Overview

Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring ""theater of cruelty"" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.

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9780801487835

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Reviews

This book . . . should not be ignored by specialists interested in medieval drama or in the nature of violence in any period. Choice

Jody Enders's bold work on drama, rhetoric, and violence changes the terms by which we understand law, persuasion, and performance from antiquity onwards. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty shows how the violence of the medieval and early modern theater is grounded in rhetoric's real and symbolic dependence upon torture, punishment, and pain. This is a brilliant reading of medieval theater, a revolutionary reading of the rhetorical tradition, and a powerful argument for the immediacy of intellectual history to contemporary social analysis. Rita Copeland, University of Minnesota

This important new study returns to the topics of rhetoric and medieval drama but implicates these areas of this writer's interest and expertise with another topic about which she cares with equal passion: the historical continuity and seeming ubiquity of violence and cruelty. -Ann Blake, Parergon

Author Information

Jody Enders is Professor of French and Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara and editor of Theatre Survey. She is the author of Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, and Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends.

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