"Maculating Mary: The Detractors of the N-Twon Cycle's 'Trial of Joseph and Mary'"

Maculating Mary: The Detractors of the N-Town Cycle’s “Trial of Joseph and Mary”

by Alison M. Hunt

In her article “Maculating Mary: The Detractors of the N-Town Cycle’s “Trial of Joseph and Mary,” Alison M. Hunt examines the role of the detractors in the trial play in light of two other common medieval slander locations: the romance and the Lollard critique of the church.

 

In a romance, she says, a slanderer functions to show how enviable the hero is, to send the hero into exile, and to provide the hero a chance to redeem his reputation. Hunt notes that the ecclesiastical court system relied upon public rumor to bring people to court, but also that it demanded that the accusers be people of good character. The court system then functioned as the ally of the accused, offering the person an opportunity to redeem his or her good name.

 

Hunt also examines the case of Lollard dissent, especially pointing out the threat it posed in the eyes of the church to social unity. In the N-Town trial play, accusation of Mary can stand in for any skepticism of church teachings, for the body of Mary represents the church. At the end, when Mary restores the community of the audience, she represents how the church restores community.

 

I plan to use Hunt’s claims about the importance of public opinion, not only for an individual’s place in society (thus making public opinion a strong coercive force) but as a standard by which to assess the value or danger of a dissenting belief. If a belief stands or falls on the basis of how it will impact social unity, then the standard for correct belief is not just the Bible or even church tradition, but the community’s consent.

Backbiter article

Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction

Hayes, Douglas W. Comparative Drama 34.1 (2000): 53-78.

Hayes sets up his examination of the detractors, and Backbiter in particular, by looking at Backbiter’s role in The Castle of Perseverance, a text pre-dating the N-Town plays. Using language, Backbiter moves back and forth across the strict lines between good and evil, blurring those lines. Hayes compares his place as a representative of “sins of the tongue” to Augustine’s understanding that rhetoric can be a force for evil as much as for good.

 

In the N-Town plays, Hayes says, the detractors use their ambivalent rhetoric for complicated purposes. The very presence of these characters forces the audience into an interpretive position by disrupting the sense of pure historical portrayal and reminding the audience of the dramatic setting. By addressing the audience, the detractors insert the audience into the biblical moment and force it to face the questions the biblical characters faced. Thus, the detractors put the audience in a position of attending to arguments against central tenets of Christian orthodoxy. When the detractors receive God’s wrath in payment, the audience knows which side of the argument is correct, but maintains its interpretive position; now the audience members have made an interpretive choice, and are no longer mere spectators to the biblical story. Still, Backbiter seems to escape unscathed, and may return.

 

In my paper about who determines correct belief, I had already planned to argue something similar about the role of the dramatic setting to make the audience interpret and judge heresy. Hayes’ article, by focusing on the detractors, points out a specific way that the plays do so. I plan to expand on his that the detractors force the audience to decide (with guidance) what is correct belief, arguing that the presence of God’s judgment at the end of the plays motivates the audience to become self-regulating in belief and to regulate the heterodox beliefs of others.

The Animated Canterbury Tales

In the event that you have time over Christmas break that you want to spend experiencing Chaucer, then look no further than this award winning series. Airing in the late 1990's, this stop-motion series captures the tales of Chaucer in visually entertaining episodes of around 30 minutes each, complete with the narration of our friend Chaucer Pilgrim. Although not completely loyal to the text, this miniseries captures the hilarity and bawdiness of the Canterbury Pilgrims and gives it new life through visual representation. I thought that it was highly entertaining, even though it wasn't that helpful for my paper.
There are three episodes available on YouTube. I've attached the first one. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3zUoNG_P_0&list=PLFM2U6J6u5w2Ye9L5lGx7kknNZYlj0no8

Pilgrim, Audience, God: David Williams on the audience of The Canterbury Tales

This chapter of David Williams’ The Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage presents a new way of understanding how Chaucer interacts with his audience. Williams argues that Chaucer creates “a complicated set of analogous audiences…to associate us, as audience, at various times, with one or another of these fictional audiences” (24). That is, Chaucer gives us the tools to “transcend fiction through fiction.” Williams describes this narrative construction as “cosmological,” and even goes on to argue that each pilgrim tells a tale that has a nuclei (perhaps more simply the “moral” of a tale?) that is received by several different audiences: other pilgrims, Chaucer poet, even God. This creates a narrative at an existential level and an opportunity for us as the reader-audience to “recognize ourselves by analogy as the ultimate level of a whole series of flawed authors,” which then begs the question of what our tale is. Williams asserts a “didactic Chaucer” that draws in us as his audience to participate as pilgrims. I’m not sure I’m wholly convinced of his argument, but it was the first of its kind that I have come across and gave me a new lens of trying to understand the function of storytelling in The Canterbury Tales.

Making Trouble: Postmodern Theory With/In Chaucer Studies

In this essay, Faye Walker analyzes the boundaries between medieval studies and poststructuralism, two areas that her experience has deemed largely incompatible in pedagogy. The primary difficult lies in attempting to take “apart the nineteenth-century construction of "medieval studies" and trying to imagine both a pre-nineteenth century model and a postmodern "shape" (for lack of a more descriptive word of a loosely structured body of material) for medieval studies.” She calls out the false dichotomy of poststructuralism and medieval studies, and through an exhaustive amount of academic research posits that both forms of literary study can be helpful in understanding the other. I was a bit surprised with this article, mainly because I didn’t realize that there was such a distinction between these two areas of study. Although the article didn’t end up being helpful for my paper, it was an interesting read and gave me something to think about. Also, Jill Mann (the editor of our version of the Canterbury Tales) is briefly quoted as one of the many scholars Walker refers to in this article.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=4faf2dc9-62b3-467d-a695-913f1e2974b8%40sessionmgr114&vid=0&hid=118&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=f5h&AN=9610233851

Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays by Theresa Coletti

This article (from Doug’s collection) by Theresa Coletti looks at the content and staging of the N-Town Marian plays in light of the religious iconography of the Middle Ages in order to better understand the cultural function of these plays. Coletti explores the staging of the N-Town plays as it interacts with medieval iconographic art and argues that iconographic presentation in the N-Town plays is justified by “forms of late medieval spirituality” (267), which I found to be a really interesting tracking of the relationship between the N-Town plays and the society from which these plays were born. Her overall argument is that medieval drama is inseparable from the devotional background that produced them, and the interaction of the two introduces a crossing of artistic sensibilities and iconographic representations that has transformed from painting and liturgy to dramatic interpretation.

Paul Zumthor on Pilgrimage Narratives

            I found this essay by Paul Zumthor absolutely fascinating. Zumthor looks at the unifying characteristics of a diverse array of medieval narrative, and how these narratives interact with their audiences rhetorically. He dissects the societal value of pilgrimage and explores why pilgrimage was so popular, not as a spiritual expression or amode of tourism but as a form of narrative in the middle ages. He notes a medieval “fascination…of a special order, the understanding of which is an experience of otherness, for better or for worse” (812), and creates a link between the medieval audiences curiosity for the “other” and the reality of a physical and distancing spatial order. This fascination is drives the production of what Zumthor believes is a “double account, narrative and descriptive” (812) of every pilgrimage tale, and often one quality subverts the other depending on the tone of a text. For example, the Canterbury Tales is a rich collection of narratives from various speakers, but the description of the actual pilgrimage is rather sparse. The narrative side of the tale takes precedence over the descriptive side. Zumthor’s article has a lot of really interesting ways of understanding travel narratives (he even has a little something to say on science-fiction as a travel narrative!), and I would highly recommend reading it—even if, dare I say, just for fun.

Zumthor, Paul, and Catherine Peebles. “The Medieval Travel Narrative”. New Literary History 25.4 (1994): 809–824. Web.