Extract

This fine book takes up, works with and complicates a whole series of narratives about power, justice, punishment and death, treating gruesome material with a humane sensitivity that is wholly admirable. Thought-provoking at almost every turn, it poses questions about ordinary people's relationship with the most extreme manifestations of state power that continue to resonate into the present day.

Paul Friedland's account opens with the infamous—not to say legendary—Sow of Falaise, a Norman pig executed for the crime of attacking a baby in its crib, most likely in 1386. From a single tangential reference in an archival document, later historians erected a mythical structure that had the pig led to its death in human garb, and even other pigs and piglets brought to the scaffold to witness a deterrent spectacle. What Friedland exposes as fantasy, he also reveals as an attempt to project back in time a one-dimensional construction of spectacular justice as deterrence, when in fact it had been carried out for a wide range of avowed purposes.

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