The material bodies of Medieval religious performance in England
The cultural debate surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ revealed a degree of anxiety in contemporary society about the power religious performances exert over the spectator's body. Specifically, critics were troubled by how the materiality of The Passion's violence migh...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2006]
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| In: |
Material religion
Year: 2006, Volume: 2, Issue: 2, Pages: 204-234 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
| Summary: | The cultural debate surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ revealed a degree of anxiety in contemporary society about the power religious performances exert over the spectator's body. Specifically, critics were troubled by how the materiality of The Passion's violence might translate into alternative religious acts through the bodies of spectators. These concerns have a rich historical legacy, particularly during the Middle Ages. Medieval opponents of religious performances express apprehension about the same characteristic that contemporary critics fearthe ability of religious performance's effect to remain lodged in the spectator's body. This article argues that medieval religious performances engaged the spectator's body in a unique form of visual piety and, ultimately, trained it in a form of literacy. Laypeople then used this "performance literacy" in other devotional contexts with different images. To explore this concept, I use performance as a lens through which I examine eight devotional images inserted into a fifteenth-century manuscript commonly called the Pavement Hours. These insertions suggest different ways in which an object's users could draw upon their bodies to recreate a performance-viewing aesthetic that situated them as sacred viewers, marked sacred events with their material presence, and reinterpreted their devotional role accordingly. |
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| ISSN: | 1751-8342 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Material religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2752/174322006778053681 |