LHub Seminar Series: Death by water: immersion, ordeal and execution in early medieval England

Partial or total bodily immersion in water is a staple of human societies across space and time and takes an abundance of forms and purposes: for pleasure, sport, hygiene and cleanliness (physical and spiritual), as a means of transit or transport, as a necessity during travel, work or resource extraction, or for accidental reasons, through shipwreck or similar misfortune. In some cases immersions become imbued with special and powerful significance: the new research project on which I am embarking explores the many and various cultural meanings of human immersion in the early middle ages in north-western Europe and England in particular. To medieval Christianity, immersion was powerfully associated with the rite of baptism, but it also carried significant risks: drowning was viewed as among the worst of deaths, its victims unshriven and their bodies generally lost and unable to rise at the Last Judgment. Drowning was associated, furthermore, with the fate of Pharaoh and his armies in the Red Sea: it was a fate appropriate to the worst, the damned, and those forsaken by God. Amid this complex of sometimes contradictory ideas, this paper is an attempt to examine and contextualise early medieval judicial and penal immersions: that is, ordeal by hot and by cold water, and execution by drowning. Probably of Frankish origin in late Antiquity, ordeal became more common from the eighth century, continuing up to the thirteenth century. Drowning as a mode of punishment in England (particularly for women) is evidenced, although only thinly, in lawcodes and other written sources from the tenth century, but may also be identifiable in archaeological evidence. To what extent should these sanctions be read in the context of broader cultural and religious attitudes to human immersions and how should their strongly gendered character be interpreted?

Speaker: Dr Simon Trafford, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Discussant: Dr Danica Summerlin, Lecturer in Medieval History, School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Sheffield

Danica Summerlin is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University in Sheffield. Her research interests span ecclesiastical and legal history, focussing on where the two intersect in Medieval Canon Law and in the political and legal elements of papal government. She has recently finished a project on jurisdictions in the Central Middle Ages, and is now going back to papal history with a project on '(Anti-)popes and the law' at the time. 

Chair: Shekinah Vera-Cruz,  LHub & the University of Warwick

The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants.

This event is free to attend, but booking is required.