The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence - Hardcover

Enders, Jody

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801433347 ISBN 13: 9780801433344

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801433347
• ISBN 13: 9780801433344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288