Abstract
Laypeople used funerals, objects, and images to extend themselves physically into the devotional lives of those who survived them. By tracing themselves into the bodies of friends and family members, thereby promoting embodied remembrance, laypeople were able to retain a posthumous presence in York that operated well beyond visual representation. The cognitive theory of conceptual blending can enable us to better understand how elements of material culture helped laypeople achieve this goal. Conceptual blending is the cognitive process by which we transform various inputs into coherent structures of meaning. As we navigate in and interact with the world, we reconstruct it into “mental spaces,” what Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner describe as “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action.”1 Mental spaces are connected to schematic knowledge since they “become entrenched in long-term memory.”2 We build mental spaces from immediate experiences, as well as from what people tell us about the world, and once we organize a mental space’s elements and the relations between those elements into a “known” package, we have “framed” it.3 As Fauconnier and Turner explain, a space can have minimal abstract framing that offers little specification, but its organizing frame “specifies the nature of the relevant activity, events, and participants”; therefore, learning a mental space often involves learning its organizing frame.4
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Notes
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 102.
This decision suggests that the community was prepared to perform this play on relatively short notice. Royal visitors to York include: Richard II, Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III, Henry VII, Princess Margaret (Henry VII’s daughter), and Henry VIII. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., Records of Early English Drama: York, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 130–1.
Lorraine Attreed, “The Politics of Welcome: Ceremonies and Constitutional Development in Later Medieval English Towns,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 215.
Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 134–9.
Rhonda Blair, “Image and Action: Cognitive Neuroscience and Actor-Training,” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, eds. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge, 2006), 176
Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (London: Taylor & Francis, 2008).
P. Jeremy P. Goldberg, “Craft Guilds, The Corpus Christi Play and Civic Government,” in The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (York: University of York and Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1997), 148–9.
Heather Swanson, Medieval British Towns (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
R. B. Dobson who argues that the cycle developed as a way for the overseas merchant elite to exert control over York’s commercial life. “Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Mystery Plays Reassessed,” in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Knight (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 91–105.
Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 53.
Margaret Aziza Pappano, “Judas in York: Masters and Servants in the Late Medieval Cycle Drama,” Exemplaria 14, no. 2 (October 2002): 317–50
Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town,” Past and Present 154 (1997): 3–31.
After 1517, when this body was patented as the “Common Council,” it was composed of two representatives from each of the thirteen “major crafts” and one representative from the fifteen “minor crafts.” Meetings of the civic council were normally attended by the mayor, Council of Twelve (made up of the twelve aldermen), and the Council of Twenty-four (whose life-term memberships were limited to ex-sheriffs). The Common Council did not convene regularly, though it sometimes met to protest the actions taken by the senior Councils or to present its concerns to these bodies. Johnston and Rogerson, York, xiii. See also Sarah Rees Jones, “York’s Civic Administration 1354–1464,” in The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, ed. Rees Jones (York: University of York and Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1997), 108–40.
For example, The Temptation opens with Diabolus saying, “Make rome belyve, and late me gang!” (22.1), suggesting that the actor entered through, or at least physically interacted with, the crowd of spectators. The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982)
Bruce McConachie, “Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007): 559.
Theodore K. Lerud, “Quick Images: Memory and the English Corpus Christi Drama,” in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 213–37
For instance, Rhetorica ad Herennium, by pseudo-Cicero, instructs readers to remember a man accused of murder in order to obtain an inheritance by imagining a man lying ill in bed with the defendant at his bedside “holding in his right hand a cup, and in his left tablets, and on the fourth finger a ram’s testicles” (III.xx). Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. H. Caplan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 215.
Thomas Bradwardine, “On Acquiring a Trained Memory,” in The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, eds. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 208.
Kimberly Rivers, “Memory and Medieval Preaching: Mnemonic Advice in the Ars Praedicandi ofFrancesc Eiximenis (ca. 1327–1409),” Viator 30 (1999): 253–84.
Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “Medieval Sermons and their Performance: Theory and Record,” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden, Boston & Köln: Brill, 2002), 89–124.
Johnston, “John Waldeby, the Augustinian Friary, and the Plays of York,” in In Honor of Clifford Davidson: Papers Presented at the 35th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 6, 2000 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), 1–15.
Amy Cook, “Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Science Approach to Theatre,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007): 589.
Beckwith, Signifying God, 100–3; Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 42.
Scholars such as Ruth Evans and Sarah Beckwith have examined how York’s pageants generate theological meaning through the spectator’s presence within the cycle’s representational field. Although they recognize the spectator and actor as bodied, these scholars concentrate on how meaning develops through signification rather than on how it develops through the spectator’s embodiment explicitly. Ruth Evans, “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
Simon Shepherd, Theatre, Body and Pleasure (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 76.
Mary Carruthers, “The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 881–2.
Francesc Eiximenis, “On Two Kinds of Order that Aid Understanding and Memory,” in The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, eds. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 192.
Mary Carruthers, “Rhetorical Ductus, or, Moving through a Composition,” in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, eds. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 104.
Many scholars have considered how the medieval processional cycle generated social meaning through civic space. The most widely cited article is Mervyn James’ “Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29.
Benjamin R. McRee, “Unity or Division?: The Social Meaning of Guild Ceremony in Urban Communities,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), 189–207.
David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 63–91
Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Much work has examined the York cycle’s route and staging, including Eileen White, “Places to Hear the Play in York: The Performance of the Corpus Christi Play in York,” Early Theatre 3 (2000): 49–78
Meg Twycross, “The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 37–84
David Crouch, “Paying to See the Play: The Stationholders on the Route of the York Corpus Christi Play in the Fifteenth Century,” Medieval English Theatre 13 (1991): 64–111.
William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 114–20.
Gervase Rosser, “Communities of Parish and Guild in the Late Middle Ages,” in Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750, ed. Susan Wright (London: Hutchinson 1988), 35.
See Lynette Muir’s argument regarding the development of the cycle route out of the Eucharistic processional route in The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Julia A. Walker, “The Text/Performance Split Across the Analytic/ Continental Divide,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, eds. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 39.
Sarah Rees Jones and Felicity Riddy, “The Bolton Hours of York: Female Domestic Piety and the Public Sphere,” in Household, Women and Christianities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, eds. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakke and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 245.
Ibid., 239. See also Christopher Dyer, “Work Ethics in the Fourteenth Century,” in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, eds. James Bothwell and P. Jeremy P. Goldberg (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000), 21–42.
Pamela King, “York Plays, Urban Piety and the Case of Nicholas Blackburn, Mercer,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 232 (1995): 42.
P. Jeremy P. Goldberg, “Lay Book Ownership in Late Medieval York: The Evidence of Wills,” The Library 16, no. 3 (September 1994): 185.
For a model for the medieval Book of Hours based upon the York Use, see Horae Eboracenses: The Prymer or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, According to the Use of the Illustrious Church of York, with other devotions as they were used by the lay-folk in the Northern Province in the XVth and XVIth centuries, ed. C. Wordsworth (Durham: Surtees Society, 1920).
For instance, in their analysis of the Bolton Hours, another Book of Hours from York dated to the same period as the Pavement Hours, Patricia Cullum and P. Jeremy P. Goldberg suggest that it was commissioned by a mother under the assumption that it would be passed down along her family’s female line. But the authors also propose that this manuscript may have simultaneously served as a family book. See “How Margaret Blackburn Taught her Daughters: Reading Devotional Instruction in a Book of Hours,” in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 217–36.
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.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 135.
Transcription from Neil Ker and A. J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 729.
For a discussion of “ghosting” in the theatre, see Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
Mark Amsler, “Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle Ages,” Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001): 84.
My conclusions are supported by David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese’s research into aesthetic experiences with art that I discussed in chapter one. Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197–203.
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© 2010 Jill Stevenson
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Stevenson, J. (2010). Devotion and Conceptual Blending. In: Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109070_5
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