Dramatizing Devotion in the Old English Vercelli Homily IV

When tracing the complexities of early medieval drama, the late O. B. Hardison suggested that medieval performance was a "multi-headed beast."¹ True to this metaphor, Anglo-Saxonists have long struggled to define the parameters of "drama," both because the field spans a range of critical categories (such as performance studies, ritual, literacy, and orality), and also because the period largely lacks records of oral performance and designated play spaces.² In this present article, I follow scholars like M. Bradford Bedingfield, M. R. Rambaran-Olm, and Allen Frantzen in arguing that Anglo-Saxon texts deserve a larger place within the history of performance.³ The liturgy has traditionally emerged in medieval scholarship as the birthplace of Old English (OE) drama, with special attention paid to texts like the Visitatio Sepulchri, which feature explicit costuming and role instructions.⁴ I am specifically interested in OE homilies and the way they might function as early medieval drama. While scholars have sought to recapture how these texts were performed orally, this study examines the link between performance and private reading. In doing so, I unpack how dramatic OE homilies incited and required active reading, and how they provided a script for a medieval reader's devotional practice.⁵ By turning to performance and drama to evaluate reading practices in Anglo-Saxon England, this study breaks down assumptions about reading as passive reception. It instead thinks about OE literature as compendia of dramatic dialogue and gesture that activate the medieval reader's imagination. I use as an example the soul and body homily Vercelli IV both because of its extensive dialogue and direct speech, and because of its place within the private reader, Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII. Vercelli IV might initially appear to be an unlikely candidate for categorization as "drama" or "performance," but, by invoking dynamic spectacles like the damned soul's lament and the Judgment Day trial scene, it is linked with communal Christian doctrine that can be accessed and performed by readers whenever they read and re-read the text. In what follows, I briefly contextualize the definition of drama in early medieval scholarship, before closely examining how drama and dialogue in Vercelli IV encourages readers to perform devotion.

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE AS DRAMA

Historically in the field of medieval drama, scholars like E. K. Chambers, Karl Young, and David Dumville have focused their attentions on the oral performance of liturgy.⁶ While acknowledging the dramatic nature of liturgical re-enactments such as the "Quem Quaeritis" tradition, they understood the liturgy as ritualistic precursors to later medieval drama. Hardison later complicated these arguments by challenging this evolutionary model, calling it "literary Darwinism" that features a teleological and romantic pattern of developing secularization.⁷ Building on Hardison's work, Bedingfield has made significant strides in redefining the dramatic parameters of the liturgy. Unlike Young, Chambers, or even Hardison, he understands the dramatic elements in texts like the Visitatio Sepulchri as symptoms of a unique tendency in Anglo-Saxon England to engage lay audiences in the liturgy.⁸ He argues that homilies enhance the dramatic participation of worshippers within Mass by drawing the audience into a re-enactment of sacred history. In this present study, I use Bedingfield's work as a springboard to further expand our understanding of early drama and to discuss these issues of audience participation within the realm of private reading—which, I argue, can productively incite medieval readers to imagine or mentally rehearse devotional scenes like Judgment Day.

Since Bedingfield's work on dramatic liturgy, early medieval scholarship has continued to expand the scope of drama to incorporate both nonliturgical texts and a broader range of theoretical frameworks and schema.⁹ Allen Frantzen, like Bedingfield, examines the complex "feedback process" that occurs between audience and performer, though his focus is on OE poetry rather than the liturgy.¹⁰ In locating drama in Beowulf and Cynewulf's Juliana using semiotics to "conceptualize drama as an exchange-driven process of communication," he discusses how dialogue and gesture require audience members to complete each narrative or performance with their own experience...