sense of self, and more importantly, how could they prove this self to others? In our era of ubiquitous proof and marks of self, it is easy to forget how difficult it must have been to prove oneself in an era before photography, biometrics, IDs, and other official proof of self. Groebner's most recent book - which I haven't gotten round to yet - follows this theme, furnishing a history of the development of IDs, passports and other official documentation, produced by both established ecclesiastical and nascent state institutions.
"Defaced" seems like it might be a side-project of the longer work on passports. Groebner looks at violence in the early modern period, especially violence done to the face, or violence carried out by or upon the faceless. For example, one section examines violence done to people's faces in disputes over honor, and uses courts cases to determine the amount of money to be paid for doing violence to various types and parts of faces - lordly and plebeian, female and male, child and adult, nose and mouth, etc. Another chapters looks at anonymous nighttime violence, by masked and disguised parties, in the Alps of Switzerland and Italy.
Overall, a fascinating book, well-written, and with the occasional aside that links these earlier concerns over the face, identity and violence to our own modern era.
December 20, 2012
Groebner is a great, engaging historian, and this is my favorite book of his. Some of the stuff on facial mutilation stuck with me and informed a lot of work I did in the following months, and his material on the "man of constant sorrows" meshed well with some thoughts I'd been mulling over from Caroline Walker-Bynum.
March 21, 2010
exceptional. thoughtful. need to work some of this into my classes.
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October 27, 2017704.9 G8741 2004
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews