Bibliographical Essay

The literature germane to this topic straddles a number of conventional divides. Chronologically the period in question encompasses the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as the first century of what is now called Early Modernity.

Still there is no comprehensive survey of ‘violence in art' or the ‘iconography of violence' for our period. A number of broad-based studies have, however, attempted to give general accounts of the pervasiveness of violence, brutality and pain across functional contexts and across the recognised genres of premodern art. Criminal justice procedures, torture and the rituals of punishment have provided an especially fertile contextual field for this kind of effort. The pioneering works are S. Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) and L. Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence and Martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). Subsequent contributions are M. B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); N. Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); V.

The convergence of pictorial naturalism with extreme forms of violence and bloodshed in late medieval religious art and drama has generated a rich, cross-disciplinary literature. Foundational are J. H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979) and the pioneering publications of C. W. Bynum, especially Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1992), focused on devotional culture, gender and bodily identity; and Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). A useful synthetic statement is C. W. Bynum, ‘Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety: Fifteenth Annual Lecture of the GHI, November 8, 2001', Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 30 (2002), 3-36; followed in the same issue by M. B. Merback, ‘Reverberations of Guilt and Violence, Resonances of Peace: A Comment on Caroline Walker Bynum's Lecture' (37-50).

Dittmeyer, Gewalt und Heil: Bildliche Inszenierungen von Passion und Martyrium im Spdten Mittelalter (Vienna: Bohlau, 2014), with an especially valuable survey of research, and C. Puglisi and William Barcham (eds.), New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013).

A more comprehensive bibliography would include special sections devoted to representations of premodern warfare, battle, chivalric combat and the portrayal of military men; violence in medieval drama and other kinds of ritual spectacles (for example, flagellant processions); the sexualisation of violence, especially in martyrdom and witchcraft imagery; representations of plague and other ecological upheavals, the eschatological violences of Antichrist's reign, the parousia and Last Judgment; and the era's extravagant imaginative visions of purgatory's pains and hell's horrors.