How to address the violent elements in medieval culture is a question of perennial importance. It is a question made all the more pressing, and all the more complex, by the conventional image of the period, which tends to regard it as ‘dark, dirty, and violent’ at an almost elemental level. As a string of medievalists has noted from Umberto Eco onwards, contemporary culture is only too ready to classify the Middle Ages in their entirety as ‘barbaric’ or ‘brutal and cruel’, driven by ‘outlaw feelings’ and ‘brute force’, to the extent that the very term ‘medieval’ has come to function as a synonym for sadism or untrammelled butchery. To complicate matters still further, this thinking is not confined to popular representation; when scholarship attempts to chart the frontier between medieval and modern, the image of an indissolubly violent Middle Ages also frequently comes into play. From early work by Huizinga and Marc Bloch, to more recent discussions by Muchembled, Manchester and Pinker, there is a comparable insistence that a ‘violent tenor of life’ reigned over the period, that it was ‘imbued … from top to bottom with the taste for violence’, or that ‘a multiform murderous violence’ was ‘deeply embedded in its fabric’. Indeed, this view has been cemented by some of the most authoritative names in late twentieth-century historiography and cultural theory, who also install violence among ‘the historical processes that have brought us to our present condition’: for such figures as Norbert Elias, Georges Duby, Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, the Middle Ages were fundamentally brutish or aggressive, with ‘the world giving in to reason’ only at their conclusion. Understanding medieval violence is therefore of paramount importance, not only because cruelty dominates our current ‘gothicised’ sense of the period, but because such thinking carries with it a powerful, commonsensical view of how medieval violence functioned, projecting a vision of a culture that was aggressive in an all-pervasive, unchallenged and ungoverned way.

Nevertheless, no matter how tempting it might be to dismiss this viewpoint out of hand, if only for ‘relegating the Middle Ages to an abjected, premodern “other”’, it is not easily shrugged off.