CMEMS Workshop

"Weak Power: Politics of Victimhood in the Middle Ages" 

In this article, I present a genealogy of the concept of victim in order to explore how the concept, originally designated as an object of sacrifice, came to label a harmed party. In the course of this examination, I reject the thesis adopted by earlier scholarship—namely, that the figural meaning of victim (‘a harmed party’) emerges through the interpretation of Christ’s death in terms of sacrifice within Christian theology. Instead, I identify the concept of victim, signifying harmed person, through a variety of pre-Christian authors and sources. Moreover, the patristic authors themselves avoided the application of the term to Christ.  My article demonstrates that it is not the initial representation of the Passions as a sacrifice, but rather modifications to the term that occurred in late medieval piety, that informed the fusion and confusion of meanings of victim. Beginning from the High Middle Ages, the marginal figural meaning gradually overcame the original religious one and by the 18th century became the primary sense that disconnected the victim from a ritualistic context.