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Katherine Royer
Little Old Lady
Professor Emeritus
Physician
and occasional wiseass
Published Work
Books
heTheBig Title
The English Execution Narrative, 1200-1700
Pickering and Chatto, 2014
The English Execution Narrative, 1200-1700 explores how descriptions of the execution ritual changed from late medieval to early modern England and in particular examines the changing role of the body in the interpretation of these events.
Contents
1. Setting up the Scaffold
2.The Body in Space
3.The Case of the Missing Blood
4.Death, Time and the Body on the
Scaffold
5. Dressed for Dying
6. The Last Words of that "Cunning Coiner" Henry Cuffe
Book Review from the
Sixteenth Century Journal
The English Execution Narrative
adds crucial elements to the historical understanding of the power of the state, the agency of condemned criminals, medieval and early modern culture, and especially the intersection of the state, religion and the use of ritual.
Excerpt...
Certainly, the younger Hugh Despenser bled a lot at his execution in 1326- yet blood is interestingly absent in the multiple accounts describing this event. In late medieval England the criminal body could be decapitated, disemboweled and dismembered, but it did not bleed- at least not in the narratives describing these executions. From the traitors dismembered by Edward I as he extended his authority over Scotland and Wales to the quartered Thomas Wyatt in 1554, the descriptions of these executions remained significantly bloodless.
Certainly, the event itself was not. Dismembered and beheaded, with their hearts sometimes ripped from their chests, men in late medieval England were executed in ways that had to have been occasioned by significant bleeding. Of course, if they died by hanging before their bodies were dismembered there would not have been a lot of bleeding, but if they, like Dafydd of Wales, were cut down before they expired, the blood loss would have been significant. Yet bleeding is largely absent as a rhetorical device in the late medieval execution narratives.....
Essays
The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague
This chapter examines the history of rats, historians, plague scientists, and two separate plague epidemics to tell the story of how the seductive power of a one-size fits all explanation for the transmission of a disease with multiple hosts, vectors, and victims has complicated the history of plague.
In Medicine and Colonialism,
Ed. Poonam Bala, Pickering and Chatto, 2014
Dead Men Talking: Truth, Texts and the Scaffold in Early Modern England
John Foxe's tale of a dead man whose decomposing body was tried, condemned and posthumously burned at the stake in 1555 is used in this essay to explore the shift in focus of punishment from retribution to reformation in sixteenth-century England.
In Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900: Punishing the English
Ed. Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths
Palgrave MacMillan, 2004
The Body in Parts: Reading the Execution Ritual in Late Medieval England
This essay challenges the assumption that the spectacular executions of late medieval England were solely intended to showcase the power of the state. It argues that these events contained multiple messages one of which was the crown's need to address complaints about the arbitrary nature of royal justice.
In Historical Reflections, Vol. 29, no. 2, Summer 2003.
Works in Progress
Cowboys in the Cath Lab: Other People's Money and the Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Medicine
This book focuses on the experience of physicians trained in the United States from 1964 to 1984 and the creation of the archetype of the Golden Age of Medicine: the "medical cowboy." Bringing together medical history, medical sociology, and anthropology this work explores the characteristics of the "boomer" generation of physicians, the role the policies of third party payers, managed care, and the institutional rationalization of medicine played in their practice experience and rituals, and how these forces helped shape a generation of physicians and changed the practice of medicine.
Myth and the Making of Britain
This is a collection of lectures given on the role of myth in the creation of British identity from the late Middle Ages to the present. Exploring how myths about Merlin, King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Magna Carta, and Lady Godiva changed over time, these lectures address the ways in which myth both reflects and shapes national identity.
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