Abstract
To see the Middle English biblical plays with the devil unravels violence as the structural principle of the body of argument within the nexus of power–knowledge–truth. The body of argument intertwines Christian dogmatic reasoning about the body and persuasion through brute force. In often-heated debates, the body is made to perform simultaneously as instrument, reference and signifier of power relations. Knowledge entitlement is en-gendered, within social and religious hierarchies, relative to knowledge of Jesus’s body or of divine plans: women’s/feminised empirical knowledge is pitted against men’s dogmatic knowledge qua Truth and disavowed. More than power qua knowledge does, power qua justice becomes problematic at script level and on the stage through the multiplication of agents of punishment, yet selective punishment of crime.
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Ciobanu, E. (2018). Conclusion. In: Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90918-9_8
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