‘Performance of the Passion: The Enactment of Devotion in the Later Middle Ages.’ In Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts. Edited by Elina Gertsman, (Ashgate, 2008), pp. 129–42. (original) (raw)
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Recently, theatre studies have focused on the relathionships between dramatic action and both the rhetorical mechanisms of writing and reading - based on locational memory’s techniques - and the construction of mental or artistic images. This article aims to demonstrate that in monastic circles, throught ninth and eleventh centuries, there is a deep change in the rhetorical memoria’s device for visualizing the Passion of Christ. It is a change that characterizes both silent, daily prayer and the public rites of Good Friday, especially the adoratio Crucis’ cerimonies. I will describe this change using three textual exemples of prayers to the Cross: we shall see that when the point of view changes, at the same time there is a change in the textual structure and in the dramatic system; in addition, the emotional response from the beholder also changes. From Peter Damian to Anselm there seems to be a process that moves from an ostensive intention of Christ’s body (quite a ‘seeing’ the broken body, covered with blood and injuries) to an affective sense of the Passion’s event (quite a ‘feeling’ and ‘sharing’ the pain for those wounds). The analysis would try to highlight how this change represents the historical foundation of the ‘theater of mercy’, so important in late Middle Age.
The Physical Actions of Medieval Women's Sacred Performances
Magistra: A Journal of Women's Spirituality in History, 2011
Many nuns and beguines of the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries performed their faith physically, in ways as subtle as stillness or simple gestures, or as dramatic as violent falling, whirling, or dancing. These sacred performances, deeply meaningful to the women who created them and both affecting and efficacious for those who observed, have become the focus of much scholarly attention in recent decades. 1
The following article approaches a historical phenomenon in an interdisciplinary manner.l We see our approach as critical because it questions the narrow methods of single disciplines that, for example, explain music solely on the basis of other pieces of music, or visual images as if they were engendered by previous "works of art". Further we hope to make a contribution to the "rewriting of the history of the Christian arts" by writing in those whom the various disciplines have often written out: women, ethnic or religious minorities, wide popular audiences that include participants who were neither affluent nor educated. 2 We propose an infinitely critical methodology that probes the motivations of our historical protagonists, of our disciplinary forbears, and of ourselves. Consequently we are cautious of simplistic overarching theories, and persistently sceptical of even our own doing. Did the Holy Lance signify only or primarily the Passion of Christ? Did restricted and controlled access serve mainly to protect the objects from theft or abuse? Did the ordering of the participants in the rituals serve solely to legitimate Nuremberg's oligarchy and stabilize its internal social structure, or did it also incorporate vehicles for change and challenge? By performing ideological criticism on the Middle Ages are we setting ourselves apart and colonizing medieval Christianity for the sake of our own (historically chauvinistic) scholarship?
Performing the Passion: Music, Ritual, and the Eastertide Labyrinth
… Music Review= Revista Transcultural de Música, 2009
un juego litúrgico realizado en un laberinto eclesiástico el lunes de Semana Santa y del cual se tiene documentación desde el siglo XIV. En este rito festivo, miembros del clero bailaban mientras se lanzaban una pelota unos a otros y cantaban la secuencia Victimae paschali laudes. Este tipo de chorea circa daedalum sincronizaba lo temporal y lo sublunar en un ritual corporal que al mismo tiempo retomaba paradigmas neoplatónicos multivalentes dentro de la música y la danza. Esta cultura encarnada reunía lo secular con lo eclesiástico en su evocación concomitante de la armonía de las esferas, la Pasión de Cristo y las míticas trayectorias de Teseo y Orfeo. El artículo cuestiona las implicaciones socioculturales y comunales de este legado y el papel constitutivo de la música en esta práctica colectiva. Palabras clave: Laberinto-danza-ritual-Victimae paschali laudes-performatividad-ludus-juego de pelota-Medioevo-Semana Santa.