Suchergebnisse

AbstractPassion episodes such as the Buffeting are known for the powerful acts of compassion they occasioned within audiences through their performance of violence on the person of Jesus. Few critics, however, have considered that these episodes depend on antisemitic, Islamophobic, and anti-Black depictions of antagonists when engendering such emotional dispositions. By investigating the dynamics of mockery through a deeper look into the composite identities of Jesus's antagonists, this study reveals that these plays and the communities that produced them rely on a disingenuous stance of victimhood for their effectiveness. This 'victim play'—the collaborative community effort to claim the status of victim while simultaneously participating in the victimization of others—obscures that those who are attributed cruel acts of mockery are actually its targets. The powerful rhetorical strategies of the premodern English episodes are thus unearthed in this study.

This article discusses two traditions of the Visitatio Sepulcri enacted by women religious in late medieval England, based on the exceptional surviving documentation of liturgical performances from the abbeys of Barking and Wilton. Although these documents do not give access to what happened in these Easter morning performances, they do provide evidence for how the agency of the nuns was encoded into every aspect of their respective liturgical tradition. One of the most striking dimensions of this agency is that the abbesses and nuns shaped performance practices to conceptions of their embodiment. I explore how each abbey grounded authority within the bodies of holy women in relation to biblical episodes in which they touch the resurrected body of Christ, and via the teachings of the apostolorum apostola, Mary Magdalene. Of central concern are the critical tools necessary to read the embodied practices that each abbey crafted through their repertoire of movement and use of artifacts.