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.