Jean Fouquet's miniature of the Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia (c. 1415/20– 1481—fig. 1) represents a moment repeated, throughout late-medieval France and in other countries: an individual being tortured is on the verge of death, while a crowd, seeing the horror, looks on dispassionately, it seems. Two men bind the saint to an inclined plank with taut ropes, and another pulls her golden hair, while a fourth man yanks out her teeth with pliers that are nearly as long as her body. Apollonia's torture became slow and cruel in late-medieval hagiography and iconography, in contrast with the swift and violent tooth-breaking found in earlier versions of the story from the fourth century through the thirteenth-c. Legenda aurea, according to Leslie Abend Callahan, who cites a late fourteenth-c. Passio as well as Fouquet's illustration. She calls the later representations “an apparent shift in focus from the narration of events to the highlighting of one moment of physical pain and torment.” During the same time period, onlookers witnessed similarly painful moments within the dramatic framework of most saint plays and in public punishments.

This article explores three models for response by late-medieval spectators to the theatrical saint's body in pain: seeing the body as object, identifying with it, and entering into a dialogue with it. Each model is interpreted within a fifteenth-c. French context, always taking into account the hypothetical spectator's gender (thereby turning our three models into six). Although we will not consider the implications of a gender switch for the body in pain at the center of the spectacle, we must note that the martyrdom of male saints followed much the same pattern as that which is discussed here. Our goal is also to understand the ways in which spectator response to suffering helped to create France as a nation, as saint plays belonged to the same culture-building mechanism as judicial torture and public execution, which we will discuss in passing. Modern theoretical approaches to the body in performance may indeed lead to understanding medieval culture, provided that they are used with our careful regard for the historical context of this martyrdom.