The skull of a prominent Wampanoag Indian whose father was a dignitary in the eyes of the earliest British settlers was on display at a Plymouth fort for decades. A reenactment showed lovely colonial women going about their gardening with the head on a post nearby, while the narrator said they took it as a sign that God was taking care of them. So my question is this: how does a supposedly civilized culture treat the grotesque and brutal as normal and even positive? I'm specifically curious about the "fairer sex," as I can't imagine something as serene as garden work juxtaposed with horror for the non-war-waging gender.
I'll be the one ducking in the corner to avoid shots fired over my sexism while one or more of you great historians gives an answer.
Who knows, maybe it's relevant given the current ISIS problem.
Thank you!
You have to remember that putting the head of a criminal on a gate , or "gibbeting" the whole corpse, for public display was a commonplace of 17th century justice in England, had been for quite some time. Gibbeting would be continued into the 18h century. Puritans were not exempt from using it, or other cruel and unusual punishments. When James Naylor the Quaker was found guilty of blasphemy ( riding into Bristol on Palm Sunday imitating Jesus) the Puritan "Barebones" Parliament spent great deal of time debating whether to bore his tongue, brand him,cut off his ears, etc.