Heads will roll : decapitation in the medieval and early modern imagination / edited by Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey.

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2012], ©2012.

xviii, 352 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Larissa Tracy and Jefff Massey -- Non potest hoc corpus decollari : beheading and the impossible / Nicola Masciandaro -- Execution and hagiography -- "Like a Virgin" : the reheading of St. Edmund and monastic reform in late tenth-century England / Mark Faulkner -- A crowning achievement : the royal execution and damnation of Eadric Streona / Jay Paul Gates -- Decapitation, martyrdom, and late medieval execution practices in the book of Margery Kempe / Christine F. Cooper-Rompato -- Continental narratives of punishment and othering -- Talking heads in hell : Dante's use of severed heads in inferno / Dwayne C. Coleman -- Severed silence : social boundaries and family honor in Boccaccio's "Tale of -- Lisabetta" / Mary Leech -- Contents the headless giant : the function of severed heads in the ahistorical (aventiurehafte) Dietrich epics / Tina Boyer -- English romance and reality "to be a "fleschhewere" : beheading, butcher-knights, and blood-taboos in Octavian imperator / Renee Ward -- The Werewolf at the head table : metatheatric "subtlety" in Arthur and Gorlagon / Jefff Massey -- "So he smote of hir hede by myssefortune" : the real price of the beheading game in SGGK and glory / Larissa Tracy -- Early modern practice and imagination "at the time of his death" : the contested narrative of Sir Walter Ralegh's beheading / Andrew Fleck -- "Killing swine" and planting heads in shakespeare's macbeththomas herron -- "Tucked beneath her arm" : culture, ideology, and fantasy in the curious legend of Anne Boleyn / Thea Cervone -- Answering the call of the severed head" Asa / Simon Mittman -- Bibliography -- Index.