Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture by Robert Mills (review)

REVIEWS 265 ment in financial credit mechanisms. Women’s participation in the production and sale of goods is examined in the third part of the book, which focuses on drink and food trades, and skilled crafts. Despite the reliance of manufacturing and retailing sectors on female labour, women’s work was typically concentrated at the bottom of those systems . Women, according to McIntosh, faced several gender-based handicaps which typically excluded them from more lucrative economic opportunities. In addition to their inability to travel, to arrange transport on a large scale, and to use the courts to force repayment from debtors, women generally lacked access to substantial capital and/or credit necessary to purchase equipment and supplies , and to hire additional labour, which limited the opportunities available for women as producers and sellers. McIntosh cites several interesting examples from the areas of innkeeping, beer-brewing and baking to highlight the disadvantages faced by women. Working Women in English Society is an original contribution to the scholarship on women’s work in the later medieval and early modern periods. McIntosh delivers a fascinating study, offering an accessible and articulate discussion of working women’s lives. This book is a worthwhile read for advanced and beginning scholars interested in the diverse nature of women’s work and the changes which influenced women’s participation in the market economy. JENNA STOOK, English, University of Calgary Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books 2005) 248 pp., ill. In Suspended Animation, Robert Mills considers representations of human pain in medieval art and literature and the messages that these images communicate to a medieval audience. By invoking the metaphor of suspension, Mills explains that the bodies, which are depicted on the verge of suffering and death, both signify and transcend the corporeality of human life, both evoke pain and supplant it with pleasure. This ambiguity likewise suspends medieval viewers and readers between interpretative possibilities. Their decisions—to identify with the punished body or with the legal, political, or theological forces that impose the punishment, for example—determine “which of the image’s meanings prevails” (203). Mills discerns how medieval audiences understood images of bodily pain by balancing critical reasoning with subjective impressions. As with all of his methodological innovations, Mills convincingly justifies the role of subjective response as a scholarly interpretive tool. If we scholars “are to understand the painting not simply as political allegory or moral exemplum, emptied of all affective content, but as an image that relies on particular visual codes and embodied responses to articulate its ideological message,” Mills argues, then we must reject the protocol by which “the bodies of viewers and the bodies of paintings are not allowed to connect, to touch or mingle in scholarly writing— when one is not allowed to experience shock or horror or surprise in response to a historical artifact” (65). In legitimizing emotional response as an epistemological tool, Mills prudently asserts that the response be grounded in REVIEWS 266 the cultural associations of the Middle Ages themselves, rather than the scholar’s anachronistic, gut-level reaction. The book’s methodology is largely informed by what Mills terms “antidisciplinarity—a resistance to the tendency for disciplinary analysis to exclude certain objects and interpretations from view” (22). Mills examines pictorial and textual artifacts side by side, with consistent reference to the theoretical perspectives of Georges Bataille, Caroline Walker Bynum, Carolyn Dinshaw, Andrea Dworkin, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Elaine Scarry. Antidisciplinarity, then, allows Mills to examine both art and literature complimentary artifacts of medieval culture, and to view these artifacts through the lens of critical theory. Further, antidisciplinarity allows Mills to include elements of modern culture as a means of elucidating medieval culture and demonstrating that, contrary to popular opinion, medieval Christian culture was not obsessed with violence and punishment in a way that is unintelligible to modern sensibilities. He concludes his chapter on medieval representations of hanging by comparing Francois Villon’s fifteenth-century poem Ballade des pendus to Billie Holiday ’s 1939 rendition of “Strange Fruit” (chap. 1); he ends his examination of sodomy in medieval society by noting the similarities between depictions of sodomites in medieval Italian...

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