Abstract
While the unpredictability of an audience makes completely shared vision impossible, The Castle of Perseverance still attempts to define the central castle structure as the location of communal vision and a counter to vision that is turned on the self. In entering the castle, Humanum Genus is in effect looking to both the universal and local church. However, The Castle of Perseverance also reconciles individual piety—which in many cases in East Anglia involved the creation of an object for visual contemplation—with community contribution. Both are declared as essential for the common good, and together they provide the ultimate defense from inward-turned vision. As the experience of a play does not allow for moments of deep mystical contemplation, The Castle of Perseverance instead demonstrates the importance of looking on correct images and designates the creation of such images as a pious act. What’s more, by making these images out of cloth—the commodity that made East Anglia so prosperous—the play appears to acknowledge both social and individual piety. The play uses visuality to teach about vision, culminating in the central siege on the castle, which I propose renaming the “battle of the banners.”
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Notes
Jennifer L. Ball, “Double-Headed Eagle Embroidery: From Battlefield to Altar,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 41 (2006), 59–64, shows how a medieval altar cloth was adapted in the nineteenth century.
Pamela Sheingorn, “On Using Medieval Art in the Study of Medieval Drama: An Introduction to Methodology,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 22 (1979), 101–109, quotes one record: “Item ij vestments…and one sepulchre [cloth] sold to Mr blewit sens candlemas last past 1565 and he haithe defaced and cut theim in peces and made bed hangings thereof and cushinges” (104). Sheingorn references
Edward Peacock, English Church Furniture, Ornaments and Decorations, at the Period of the Reformation (London: John Camden Hotten, 1866). Items cited from Lincolnshire inventory, Harlaxton.
Jessica N. Richardson, “The Brotherhood of Saint Leonard and Saint. Francis: Banners, Sacred Topography and Confraternal Identity in Assisi,” Art History, 34.5 (2011), 886.
Joanna Cannon and Caroline Villers also make the same point in Caroline Villers, ed., The Fabric of Images: European Paintings on Textile Supports in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London: Arcetype Publications, 2000), introduction, vii.
Nicola A. Lowe, “Women’s Devotional Bequests of Textiles in the Late Medieval English Parish Church c. 1350–1550,” Gender and History, 22.2 (2010), 407–429. “Apart from donating items, women were also responsible for the constant washing and patching of church linen which was not discarded until it was beyond repair. The 1505 churchwardens’ accounts for Bishop’s Stortford record that, after making several earlier payments to John Hopkins’s wife for mending holed and frayed items, ‘3 broken surpleys and a torren awtercloth’ were finally sold for 6d” (411).
Robert W. Jones, Bloodied Banners: Martial Display on the Medieval Battlefield (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 33.
Peter Arnade, “Crowds, Banners, and the Marketplace: Symbols of Defiance and Defeat during the Ghent War of 1452–1453,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 24.3 (1994), 496, 492.
John R. E Bliese, “Saint Cuthbert and War,” Journal of Medieval History, 24.3 (1998), 215–241.
Norman Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532, PIMS Studies and Texts 66 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies [PIMS], 1984), 70–71, lists ordinances of 1449 that call for all crafts to process with their banners.
John Wasson and David Galloway, eds., Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk, Malone Society Collections II, 1 (Oxford: The Malone Society, 1980). Wasson and Galloway comment on the records from Kings Lynn: “Numerous undated computi in this small paper book give, between 1469 and 1499, payments ‘for burying of ye shaft on halowmesday and Corpus Christi day’—vexillators, apparently” (p.52). They also note that in Snettisham, “an expense ‘for ye schaftes on holy thorsday” always follows the annual payment to the Ingaldsthorpe procession. Whether the two payments were related, or whether the shafts were for vexillators, cannot be ascertained” (p.85). Other records that they have collected include: King’s Lynn, 1488, “And we ordeigne that the baner be born on holi Thursday and Corpus xpi Day at ye skyvens coste or to lese I lb. wax” (p. 54) and Snettisham 1501,“Item payd to ye young men for beryng ther shaft to sent Edmunde vjd” (p. 9). Commenting on the collections of money that were likely accompanied by a banner, “Tilney All Saints seems to have derived most of its income from collections about the town. The first, recorded in 1453, is simply called ‘le candelsylver.’ Later there is the usual Plough Monday collection (called ‘Plow sylver’), and additional collections, with banners and tabernacles, are added at the May fete and in Cross Monday of Rogation week” (116). Other records listed by Wasson and Galloway include: Tilney All Saints 1474, “in expensis pro portantibus vexilla in processionibus iiijd” (p. 116); Tilney All Saints 1477, “Item solutum pro veccione imagines Sancti Jacobi et iijm tore: ijd” (p. 117); Tilney All Saints 1508, “Imprimis for beryng off banerys to Saynt Lawrence and ye Crosse dayys iiijd” (p. 117); Tilney All Saints 1545, “Item payd for…beryng of the banner in Crost wyke ijd” (p. 118); Creeting St Mary 1506 and 1507, “Item to the baner Berer” jd paid in both years” (p. 151); Creeting St Mary (Suffolk), banner bearer and minstrel 1506–1507, 1509–1514 minstrel, 1515–1521 minstrel, banner bearer, 1522–1526 banner bearer, 1527–1529 banner bearer, minstrel, 1530 minstrel, 1531–1532, 1535–1526 banner bearer, minstrel, 1537?-1538? minstrel (p. 231); Croxton (Norfolk) 1506–1507, 1524–1525 banns?; Thetford (p. 231); Little Walsingham (Norfolk), 1517–1519 minstrels, 1520 vexillators, minstrels, 1521–1533, 1535–1536, 1538 minstrels, 1539 vexillators, 1541–1542 minstrels, bearer of dragon, 1543 bearer of dragon, 1544–1545 minstrels, bearer of dragon (p. 234).
Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, eds., York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, first edn 1984, repr. as Oxford World’s Classics, 1999). This play also refers to “shafts” (168, 241), banners (168, 177, 217, 242), lances (182), standards (194, 214).
See, for example, Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘“This Skill in a Woman Is by No Means to Be Despised’: Weaving and the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork and Other Cultural Imagining, ed. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 104;
Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years—Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (New York: Norton, 1995);
Katherine L. French, “‘I Leave My Best Gown as a Vestment’: Women’s Spiritual Interests in the Late Medieval English Parish,” Magistra, 4 (1998), 57–77.
“This incident is included in the three great French Passions and Mâle argues that these dramatic representations account for the sudden appearance of St Veronica in late medieval iconographic representations of the road to Calvary.” Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 403.
Coldewey, “The Non-Cycle Plays,” 213, referencing P. J. Bowdwen, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1962);
R. S. Schofield, “The Geographical Distribution of Wealth in England, 1334–1649,” Economic History Review, 18 (1965), 353–356; and Beadle’s discussion of East Anglian society in “The Medieval Drama of East Anglia,” 128–130.
See also Penelope Dunn, “Trade,” in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), 213–234.
Edward T. Long, “Screen Paintings in Devon and East Anglia,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 39.343 (1931), 170.
Keen notes that fourteenth-century heralds had the roll of messenger, were protected through immunity, but also had to act as historians, noting the different abilities of those fighting and providing a commentary on those fallen. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (London: Yale University Press, 1984), 134–135.
Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Patricia H. Ward, “The Significance of Roses as Weapons in The Castle of Perseverance,”Studia Mystica, 14.2 (1991), 84–92: “It would be foolish to deny that the rose had manifold symbolic meanings in the Middle Ages. The Virgin Mary is often referred to as the ‘rosa sine spina’ in hymns and lyrics. The rose is also mentioned in several verses in the Old Testament (e.g. Ecclesiasticus 24:18, 39:17, 50:8, Wisdom 2:8) which of course were interpreted allegorically by the exegetes” (87). She also notes that St Bernard compares Christ’s five wounds with the five petals of the rose (89).
Joyce Hill, “The Soldier of Christ in Old English Prose and Poetry,” Leeds Studies in English, 12 (1981), 60.
Michael G. Sargent, ed., Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004).
Peter Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 17, 16.
That Eucharistie piety was extremely important in East Anglia has been argued by Nichols, who argues that the Croxton Play of the Sacrament should be read more like a passion play than as an anti-Lollard play and “not as a reaction to anti-Eucharistic heresy, but rather as a reflection of fifteenth-century Eucharistie piety”: Ann Eljenholm Nichols, “The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: A Re-reading,” Comparative Drama, 22.2, 137.
Katherine L. French, “Women in the Late Medieval English Parish,” in Gendering the Master Narrative, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 160.
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© 2015 Andrea Louise Young
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Young, A.L. (2015). Vision and Visuality: The Battle of the Banners. In: Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137446077_5
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