Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
Jody Enders is Professor of French and Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara and editor of Theatre Survey. She is the author of Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, and Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends.
Table of Contents
Illustrations
ix
Preface
xi
Abbreviations
xv
A Polemical Introduction
1
Chapter 1.
The Dramatic Violence of Invention
25
The Inventional Drama of Torture
28
Rhetoric and Drama, Torture and Truth
38
The Violent Invention of Drama
48
Chapter 2.
The Memory of Pain
63
Foundational Violence
71
Violent Births, Miscarriages of Justice, Tortured Spaces
82
The Architecture of the Body in Pain
96
Violent Origins and Virtual Performances
111
Dramatic Figuration and Mnemonic Disfigurement in Medieval French Drama
120
Pedagogy, Spectacle, and the Mnemonic Agon
129
The Memory of Drama
152
Chapter 3.
The Performance of Violence
160
Pleasure, Pain, and the Spectacle of Scourging
170
Witnesses at the Scene
185
Special Effects
192
Death by Drama
202
Violence and Performativity on the French Medieval Stage: A Retrospective
Jody Enders's bold work on drama, rhetoric, and violence changes the terms by which we understand law, persuasion, and performance from antiquity onwards. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty shows how the violence of the medieval and early modern theater is grounded in rhetoric's real and symbolic dependence upon torture, punishment, and pain. This is a brilliant reading of medieval theater, a revolutionary reading of the rhetorical tradition, and a powerful argument for the immediacy of intellectual history to contemporary social analysis.
John M. Ganim
Following Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punishment and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, an entire subdiscipline of the study of torture and incarceration has developed. Jody Enders makes the connection that most investigators have glossed over: that drama and rhetoric and forensic share a concern, even obsession, with violence, with the language of violence and the violence of language, with representation of violence and the violence of representation, and with the recreation and memory of violence which is itself purged through an equal and opposite expression of violence. It is impossible to read any of the texts Enders discusses in the same way again.
