The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence

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.

Author: Jody Enders
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 04/25/2002
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.26w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780801487835

About the Author

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.