Abstract
I remember distinctly the experience that sparked my passion for theatre. I was ten years old and sat in the front row of the mezzanine at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. During the performance, I leaned forward, my forehead pressed to the balcony railing and eyes glued to the stage. In the weeks that followed, despite repeatedly recounting in vivid detail all that I had heard and seen onstage, I felt incapable of expressing in words the show’s powerful impact on me. Its narrative and main idea were not the source of pleasure; the spectacular set, make-up, and costumes were not the cause either. And although I am certain that I had seen other plays before this one, this is the production that stays with me even now. It was Cats.
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Notes
Aleksandra Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 1 (2005): 85
See Kathleen Ashley, “Sponsorship, Reflexivity and Resistance: Cultural Readings of the York Cycle Plays,” in The Performance of Middle English Cultures: Essays on Chaucer and Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens, eds. James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, 9–24 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1998)
Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
There are certainly exceptions. Two recent publications that address this gap are: Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1.
The narrator in Piers Plowman recalls: “The ladies danced until the day dawned, / When the men rang bells to the resurrection—right then I woke, / And I called to Kytt my wife and Calote my daughter: / “Rise and go do honor to God’s resurrection, / And creep to the cross on knees, and kiss it as if it were a jewel!” William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 325.
Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 49–50.
Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., “The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology,” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 31.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 53.
Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992).
Sarah Stanbury argues, “One of the most striking and coercive features of both the Meditationes and of Love’s Mirror is the use of the vocative, the voice of an invisible authority that not only orchestrates the story and commentary but also tells us how to see it, coaxing us to ‘behold’ landmark events in Christ’s life.” The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 178.
See particularly Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France, The Twelfth Century: A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)
M. D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 87–104.
York Art: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art Including Items Relevant to Early Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1978), iii.
For a critique of EDAM’s mission, see Martin Stevens, “The Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama,” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 318
Sheingorn, “On Using Medieval Art,” 101–9; “Medieval Drama Studies and the New Art History,” Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 143–62
“The Visual Language of Drama: Principles of Composition,” in Contexts for Early English Drama, eds. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldeway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 173–91.
As I will argue in chapter one, materiality is a particularly important element to consider with respect to medieval art. As Herbert L. Kessler writes, “Overt materiality is a distinguishing characteristic of medieval art... The materials do not vanish from sight through the mimicking of the perception of other things; to the contrary, their very physicality asserts the essential artifice of the image or object.” Seeing Medieval Art (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), 19.
Robert Scribner describes piety as a “way of seeing” in “Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany,” Journal of Religious History 15 (1989): 456.
Here are just a few texts published on this subject in the last decade: Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)
Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003)
A. B. Mulder-Bakker, ed., Seeing and Knowing: Medieval Women and the Transmission of Knowledge (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004)
Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Pauline Stafford and Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, eds., Gendering the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002)
Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991)
Anna Dronzek, “Gendered Theories of Education in Fifteenth-Century Conduct Books,” in Medieval Conduct, eds. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 142.
Ibid., 143. See also Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 50–74; and Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71, no. 1 (January 1996): 66–86.
Robert L. A. Clark, “Constructing the Female Subject in Devotion,” in Medieval Conduct, eds. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 173–4.
See particularly Performance and Cognition, eds. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, eds. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006)
Anne L. Clark’s essay “Why All the Fuss About the Mind? A Medievalist’s Perspective on Cognitive Theory,” in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, eds. Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 170–81.
Bruce McConachie, “Metaphors We Act By: Kinesthetics, Cognitive Psychology, and Historical Structures,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 8, no. 2 (1993): 23–45
Bruce McConachie, “Preface,” Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, eds. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge, 2006), ix.
Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14.
Mark Johnson’s recent work in this area, see The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 5
Naomi Rokotnitz, “‘It is required/You do awake your faith’: Learning To Trust the Body Through Performing The Winter’s Tale,” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, eds. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge, 2006), 140.
There has been a significant amount of research on the art and architecture of medieval York, including York Art, edited by Clifford Davidson, and the Royal Commission’s Inventories of Historical Monuments in York. I have used Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York. Volume Three: Southwest of the Ouse (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1972)
E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1903).
Harold C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946)
V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966)
Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)
R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983)
Peter W. Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
Patrick J. Collins, The N-Town Plays and Medieval Picture Cycles (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1979).
In Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, Martin Stevens identifies the York cycle as “more nearly a communal enterprise than any other extant English cycle” (17). Richard Beadle describes how York’s cycle “contrasts variously with the eclectic approach to the cycle structure adopted by the compiler of the N-town manuscript, or Chester’s self-conscious attempt to recreate the genre in a form appropriate to the changing times of the sixteenth century, or the radical experimentations with the individual components of the cycle found in the plays of the Wakefield Master.” See “The York Cycle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 89.
Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., Records of Early English Drama: York, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), xix.
Theresa Coletti’s “Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 248–84
Patricia Badir’s response, “Playing Space: History, the Body, and Records of Early English Drama,” Exemplaria 9, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 255–79.
I am not suggesting that an exact reconstruction of the medieval performance could ever take place. However, York’s topography still provides the pageant route, with many medieval buildings and churches along its path. As Eileen White admits, “it is still possible to walk the streets of York that contained the procession of wagons and by their shape and size dictated the style of performance, and sense a link between the old and the new tradition” (75). “Places to Hear the Play: The Performance of the Corpus Christi Play at York,” Early Theatre 3 (2000): 49–78.
Ibid., 3. Revisiting the A/Ywith a digital camera, Meg Twycross has identified previously unseen erasures and emendations that shed further light on the continually shifting life of the York cycle. In respect to this particular 1376 entry, she discovered that it “is written over an erasure in a different ink and different, later, hand, and that the accepted dating of the earliest record of the York cycle is therefore, to say the least, unsafe” (113). She suggests that, at this point, the hand looks like “one which appears later in the Memorandum Book, from the 1390s” (129). “The Ordo paginarum Revisited, with a Digital Camera,” in “Bring furth thepagants”: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, eds. David Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 105–31.
Alexandra F. Johnston argues that these plays were presented on wagons in the same processional format as the Corpus Christi cycle, and most scholars believe that both the Creed and Pater Noster plays were divided into smaller pageants that coincided with the petitions. See Johnston, “The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York: The Creed Play and The Pater Noster Play,” Speculum 50 (1975): 55–90.
Sue Powell, “Pastoralia and the Lost York Plays of the Creed and Paternoster,” European Medieval Drama 8 (2004): 35–50.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, “Becoming and Unbecoming,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, eds. Cohen and Wheeler (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997), xviii.
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© 2010 Jill Stevenson
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Stevenson, J. (2010). Introduction: Devotional Modes of Becoming in Late Medieval York. In: Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109070_1
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