Pathos as Communicative Strategy in Late-Medieval Religious Drama and Art explores the strategies employed to trigger emotional responses in late-medieval dramatic texts from several Western European traditions, and juxtaposes these texts with artistic productions from the same areas, with an emphasis on Britain. The aim is to unravel the mechanisms through which pathos was produced and employed, mainly through the representation of pain and suffering, with mainly religious, but also political aims. The novelty of the book resides in its specific linguistic perspective, which highlights the recurrent use of words, structures and dialogic patterns in drama to reinforce messages on the salvific value of suffering, in synergy with visual messages produced in the same cultural milieu.

Performing Arguments: Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama proposes a fresh performance-centered view of rhetoric by recovering, tracing, and analyzing the trope and tradition of aestheticized argumentation as a mode of performance across several early ludic genres: Middle English debate poetry, the fifteenth-century ‘disguising’ play, the Tudor Humanist debate interlude, and four Shakespearean works in which the dynamics of debate invite the plays’ reconsideration under the new rubric of ‘rhetorical problem plays.’ Performing Arguments further establishes a distinction between instrumental argumentation, through which an arguer seeks to persuade an opponent or audience, and performative argumentation, through which the arguer provides an aesthetic display of verbal or intellectual skill with persuasion being of secondary concern, or of no concern at all. This study also examines rhetorical and performance theories and practices contemporary with the early texts and genres explored, and is further influenced by more recent critical perspectives on resonance and reception and theories of audience response and reconstruction.

Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. This volume examines the sacred and the profane in the early modern period. The 2023 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The opening essay juxtaposes Socratic irony and Hermeticism in its exploration of the Neoplatonic influences in Spenser's Faerie Queene. It is followed by three analyses of religious poems; the first demonstrates the ways in which William Baldwin resurrects Edward the sixth in his "Funeralles of King Edward" to promote his own evangelical agenda; the second takes a close look at Herrick's "Rex Tragicus," arguing that it is a powerful expression of "English religious identity." The final essay in this group seeks to complicate the history of the early modern female sonneteer. Returning to the secular, the next essay compares a work by Polish writer Andrzej Modrzewski to Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Art history is the focus of the following triad of essays, which illuminate the visual cultures of the Netherlands and Spain; they address the collaborative organization of the Spanish sculptor Alonso Berruguete's workshop, the related phenomenon of fiction, faith, and spectacle in Maarten van Heemskerck's religious imagery, and the political dimensions of the aesthetics of Habsburg portraiture. The volume concludes with an exuberant analysis of the role of fiction in the art of biographical writing, using the example of Katherine Rundell's Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Contributors: Sunmin Cha, Ilenia Colón Mendoza, Scott Lucas, Gerardo Rappazzo Amura, Mary Ruth Robinson, Jesse Russell, Paul J. Stapleton, John Wall, Vaclav Zheng.

Grief binds the worshipers together in an adagio of sorrow as they encounter the sculptural representation of the Entombment of Christ. Located in funerary chapels, parish churches, cemeteries, and hospitals, these works embody the piety of the later Middle Ages. In this book, Donna Sadler examines the sculptural Entombments from Burgundy and Champagne through a variety of lenses, including performance theory, embodied perception, and the invocation of the absent presence of the Holy Sepulcher. The author demonstrates how the action of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus entombing Christ in the presence of the Marys and John operates in a commemorative and collective fashion: the worshiper enters the realm of the holy and becomes a participant in the biblical event.

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Saints and heroes were often central characters in Middle English biblical plays, although scholarship has tended to focus more on the villainous than the virtuous. In this study, Chester Scoville examines how medieval playwrights portrayed saints and how they used them to convey feelings of social virtue, devotion, compassion and community in the audience. Although looking also at performance practices, costume, gesture and scenert, the main emphasis is on language and rhetoric in biblical drama and the position of saints lying between the earthly and ultimate community. Four `role models' are jeld up for close examination: Thomas the Doubter, Mary Magdalene, Jospeh and Paul.

From late medieval reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross to Sol Lewitt’s “Buried Cube,” Depositions is about taking down images and about images that anticipate being taken down. Foretelling their own depositions, as well as their re-elevations in contexts far from those in which they were made, the images studied in this book reveal themselves to be untimely — no truer to their first appearance than to their later reappearances. In Depositions, Amy Knight Powell makes the case that late medieval paintings and ritual reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross not only picture the deposition of Christ (the imago Dei) but also allegorize the deposition of the image as such and, in so doing, prefigure the lowering of “dead images” during the Protestant Reformation. Late medieval pre-figurations of Reformation iconoclasm anticipate, in turn, the repeated “deaths” of art since the advent of photography: that is the premise of the vignettes devoted to twentieth-century works of art that conclude each chapter of this book. In these vignettes, images that once stood in late medieval churches now find themselves among works of art from the more recent past with which they share certain formal characteristics. These surreal encounters compel us to reckon with affinities between images from different times and places. Turning on its head the pejorative (art-historical) use of the term pseudomorphosis — formal resemblance where there is no similarity of artistic intent — Powell explores what happens to our understanding of historically and conceptually distant works of art when they look alike.

Analyzing a wide range of textual and pictorial evidence, the author finds that the bleeding flesh of the wounded Savior manifests divine presence; in the intensified corporeality of the suffering Jesus whose flesh not only condemns, but also nurtures, heals, and feeds, believers meet a trinitarian God of mercy.

Examines the painted body of the actor on the early modern stage. Inventions of the Skin illuminates a history of the stage technology of paint that extends backward to the 1460s York cycle and forward to the 1630s. Organized as a series of studies, the four chapters of this book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play, with special attention to the pageant representing The Transfiguration of Christ; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, specifically blood's unexpected role as a device for disguise in plays such as Look About You (anon.) and Shakespeare's Coriolanus; racial masquerade within seventeenth-century court performances and popular plays, from Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness to William Berkeley's The Lost Lady; and finally whiteface, death, and stoniness"e; in Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Recovering a crucial grammar of theatrical representation, this book argues that the onstage embodiment of characters--not just the words written for them to speak--forms an important and overlooked aspect of stage representation.

In Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith, Donna Sadler explores the manner in which worshipers responded to the carved and polychromed retables adorning the altars of their parish churches. Framed by the symbolic death of Christ re-enacted during the Mass, the historical account of the Passion on the retable situated Christ’s suffering and triumph over death in the present. The dramatic gestures, contemporary garb, and wealth of anecdotal detail on the altarpiece, invited the viewer’s absorption in the narrative. As in the Imitatio Christi, the worshiper imaginatively projected himself into the story like a child before a dollhouse. The five senses, the sculptural medium, the small scale, and the rhetoric of memory foster this immersion.