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

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Green. These, and doubtless others this reviewer is now too limited to appreciate fully, will becomeclassics in their respective areas. Regardless of perspective, each contributor manages to demonstrate Christine's dis­ tinct authorial voice as marginalized by her gender yet privileged by her own self-determinism. If she is not always as radical as modern feminists would like, she nonetheless enlightens us as to how a single woman could survive respectably in her time, and even ours. The editor has carefully cross-referenced the essays to each other at pertinent moments throughout. A reasonably accurate cumulative bib­ liography and useful (proper-name) index complete the volume. However, a final word, a caveat, seems necessary. That only twelve articles are herein contained out of the seventy papers, many by major international specialists in Christine de Pizan, presented at the Bing­ hamton conference-the "small proportion of that dialogue" to which the preface alludes-might lead one to question why. Neither the pan­ icky, unappealing title-scrambling, like the introduction, to impose trendy cohesiveness where little exists due to decimation-nor the pref­ atory remarks furnish a real explanation. For those involved in both en­ terprises, the conference was a labor of love, generating lively discussion and true cultivation of "difference"; by contrast, this volume emerged out of needless dismay and hurt, even for some of those included, though benefiting those journals and volumes that later welcomed the with­ drawn and rejected articles. The abundant world of Christine studies should not exact its namesake's capacity for suffering from its diverse participants. NADIA MARGOLIS Leverett, Massachusetts ]ODY ENDERS. The Medieval Theater ofCruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. viii, 268. $45.00. Jody Enders is an unabashed foundationalist. She is after the Ur narra­ tives of Western civilization (p. 232). She goes looking for them at her ground zero: rhetoric. These latest efforts bring her deeper than in her first book, Rhetoric and the Origins ofDrama (1992). They probe frames of 474 REVIEWS mind and the sorts of abstract scenes played out on a classical theatrum or stage. What she finds there is a far cry from the uplifting stories of progress that once typified the search for foundations. In the spirit of our times, she tracks with fierce intent a disturbing side of our culture. Enders's argument runs like this: Rhetoric's work on the mind is coer­ cive; it is expressed dramatically and sticks violently. The so-called civi­ lizing process that rhetoric enables is anything but civil. People are wont to discount this understanding because to do otherwise would sap their most basic assumptions about social behavior. This is a very tricky picture to grasp, and Enders grapples with it by concentrating on many kinds ofpublic actions that may well substanti­ ate such mental happenings. She ranges ambitiously over legal trials, schoolroom exercises, mystery plays and urban rituals in classical and premodern Europe, cutting back and forth between her two favorite sources: Latin rhetoric, and French and English drama. The story Enders ends up telling is a conventional one of origins, yet flipped over to show its underside. Like Artaud, her compagnon de route, her work packs icono­ clastic punch. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty is organized according to three prin­ cipal categories of rhetoric: invention, memory, actio or delivery. Chap­ ter 1 takes on torture as a way into rhetorical inventio. It develops the premise that there is a "similarity between finding the truth in a tor­ tured victim's body and finding a rhetorical proof in one's own mind through the dramatic procedures of invention" (p. 30). Both quests are relentless; and their troubling quality suggests why their connection has been left unprobed. Enders does not flinch at the task. She goes right to the psychomachia in classical and medieval rhetorical treatises such as Geoffrey ofVinsauf's Poetria Nova. Here, as in the Rhetorica adHerennium, she confronts a primal scene of a mind at war with itself. It captures for her the outbursts of violence inherent to invention. Further on, she tests the philological evidence in vernacular texts for signs of such violence. The...