Costume in the Moralities: The Evidence of East Anglian Art

Costume in the Moralities: The Evidence of East Anglian Art Ann Eljenholm Nichols A great deal has been written about the influence of medieval drama on art and art on drama. At the turn of this century, Emile Mâle argued that major changes in religious art could be traced to direct influence from medieval drama: "ce changement s'explique par l'épanouissement du théâtre religieux dans la chrétienté tout entière au commencement du xve siècle."! In the 1930's, scholars in the field of Byzantine studies also argued for the influence of drama on art,2 and in a paper originally read in 1939 but published ten years later, W. L. Hildburgh noted: "The idea, long since accepted, that alabastercarvers . . . depicted in their reliefs things that they had seen in presentations of religious plays . . . has, I believe, not seriously been questioned."3 The shift of the critical pendulum, however, is suggested by the recent remark of one critic who referred to the 1930's as "the heyday of near-blind faith in the passion-play theory of late medieval realism."4 In the second half of this century, philosophers have argued that it was nominalism that accounted for the growth of realism in the fifteenth century; art critics have countered that we have misread art—what seems like naturalistic detail is actually complex symbolism. It is not the purpose of this article to discuss the complicated interrelationships of cultural history and the arts in the fifteenth century. Its purpose is more modest, merely to describe one new art form that originated in the second half of the fifteenth century and to consider possible relationships between that ANN ELJENHOLM NICHOLS, Professor of English at Winona State University, has just completed a study of the seven-sacrament baptismal fonts in East Anglia, and is working on a Subject List of Art in Northeast Norfolk for the Early Drama, Art and Music Reference Series. 305 306Comparative Drama form and the costuming of contemporary drama. This paper is not a "source" study, although it is concerned with sources of pertinent information for the modern producer of medieval drama. The art form in question is the seven-sacrament baptismal font. Figured decoration of font bowls had been common since the Romanesque period. However, after the 1460's a new form of decoration became popular in East Anglia. On seven faces of octagonal bowls were carved vivid representations of the seven sacraments; on the eighth face the subject varied, but commonly it was the Baptism of Christ or the Crucifixion. About forty fonts were carved between 1463 and 1544; the thirty-three that remain in reasonably good condition contain detailed information about contemporary costume and church furnishings.5 The stone carvers recorded details of dress, stylish hats and conservative hoods and liripipes, butterfly headdresses and gabled hoods with frontals, simple laced dresses and houppelandes . A stylishly dressed groom in slit-sleeved coat, holding a modish hat, is contrasted with his father in a long coat with wide reveres. A waiting penitent fingers his beads; an acolyte rings a handbell at the elevation of the host. Ecclesiastical as well as domestic furnishings are carved in exacting detail: shriving stools, canopied chairs, and chrismatories long since melted down for the royal treasury; the details of the sickroom, shoes on the floor, sagging covers on slanted beds, and emaciated bodies of dying men. Thus the most striking characteristic of the figured panels on the seven-sacrament fonts is their literalism, their exacting preservation of realistic detail. The liturgical action is presented exactly as it could be observed in any parish church. Whereas contemporary seven-sacrament windows symbolically connected the sacraments with the Crucifixion, the fonts do not.6 Although other East Anglian bowls are decorated by symbols—e.g., symbols of the evangelists and the Arma Christi—on the seven-sacrament fonts symbolism is restricted to the substructure of the font. The symbols of the four evangelists, where they occur, are at the foot of the pedestal, and in a few fonts where angels carry symbolic impedimenta, they are on the bowl chamfer beneath the sacrament panels. Only in the Penance panels do the...