The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England

Dyndor, Zoe

doi:10.1057/9781137444011_4

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Gibbeting, for example, involved 'the criminal body being hung raised in chains to rot and stink for any squeamish passer-by travelling along a major public thoroughfare, like the Tyburn road, to see' (Gatrell 2010). Gibbets were deliberately sited for maximum public exposure (Dyndor 2015)-a device that expressed the will of the state and acted as a symbolic form of disciplinary power at a distance (see Foucault 1991).…”

Section: Retributive Justice Deterrent and Posthumous Punishmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capital Punishment, Posthumous Punishment and Pardon

Tomasini

2017

Remembering and Disremembering the Dead

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Capital punishment is understood in the context of the First World War. Those executed by their own country were shot at dawn under the authority of the British Army Act 1881. Chapter 4 opens by attempting to understand 'the shot at dawn' policy as deterrent and posthumous punishment. It does so from a multiplicity of perspectives: a fictive account of what being shot at dawn might have been like; a more formal perspective of the facts and reasons behind the 'shot at dawn' policy; its inconvenient longer-term consequences; and examples of a variety of cases where individuals are tried, sentenced and executed. The corollary of posthumous punishment, both short and long term, is posthumous redemption through pardoning. This chapter proceeds by looking at arguments for and against posthumously pardoning those shot at dawn. While both cases have merit, there is a lack of conceptual clarity on how to decide which is the better. With this in mind, there is an attempt to put forward an argument for posthumous pardoning. To end, posthumous punishment and pardoning is understood in its historical long-view, in order to show how such concepts are subject to continuity and change over time.

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Section: Retributive Justice Deterrent and Posthumous Punishmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capital Punishment, Posthumous Punishment and Pardon

Tomasini

2017

Remembering and Disremembering the Dead

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“…This is particularly true through the symbol of the gibbet as an instrument of public execution and postmortem punishment. The prevalence of the public display of decaying and dissected bodies through the gibbet ensured lasting import of the criminal body through popular lore and ghost stories (Dyndor, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life after death: an introduction to the criminal body in the West

Schrift

2016

Mortality

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This volume explores the cultural meanings of the criminal body in the West through interdisciplinary frameworks. Authors situate the criminal body at different historical junctures to examine its varied and changing symbolic import. Centring analyses on the criminal body at the time of, or after, execution, authors focus on the ways in which the criminal corpse is displayed and managed for social, political, magical and medicinal powers and purposes. Papers draw from archaeological studies, as well as ethnographic sources, including newspapers, museum displays, popular culture and social media. In the individual papers of this issue, authors reference the, by now, wellestablished literature on the significance of studies focused on sociocultural aspects of personhood and the body. 1 More relevant to this issue is the scholarship that has extrapolated from this corpus of 'body' work to focus more specifically on the dead body (Crossland, 2009; Laqueur, 2015; Tarlow, 2011; Verdery, 1999). In what Crossland refers to as the 'public testimony of the body' (Crossland, 2009, p. 70), we have come to understand dead bodies as symbolic venues, protean in their capacity to represent ideas, values and beliefs central to the living. Thus, we can understand the dead as 'social beings, as creatures who need to be eased out of this world and settled safely into the next and into memory (Laqueur, 2015, p. 10).' Studies on the criminal body or, more specifically, the criminal corpse, represent a current addendum 'dead body studies' (Verdery, 1999) aimed to examine the meanings of the criminal body over time and space (

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A Dangerously Empty Space: Crime and Punishment on English Wastelands

Collins

2022

Landscapes

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The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Capital Punishment, Posthumous Punishment and Pardon

Capital Punishment, Posthumous Punishment and Pardon

Life after death: an introduction to the criminal body in the West

A Dangerously Empty Space: Crime and Punishment on English Wastelands

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