Junior Faculty Fellow 2001-02
Margaret Pappano (English and Comparative Literature)
Columbia University
The Priest's Body in Performance:
Clerical Playing and Theatrical Space in the Late Middle Ages
Following the Gregorian reforms and widespread institution and
enforcement of clerical celibacy as well as the related explosion
in Eucharistic theology and practices, notions of the priest's body
underwent a profound shift in western Europe; henceforth, his body
had to be perceived as different and pure, as something of a non-body
even. This study examines the massive cultural mechanisms that were
deployed in the late Middle Ages to "disembody" the priest,
that is, to radically spiritualize his fleshly presence. Theatre,
including the performance of liturgy, processions, as well as Latin
and vernacular plays, often served just this purpose. In the space
of the theatre, the body of the priest may be divinized, likened
to the body of Christ and ontologically dissociated from the material,
corruptible body of
the layperson. But theatre may also destabilize priestly identity
because of the very challenge that play-acting and the patent simulacra
of theatricality bear to the ineffable truth of sacred identity.
In performance, there is always the risk that the priestly body
may be perceived as nothing more than a costumed human body; so,
too, the spiritual apparatus from which priestly power derived could
be quickly confused and even conflated with the representational
apparatus of the play. By using a range of traditional and non-traditional
theatrical evidence from late Medieval England and France, this
study examines what a priest's bodily presence means to the spiritual
and hermeneutical program of a dramatic performance and also what
theatre does to priestly identity.
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