The Poetics of Violence in Post-Medieval England: Identification of Gendered Performative Violence in the Past

Employing Whitehead’s poetics of violence model, Stone’s approach for identifying cultural violence, and an intersectional approach, we assess evidence for modes of performative violence in an aggregate sample of 113 individuals with observed trauma from five post-Medieval London cemeteries. We focus on evidence for skimmingtons, violent public shamings used to punish community members for violations of social norms, especially gendered norms, and enforce social order. We used established data to assess indicators of domestic violence (DV) (rib fractures, craniofacial trauma, cranial depression fractures) in order to identify individuals potentially subjected to DV and skimmingtons. Low sub-sample sizes limited an intersectional analysis. However, we detected significantly more DV indicators within low socioeconomic status (SES) males (p = .0037), especially older ones, than amongst other social groups, as well as associations between SES and DV indicators. These may represent evidence of DV and/ or skimmingtons, or may be attributable to accidents, assaults, or historically and bioarchaeologically documented high levels of ritualized interpersonal conflict amongst lower SES men that were inherent to the expression of masculinity in post-Medieval England. Embedded within Whitehead’s model, this research may encourage future work on performative violence in the past, such as skimmingtons, that have previously been deemed bioarchaeologically invisible.