The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (review)

One of the most interesting aspects of the shift taking place in the field of medieval studies is, as Howard R. Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, the editors of Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (1996), indicate, that the investigation of medieval literature and culture has never been more alive or more innovative. Recent publications represent new research strategies by scholars who are not only well-versed in the battlefields within what used to be defined as hermetically-closed or marginalized medieval studies, but also in the vagaries of postmodern theory. Accordingly, scholars of medieval drama and theatre have seen the changes in how medieval drama and theatre was redefined to include both written texts as well as accompanying physical events. They have also brought in theoretical formulations which ruptured modernist critical agendas. With questions posed about the relationship between the subject (a historian) and the object (a document, an event), historical investigations need to take into account the postmodern condition and its emphasis on, for example, social negotiations, the functioning of power regulating and controlling bodies and spaces in the episteme, or fatal strategies and simulacra which reduce events to aural and optical effects.

The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty responds to these possibilities. Jody Enders traverses through the landscape of rhetoric, law, drama, and criminal records of the Middle Ages in her pursuit of an answer to a question: why are there so many scenes of torture in the medieval plays? Any student of the medieval drama and theatre is familiar with the crucifixion episode from the Cycle Plays or with the French-language corpus of mystères de la passion. Whereas we often accept a heightened realism and spectacularism of these episodes of the reenactment of the pain and suffering of Christ as part of the historical, social, or ideological narrative, Enders challenges the doxa and poses questions about the phenomenology of theatrical violence, medieval and modern, as a point of departure from broader speculation about the interplay between theatricality, pleasure, didacticism, morality and real life. Hers is a powerful discourse that exposes the weaknesses in those narrative statements which desire to anesthetize the rhetoric of cruelty by suggesting the alterity of the Middle Ages—both institutional as well as ideological—in the process of constructing intellectual sites of amnesia. Enders draws attention to the fact that such a process parallels Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic violence” which is made invisible by the configuration of knowledge and classificatory schemes both past and present. Theories of rhetoric and law from the times of Quintilian’s narrative, which describes Simonides’s desire to remember the dismembered bodies, as well as a hermeneutic of torture, which exploits the relationship between language and pain, form deference and “mask a very real denial of the contemporary spectacle of violence and of contemporary complicity in the history of that violence” (24). In order to change our attitude to medieval drama and theatre, which brought to the fore a Christian spectacle of moral violence, Enders, using a rhetorical matrix, explores the possibility that “no real critique of violence can lead to social change unless the pervasive linguistic and ideological foundations of violence are exposed” (10).

To substantiate this point, Enders reevaluates the spectacular nature of violence, transgression, discipline, and punishment as treated by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish or Elaine Scarry in Body in Pain, the notion of a hidden system of pain production as discussed by Anthony Kubiak in Stages of Terror, a possibility that a social organization writes upon bodies in order to create a collective memory as analyzed by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus. She does so in order to draw our attention that “what is at stake here is the demystification of both the aesthetics of violence and the critical response to it. In the case of torture, the critical tendency to condemn, to overexplain, or to excuse might ultimately derive less from a true sensitivity to the Middle Ages...