Sensual bodies and devotional encounters: The influence of performance on lay visual piety in late medieval York.
Item
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Title
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Sensual bodies and devotional encounters: The influence of performance on lay visual piety in late medieval York.
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Identifier
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AAI3213165
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identifier
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3213165
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Creator
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Stevenson, Jill.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Pamela Sheingorn
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | History, Medieval | Religion, General
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Abstract
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In this dissertation I assert that religious performance influenced late medieval visual culture by offering laypeople opportunities for embodied spectatorship. In the first chapter I use records of public performances in medieval York and that city's Corpus Christi cycle text to argue that York's religious performance tradition encouraged laypeople in a particular form of devotional seeing that not only instructed them in sacred viewing practices, but that also situated the lay body as a central element in popular visual piety. In the second chapter I employ phenomenology and medieval visual theory to examine various moments in the York cycle when the encounter between the actor's and the spectator's live bodies may have generated meaning for the audience beyond the text. I analyze the anti-theatrical discourse in the Middle Ages and argue that it was the material, bodied encounter between actor and spectator that generated medieval anxiety about performance. I suggest that the performance viewing experience may have constituted a form of lay literacy that I ultimately label "performance literacy.".;In my final chapter I use performance literacy to explore other devotional practices, contexts, and objects, in order to identify instances in which laypeople either perceived through performance or constructed situations in ways that provoked others to perceive through performance. I first examine how laypeople may have evoked performance literacy through their funeral arrangements. I then explore the parish church as a material space that encouraged laypeople to see with their bodies and that afforded them ways to prompt others do to the same. In this section, I also analyze late medieval discourse about devotional images and show how texts about images convey an emphasis on materiality that parallels what I identified in anti-theatrical writing from the same period. Finally, I examine the domestic space and different material objects of devotion that laypeople employed in that space. In situations when a material devotional experience may have prompted the lay person to see by means of performance, I do not simply detect performativity, but I also identify certain practices of visual piety as extensions of performance.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
