Saints at Play: The Performance Features of French Hagiographic Mystery Plays by Vicki L. Hamblin (review)

Vicki Hamblin’s Saints at Play makes an impressive addition to the growing list of critical and historical studies devoted to medieval performance practices. Her approach is best described as comparative analysis. Her first move is to select a ‘study–set’, which she does by making categorical exclusions from the extant corpus of French hagiographic mystery plays: she chooses only fifteenth– and sixteenth–century works (the period ‘when this kind of spectacle was at the height of its popularity’) and eliminates Occitan works (in order to ensure ‘a more consistent lexical focus’); works featuring biblical, rather than historical, saints (since scriptural sources might have entailed ‘perceived restrictions’); and works that fail to include episodes of ‘divine intervention’ and ‘devilish harassment’ (‘performance truisms […] [that] reiterate not only an acknowledged staging convention but the cosmic imperative of religious drama in the Middle Ages’) (pp. 3–5). The result is a manageable and coherent selection of twenty–eight works that does not constitute ‘a distinct literary genre’ (p. 6) but nonetheless allows for rigorous comparative study. Hamblin’s methodology involves analysing these works, as well as their paratextual and ancillary materials, as ‘performance remnants’ that attest, often somewhat obliquely, the ‘cultural, social, political, and psychological’ factors governing theatrical performance and reception (p. 6). The book’s five chapters examine the following topics: hagiographic mystery plays as a ‘community–driven and community–focused’ practice (p. 9); the plays’ thematic and narrative features and how those relate to ‘participatory reenactment’ (p. 29) in highly diverse, socially stratified settings; the manuscript and print texts in which plays were preserved and the ways in which those texts reflect social norms, values, and hierarchies; theatre spaces and their relationship to staging, audience interpretation, and communal ‘resolving processes’ (p. 119); and, finally, the physical, visual, and musical aspects of performance, which, given the acoustic limitations of large, open–air performance spaces, may have had greater importance even than verbal expression. Scholars devoted to conceptual analysis and close reading may be disappointed by Hamblin’s explicitly scientific and supratextual approach, which involved borrowing ‘a computational model from the social sciences in order to better integrate text, cultural community, and performance’ (p. 4). She is hardly disengaged from literary and theoretical scholarship, however; and her empirical perspective allows her to make many illuminating observations about the consistency and diversity of medieval performance practices. For instance, although many of the plays in her study–set ‘conceive of their community’s societal structure in similar fashion’, thereby confirming hierarchical arrangements through theatrical fiction, their stylistic and socializing functions are ‘far more disparate than scholarship has traditionally recognized’, with ‘no two plays shar[ing] exactly the same features or perspectives, despite their overriding religiosity and even their similar staging styles’ (p. 227). For that matter, ‘their messages are not consistently religious, reflecting instead a diversity of points of view and varying commitments to faith’ (p. 229), and therefore anticipating secularization. Hamblin’s meticulous, painstaking approach to a broad swathe of much–neglected medieval works allows her to make this claim with unusual force and ensures that her book is a signal achievement in the fields of medieval and performance studies.