Abstract
The medieval laity approached religious media with bodies prepared to construct devotional meaning from their live, physical encounters with these works. I have called this devotional tactic performance literacy because it involves seeing and relating to images and objects as if they are live performance events. Performance literacy constitutes an embodied schema; therefore, it is comprised of both the infiction that a person brings to the art work, as well as the patterns for understanding that this encounter with the work traces within the viewer. Like other embodied schemata, performance literacy is not only the means by which spectators may generate meaning through their experiences with devotional art, but it also functions as a plan for future bodily interactions with devotional media. By employing the concept of performance literacy, I aim to foreground the body’s role in visual piety.
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Notes
See Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)
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John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Quill, 1998), 59.
Suzannah Biernoffexplains, “medieval vision had a kinaesthetic dimension. It involved a sensation of movement.” Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 97.
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Robert N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 191–234
Various scholars have analyzed medieval wills as examples of identity performance, and the funerals they describe as public performances. For example, see Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 67–106
Gail Camiciotti Del Lungo, “Performative Aspects of Late Medieval Wills,” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3, no. 2 (2002): 205–27.
Clive Burgess, “Late Medieval Wills and Pious Convention: Testamentary Evidence Reconsidered,” in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1990), 17.
Peter Heath, “Urban Piety in the Later Middle Ages: The Evidence of Hull Wills,” in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 210.
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For an introduction to the typical features of late medieval wills from York and customary funeral practices, see P. S. Barnwell, “‘Four hundred masses on the four Fridays next after my decease.’ The Care of Souls in Fifteenth-Century All Saints’, North Street, York,” in Mass and Parish in Late Medieval England: The Use of York, eds. Barnwell, Claire Cross, and Ann Rycraft (Reading: Spire Books, 2005), 57–87.
John Mirk, Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus, vol. 1, ed. Theodor Erbe (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905; Kraus Reprint, 1987), 297.
P. S. Barnwell and Claire Cross note, “at their deaths virtually all of the more prosperous York testators paid for the four orders of friars to celebrate Masses for the welfare of their soul.” “The Mass in its Urban Setting,” in Mass and Parish in Late Medieval England: The Use of York, eds. Barnwell, Cross, and Ann Rycraft (Reading: Spire Books, 2005), 23.
Anne Bagnall Yardley, Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 113
Clifford Flanagan’s “Medieval Liturgical Processions in Semiotic and Cultural Perspectives,” in Moving Subjects: Procession Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 35–51.
Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 124–5.
Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 243.
The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, ed. R. H. Skaife (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1872).
Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., Records of Early English Drama: York, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979)
This organization was first established in 1357 as the fraternity and guild of Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, associated with the parish church of St. Crux. Between 1358 and 1361, the fraternity built a guildhall on the Foss River, which still stands today. The guild was associated with the Mercers’ craft from its earliest years and by 1420 more than two-thirds of the men working in the guild’s hospital were Mercers; however, other professions are represented among testamentary gifts to the guild. Because the religious guild seems to have offered a fertile beginning for the Mercers’ guild, but was always open to a wider range of professions, any analysis of the Mercers’ pageant must acknowledge the variety of individuals who may have contributed to the play’s design and performance (including the guild’s female members), and also how the Mercers’ organization was simultaneously secular and sacred in nature. D. M. Palliser, Company History (York: The Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, 1998), 4
David Crouch, Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389–1547 (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), 139–40.
For detailed analyses of this indenture, see Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, “The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers, 1433,” Leeds Studies in English 5 (1971): 29–34
Johnston and Dorrell, “The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526,” Leeds Studies in English 6 (1972): 10–35
Peter Meredith, “The Development of the York Mercers’ Pageant Waggon,” Medieval English Theatre 1 (1979): 5–18.
Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 89.
A three-play series related to the death of the Virgin appears at the end of the cycle: The Death of the Virgin, The Assumption of the Virgin, and The Coronation of the Virgin. The series appears between the pageants Pentecost and The Last Judgment. Originally there were four plays in this group, but The Funeral of the Virgin, also known as the “Fergus” play, does not survive. For work on contemporary staging of these plays, see John McKinnell, “Producing the York Mary plays,” Medieval English Theatre 12 (1990): 101–23.
Original: “Rise Marie, pou maiden and modir so milde”; “Come vppe to pe kyng to be crouned.” The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982)
Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, eds., York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Mary’s Assumption is described in an apocryphal book attributed to John the Evangelist. The Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives compiled around 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine, provides us with a version of the Assumption narrative that handles Thomas’s doubt differently: “Thereupon Mary’s soul entered her body, and she came forth glorious from the monument and was assumed into the heavenly bridal chamber, a great multitude of angels keeping her company. Thomas, however, was absent, and when he came back refused to believe. Then suddenly the girdle that had encircled her body fell intact into his hands, and he realized that the Blessed Virgin has really been assumed body and soul.” Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 2, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 82.
Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 17.
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), 191.
Ruth Evans also discusses how this play associates the girdle with Mary’s body. She argues that the pageant sexualized the girdle with the apostles treating it “almost as a fetish, dwelling on its proximity to Mary’s body” (210). “When a Body Meets a Body: Fergus and Mary in the York Cycle,” in New Medieval Literatures, eds. Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland, and David Lawton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 193–212.
Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Richard Marks, “An Age of Consumption: Art for England c. 1400–1547,” in Gothic Art for England 1400–1547, eds. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (London: V&A Publications, 2003), 15.
Susan Foister, “Private Devotion,” in Gothic Art for England 1400–1547, eds. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (London: V&A Publications, 2003), 334–6.
Susan Foister, “Paintings in Sixteenth-Century English Inventories,” Burlington Magazine 123, no. 938 (May 1981): 273–82.
P. M. Stell and Louise Hampson outline the standard format used for medieval English inventories, as well as medieval monetary values, in Probate Inventories of the York Diocese 1350–1500 (York: Unpublished typescript, 2005), 3–7
Revetour’s performance-related entries appear in Johnston and Rogerson, York, 68. For a Latin transcription and English translation of Revetour’s entire will, see Alexandra F. Johnston, “William Revetour, Chaplain and Clerk of York, Testator,” Leeds Studies in English 29 (1998): 153–71.
David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197–203.
Johnston and Rogerson, York, 16. See also The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290, together with a Facsimile of the Ordo Paginarum Section of the A/Y Memorandum Book, and a Note on the Music by Richard Rastall, eds. Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith (Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1983).
“And concerning the rent of the first station, it is let to William Catterton and others beyond the station of the common clerk.” Johnston and Rogerson, York, 801 (187). Source: City Chamberlains’ Rolls. See also Peter Meredith, “John Clerke’s Hand in the York Register,” Leeds Studies in English 12 (1981): 245–71.
Johnston and Rogerson, York, 722 (37). Richard Beadle discusses possible reasons for this performance change in “The York Cycle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 100–2.
A similar concern is expressed in the Banns to the Chester cycle. Although the 1609 Banns describe Chester’s pageants as “set forth apparently to all eyes,” the anxiety over reception expressed here is directed at the performance’s verbal cues: “Condemn not our matter when simple words you hear / which convey at this day little sense or understanding.” Lawrence Clopper, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 240
Pamela M. King, “The York Cycle and Instruction on the Sacraments,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 178
David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 48.
Seth Lerer identifies in medieval drama “a growing self-consciousness about the theatricality of theater.” “‘Representyd now in yower syght’: The Culture of Spectatorship in Late Fifteenth Century England,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, eds. Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 34.
Le livre de conduite du régisseur et le compte des dépenses pour le Mystère de la Passion joué à Mons en 1501 (The Director’s Handbook and the Expense Record for the Mystery of the Passion Performed at Mons in 1501), ed. Gustave Cohen (Paris: Champion, 1925).
Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documentation in English Translation (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982).
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© 2010 Jill Stevenson
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Stevenson, J. (2010). Material Devotion: Objects as Performance Events. In: Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109070_3
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