Sacrilege and theatricality: The croxton play of the sacrament

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 281-309

  Lawton, David ^a  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950372685     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-33-2-281     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 30 (German), Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin, 1995), 246
2. Both of these definitions of mimesis are glossed by Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993): Caillois (34), from his "Mimetisme et psychasthenie legendaire," Minotaure 7(1935): 4-10
3. Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 754-88
4. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999)
5. See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
6. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 16
7. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), 10: "Le paradoxe de ce pur devenir, . . . c'est l'identité infinie."
8. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15
9. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 16
10. See also The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
11. and David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), esp. 82-83, 86-92
12. Robin R. Mundill, England's Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1269-1290 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
13. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996)
14. William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice 4.1.395-97, from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
15. Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982)
16. Sir Edmund Chambers, The English Folk-Play (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 169-70, first set Croxton beside the doctor scenes in the mummers' plays
17. Cecilia Cutts, "The English Background to the 'Play of the Sacrament'" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1938)
18. and Cutts, "The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece," Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 45-60
19. see the criticism by David Aers, "Altars of Power," Literature and History 3 (1994): 90-105
20. See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 35-36
21. and Ann Eljenholm Nichols, Seeable Signs: The Iconography of the Seven Sacraments, 1350-1544 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1994), 107-9
22. rescinding her own earlier skepticism about Cutts's conclusions; see also Nichols, "The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: A Re-Reading," Comparative Drama 22 (1988): 117-37
23. Robert Clark and Claire Sponsler, "Othered Bodies: Cross-Dressing in the Mystere de la Sainte Hostie and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 61-87, at 69
24. Kathleen Biddick, "The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet," in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 291 n. 2
25. Sarah Beckwith, "Ritual, Church, and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body," in Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 65-89
26. Steven Kruger, "The Spectral Jew," New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998): 9-35
27. See also his essay, "The Bodies of Jews in the Middle Ages," in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 301-23
28. See, respectively, Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
29. Alexandra Reid Schwartz, "Economies of Salvation: Commerce and the Eucharist in the Profanation of the Host in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," Comitatus 25 (1994): 1-20
30. Steven Kruger, "Fetishism 1927, 1614, 1461," in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Cohen, 193-208
31. Donalee Dox, "Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of the Imagination: Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 167-98
32. Michael Jones, "Theatrical History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," English Literary History 66 (1999): 223-60
33. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 273-74, 287-88
34. Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 85-96, 252-54
35. See the full-page performance photograph in Victor L. Scherb, "Violence and the Social Body in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament" Violence in Drama, Themes in Drama 13, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 69-78, at 72
36. and Wasson, "The English Church as Theatrical Space," 25-37, at 31
37. For Thetford, see William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 62-63
38. This was noticed long ago by E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 2:260-61 (Appendix F)
39. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 159
40. see also, for example, the essays by Spector ("Time, Space, and Identity") and Scherb ("Violence and the Social Body"), and other examples of work influenced rather sentimentally by the important work of Mervyn James, "Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Towns," Past and Present 98 (1983): 3-29
41. I allude here to the Lacanian reading of Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989)
42. Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in Masochism (1971; repr. New York: Zone Books, 1991), 20; and see 96-97 for Cain and Christ; and 100, for the new Man
43. Elizabeth Grosz, "Judaism and Exile: the Ethics of Otherness," Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, ed. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993)
44. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Original Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983, rev. 1991), 55-56
45. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 14
46. See my essay, "The Surveying Subject and the "Whole World' of Belief: Three Case Studies," New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 9-37
47. I cite the title of Abu-Lughod's study, Before European Hegemony
48. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, trans. Ian Maclean (London: Viking, 1995)
49. See Schwartz, "Economies of Salvation"
50. John W. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959)
51. and Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
52. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xviii, 46, and 44, respectively
53. Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, quoted in Robert Mills, "A Man is Being Beaten," in New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 115-53
54. Frank Kermode, "Art among the Ruins," New York Review of Books 48.11 (5 July 2001): 59-63