Two hearts, one belonging to the wife of King Edward I and carried with great ceremony to its burial place in London (70), and the other, ripped from the chest of Hugh Despenser the Younger and burned on the scaffold, remind us that bodily partition in medieval society took place in multiple settings. Despite its shortcomings, Danielle Westerhof 's Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England brings much-needed attention to a connection that has too often been overlooked: the division of the noble body for burial and its dismemberment on the scaffold.

Westerhof contends that the funerary practices and execution rituals that partitioned the aristocratic body were rooted in the construction of a noble identity that was tied to physical superiority and haunted by the specter of decay. Thus, the aristocratic corpse was divided after death in order to forestall putrefaction, and, conversely, the display of the decomposing limbs of a traitor symbolized his lack of true nobility. Unfortunately, when compared to the vast scholarship on the body and identity, Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England is not particularly innovative, and Westerhof is not at her best when exploring the nuances of the medieval mentalité. More problematic, she attributes these practices to an embodied noble identity that she presents as static, when in fact the crises of late medieval Britain played an important role in eroding the very solidarity she describes. Although these are significant problems, this work does fill an important gap in the scholarship on medieval penal practice, which has too often failed to acknowledge that kings and queens, as well as traitors, were dismembered after death.

The cadaver, interpreted as the symbol of the state of the soul, is at the heart of the first chapter. The smell of death is the overriding image from this section, from the sweet-smelling uncorrupted body of the saintly Hugh of Lincoln (28) to the stench emanating from the decaying body of the far less admired William the Conqueror (30). Westerhof is at her best when offering up memorable anecdotes such as the story of the embalmed body of Henry I leaking a black fetid liquid (31). She is less successful in handling the intellectual currents that helped shape attitudes toward death and decay, touching only briefly on the doctrine of Purgatory (20) and completely overlooking the importance of the Passion in late medieval piety and its impact on the role of the body as a text. A far better discussion of these issues can be found elsewhere, and Westerhof merely scratches the surface of this complex topic.

In the next chapter, on the construction of noble identity, she argues that the aristocracy felt threatened by the increasingly permeable social boundaries in late medieval England and sought to differentiate itself through the adoption of a cultural identity that was rooted in the embodiment of noble ancestry and virtue. In a reading of the courtly literature that covers very little new ground, she argues that the image of the strong, virtuous, and virile knight was intended to draw a contrast between true nobility and the upwardly mobile but portly and unattractive burgher.

In the subsequent chapters on the funerary practices of the aristocracy and the distribution of the divided body after death, Westerhof argues that multiple burial was rooted in a fantasy of the wholeness and incorruptibility of the noble body. Her reading of the medieval medical texts on the preservation of the body is one of the strengths of this book, and she demonstrates that medieval political discourse, which assigned a certain status to specific body parts, was in concert with medical recommendations for how to delay putrefaction. Although bodily partition for the purpose of multiple burial is discussed with greater skill by Caroline Walker Bynum (Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body on Medieval Religion [New York: 1992]) and Elizabeth Brown (“Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 12 [1981]: 221–70), Westerhof's section on Detestande feritatis builds nicely on this earlier scholarship.

She goes on to argue that, once removed to prevent putrefaction, hearts and entrails, along with the rest of the body, became a form of currency that was used to reinforce multiple social networks. Her point that the nobility employed their divided bodies to negotiate conflicts between tribal loyalty and group solidarity is an old argument. The real value in this chapter is Westerhof's aggregation of the data on burial locations of the hearts and bodies of the aristocracy. Here she demonstrates that dynastic continuity governed the location of the body, whereas the disposition of the heart was often a more personal decision.

In the final chapters she examines the treatment of the body of the traitor. She links the advent of an idealized self-definition of embodied nobility with the mutilating punishments of late medieval England, arguing that the dismembered and decaying bodies of executed traitors were intended to advertise an inner corruption and lack of true noble character. Unfortunately, much of this discussion is too unmoored from political events and, in particular, Westerhof fails to address the impact of the crisis of Anglo-Norman colonialism on aristocratic identity. As the Anglo-Scottish wars remind us, the concept of a single Anglo-Norman elite holding firm to a cultural identity that transcended border politics was not the case after the mid-thirteenth century. The severed limbs of William Wallace were sent to cities in Scotland and northern England for a reason, and, despite her claim that the intended audience of these executions was the nobility, the urban location, crowds in attendance, and distribution of body parts suggest otherwise. Because one cannot disconnect a discussion of noble identity from the crises of the Anglo-Norman empire, a little of the new British history would have gone a long way in improving this book. Although this work is important because it brings together in a single volume an examination of bodily partition in multiple settings, Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England falls short of realizing its full potential.