Violent Death in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century England

In: Comparative studies in society and history, Volume 18, Issue 3, p. 297-320

Abstract

Murder has both an attractive and a repellent quality. The tingling, fearfully pleasurable sensation of reading or hearing about murders makes them popular in literature and in the media. George Orwell perceptively sums up this human reaction when he says of one of his characters, "Mother preferred the News of the World which she considered had more murders in it." The fascination with split heads, spilled brains and dismembered bodies was a dominant theme of medieval as well as of modern literature.