"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.

Like a Virgin: Mary and her Doubters in the N-Town Cycle

This article by Cindy L Carlson is found in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages. It talks about "the connections between Mary's virginal body and the social body of which she is an anomalous part, with special reference to the N-town cycle." It highlights the social problems that arise concerning the visibility of Mary's pregnancy in contrast to the invisibility of her virginity. Carlson makes the argument that Mary's virginity and the community are connected inherently, that Mary's virginity both threatens the cohesion of the society she lives in while also providing a model for the society to recover its purity and wholeness.

It talks a lot about Mary's doubters, particularly Joseph himself, and also the political system and trials that they get caught up in. From there, she discusses how the pageants that concern Mary are as political as they are spiritual.

Tales of Pathos

There is an essay in the Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (available at our library) that I have found really useful. It is written by Robert Worth Frank Jr, titled "The Canterbury Tales III: pathos". It focuses on the tales of the Man of Law, the Second Nun, the Clerk, the Physician, the Prioress, and the Monk. He lumps these tales together under the heading of "tales of pathos," meaning any tale that aims to create in the reader a strong emotional response.

While Frank does discuss the fourteenth-century reader's feelings towards these tales, he focuses also on how the modern reader interacts with them differently. He states that these tales "make greater demands on a modern reader's historical sense and imaginative sympathies," and also that they are crucial to understanding the minds and emotions of people in the fourteenth century/Chaucer's readers.

He also looks at literature and works present during the fourteenth century that followed the same patterns as these tales of pathos: Meditations on the Life of Christ, the Golden Legend, and also the various tales that Chaucer adapted to write some of the tales listed above.

If anyone is writing their paper on any of these tales or discussing the evolving reactions to the Canterbury Tales, this article could be really helpful.

"Pathos may seem alien because it works with extremes. It willingly tramples over probability if need be to portray these extremes -- of goodness, of evil, of suffering, of faith, of innocence. From this pushing to extremes arises its abstract character."

Article Review: “Theatrical Pragmatics: The Actor-Audience Relationship from the Mystery Cycles to the Early Tudor Comedies” by Hans-Jürgen Diller

In the article, Hans-Jürgen Diller argues that actor-audience relationships that were extremely important in the mystery plays. These relationships manifest in actors addressing their audience, “an important strategy to establish and sustain the W^d,” (Diller 157) or the “dramatic world” (156). Because the medieval dramatists did not have the technology to establish W^d (switch-off lighting, curtains, controlled and regulated seating), dramatists had to rely on spoken word and staging for W^d. The three types of actor-audience relationships are as follows: straddling, framing, and homiletic. Diller gives definitions and evidence (from the mystery plays and some comedies such as Magnyfycence) for each of these categories.

I recently received this article via Inter-Library Loan. Given its accessible (and interesting) theory-based discussion of medieval theater, it is likely relevant to all discussions of the N-Town Plays. So, if you’d like to read it let me know and I’ll send you the PDF!

Diller, Hans-Jürgen. “Theatrical Pragmatics: The Actor-Audience Relationship from the Mystery Cycles to the Early Tudor Comedies.” Comparative Drama 23 (1989): 156-165. Print.

"Gloria laus et Honor": Worshipping in the N-Town Plays

Hello, All,

I hope you are well and that most of you are weathering the aftermath of the storm with power and heat rather than without. Hopefully, when you have access to Wi-Fi, this post may be helpful for anyone whose interested in the "Passion Plays" section of N-Town.

I imagine that some of you, like myself, were curious as to what "Gloria laus et Honor" is--the song sung as Jesus is entering into the city of Jerusalem (218). I thought, to make it easy for us, I'd post the English and Latin lyrics together:

All glory, laud, and honor
to you, Redeemer, King,
to whom the lips of children
made sweet hosannas ring.
You are the King of Israel
and David's royal Son,
now in the Lord's name coming,
the King and Blessed One.


The company of angels
is praising you on high;
and we with all creation
in chorus make reply.
The people of the Hebrews
with palms before you went;
our praise and prayer and anthems
before you we present.


To you before your passion
they sang their hymns of praise;
to you, now high exalted,
our melody we raise.
As you received their praises,
accept the prayers we bring,
for you delight in goodness,
O good and gracious King!

(cf. hymnary.org; All Glory, Laud and Honor; http://www.hymnary.org/text/all_glory_laud_and_honor)

In Latin, as it would have been sung for the play:



(et. al, http://www.hymnary.org/text/gloria_laus_et_honor_tibi_sit)

And, lastly, if you'd like to listen to the hymn, originally written by Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmyCH4sPm6U

Interestingly, reference to the Hebrews, who "with palms before you went" (v. 4 in the Latin version; v. 2 in the shortened English version), is actually in the past tense. Thus, like much of the N-Town text, the song was sung as though those singing were already Christians. To some extent, of course, this was true because those who would have been singing the hymn would have been either Christians in the audience or the Christian actors. Significantly, then, the entrance into Jerusalem was being played in such a way that it was at once an act and an opportunity to worship God for the audience members. As is evident when audience members are invited on stage, too, N-Town was not meant to be a mere performance; it was, in fact, to encourage proper participation in the drama and in the Christian life.

Article Review: At Home; Out of House

So I've gotten a few emails regarding the article I presented on (that I forgot to publish on here). It is from The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing book on reserve at the library, but I have a PDF of the chapter if anyone would like it! It focuses on women as a representation of the home. Some of the main points focus on how women were to be a literal representation of the home, even if they were outside of it. They needed to be clothed in "proper" attire, surrounded by servants/maids, and even her speech had to point back to her house. Another interesting point was that the woman was not to travel far from the house which is in contrast with the Wife of Bath's pilgrimages (which she did even while married). A woman outside of the house was seen as a sexual deviant. Also, a woman located next to a window was seen as a sexual object because she was flaunting herself as outside of her home- which is also interesting when considering the Canterbury Tales and how the lover (or criminal) comes to the window.

Salih, Sarah. "At Home; Out of House". The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing.

Article Review: “The Audience-Interactive Games of the Middle English Religious Drama” by Peter Ramey

Ramey’s article creates a framework for understanding medieval religious drama using a very unlikely source—videogame design theory. Borrowing videogame design theory’s understanding of multiplayer internet-based games as “systems of uncertainty,” (56) Ramey builds a definition of the medieval game as “meaningful play” (57) within an interactive and rule-governed encounter, which given religious drama’s emphasis on audience response, can be understood as the play itself.

Using this framework, Ramey analyzes three “dramatic games” (57): the Coercion Game as utilized by tyrant characters, the Subversion Game as utilized by “underlings” (63), and the Conversion Game as utilized by the Christ character. Each Game has a different understanding of meaningful play: Coercion Game as power, Subversion Game as pleasure, and Conversion Game as presence. Ramey expounds on each of these games and definitions of play throughout the article, using the York, Towneley, and Chester cycles as support. While the article is more explorative than conclusive, Ramey ultimately argues for a revision of how modern viewers understand medieval theater; it is a participatory experience that requires the audience member to be more than a passive spectator.

Ramey does not explicitly quote or reference the N-Town Plays. However, his article is useful in its thorough treatment of other plays and of medieval audience writ large, and is therefore a worthwhile read!

Ramey, Peter. “The Audience-Interactive Games of the Middle English Religious Drama.” Comparative Drama 71.1 (2013): 55-83. Proquest. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.