"The Bloody Theatre of Europe". The Culture of Pain, Cruelty and Martyrdom in Early Modern Hungary

Tóth G, Péter (2003) "The Bloody Theatre of Europe". The Culture of Pain, Cruelty and Martyrdom in Early Modern Hungary. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 48 (3-4). pp. 385-396. ISSN 1216-9803

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Abstract

Words like aggression, violence, and violent actions usually carry destructive meanings. People tend to forget their constructive culturally determined meanings. In spite of this, it can be argued that aggressive feelings, hatred, anger, verbal aggression, threatening behaviour, assault, inflicting pain, injuring or ritual killing of men, or the fighting of war are all part of our lives as much as feasts and rituals that bind communities together, or the command to love of different religious ideologies. In the 16th century there was a definitive turn in judging the body in public. It meant that public attention gradually turned from the corpse of Christ to the bodies of the thieves. The two thieves were brought down from their crosses, laid out on the dissecting table, or their bodies were torn apart during fights. Evil-doers became part of scientific cognition. The antisocial public enemy became a hero of the community in the popular literature and historic stories. The conserved and stuffed bodies of robbers and killers were displayed in the first museums of the Early Modern Age, as a main attraction. Rebels were cut into pieces as part of a baroque play on the killing floor to display the parts in buildings of the town. The body of the everyday killer became a spectacle, and the interest in the mind of the solitary killer developed medical thinking on the human spirit.

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