The Ambivalences of Medieval Religious Drama by Rainer Warning (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Rainer Warning. The Ambivalences of Medieval Religious Drama. Trans. Steven Rendall. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. xx, 308. $60.00. This translation of Funktion und Struktur: Die Ambivalenzen des geistlichen Spiels, originally published in 1974, makes available to Anglo-American audiences an important study of medieval religious theater by a prominent continental literary and cultural theorist. Up to now, these readers most likely would have encountered Warning’s analyses of medieval religious theater in an essay, ‘‘On the Alterity of Medieval Religious Drama,’’ which presented excerpts from this book’s arguments for a ground-breaking special issue of New Literary History dedicated to ‘‘Medieval Literature and Contemporary Theory’’ (no. 10 [1979]). Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s foreward to this new translation usefully situates Warning’s study in relation to the intellectual moment of its genesis and the theoretical engagements that marked German humanist scholarship in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Critical debates then current in medieval theater studies also provide a significant informing context for Warning’s endeavor. Focusing on hypotheses about the origins and development of religious drama, scholars had embraced evolutionary and genealogical models that posited organic relationships between Latin liturgical and vernacular traditions. Even with the abandonment of the idea that liturgical ceremony had moved gradually from sacred to secular space as it was translated from Latin into the European vernaculars , the medieval drama scholarship that motivated Warning’s intervention was captive to a positivist historiography preoccupied with texts and sources. Its objects of study were sometimes evaluated by aesthetic criteria ‘‘normatively defined by reference to Shakespeare’’ (2), or, in the case of Germanic texts, for evidence of folkloric continuities that reinforced their nationalistic character. The humor and naturalism of medieval religious theater were understood as the entertaining yeast that ecclesiastical sponsorship had added to leaven the drama’s fundamentally moral and didactic aims. Warning challenged such traditional methodologies and findings by mobilizing paradigms from social anthropology, structuralism, systems theory, and theories of play and laughter to counter the ‘‘general hermeneutic helplessness’’ (2) that he identified in the field of religious drama studies. His major contribution to that field involves his book’s argument about vernacular religious drama’s discontinuity with both liturgi442 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:31 PS REVIEWS cal ceremony and medieval Christian theology. Rather than further the aims of the Christian cult, vernacular religious drama opposes them, drawing its power from enactment of a different kind of ritual, the very archaic, mythological beliefs that Christian theology labored to exclude. Presented as an effort to theorize and explain the cultural functions of religious drama, this book also seeks to recuperate—it was the first study to do so—graphic, profane, and obscene elements of vernacular theater such as the sensationalized tortures of French Passion dramas or the obscene banter of German hortulanus scenes, which had resisted analysis by any conventional critical paradigm. The book considers both insular and continental dramatic texts, but it focuses on liturgical ceremony and French and German plays. It is divided into three major sections. Part One focuses on the visitatio sepulchri and later vernacular Easter dramas, principally German, that secularize and profane the same scriptural events enacted in the liturgical ceremony. Part Two examines the twelfth-century Ordo representacionis Ade, or the Play of Adam, as a theoretical test case for the coincident emergence of vernacular religious drama and the promulgation of theories of redemption articulated in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. Part Three discusses how late medieval French Passion plays bear witness to popular reception of the fundamental tension between a theology focused on the bloodless sacrifice of the Mass and the fact of Christ’s bloody sacrificial death. In each case Warning posits that the interests of vernacular drama diverge from those of the theology that ostensibly motivated it. Drama discloses latent functions that are tied far more to pre-Christian ritual elements than to dogma, thereby exposing the ambivalence at its core. Marks of these ritual elements and the ambivalence produced by their incorporation into sacred drama are evident, for example, in hortulanus scenes that present a resurrected Christian deity who is also the pagan year-god...