This chapter examines the dream vision of Walchelin the priest, as retold by Orderic Vitalis in Book VII of his Ecclesiastical History. This episode has been analysed several times as evidence of the growing importance of purgatory in religious life. Utilising the insights of Elisabeth van Houts into the credibility of witness testimonies, gender and how memory can be anchored in material objects, it argues that this excursus in Orderic's work, presented as an oral narrative, functions as both memory of trauma, and a gendered story of reclaiming power and authority through its re-telling. Walchelin's own, apparently scarred, body can be read as a 'peg' for structuring his memory of a supernatural event. The inclusion of Walchelin's brother as one of the nightmarish host seen by Walchelin introduces a family dimension that, it is argued, makes the story relatable to Orderic's own life as well. The chapter will first outline the story, then examine the ways in which Walchelin established his authority as a witness to Orderic, and finally explore how Orderic himself both remembered and 're-membered', that is, literally put flesh on the bones of, the story in his text.

IN HER SURVEY Crime and Punishment in Ancient India, Sukla Das highlights the occurrence—in religious texts, literary material, and legal digests—of the use of branding and mutilation of the face and body to punish specific misdemeanors, including theft, the sexual violation of women, female adultery, defamation, and assault. Moreover, mutilation (including blinding of the eyes) might also be prescribed instead of the death penalty for acts of treason, and was considered a lenient alternative to death. Such penalties, the rhetoric surrounding their use, and the circumstances in which they were prescribed sound very familiar to a historian of early medieval Europe, where the language and targets of such precepts were similar to those set out in the Indian material. Yet drawing a comparison between the two regions, or even suggesting that their similarities constitute a “legal encounter,” is fraught with methodological problems. First, there is a clear chronological mismatch between the development of the prevailing legal norms of India and Europe; second, neither region can be treated as an undifferentiated whole; third, there is an important qualitative difference between “legal” texts in Europe and India; and finally, even if points of similarity and difference are identified in the texts, these represent not so much a dialogue as a shared recognition that the human body has always been an effective target for coercive and corrective practices. All of this leads to an inevitable conclusion that the corresponding passages in Hindu and Western European texts should not surprise us at all.

Yet the apparent incommensurability of the two regions in the period before 1200 CE has not deterred historians from demanding and attempting comparative work. Susan Reynolds, for example, recently has called specifically for more comparative research on the laws of medieval Europe and India, and set out some questions surrounding the relationships between the royal authority and the law, the role of legal professionals, and the process of justice. This essay, whilst not addressing all of those broader issues directly, will first highlight the problems of comparison across time and place, before examining in detail a specific element of the legal culture of both regions, the use of corporal punishment.

The facial disfigurement of women, whether through deliberate mutilation, accidental injury or the ravages of disease, was and still is a subject that evokes strong reactions, both positive (sympathy for the victim, attempts at rehabilitation and/or reconstruction of the damaged features, psychological counselling) and negative (shock or repulsion at the appearance of the victim, the passing of judgement or calculation of fault that led to the disfigurement, her rejection from the community). Whilst men, too, might suffer traumatic facial damage, the gendered assumption that a woman valued and was valued for her beauty (regardless of the number of onlookers permitted to see her face) was and still is a strong element in the habitus of many communities. Our evolution as human beings has led us to scrutinise the face before all other features, to determine community membership (is s/he one of us?), recognition (who is s/he?), likely reception (is s/he friendly?) and subjective value (is s/he pleasing to the eye?). Any disruption of the facial features confuses such signals, and may even send out misleading ones to the viewer (for example, if features are missing, or paralysis or disease limits facial expressions). The equation of beauty with good and ugliness with evil is a powerful idea.

Yet such categories are not set in stone. Dyan Elliot has pointed up the dangers of female beauty in the specific context of the medieval relationship between confessing women and their clerical confessors, and highlighted the increasing attention of commentators to preventing such relationships becoming carnal. Raymond of Peñafort, for example, recommended sitting opposite the penitent but not looking at her face during her confession. Moreover, the phenomenon of the frequently-confessing woman, she argues, came to be viewed not as a beneficial practice but a ‘pathological’ one. Such terminology marks out one of the ways in which gender, religion and medicine – at least medical metaphors – could intersect, and has direct resonances with the case studies featured in this chapter.

Based on the experiences I have shared with Elisabeth van Houts in compiling a recently published book of translated sources for secular women’s lives from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, this chapter examines the applicability of life-cycle as a structuring tool in the study of women’s lives in the past. Taking as its starting point what commentators such as Carolyn Dinshaw have identified as masculinist conceptions of linear time, as expressed in such schemata as ‘the ages of man’, it will argue that the apparent order and linearity of a lifetime, and its expectation of smooth progress from one life stage to the next, is an illusory ideal, interrupted and disrupted by actual life events. Moreover, certain life events, such as giving birth and mourning, might actually remove a woman from the linear flow of time within her community, as she withdrew from the everyday to observe ritual obligations or vigils. And, if she returned to her normal life afterwards, it might be with the aim of repeating a particular life stage, rather than ‘progressing’ forward through her life. Therefore, as I shall suggest, such a cyclical experience of time may well have produced – and stored for posterity – different types of memories from those available to the women’s menfolk. Collecting sources about secular women enabled an overview of how such processes might work in practice.

It is fair to say there has been a significant dropping-off of publication of sourcebooks about medieval women in the new millennium: is the market saturated, or does this reflect the massive increase in and uptake of material from internet resources? Has the project of documenting medieval women, the starting point in the wider drive to make medieval studies more inclusive, run its natural course? Or might the reluctance to create more source collections acknowledge the difficulty in representing women’s lives, given that previous volumes have rather arbitrarily organized their materials according to preconceived modern notions of medieval women’s communities (thus grouping by social rank) or activities (thus grouping ‘working women’ without really interrogating the term ‘work’)? As early as 1993 Judith Bennett commented along much the same lines, and pointed out that feminism had yet to be integrated into medieval curricula and research frameworks.