Abstract
The Book of Margery Kempe offers ample evidence of imagery’s prominent role within lay devotional practices. The book’s author suggests that religious images frequently triggered Kempe’s powerful physical reactions:
this creature saw a beautiful image of our Lady called a pieta. And through looking at that pieta her mind was wholly occupied with the Passion of our Lord Christ and with the compassion of our Lady, St Mary, by which she was compelled to cry out very loudly and weep very bitterly.1
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Notes
The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (New York: Penguin, 1985), 186 (I.60.3492-5). For the original language, see The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996)
James H. Marrow, “Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance,” Simiolus 16 (1986): 152
Scholars of medieval drama who have attended to performance’s visual contributions to lay devotional culture include: Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Victor I. Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian Drama in the Later Middle Ages (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001)
Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Glenn Ehrstine, Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555 (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 2002)
“Framing the Passion: Mansion Staging as Visual Mnemonic,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 263–77.
Beth Williamson, “Altarpieces, Liturgy, and Devotion,” Speculum 79, no. 2 (April 2004): 381
Eamon Duffy, “Late Medieval Religion,” in Gothic Art for England 1400–1547, eds. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (London: V&A Publications, 2003), 57.
Ibid., 40. Comments by an Italian visitor to England in 1497 reflect this characteristic of lay piety: “Although they all attend mass every day, and say many Paternosters in public, the women carrying long rosaries in their hands, and any who can read taking the office of our Lady with them and with some companion reciting it in the church verse by verse in a low voice after the manner of churchmen, they always hear mass on Sunday in their parish church.” “A Relation... of the Island of England... about the Year 1500,” in Women in England c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources, ed. P. Jeremy P. Goldberg, trans. C. A. Sneyd (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 283.
David Saltz, “Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, eds. David Krasner and David Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 203.
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 104.
For example, scholars have argued that the N-town manuscript was compiled for a reader. See Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 184
Darwin Smith makes similar conclusions about a medieval copy of Pierre Pathelin. See Maistre Pierre Pathelin-Le Miroir d’Orgueil (Saint-Benoît-du-Sault: Tarabuste Editions, 2002).
As David Morgan asserts, a popular religious image is not “a neutral or a blank slate, an unresistant medium that receives whatever believers wish to see limned there.” Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 122.
A frequently quoted story from the early seventeenth century recounts an old man who, when quizzed on his knowledge of Christ, replied “I think I heard of that man you spake of, once in a play at Kendall, called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree, and the blood ran down.” “The Life of Master John Shaw,” in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Charles Jackson (Durham: Andrews and Company, 1877), 139.
Mary of Nemmegen, ed. Margaret M. Raftery (Leiden: Brill, 1991).
Simon Shepherd, Theatre, Body and Pleasure (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 36–7.
Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 12.
Paul Stoller reviews Husserl’s contribution to phenomenology in “Rationality,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 249.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1945; New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962; reprint, London and New York: Routledge, 2005), xii.
Nelson Goodman, “Pictures in the Mind?” in Image and Understanding: Thoughts about Images, Ideas About Understanding, eds. Horace Barlow, Colin Blakemore, and Miranda Weston-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 362–3.
Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 28.
Thompson, Mind in Life, 358. Francisco J. Varela first outlined this approach in “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (1996): 330–50.
Suzannah Biernoff, “Carnal Relations: Embodied Sight in Merleau-Ponty, Roger Bacon and St Francis,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 1 (2005): 39–40.
Robert S. Nelson, “Descartes’s Cow and Other Domestications of the Visual,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others See, ed. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–21.
Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others See, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 208.
David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 104–21.
Roger Bacon, The Opus majus of Roger Bacon, 3 vols, ed. John H. Bridges (London, 1900; Reprint, Frankfurt: Minerva-Verlag, 1964), 2: 52
Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 75
Giacomo Rizzolatti, Laila Craighero, and Luciano Fadiga, “The Mirror System in Humans,” Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language, eds. Maxim I. Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002), 37–59.
Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 22, no. 3/4 (2005), 463.
It is important to recognize that mirror neuron system (MNS) research is still developing and that the evidence is far from conclusive. Recent articles have challenged the notion of action understanding through the MNS in humans or questioned the existence of an MNS in humans entirely. See Gregory Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21, no. 7 (2008): 1229–1243
Angelika Lingnau, Benno Gesierich, and Alfonso Caramazza, “Asymmetric fMRI Adaptation Reveals No Evidence for Mirror Neurons in Humans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 24 (2009): 9925–9930.
Christian Keysers, “Mirror Neurons,” Current Biology 19, no. 21 (2009): R971–R973.
Vittorio Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity,” Psychopathology 36 (2003): 174.
Making a similar point, Phillip B. Zarrilli suggests that “the actor’s body is a site that generates representation, as well as experience, for both self and other,” and that the actor’s experience constitutes “one’s being-in-the-world.” “Towards a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience,” Theatre Journal 56, no. 4 (2004): 664.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 13.
Vittorio Gallese, Morris N. Eagle, and Paolo Migone, “Intentional Attunement: Mirror Neurons and the Neural Underpinnings of Interpersonal Relations,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55, no. 1 (2007): 143.
Kai Vogeley and Albert Newen, “Mirror Neurons and the Self Construct,” in Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language, eds. Maxim I. Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002), 136.
Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 72.
Ibid. Robert Pasnau also discusses this characteristic of medieval visual theory in Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 43.
Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, trans. K. Foster and S. Humphries (London: Routledge, 1951)
Jean Gerson, “Treatise against The Romance of the Rose,” in Jean Gerson: Early Works, trans. Brian Patrick McGuire (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 388
Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Tobin Nellhaus, “Performance Strategies, Image Schemas, and Communication Frameworks,” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, eds. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge, 2006), 83.
A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993).
Lawrence Clopper summarizes these arguments in Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 63–107.
Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1981)
Glending Olson, “Plays as Plays: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge” Viator 26 (1995): 195–221.
Augustine, On Genesis: Two Books on Genesis Against the Manichees and On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, trans. R. J. Teske (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1991), 2: 186–215.
Donnalee Dox, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 14.
Original: “Nam quod legentibus scriptura, hoc idiotis praestat pictura cernentibus, quia in ipsa etiam ignorantes vident quid sequi debeant, in ipsa legunt qui litteras nesciunt; unde et praecipue gentibus pro lectione pictura est.” Latin and English translation as cited in Celia Chazelle, “Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles,” Word and Image 6 (1990): 139–40.
For connections between iconoclasm and anti-theatrical prejudice, see Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama, eds. Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989)
Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Theodore K. Lerud, “Quick Images: Memory and the English Corpus Christi Drama,” in Moving Subjects: Procession Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 215.
Reginald Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Robert, 1860), 163
British Library Add. 24202 contains A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (fols 14r-17v) and Tretyse of Ymagis (fols 26r-28v). I will refer to these texts as Tretise and Ymagis hereafter. A transcription of the Middle English Ymagis is published as “Images and Pilgrimages,” in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 83–8.
Sara Lipton, “‘The Sweet Lean of His Head’: Writing About Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80, no. 4 (October 2005): 1173.
Herbert Kessler describes how in the Middle Ages “many materials were selected because they seemed, in their very nature, to negotiate between the world of matter and the world of spirit.” Seeing Medieval Art (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), 29.
J. Giles Milhaven, “A Medieval Lesson on Bodily Knowing: Women’s Experience and Men’s Thought,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 2 (1989): 356–7.
Ibid., 360, 355. Milhaven builds on Joanna E. Ziegler’s analysis in Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries c. 1300–c. 1600 (Rome: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1992).
In their study of material possessions, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton assert “in all cases where actual physical objects become associated with a particular quality of the self, it is difficult to know how far the thing simply reflects an already existing trait and to what extent it anticipates, or even generates, a previous nonexistent quality.” The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 28
Alice Rayner, “Presenting Objects, Presenting Things,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, eds. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 187–8.
McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 83. Using neuroscientific evidence, Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod suggest that seeing is the product of interplay between two visual systems. Looking at inanimate elements uses a system that creates “visual perceptions,” while the system that processes actions generates “visuomotor representations”; simply put, seeing an object and seeing someone pick up an object trigger different visual systems. Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi–xvi.
David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 200.
Roberto Casati and Alessandro Pignocchi, “Mirror and Canonical Neurons are not Constitutive of Aesthetic Response,” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 10 (2007): 410
Freedberg and Gallese’s response, “Mirror and Canonical Neurons are Crucial Elements in Esthetic Response,” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 10 (2007): 411.
Work by cognitive-evolutionary psychologists can help us explore this idea further. Research reveals that as children we begin to think of plants, animals, and humans as having immutable “essences,” but that we do not ascribe these same essences to objects or artifacts. Instead, we tend to think of objects in terms of function. In her article “Essentialism and Comedy,” Lisa Zunshine provides a brief review of the scholarship in this area. Zunshine suggests that it is in part because the set of essentialism-enabled inferences that we “use to deal with living things is very different from that for dealing with artifacts” that we find plays and stories involving “domain-crossing” so compelling (105, 106). “Essentialism and Comedy: A Cognitive Reading of the Motif of Mislaid Identity in Dryden’s Amphitryon (1690),” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, eds. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge, 2006), 97–121.
David Z. Saltz, “Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance,” Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, eds. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 215
In his article analyzing William Wordsworth’s ethics of the thing, Adam Potkay examines the way the term “thing” had been employed before Wordsworth. According to Potkay, “in Old English there is no term such as object, for a material entity... From this linguistic detail we can surmise that medieval Germanic-language speakers... did not in general conceive of material objects in a delimited physical sense, as separate from events, from the constitution and frame of that which is and comes to be, from the transcendental condition for knowing what little we can know of systems or stories that exceed our comprehension.” For example, he notes how in Beowulf “‘thing’ designates narrative that is not fully known and gestures toward the unknowability of larger chains of events.” Moreover, the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that it is not until William Blackstone’s mid-eighteenth-century use of the term that we have “the first clear example of thing as a —being without life or consciousness; an inanimate object, as distinguished from a person or living creature.’” Potkay, “Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 394.
Katherine Zieman, “Reading, Singing and Understanding: Constructions of the Literacy of Women Religious in Late Medieval England,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 101.
Keyan G. Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson remind us that “people simply are not born literate: they become more or less literate as they develop their endowments into talents through education... Everyday people get on with life as they encounter it, draw on their experience as a basis for getting along, and make it all intelligible by virtue of the fact that what they do works for them.” “’speaking in Tongues, Writing in Vision’: Orality and Literacy in Televangelistic Communications,” in Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion, and Culture, eds. Stewart M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 348–9
Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix
One could argue that this kind of seeing through the body served to perpetuate the trend toward a more visceral faith that began among mystics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Caroline Bynum argues that mystical writing from this period expresses a desire for encounters with God and that “such desire is not only for bodies; it is lodged in bodies.” “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (August 1995): 26. The connection between body and desire found in these texts also invaded lay pious practices. 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
Kathleen Ashley argues that the metaphor of the tactic “allows us to see medieval dramatic performances as always a reinterpretation or adaptation of traditional myths and ideologies.” I am suggesting that it also allows us to see the performance encounter as a reinterpretation or adaptation of the laity’s traditional role in devotion and devotional seeing. See Ashley, “Contemporary Theories of Popular Culture and Medieval Performances,” Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 9.
In some ways, performance literacy is related to the educational concept of disciplinary literacy: “Disciplinary literacy is based on the premise that students can develop deep conceptual knowledge in a discipline only by using the habits of reading, writing, talking, and thinking which that discipline values and uses” (8). See Stephanie McConachie, et al., “Task, Text, and Talk,” Educational Leadership 64, no. 2 (2006): 8–14.
Oliver Gerland, “From Playhouse to P2P Network: The History and Theory of Performance under Copyright Law in the United States,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 1 (2007): 92–3.
Aleksandra Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 1 (2005): 88.
During the later Middle Ages, York had a clear sense of itself as an historically significant city. York was self-governing, the seat of England’s other archbishopric, second only to Canterbury, and by the late fourteenth century had the second largest population in England estimated at fifteen thousand. As Peter Meredith writes, “it was clearly a city proud of its history and its status and jealous of its privileges.” “The City of York and its ‘Play of Pageants,’” Early Theatre 3 (2000): 23.
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Stevenson, J. (2010). Performance Literacy: Theorizing Medieval Devotional Seeing. In: Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109070_2
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