This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages by Michal Kobialka (review)

REVIEWS 234 France, where Natalie Zemon Davis has analyzed petitions that were designed to explain the offenses committed by narrating the offense and by making it appear excusable in the eyes of the law, very few petitions protested the innocence of the convicted party and the vast majority focused on expressing remorse . “Lack of malice, youthful indiscretion, familial responsibilities, previous good conduct, and offers of service figured into many of the requests for pardon. Expressions of penitence and humble sorrow appeared in all” (112). Kesselring concludes that in cases where the sovereign had most discretion— that is where a pardon was given de gratia and not de cursu (that is to say, as a matter of course because the offense was deemed, for example, excusable homicide rather than murder because they were acts of self-defense)—explanations for the extension rather than withholding of clemency must be developed within the economy of patronage, because the petitioning process was almost entirely unbureaucratized and usually required the intercession of persons on the defendant’s behalf (119ff). The author goes on to discuss the performative nature of pardoning and the process of negotiation surrounding pardoning in cases of public revolt. Kesselring mediates between accounts found in Foucault and Thomas Lacqueur, whereby public executions and their occasional commutation by popular demand represent alternatively the superpower of the sovereign written into the tortured body of the executed and the carnivalesque power of the crowd to contest and overturn the pronouncements of princely power, arguing instead, with Peter Lake and Michael Questier, that “the public execution [was] a potential site of intense ideological struggle where various actors attempted to appropriate the message of the stake and the gallows to their own ends” (152). There is something perhaps a little formulaic about this reconciliation, a reconciliation that the author qualifies with the equally formulaic-sounding caveat that although punishment and its commuting were domains of political negotiation in early modern England it is probably wiser to emphasize the power of the state rather than the of its subjects (205), but this capable study of mitigation in sixteenth-century England has the merit of opening up ground on which modes of historical inquiry from cultural, intellectual and political history can cohere in what might be termed a new history of rhetoric, where politics is conceived of as the opposite of violence, as the sum of discursive negotiation and where attention is paid to the enacting in speech of such political commerce. DAVID MARSHALL, History, The Johns Hopkins University Michal Kobialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2003) 313 pp. The earliest evidence of medieval theater is generally considered to be the description of the Quem quaeritis portion of the Easter service found in the Regularis Concordia, a tenth-century English text that sought to unify monastic practices. The text states that during the Easter service, as they sing the Quem quaeritis chant, the brethren may enact the women arriving at the sepulcher in search of the body of Jesus and finding the angel sitting in front of the empty tomb. Although Michal Kobialka takes this text as the starting point for This Is My Body and is himself a professor of Theater Arts, he is not interested here in the history of medieval drama; instead, he correlates the elements of this per- REVIEWS 235 formance to ways of understanding the Eucharist expressed in contemporaneous texts in order to elucidate the representational practices of the medieval period. In this way he hopes to correct the imposition of modern representational practices on medieval culture as well as the misperception of medieval representational practice as unified and stable. As Kobialka demonstrates, the medieval period, specifically the late tenth to early thirteenth centuries, was characterized by a multiplicity of representational practices. This work also addresses the shift to the visual and the narrowing of possibilities for representational practice over the medieval period, culminating in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which codified the prevalence of the visual, and according to Kobialka, paved the way for perspectival representation. The first chapter deals with the Quem quaeritis chant from the earliest copy of...