Technology and Wonder in Thirteenth-Century Iberia and Beyond

Abstract

In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) wrote, “allegory serves as a kind of machine to the spirit by means of which it may be raised up to God” (qtd in Swaim 21). According to Gregory, because the human soul has fallen from grace, it requires an allegory machine to elevate it again: “[t]hus when enigmas are set before a man and he recognizes certain things in the world which are familiar to him, he may understand in the sense of the words what is not familiar to him; and by means of earthly words he is separated from earth” (ibid.). According to the traditional explanation of the development of theatre in medieval Europe, mimesis and written drama share common DNA with Pope Gregory’s seventh-century program of liturgical reform, when allegorical tropes were introduced to the Mass.¹ While contemporary scholars have challenged and rewritten an evolutionary model of medieval theatre,² there is little doubt that, as it was explored in musical and figural elaborations of the liturgy, the central rite of the medieval Church was a theatrical act animated by allegory-producing machines.