session 1

1: Woman Saints:

Robert Potter

University of California, USA:

Pornography and the Saints Play.

Marla Carlson

Brooklyn, USA:

Impassive Bodies: Hrotsvit Stages Martyrdom.

James Wyatt Cook

Albion, USA:

The Concerns of Women in the Saints' Plays of Antonia Pulci (1452-1501).

session 4

2: France:

Alan E. Knight

Pennsylvania State University, USA:

The Roman "Saint Plays" of Lille.

session 5

3: France, esp. St Martin:

Lynette R. Muir

England:

From Genevieve to Joan: saviours of France.

Elyse Dupras

Canada:

Déguisement chez les diables dans les Mystères à saints et à saintes.

Pascale Dumont

RUCA - T.E.W. Antwerpen, Belgium:

Troublantes similitudes entre le Jeu de saint Nicolas (Jehan Bodel) et le Mystère de saint Martin (Andrieu de la Vigne).

session 9

4: Europe:

John Cartwright

University of Cape Town, South Africa:

Epic encyclopaedic-juristic theatre: the Brussels Eerste Bliscap van Maria.

Phillip Butterworth

College of the University of Leeds, England: 

Jean Fouquet's "The Martyrdom of St. Appolonia" and "The Rape of the Sabine Women" as iconographical evidence of medieval theatre practice.

Jordi Bertran

Tarragona, Spain:

Martyrdom and Saints' Plays in the Area of Tarragona, Catalonia.

J. M. González Fernández de Sevilla

Spain:

The saint's play in Calderón's drama.

session 12

5: England & Germany + Elizabethan Perspectives:

Clifford Davidson

Western Michigan University, USA:

English Saint Play Records: Coping with Ambiguity.

David Lampe

Buffalo, USA:

Saints Paul and Bartholomew, Stage Center, Please!

Potter, Robert

Pornography and the Saints Play.

There are times when it pays to be a medievalist. So I thought as I sat watching a drama featuring excruciating violence, explicit sex as female spirituality, pain as divine test, suffering as a holy ordeal that led along a lurid via crucis from virginity to whoredom to sainthood. I was not watching a medieval drama, but rather the Danish director Lars von Trier's 1996 film Breaking the Waves.

In its shrewd mixture of voyeuristic depravity and heroic sanctity, this film rediscovers what seems to be an old and successful dramatic formula. A rebellious young virgin defies the authorities of her family and community, heeding the voice of God instead, and suffers an ascendingly horrific sequence of ordeals leading to a marturdom with miraculous consequences. A context of spirituality envelopes, and lends moral justification, to sensational events that otherwise might be mistaken for pornography.

To what extent is this variety of drama truly "medieval"? To what degree can medieval martyrdom plays be regarded in retrospect as thinly-disguised pornography? I will pursue these questions in considering selected European Saints Plays featuring virgin martyrs as heroines. My list of suspects includes Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Margaret, Saint Agatha, Saint Aollonia, Saint Cecelia, Saint Mary Magdalene and of course Saint Barbara.

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Carlson, Marla

Impassive Bodies: Hrotsvit Stages Martyrdom.

In this paper I look at Hrotsvit's use of the martyred female body and argue that in Sapientia, what the pagans intend as torture is translated into ordeal. Pain can force the body to signify, at the very least turning the pain of the victim into a sign of the torturer's power, but torture's avowed goal is "true" speech. As Elaine Scarry puts it, the torturer appropriates the voice of the victim. Ordeal, on the other hand, produces a bodily sign of God's judgement. Hrotsvit dramatizes tortures intended to make Christians speak in a pagan voice, but Hrotsvit's martyrs do not endure pain. Rather, they are miraculously protected from their bodily experience. Their deaths are not a result of pagan brutality but a sign of God's grace. In martyrdom, it is God who takes away/takes over the voice of the torturer.

Because Hrotsvit wrote during the "heyday" of ordeal, I discuss its place in Ottonian culture as a ritual that removes conflict from its immediate context to be contained by means of performance. The outcome of an ordeal is inherently ambiguous, and the "correct" reading depends directly upon the outcome most useful to the participants. Throughout Hrotsvit's dramas, as in ordeal, events are taken for signs: beauty is a transparent sign of virtue; miraculous healing and victory in battle are signs of God's grace. Within the dramatic framework, pagans consistently misread the signs and even Christians must depend upon God's grace for an understanding of events.

While in many cases Hrotsvit structures her dramatic text around explicit exegesis, what she chooses to show might reveal as much as what she says - even if this "showing" is only imagined. After all, a body represented to be in pain does different work than a body "really" in pain. If torture forces the body to signify and appropriates its voice, what is accomplished by the representation of torture? On the surface, martyrdom locates power in passivity or weakness. Is this necessarily subversive, or does its use get turned around by Hrotsvit, so that the subversive energy is in fact contained and reclaimed by the powerful? I argue that her construction of female strength constituted by weakness (in the epistolary dedications as well as in the dramas) still serves to reinforce male strength in action, and Hrotsvit's writing ultimately supports Otto's consolidation of power. I suggest that her apparent inversion of power works to maintain bonds of solidarity with subordinate groups, because Ottonian imperial expansion depended upon not only the containment but also the support of nobles and the church, and women were important members of both groups.

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Cook, James Wyatt

The Concerns of Women in the Saints' Plays of Antonia Pulci (1451-1501).

Antonia Pulci, wife of Bernardo Pulci and, after she was widowed, founder of an order of Augustinian Tertiararies, authored at least five and possibly as many as nine sacre rappresentazioni for performance at festivals and in convents. My translations of seven of them appeared in fall 1996 from the University of Chicago Press under the title: Florentine Drama from Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays. In preparing these plays for the press, I was struck by Pulci's careful avoidance of the misogynist tradition that sometimes informs the writings of religious women - St. Teresa of Avila, for example. At the same time, I became interested in the way Pulci explores in the lives of her saints Domitilla, Guglielma, and Theodor.

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Knight, Alan E.

The Roman "Saint Plays" of Lille.

The manuscript collection of plays from Lille contains only one play devoted to a non-Biblical Christian saint. It is the life of Saint Euphrosyna, a fifth-century virgin of Alexandria, whose legend is recounted in the Vitæ Patrum. The manuscript does contain, however, three plays drawn from Roman history that resemble saint plays. The heroic deeds of three pagans are presented to the fifteenth-century spectators as examples of virtuous behavior to be imitated. The playwights contextualize the stories by posing the question: If pagans could do such things merely for worldly glory, should not Christians be far more willing to perform virtuous acts for an eternal reward?

One of the plays dramatizes the story of Atilius Regulus, who preferred to suffer martyrdom at the hands of the Carthaginians rather than break his promise to return to Carthage. The Christian spectators are told that they have even more reason to be willing to suffer martyrdom "pour foy et loiaulté garder". Another play presents the story of Mucius Scaevola, who, failing in his attempt to assassinate Porsenna, the besieger of Rome, held his hand in a flame to prove to Porsenna that he had no fear of the torments his intended victim threatened to inflict on him. Porsenna was so impressed by Mucius' courage that he abandoned the siege. One might say that Rome was saved by a "miracle", at a moment when force of arms could bring no relief. The third play presents the story of the noblewoman Orgia, who, taken captive by the Romans, was raped by the centurion assigned to guard her. Valerius Maximus recounts the story in his chapter on chastity because the woman maintained her purity of intent.

The stories of these three people and their heroic deeds served in the Roman world much the same function as the stories of the saints in the Christian world. Indeed, if the three had been Christians, they might well have been considered saints in the Middle Ages. The dramatists of Lille saw the resmblance to saints' lives and made "saint plays" out of the legends of ancient Rome.

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Muir, Lynette R.

From Genevieve to Joan: Saviours of France.

The very large surviving corpus of French saints' plays includes several that are unique in the genre. Among the saints who were treated dramatically, some patron saints like St George of England (and Portugal and many other places) had never been to the countries of their patronage. Others like St James of Spain and St Denis of France himself, came there as missionary saints from the East. St James indeed only features in post-mortem miracle plays. In contrast, the French plays of SS Genevieve and Louis, and the not-yet-even-canonised Maid of Orleans dramatise the lives of saints not merely active in France but who were born and lived there. In this paper I shall explore the lives of of these and the other French saints including St Guillem du désert (alias Guillaume d'Orange, paladin of Charlemagne) and St Didier, bishop of Langres, which were selected for dramatisation and try to identify why they were chosen and how the subject matter is treated.

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Dupras, Elyse

Déguisement chez les diables dans les Mystères à saints et à saintes.

Au théâtre, le vêtement agit comme premier langage du corps, il annonce l'identité de celui qui le porte. Dans ce contexte, le déguisement apparaît comme un mensonge ou un camouflage de l'identité: en brouillant le code vestimentaire, il crée du l'impression de menace qui se dégage de lui, et celle de désordre qui émane du décor infernal et du masque total du diable.

Dans cette communication, je relèverai quelques-uns des déguisements empruntés par les diables dans certains Mystères à saints et à saintes. Le rôle de ces déguisements sera examiné, ainsi que leur efficacité. Nous verrons comment le déguisement donne lieu à une superposition de masques: l'acteur est caché sous un premier masque, le masque total, et ainsi il représente le diable: il endosse par ailleurs le déguisement choisi par le diable.

Le premier déguisement du diable est celui de serpent. Il est très souvent surmonté, dans l'iconographie et dans certains mystères, d'une tête de pucelle. Si c'est le premier masque de la tentation, ce n'est pas le seul: l'iconographie représente souvent le diable se déguisant en belle jeune femme pour séduire un ermite. Le Mystère de saint Martin présente également une occurrence de ce type de déguisement: Proserpine est chargée par Lucifer de prendre les traits d'une jeune femme afin de séduire Martin. Dans plusieurs cas, cependant, ce n'est pas la beauté du diable qui lui permet de tenter sa victime potentielle: plusieurs diables utilisent des cadavres (de damnés, bien sûr!) comme déguisements, comme dans La Pacience de Job. Ce ne sont là que quelques-uns des déguisements qu'affectionnent les diables.

Le déguisement est utilisé comme adjuvant dans l'art de séduction. Or, malheureusement, l'homme (ou la femme) pieux n'est pas dupé, alors que celui dont la foi vacille est facilement tenté. Le métier de tentateur est plein de frustrations!

Au delà de la tentation et tout comme le costume, le déguisement révèle autant qu'il dissimule. Des nombreux masques portés par les diables émerge une créature dont l'apparence est instable, auquel le nom de Légions convient fort bien, autant en ce qui a trait au nombre qu'en ce qui concerne l'apparence. Le diable revêt tous les visages du Mal.

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Dumont, Pascale

Troublantes similitudes entre le Jeu de saint Nicolas (Jehan Bodel) et le Mystère de saint Martin (Andrieu de la Vigne).

Près de trois siècles séparent le Jeu de saint Nicolas de l'Arrageois Jehan Bodel, datant des premières années du XIIIe siècle, et le Mystère de saint Martin rédigé en 1496 par l'historiographe du roi de France, Andrieu de la Vigne, qui destinait son texte à une représentation dans la localité bourguignonne de Seurre. A première vue, rien ne rapproche la dramatisation ancienne, en moins de 2000 vers, d'un miracle postume du thaumaturge de Myre, de la transposition scénique de l'existence entière de l'évêque de Tours en un mystère de plus de 10.000 vers répartis sur trois journées de représentation.

Les deux actions présentent néanmoins des similitudes, du moins si l'on compare le Jeu de saint Nicolas à la partie du Mystère consacrée à la jeunesse militaire de saint Martin: conflit armé entre deux grandes puissances dont l'une a un caractère barbare mythique, convocation de vassaux par le biais de messagers toujours prêts à boire, victoire finale par le biais d'un homme seul, non combattant et d'une foi inébranlable, emprisonnement de ce même homme pour une nuit au terme de laquelle il sera mis à l'épreuve, enfin, libération du prisonnier et reconnaissance de la valeur de sa foi suite à un miracle accomplissant le défi annoncé. Certes, similitude n'est pas identité, et le miracle de l'un n'est pas celui de l'autre: la restitution d'un trésor exposé au vol est autre chose que la reddition d'une armée. Mais, tout de même, le parallélisme se poursuit jusque dans certains détails. Ainsi, l'existence de la taverne, de l'aubergiste et des comptes à régler. Ou encore le refus de conversion d'un personnage. Il n'y a vraiment que le jeu de dés qui fasse complètement défaut dans la pièce du XVe siècle et les diables qui manquent dans celle du XIIIe siècle.

Ces similitudes invitent au rapprochement, et l'on décèle à l'analyse la présence, dans les deux textes, d'une double temporalité - l'une à l'échelle humaine et l'autre à l'échelle surnaturelle -, ainsi que d'une bipartition spatiale - un ici familier s'opposant à un ailleurs fabuleux. Andrieu de la Vigne a-t-il pu connaître et exploiter l'oeuvre de Bodel? Ou bien faut-il voir dans le Jeu de saint Nicolas de Jehan Bodel la géniale synthèse de deux traditions thaumaturgiques différentes? Affaire à suivre.

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Cartwright, John

Epic encyclopaedic-juristic theatre: the Brussels Eerste Bliscap van Maria.

In the 1440's in Brussels there was written and performed for the first time a cycle of seven plays - one per year - on the Seven Joys of Mary. Of these, only the first and the last survive. The First is a substantial play of 2081 lines, but Mary herself is not even mentioned until line 1633, and the Annunciation proper (the First Joy) begins at line 1965. However, as this is the first in the series on what was one of the most popular devotional themes of the later Middle Ages, the Annunciation must - to give it its proper significance - be situated in the whole spiritual history of the human race, just as the English mystery cycles, which centre on the redeeming power of Christ, have to be situated in the history of the world in order to make clear the necessity of Christ's life and death.

The First Joy, therefore, begins - after the Prologue - with the plottings of Lucifer and "Nijt" (Envy), the temptation and fall; at this point the legal arguments become prominent, with Lucifer selfrighteously appealing to God's well-known sense of justice; after the Expulsion, Bitter Sorrow and Earnest Prayer appeal to God on behalf of the Fathers who are suffering in Hell; an extensive debate among the Four Daughters of God ends with the Son's decision to enter the human sphere, and leads straight on to Joachim and Anna, and from them to Mary.

The thematic thread leading up to the Annunciation is clearly maintained throughout without excessive wordiness; the scenes vary in setting, pace and tone, with appropriately varied verse-forms, including some beautifully executed formal rondels at important points in the dramatic action. Even standing alone, the First Joy of Mary is a major late medieval dramatic work.

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Butterworth, Philip

Jean Fouquet's "The Martyrdom of St. Appolonia" and "The Rape of the Sabine Women" as iconographical evidence of medieval theatre practice.

Jean Fouquet's miniature of The Martyrdom of St. Appolonia (1465) has for many years been the most important visual reference available to scholars and theatre practitioners from which to reconstruct conditions and conventions surrounding the production of medieval theatre. The miniature has been minutely investigated and analysed for any information that it might yield about the nature of medieval theatre and how such theatre might have been conducted. A common belief has existed that this illustration was the only one of its kind to have been painted by Fouquet. This, however, is not the case. Another similar miniature was painted by Fouquet in 1478 depicting The Rape of the Sabine Women in a French translation of Roman history by Livy. Recognition of the potential value of the illustration to further understanding of the conditions pertaining to medieval theatre was made by Richard Hosely in 1971 and a further allusion to the miniature was made by William Tydeman in 1978. Analysis of the illustration was conducted by Henri Rey-Flaud in 1973. However, wider recognition of the existence of this miniature and its potential significance has remained undeveloped among English-speaking scholars.

There are a number of similar and different features that relate to both miniatures and I propose to examine these in order to assess their corroborative value.

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Bertran, Jordi

Martyrdom and Saints' Plays in the Area of Tarragona, Catalonia.

The area of Tarragona has the most complete collection of Martyrdom and Saints' Plays in Catalonia (Spain). These are based on medieval sources, but most of them appeared in the sixteenth century when the text began to have a great importance. However, we think that nearly all plays - some of them still performed - were written again in the last century. We set the plays in the different towns and villages. They were usually performed when the main fiesta was held or is still done.

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de Sevilla, José Manuel González Fernandez

The Saint's Play in Calderón's Drama.

Calderón is concerned with the production of plays based on the saints' lives since religion is a major interest in his dramatic output. His religious plays round off his view of life by confronting natural values with supernatural ones. These plays, following the medieval tradition, deal with stories of conversion and martyrdom. They usually dramatise the lives of the saints of the early church. Moreover they show a medieval dramatic structure as in El mágico prodigioso which presents elements associated with the moralities since Cipriano and Justina are tempted by the devil, providing the confrontation between good and bad which is the most significant feature of the theatrical action. Besides "los autos sacramentales" also show an allegorical intention. They were performed out of doors as part of the Corpus Christi celebrations. In them Calderón brought the tradition of the morality play to a high degree of spectacularity and perfection.

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Davidson, Clifford

English Saint Play Records: Coping with Ambiguity.

In a recent article Lawrence M. Clopper has provided a skeptical survey of the texts and records of the saint play in England ("Communitas: The Play of Saints in Late Medieval and Tudor England", Mediaevalia 18 [1995]: 81-109). Skepticism in this case is useful, since it forces scholars to take careful note of the evidence for this genre. Except for three records which Clopper accepts as indicative of saint play performance at Lydd, London, and York, the other forty-seven instances in records which appear to designate saint plays are listed by him as "either doubtful, for lack of evidence, or erroneous, when the extant evidence argues against their being saint plays". However, many of these should not be regarded as either doubtful or erroneous when the records are fully examined in all their implications and in their full context. Part of the difficulty is that Clopper defines the saint play narrowly as "scripted drama" that, curiously, also excludes liturgical plays such as the apparent Peregrinus at Lincoln in 1313-24. (cf. the Fleury plays, expecially of St. Nicholas, and the Beauvais Ludus Danielis). Further, since on the whole the terminology used to denote staged drama was remarkably flexible, we ought not to insist, for example, on an unambiguous definition of miracula, a term that was used in the earliest record that has been proposed for the saint play. The alleged St. Catherine play at Dunstable in c. 1110, described as both ludus and miracula, utilized valuable vestments from a nearby abbey and hence was not likely to have been "a raucous celebration by choir boys". The 1446 entry for St. James at York is listed by Clopper as "uncertain", but the will of Willian Revetour which contains the reference also refers to the York Creed Play for which there is record of performance. That a "sight", such as the case of the representation of the matyrdom of SS. Feliciana and Sabina at Shrewsbury, might be a play is verified by A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, and in fact this term designates an important aspect of the late medieval vernacular drama - its visual dimension. The placement of the Martyrdom of SS. Feliciana and Sabina in the dry quarry at Shrewsbury also argues for its dramatic character since it was a place for displaying entertainment, including other plays. The physical setting argues strongly against something static or undramatic. The saint play, though only a few English fragments and texts (including the Mary Play in the N-Town collection) remain extant, was widely popular on the Continent and cannot be discounted as a very popular dramatic genre also in late medieval England. For a number of reasons it was far more likely to have been favored by amateur actors in civic settings than the morality play, which is in fact absent from the earlier dramatic records.

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Lampe, David

Saints Paul and Bartholomew, Stage Center, Please!

Though it is admittedly risky, an assumption based on even less than paleographic evidence, almost on the presence of absence, it might still be possible to "reconstruct" the existence of English Saints Plays beyond the lonely Digby Mary Magdalene and Conversion of St. Paul by a judicious use of later plays and extant Latin and Continental models. The Digby plays though once (like many early drama efforts) condemned as turgid or unstageable, have more recently been recognized as effective theatre. My paper will explore these plays in terms of their dramaturgy and suggest that the presentation of Saint Paul in this play (and probably other plays not extant) effected the sub-text of Shakespeare's Richard III.

Though there are no extant English St. Bartholomew plays, an examination of other examples (continental) suggests theatrical and iconographic conventions that Ben Jonson inverts in his Bartholomew Fair. These two examples (as well as a number of other allusions in Shakespeare and elsewhere and careful consultation of documentary sources) will be used to suggest the vitality of a tradition otherwise unavailable and thus often ignored.

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