出版社:Institute of the History of Art of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
摘要:This paper focuses on two types of late medieval judicial monuments which were
occasionally given sophisticated microarchitectural forms -- the so-called poor
sinners' cross or confessional cross (literal translations of the German terms
Armsünderkreuz and Beichtenmarter), and the pillory. The essay has
two aims: First, to stimulate a discussion about the ways in which such works of
microarchitecture accentuated and structured the performance of civic rituals;
and second, to contribute to a recent debate that investigates the entanglement
of late medieval urban enactments of criminal punishment with contemporary
pictorial and liturgical enactments of the historical Passion narrative. The
following monuments are analyzed within their respective judicial and ritual
contexts: The Spinnerin am Kreuz in Vienna (1451--1452), the Zderad Column in
Brno (dated variously between the late 14th century and the 1470s),
and the pillories of Wroclaw (1492), Schwäbisch Hall in Swabia (1509) and
Kasteelbrakel / Braine-le-Château in southern Belgium (1521). Placed both at the
periphery and at the center of the late medieval city, these structures left a
characteristic and potent signature on people's everyday environment. By
projecting microarchitecture, images and narratives onto a piece of geography,
they invested a place with meanings that had little to do with its actual form.
Topographic features such as market squares, roads, and fields were thus
mnemonically marked as places where justice has been done, or will be done, as
places of social cleansing, expulsion and re-entry. Where Passion imagery or
quasi-liturgical types of microarchitecture provided a visual and semantic
backdrop to the discourse of criminal justice, these places furthermore
reverberated with the collective or individual memory of the events of Golgotha,
and, at least in theory, transformed themselves into moralizing stages on which
the delinquent could be seen to experience his own physical or social
extinction.