Juxta crucem lacrimosa

Juxta crucem lacrimosa is a Latin expression meaning “weeping beside the cross,” used as the numbered heading for a section that brings maternal pain, religious imagery, and Alice Espanet’s bodily nightmare into close association. The phrase does not settle what caused Alice’s actions or explain her condition; instead, it frames suffering as an image that recurs alongside the book’s examination of diagnosis, criminal responsibility, and treatment.

Placement and Form

The phrase appears twice in succession as the heading “3. Juxta crucem lacrimosa.” Its position marks a turn from a preceding reflection on the many kinds of people whose inner lives cannot be known with certainty. The section then opens with a question from an anonymous fifteenth-century funeral song about the wound of a woman who has given birth, answered with roasted apple and red wine. The sequence moves from acknowledged uncertainty, through a compact poetic image of postpartum care, to a dream in which the body’s wound becomes frighteningly active.

Maternal Suffering and the Dream

The section’s central scene is Alice’s dream that her cesarean scar opens. A faint internal scratching becomes persistent irritation; the wound tears, blood flows, and her effort to close it with her hands fails. The dream then shifts from injury to uncanny emergence: a spider’s leg probes out of the wound, followed by more legs, until Alice can no longer look and screams. Beside the cross, the heading’s image of mourning resonates with this scene of bodily vulnerability, but the dream makes suffering visceral and unsettling rather than simply devotional.

The Legal and Medical Context

Elsewhere in the account, Alice’s defense invokes Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, arguing that a mental disorder may exempt a person from criminal responsibility if it prevents her from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. At trial, the psychiatrist’s diagnosis of postpartum psychosis is challenged because it rests on Alice’s behavior and her own account, rather than an official diagnosis. The heading’s language of suffering therefore sits beside a dispute over how suffering can be evidenced and translated into a legal judgment; it is an interpretive frame, not proof of a diagnosis or a verdict.

The jury’s decision ultimately leads the judge to replace imprisonment with outpatient psychiatric treatment rather than admission to a psychiatric institution. Read against that outcome, the section heading holds grief and vulnerability in view without resolving the tension between maternal suffering and responsibility. Its placement invites the reader to see the human pain surrounding the case while leaving the legal and medical questions open to examination.