Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
There are perhaps few subjects more difficult for scholars to address than past forms of capital punishment, especially those that do not simply punish, but literally torment the victim to death. Following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault's account of the execution of François Damiens in Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), the authors of this volume take on the daunting task of making cultural and historical sense out of one of the more disturbing forms of such torment--imperial China's execution of the criminal through the systematic dismemberment of the living body (lingchi ). Seeking neither to sensationalize nor to project current values onto the past, the authors insist that it is necessary to provide a detailed history of capital punishment in China and to place such events in a comparative frame with European practices. While readers may shudder at the images reproduced here, the authors succeed in making sense out of what Europeans since the Enlightenment have viewed as an especially barbarous form of public execution by a society that claimed to be civilized.
The book opens with the execution of Wang Weiqin in Beijing in 1904, one of the...