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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Editions and Anthologies of Middle English Drama
Beadle, Richard (ed.). 1982. The York Plays. York Medieval Texts s.s. London: Edward Arnold.
England, George, and A.W. Pollard (eds.). (1897) 1966. The Towneley Plays (reprint). London and New York: Oxford University Press.
Lumiansky, R.M., and David Mills (eds.). 1974. The Chester Mystery Cycle. Early English Text Society s.s. 3. London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Sugano, Douglas (ed.). 2007. The N-Town Plays. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Electronic edition: TEAMS Middle English Texts, Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in association with the University of Rochester, 16 May 2009. http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/sugano-the-n-town-plays.
Other Primary Sources
Anselm of Canterbury, St. (1903) 1926. Cur Deus Homo, trans. Sidney Norton Deane. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. 2010. Ed. Michael D. Coogan. Fully rev. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Records of Early English Drama: York. 1979. Ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Tertullian. 1850. Tertulliani Liber Apologeticus. The Apology of Tertullian, 2nd ed., ed. Henry Annesley Woodham. Cambridge: J. Deighton.
Secondary Sources
Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. 2011. Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Biddick, Kathleen. 1998. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bodden, Mary-Catherine. 2011. Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cawsey, Kathy. 2005. Tutivillus and the ‘Kyrkchaterars’: Strategies of Control in the Middle Ages. Studies in Philology 102 (4): 434–451.
Ciobanu, Estella Antoaneta. 2013. The Body Spectacular in Middle English Theatre. Bucureşti: Ed. Etnologică.
David, Alfred. 1998. Noah’s Wife’s Flood. In The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens, ed. James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, 97–109. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
King, Pamela M. 2007. York Mystery Plays. In A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350–c. 1500, ed. Peter Brown, 491–506. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mills, Robert. 2005. Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture. London: Reaktion Books.
Morrison, Susan Signe. 2008. Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Napolitano, Frank M. 2009. Discursive Competition in the Towneley Crucifixion. Studies in Philology 106 (2): 161–177.
Sponsler, Claire. 1997. Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods and Theatricality in Late Medieval England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tolmie, Jane. 2002. Mrs. Noah and Didactic Abuses. Early Theatre 5 (1): 11–35.
Twycross, Meg. 2006. The Theatre. In The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. John F.A. Sawyer, 338–364. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Wenzel, Siegfried. 1989. Somer Game and Sermon References to a Corpus Christi Play. Modern Philology 86 (3): 274–283.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90918-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90917-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90918-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)