Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (review)

Reviews 195 Parergon 20.1 (2003) is rather that such statements insufficiently acknowledge the procedure of remaking that has occurred. As a result, the reader senses a mismatch between the refined theoretical tools and the limits of Malory’s orientation to his task of writing. The difficulty is enhanced in the present instance by a focus on books and texts, so that less space remains for grounding the Morte in the physical and cultural realities of its period. I hope it is clear that these reservations concern presentation rather than substance, and that they scarcely detract from the immense gift of insight and knowledge which Batt’s book offers to its readers. Cheryl Taylor School of Humanities James Cook University Beckwith, Sarah, Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xviii, 294; 6 b/w illustrations; RRP US$35.00; ISBN 0226041344. This book, which has been hailed by such luminaries as Derek Pearsall and Paul Strohm as a landmark contribution to the study of medieval drama, is the achievement of years of scholarly aspiration, research, writing and consultation. The generous list of acknowledgments is a tribute to the ideal of community frequently upheld in the text. The contents are further distinguished by an interdisciplinary inclusiveness, which becomes the source of a new approach, or rather of a range of new approaches, to the York drama of Corpus Christi. Because abstract concepts are worked out with close reference to the material details of the pageants’ medieval production and modern revivals, the arguments are persuasive as well as stimulating. The exemplary methodology invites adaptation to the study of other drama, and indeed of other performing and visual arts, especially if these are considered in terms of their communal meaning. The reasoning in the book frequently shifts to encompass new ideas, reflecting the prior publication of four of the eight chapters as articles. However, as the title suggests, the core concern is with the body of Christ as the chief, potentially unifying, sacramental symbol. Applying Cornelius Castoriadis’s phrase in The Imaginary Institution of Society, this is understood as the central ‘imaginary signification’ of late medieval culture. ‘How is God signified?’ asks Professor Beckwith: ‘God, or 196 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) God as Christ, does not actually denote anything as such; but in the very vagueness and indeterminacy of that denotation, he may connote everything’ (p. 27). After positioning her argument in relation to the diverse writings on ritual of Pierre Bourdieu, Catherine Bell and Mervyn James, Beckwith proceeds to interpret the body of Christ in the York plays as the ultimate object representing collective ideals. As such it is invested with ‘intense levels of social interaction’, and becomes the bearer of ‘endemic fissures and tensions in late medieval urban life’ (p. 26). Even so, final signification remains suspended: ‘Each set of categories transcodes and refers to others, and meaning is constructed and deferred through these relationships’ (p. 30). The argument emphasises the exposure of process, and not the discovery of integrated meaning, as an analytical goal. A related strategy dismantles the dichotomy between ritual and theatre previously prevailing in studies of the Cycle plays: ‘For historians who have used the concept of ritual have by and large shied away from reading the pageants themselves; critics of the theater have been constrained by tenets of formalist literary criticism that are inadequate for performative readings’ (p. 28). Signifying God thus becomes the first detailed reading of a Corpus Christi pageant cycle as sacramental theatre. Scrupulous application of these ideas results in new knowledge and insights likely to engage readers involved in student and public performances, as well as scholars and teachers. In Chapters One and Eight discussions of modern revivals and encounters with Corpus Christi theatre in film and fiction frame a thematically central group of chapters (Two – Six), dealing with the York pageant drama during its initial production period, approximately 1376 to 1569. Chapter Seven is a transitional account of the gradual, almost unconscious, suppression of the plays under the impact of cultural changes associated with the Reformation. These included altered notions of Biblical authority and textual...