The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century

Notes

Notes R introduction 1. See Stephen G. Nichols, “The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee , and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 1–26. Nichols examines a developing disciplinary interest in investigating medieval representation in its endless variety, free from privileging literature as the highest form of cultural expression and with equal attention to the differences and continuities between medieval, classical, and Renaissance mimesis (1–2). 2. This study focuses on the idea of theater as constructed in medieval texts and tracks changes in that idea. Closely related to this project are studies that follow changes in ways texts are written and read, as well as the relationships between writing and orality . See, for example, Patrick J. Geary, “Oblivion Between Orality and Textuality in the Tenth Century,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 111–22. 3. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Michal Kobialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Clifford Davidson, ed., Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michi129 gan University, 2001); Victor I. Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian Drama in the Later Middle Ages (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001); Dunbar H. Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002). 4. For this point with regard to the Carolingian period, see Giles Brown, “Introduction : The Carolingian Renaissance,” in Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation , ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1. For the twelfth century, see Bernard McGinn, “The Religious World of the Twelfth Century: Introduction,” in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff with Jean Leclercq (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 195. 5. Rodney Thomson, “John of Salisbury and William of Malmesbury: Currents in Twelfth-Century Humanism,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 117. 6. See Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). The historiography of medieval theater and drama to 1984 is well documented in Ronald W. Vince, Ancient and Medieval Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 89–129. Vince surveys major trends in scholarship, noting especially the shift away from an evolutionary model in the 1960s, differing orientations toward literature (drama) and performance (theater), and changing perceptions of relationships between medieval theater or drama and folk traditions, art and iconography, vernacular expressions of culture, pagan and Christian rituals, rhetoric and oratory, music, historical records, and literary forms. Michal Kobialka gives a thorough assessment and sharp critique of the discipline’s recent historiography, This Is My Body, 1–33. 7. Nils Hoger Petersen, “Music, Dramatic Extroversion, and Contemplative Introspection: Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo virtutum,” in Ritual, Performance, Culture: Papers by C. Clifford Flanigan, His Students, and Colleagues, ed. Robert Clark (Auckland: Wim Husken, forthcoming). 8. Nichols, “New Medievalism,” 23 n. 3. 9. John Wesley Harris simply and eloquently summarizes medieval dramatic representation as part of a sensibility in which “the whole of creation was a book provided for man, in which he could read the wonderful works of God” (Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction [London: Routledge, 1992], 8). 10. Harold C. Gardiner’s historical narrative of Protestant suppression of the Catholic religious drama in England, a revision of early twentieth-century evolutionary theory of the development of dramatic form (Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946; reprinted 1967]) has been revised in Beckwith, Signifying God. 11. Vince, Ancient and Medieval Theatre, ix. 12. The plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, written in...