Browsing by Author "McVitty, Eva Amanda"

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    False knights and true blood : reading the traitor's body in Medieval England : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2011) McVitty, Eva Amanda
    From the late thirteenth century, traitors in England were subjected to spectacular rituals of public execution that could include drawing, hanging, disembowelling, beheading, quartering and bodily display. These executions took place within a context in which the human body was saturated with significance. The body of Christ, the body politic imagined through the body of the king, and the whole and perfect body of the perfect knight were all central constructs in medieval thought. This thesis considers the polyvalent cultural meanings and responses that could be generated when the traitor’s broken and divided body was read in relationship to these other, idealised bodies. The ritualised processes of the traitor’s execution were intended to send a message about hegemonic power, particularly the king’s power over the bodies and lives of his subjects. However, the public and performative nature of these spectacles meant that they could provoke unpredictable and unexpected interpretations. Through a close analysis of documentary accounts of a number of high-profile executions that took place in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, this study explores the ways the traitor’s body could work to destabilise and subvert dominant notions and relationships of status, gender, and political authority that the ritual of execution was intended to reinforce. The work that follows is structured around three thematic chapters. In Chapter Two, it examines the ways the trial and punishment of traitors made manifest deep uncertainties surrounding the social status of ‘knighthood’, in the process publicly exposing cultural and political conflicts over claims to power. Chapter Three turns to the challenges the traitor posed to the construction of aristocratic masculinity. Beginning from a premise that the categories of ‘knight’ and ‘traitor’ were ostensibly wholly oppositional but in reality mutually constitutive, it examines the potential for slippage from the masculine ideal of knighthood to the monstrous feminised inversion represented by the traitor. Chapter Four considers the complicated relationship that could develop between the traitor’s body to the bodies of Christ and the martyrs. It analyses a number of accounts that actively engage with the Passion topos in ways that invite alternative interpretations and resistant responses to acts of spectacular public execution.
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    Treason, manhood, and the English State : shaping constitutional ideas and political subjects through the laws of treason, 1397-1424 : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2016) McVitty, Eva Amanda
    Debates about treason are inherently constitutional conflicts. By defining treason and naming the entities against which traitors offend, the state delineates the nature and limits of its own authority. By implication, treason is integral to shaping loyal political subjects. This thesis uses legal records alongside a range of other sources to examine how the relationship between the English state and its political subjects was being negotiated through the laws of treason during the politically turbulent period between 1397 and 1424. Previous studies have asserted that between the mid-­‐fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the legal scope of treason remained static and the crime continued to be viewed primarily in traditional terms as an attack on the king’s person. By contrast, this thesis demonstrates that while customary and chivalric definitions remained relevant, by the early fifteenth century they were being subsumed by constructions of treason as a crime against the the nation, the public good, and the English people. This had significant constitutional repercussions. It fostered the alignment of political subjecthood with ethnicised national identity; it introduced into English law the idea of treason as an insult to the abstract public authority of the state; and it enabled significant expansions in the scope of treason to encompass verbal and written expressions of political dissent, and other offences. By considering the content of sources but also their multilingual character, this thesis illuminates rhetorical and linguistic strategies used to construct or to resist allegations of treason, and demonstrates how the vernacular functioned both to authorise and to subvert the state’s prosecution narratives. This thesis also presents a new interpretation of significant changes in the treatment of treasonous speech by showing that this was facilitated by a cultural conjunction between the gendering of particular speech acts and the perceived material effects of men’s words. This created the justification for men's words to be punished as treasonous deeds, but also generated means by which the accused could assert resistant identities as loyal subjects and 'trewe men'.