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Ritual Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town

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Ritual Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town Mervyn James Past and Present, No. 98. (Feb., 1983), pp. 3-29. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28198302%290%3A98%3C3%3ARDASBI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 Past and Present is current...

Ritual Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town
Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town Mervyn James Past and Present, No. 98. (Feb., 1983), pp. 3-29. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28198302%290%3A98%3C3%3ARDASBI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 Past and Present is currently published by Oxford University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Fri Jul 13 13:52:45 2007 RITUAL, DRAMA AND SOCIAL BODY IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TOWN* THIS ARTICLE AIMS TO DISCUSS A SPECIFIC LATE MEDIEVAL CULT AS practised in a specific context: that of the late medieval town. The kind of town to be considered falls typically into the category of "provincial capital", or at least of "county town", in terms of a re- cently suggested c1assification.l The cult in question is the cult of Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi was celebrated annually on a day which fell sometime between the end of May and the end of June.2 What I propose to discuss are the various rites which were celebrated on Corpus Christi Day, the various dramatic, theatrical manifesta- tions which took place in connection with the occasion, and the myth- ology associated with both. By and large Corpus Christi has received more attention from literary scholars than from historians. This is because the famous Corpus Christi play cycles developed in con- nection with the Corpus Christi cult. The mythology of Corpus Christi has been very interestingly discussed by, for example, V. A. Kolve and Jerome Tay10r.~ Much has been written about the ways the plays were presented and produced, some of this by scholars with a strong historical sense, as more recently Alan Nelson and Margaret D ~ r r e l l . ~Nevertheless, there does seem to be lacking among most of these writers anything more than a very generalized idea5 of the late * This paper was put together while a member of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, during the Session 1976-7. I owe a debt of gratitude to that distinguished institution, and in particular to its School of Historical Studies, whose Chairman, John Elliott, and fellow-members provided so much by way of hospitality, stimulating discussion and conversation. I am also grateful to Michael Hunter and Bob Scribner, who organized the London University seminar on "Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe" to which it was delivered in November 1979. See P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transttion, 1500-1700:Essays in Urban Htstor,~(London, 1976), pp. 8 ff. The date of Corpus Christi Day was determined by that of Easter Sunday and showed the same var~ation from year to year. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London, 1966); Jerome Taylor, "The Dramatic Structure of the Corpus Christi Play", in Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson (eds.),.. Medteval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago, 1972), pp. ~ 148 it. Alan H . Nelson, The Medieval Engltsh Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago, 1974); Margaret Dorrell, "The Mayor of York and the Coronation Pageant", LeedsStudtes tn Engltsh, new ser., v (1971), pp. 34-45; Margaret Dorrell and Alexandra F. Johnston, "The Domesday Pageant of the York Mercers", Leeds Studtes in Engltsh, new ser., v (1971), p p 29-34 As expressed for example by Taylor, "Dramatic Structure of the Corpus Christi Play", pp. 152-3. 4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 98 medieval social background against which the cult was practised and the plays performed; and very little sense of the specific social needs and pressures to which both responded. What I aim to do here there- fore is to fill in the social dimension. Briefly, I propose to argue that the theme of Corpus Christi is society seen in terms of body; and that the concept of body provided urban societies with a mythology and ritual in terms of which the opposites of social wholeness and social differentiation could be both affirmed, and also brought into a cre- ative tension, one with the other.6 The final intention of the cult was, then, to express the social bond and to contribute to social integration. From this point of view, Corpus Christi expresses the creative role of religious rite and ideology in urban societies, in which the alternative symbols and ties of lordship, lineage and faithfulness, available in countrysides, were lacking. The feast of Corpus Christi, authorized by a papal bull of 1264 which was published in 1317,' first receives specific mention in Eng- land when it was celebrated at Ipswich in I 325. In the course of the following century, its observation spread widely; and although never exclusively an urban feast, it soon came to occupy a particularly prom- inent place in the townsman's liturgical calendar. And it was in towns that the Corpus Christi celebrations assumed their most elaborate and The general approach owes much to Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmologv (London, 1970); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysts of Con- cepts of Pollutton and Taboo (London, 1966). For the background of ideas, see Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, Conn., 1975); S. B. Chrimes, Engltsh Constttutional Ideas in the Ftfreenth Century (Lon- don, 1936); D . G. Hale, The Body Poltttc: A Polttical Metaphor in Renatssance English Literature (The Hague, 1971); E. H . Kantorowicz, The King's TWO Bodtes: A Study tn Medteval Political Theologv (Princeton, 1957); F . W. Maitland, "The Body Politic", in his Selected Essays, ed. H . D . Hazeltine (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 240 ff. The concept of body was of course by no means solely applied to urban societies; it provided a symbolism in terms of which all kinds of human social organization, including the unity of mankind itself and its relationship to the cosmos, could be expressed. See Barkan, Nature's Work ofArt , passim; Otto Gierke, Political Theones of theMiddle Age, trans. F . W. Maitland (Cambridge, 1922), p. 10. It is likely that the role attributed in this paper to the Corpus Christi celebrations in English urban society was at least similar to that of the feast and its cultus in the larger towns of western Europe in general. For the European dimension, see for ex- ample Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth Century Lyon", Past and Present, no. 90 (Feb. 1981), pp. 40 ff.; Neil C. Brooks, "Processional Drama and Dramatic Procession in Germany in the Late Middle Ages", J l . Engltsh and Gennantc Philology, xxxii (1933), pp. I41 ff.; Edwin Muir, Ctvic Ritual tn Re- naissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), pp. 223 ff.; F . G. Very, TheSpanish Corpus Christi Procession: A Literary and Folkloric Study (Valencia, 1962), passim. ' For the foundation of the cult of Corpus Christi, and the circumstances of the bull, see P. Browe, Dte Verehrung der Eucharistte im Mittelalter (Munich, 1933), pp. 70 ff.; Acta sanctorum, x Aprilis, i, (Paris, 1866), pp. 457-64; for the bull Transtturus, see Magnum bullarium Romanum, iii (Turin, 1858),,pp. 705-8. According to M. L. Spencer, Corpus Chnstt Pageants tn England (New York, 191 I), p. I I ; cf. E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1903), ii, p. 371. But the feast may already have been widely observed by 1318. See Glynne Wick- ham, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1600, 2 vols. in 3 (London, 1959-72), i, 1300 to 1576, 2nd edn. (London, 1980), p. I 30. 5 RITUAL, DRAMA AND SOCIAL BODY developed form.9 What happened on Corpus Christi Day was that first of all a mass took place, after which the congregation formed a procession in which the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, in the form of the host consecrated at the mass, was ceremonially carried through the principal thoroughfare of the place where the feast was being celebrated. It was attended by clergy and layfolk, and in the larger towns the mayor, aldermen, councillors and other municipal officials took a prominent part in the proceedings. The gilds were also required to attend, dressed in their gild uniform, or livery; and these processed in accordance with a carefully defined order of pre- cedence, the humbler crafts going first, the wealthier and more im- portant, in ascending order, coming behind them. Last of all came the aldermen, councillors, sheriffs: the town magistracy, in fact; and last of all, marching next to the host with its attendant clergy came the mayor. The procession made its way to some other church at the other end of the processional route, where the host was deposited, and the religious side of the celebrations were there completed. Feast- ing and other kinds of more secular celebration then followed.1° The feature to note however is the procession, in which the Corpus Christi becomes the point of reference in relation to which the structure of precedence and authority in the town is made visually present on Corpus Christi Day. In addition, in many towns the gild contingents in the procession were accompanied by "pageants" -moving waggon platforms. On these, theatrical properties and actors were assembled into depictions of Scriptural scenes and incidents, each one being the responsibility either of one, or collectively of several, of the gilds marching in the procession. The pageants might take the form of mute shows. But in some towns they stopped at predetermined stations to present brief speeches accompanied by dramatic actions. In others, full-length plays might be acted at some stage in the proceedings.ll The assem- bled texts of the latter constitute the well-known Corpus Christi cy- cles, of which more or less complete examples survive from Coventry, York, Wakefield, Chester and from another town which was probably Lincoln.12 Some of these play cycles were so elaborate - involving For reasons succinctly outlined by Glynne Wickham, TheMedieval Theatre (Lon- don, 1974), pp. 59 ff., and by Nelson, Medieval English Stage, pp. 10 ff. lo William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages: Western European Stage Con- dttlons, c. 800-1576 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 96 ff.; Spencer, Corpus Chnstl Pageants, pp. 61 ff. Most of the extensive material relating to the nature of the "pageants", and the manner in which the plays were presented, is summarized, with bibliographies, but with polemical intent, in Nelson, Medieval English Stage, passim. l 2 See Two Covent~l Corpus Chnsti Plays, ed. Hardin Craig, 2nd edn. (Early Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., Ixxxvii, London, 1957); York Plays, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (Oxford, 1885); The Towneley Plays, ed. George England and A. W. Pollard (Early Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., Ixxi, London, 1897); The WakefieldPageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester, 1958); TheChester Plays, ed. H . Deimling(Ear1y I conr. on p. 6 1 6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 98 in York, for example, the presentation of over fifty plays - that the dramatic aspects of the feast were liable to conflict with the proces- sional and liturgical aspects. Where this happened, the two became separated. In some towns the procession took up the morning of the feast-day, the plays the afternoon. In Chester the plays were shifted to Whitsun week; in York the plays continued to be presented on Corpus Christi Day, but the procession and mass took place the morn- ing after. l 3 As a result of this separation two aspects of the celebration emerged - the procession and the plays - each with a different significance and function which I will later discuss. What is the meaning of all this? One thing that seems to be clear is that in some kind of way the feast and its season is about body - a special kind of body admittedly: the Corpus Christi; but body never- theless, and as such related to and modelled on the human psycho- somatic self, and to the way in which this is experienced. So my starting point is going to be from the idea - developed by Mary Douglas for example in Natural Symbols14- that the human experi- ence of body tends to sustain a particular view of society, the latter in turn constraining the way in which the body itself is regarded. Of course, the body of Christ was an essentially religious conception, involving a relationship between the self and a supernatural order. But the idea also had a secular and social relevance. "Body" was the pre-eminent symbol in terms of which society was conceived. l5 Other images were available - the social order might be seen as a tree, or as a ship, as a vineyard with its graduated hierarchy of labourers, or as a church building with its component parts.16 All had the advan- tage of suggesting structure - separate parts related to each other within a larger whole. But it was the idea of the social order as body which had the widest connotation, and which was most obsessive and fruitful. It suggested in the first place the intimacy and naturalness of the social bond, since it was presented as a kind of extension of the psychosomatic self.17 Natural body and social body indeed reacted in. 12 conr. : Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., Ixii, London, 1892; re-ed. J. Matthews, Early Eng. Text Sac., extra ser., cxv, London, 1916); Ludus Coventriae: or, The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, ed. K . S. Block (Early Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., cxx, London, 1920). l 3 Spencer, Corpus Christi Pageants in England, pp. 96 ff. IJDouglas, Natural Symbols, pp. 65, 70. 15 By and large this paper inclines to the kind of "structuralist" approach developed in relation to systems of religious ritual and belief by Claude Lkvi-Strauss in his Le totemisme au'jourdhui (Paris, 1962), and in his La pensee sauvage (Paris, 1962). The view developed is that, through the medium of eucharistic beliefs, a language of ritual and symbol is set up, in terms of which an "ideal" order is projected which stands in a dialectical (or "binary") relationship to the actual order, generating a pressure to- wards a conformity of the latter to the former. 16 Edmund Dudley, The Tree of Commonwealth, ed. D. M. Brodie (Cambridge, 1948);G. R. Owst, Lirerature and Pulpit inMedieval England, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 19661, P P 72, 549. l 7 The idea of a close analogy between the body politic and the body natural orig- inates in the pre-Socratic idea that the world of nature is saturated with mind, and that 'conr, on p. :r 7 RITUAL, DRAMA AND SOCIAL BODY on each other with a closeness which comes to near-identity. Thus actions which affected the social body reacted back on the physical body - physical ailments, for example, being seen as the result of sins, lapses or crimes which had inflicted harm on the social body.ls And just as in the natural body the physiological danger points were at the joints, where member met member, or at the openings where the body could be invaded by harmful influences from without, so in the social body tensions arose at the jointures which linked group to group, class to class; and in the social body too there were the open- ings through which might pour invasion from without.19 n, I : conr. therefore all bodies within it were constructed in accordance with similar principles, and displayed a similar structure, being those perceived in mind. For Plato, in ac- cordance with his doctrine of "ideas", all living creatures similarly conformed to an "ideal" primordial model. Aristotle clearly enunciated the structural similarity of social and psychosomatic bodies, laying down the principle that "the constitution of an animal must be regarded as resembling that of a well-governed city state": Aristotle, On the Movement of Antmals, trans. E . S. Forster (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1937), p. 475. The concept received much emphasis in the writings of the Roman Stoics, as in Seneca: "We are all parts of one great body. Nature produced us related to one another, since she created us for the same end": Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistolae morales, trans. R . M . Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1917-43), iii, p. 91. The idea passed into the Christian tradition by way of St. Paul's First Eptstle to the Corinthians xii. 12, 14-23, 25-6. For these and other authorities, see Hale, Body Politic, pp. 18 ff.; Barkan, Nature's Work of Art, pp. 8 ff., 64 ff., and references there glven. l8 The concept of body meant that social dysfunction was presented in terms of disease, as in Cicero, De officiis, iii. 5. 22, quoted in Hale, Body Politic, p. 25: "AS, supposing each member of the body were so disposed as to think it could be well if it should draw to itself the health of the adjacent member, it is inevitable that the whole body would be debilitated and would perish". The interest in medicine among the early Tudor humanists, particularly in Cardinal Pole's household at Padua, led to one of the most elaborate surviving expositions of social ills in terms of disease. This was Thomas Starkey's Dialogue between CardinalPole and Thomas Lupset, ed. J .M. Cowper (Early Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., xii, London, 1871). Starkey sees the English body politic as afflicted by consumption (loss of population); dropsy (idleness); palsy (lux- ury); and pestilence (social conflict). By the same principle, applied in reverse, an explanation for the misfortunes and ills which afflicted the psychosomatic body of the individual person was sought in the latter's moral lapses and sins, which in turn caused disorders in the social body. See K. V. Thomas, Rellgton and the Decline of Magic: Studtes in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centur,~ England (London, 1971), pp. 106-7. Hence the importance given, particularly in urban societies, to the moral purity of office-bearers, and the enforcement by urban magistracies of moral policies on whose effectiveness the well-being of the town and its inhabitants was thought to depend: Bernd Moeller, Zmpenal Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, ed. and trans. H. C. E. Midelfort and M. U. Edwards Jr . (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 45-6 In the larger English towns, magistrates were commonly disqualified from office by im- morality, and urban governments enforced a sexual code which involved punishing or penalizing adultery, fornication and prostitution; before the Reformation, as after it, Sabbatarianism was an issue, leading to spasmodic Sabbatarian legislation. For the attitudes involved, see for example John Stow, A Suruq of London, ed. C. L. Kings- ford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 19081, i, pp. 189-90, where he reports that in 1383 the citizens of London, "taking upon them the rights which belonged to their bishops", proceeded to punish on their own initiative the prostitutes and p
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