Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays 9780812298468

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Cultures of Witnessing

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Cultures of Witnessing Law and the York Plays

Emma Lipton

u n i v e r si t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e ss ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8122-5385-6 EBook ISBN 978-0-8122-9846-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lipton, Emma, author. Title: Cultures of witnessing : law and the York plays / Emma Lipton. Other titles: Middle Ages series. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: The Middle Ages series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021042879 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5385-6 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: York plays. | Mysteries and miracle-plays, English—England—York. | Theater—England—York—History— Medieval, 500–1500. | City and town life—England—York— History—To 1500. | Witnesses in literature. | Law in literature. | Witnesses—England—History—To 1500. | Law—England— History—To 1500. | Law and literature—England—History— To 1500. | English drama—To 1500—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR644.Y6 L57 2022 | DDC 822/.051609—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042879

For John Evelev

Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. Space and the Cultures of Witnessing in the York “Entry into Jerusalem”

24

Chapter 2. Witnessing as Speech

46

Chapter 3. Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Trial Plays

76

Chapter 4. Witnessing and Asynchronous Temporality

105

Notes 139 Bibliography 179 Index 195 Acknowledgments 199

Introduction

Christine Blasey Ford’s televised testimony on September 27, 2018, to her decades-­ old sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh, at the hearings for his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the many public responses to it, highlighted the theatrical nature of witnessing. Her speech was understood as an embodied and affective performance that brought the past back to the present moment and private experience into a public forum. Her testimony reminded us that acts of public witnessing—even to the most personal experiences—can make history, shape politics, and potentially lead to social change, despite a persistent association of the legal system with hegemony. Commenting on her testimony, Blasey Ford later said she “was simply doing my duty as a citizen . . . I thought anyone in my position would do the same thing.”1 Here, she characterizes witnessing as a practice of citizenship and identifies it as simultaneously legal, political, and theatrical. This book argues that the York Plays, performed annually on the streets of York from around 1376 until the late 1500s, also called attention to the theatrical nature of witnessing and to the ways that medieval theater was shaped by that legal practice.2 In medieval English courts, unlike modern American ones, individual witnesses spoke both to their personal acts of perception and to common knowledge of events. Witnesses and jurors were defined as neighbors, constructing their role in terms of local community. As in some people’s response to Blasey Ford’s testimony, medieval writers were concerned about the temporal gap between initial experience and subsequent testimony, and about how the process of memory might reshape the record of the past in light of the present concerns, motives, and emotions of individual witnesses and allied groups. This book argues that legal concepts of witnessing promoted urban citizenship and provide a way to theorize the dramatic practices of the late medieval religious drama in York. The York Plays, like other compilations of medieval urban drama, have most frequently been discussed in the context of devotional culture and practice, but the pageants’ preoccupation with law, and with witnessing specifically,

2 Introduction

has received little attention.3 The plays contain an extended sequence of five pageants leading up to the Crucifixion, staging the trials of Christ; they also use the legal discourse of witnessing extensively in the “Entry into Jerusalem” and the “Last Judgment.” Although the play collections associated with other cities also engage with legal concepts, I have chosen the York Plays because they devote an unusual amount of attention to the law and to witnessing.4 Evidence for the relevance of legal concepts of witnessing to the York Plays can also be found in the York Memorandum Books, repositories of bound civic documents kept in York’s guildhall, which contain both dramatic and legal records.5 At least since the publication of the York volume by the Records of Early English Drama (REED) in 1979, study of the civic records has been central to a wide range of arguments for medieval drama’s engagement with urban culture. The York Memorandum Books and other civic records have frequently been enlisted in discussions of the relationship of the York Plays to the guilds that staged and sponsored individual pageants, to civic government and labor politics, and to drama’s engagement with rituals such as the civic processions on the feast of Corpus Christi, but the implications of the preponderance of legal records in the York Memorandum Books have been largely overlooked.6 In addition to ordinances of the city’s craft guilds and government, these volumes included legal records, trade legislation, and records from the Sheriff ’s and Admiralty courts. The York Memorandum Books testify to the ways in which both dramatic and legal records promoted York’s civic authority rather than the centralized authority of the realm. In contrast to modern notions of citizenship tied to the nation, the idea of the citizen was expressed primarily, if not exclusively, in urban documents, in the late Middle Ages. A June 7, 1417, ordinance from the York Memorandum Book, for example, states that “all the pageants of the play called Corpus Christi should be maintained and brought forth in their order by the crafts of the said city for the benefit of the citizens of the same city . . . and for the profit of the said citizens” (my emphasis).7 This ordinance directly ties the plays to an ideal of citizenship located in the city. The concept of citizenship expressed in the York civic records differs from civic humanism and from recent scholarly views of the medieval city as defined by community, oligarchy, or populism.8 The York Memorandum Books also contain the charters that gave the city jurisdiction over the courts within its boundaries and made the testimony of neighbors a local expression of citizenship. The definition of the witness as neighbor provides a new way to consider the space of the medieval city, and gives an alternative to both the classicizing tradition of citizenship found

Introduction 3

in the Italian republicanism often featured by historians and to the corporate eucharistic imagery that has long been at the center of scholarly theorizations of drama’s relationship to the city.9 The depiction of legal witnessing as a practice of citizenship in the York Plays can be understood historically as an expression of the relative power of that great northern city in late medieval England, but it also reflects a broader preoccupation with witnessing in the period. The discrediting of the ordeal by the Fourth Lateran Council, better known in recent medieval scholarship for its requirement of annual confession, helped to produce a major shift in legal practice and theory toward the courtroom trial.10 Social and legal historians, such as Shannon McSheffrey and Majorie MacIntosh, have noted the participation of an increasingly broad section of society in both the ecclesiastical and common law courts of the late Middle Ages, ensuring that legal concepts of witnessing were not esoteric professional doctrine but diffused throughout society.11 A variety of medieval texts show a widespread preoccupation with the subject of witnessing in the period that extended outside the courtroom and beyond legal documents and practice. In addition to dramatic texts, witnessing was featured in conduct books, confessional manuals, sermons, hagiography, and elsewhere.12 In these texts, witnessing was linked broadly to legal concepts, rather than to specific court practices, and is often mentioned briefly in discussions of the regulation of speech and emotions, and of proper behavior toward one’s neighbor. For example, The Book of Vices and Virtues cites the eighth commandment “þou schalt seye no fals wittenesse aȝens þi neiȝebour,” specifying that this applies in broad terms “in iugement ne out of iugement,” neither in nor out of a strictly legal context, warning that it can lead to the “harme of good men,” and then proceeding to warn against flattery and other problematic speech.13 A sermon on the same commandment also cautions against harming others and warns that “a false witness incurs the danger of temporal and eternal punishment,” referring broadly to the earthly courts as well as to the court of the Last Jugdment.14 A passage from Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwit or the Remorse of Conscience warns against false witnesses in “cristene cort” or “leawede cort,” making a distinction rare in these texts between common law and canon law courts, but this discussion remains broadly construed: false witnessing is only one of many examples of false claims in a broader discussion of the sin of avarice.15 False witnessing surfaces again very briefly later in the same text, as one of many examples of lying in a larger consideration of sins

4 Introduction

of the tongue.16 Similarly, concerns about false witnessing and false oaths were folded into broader conversations about the need to regulate speech in conduct books and in poems that addressed behavior and manners. For example, “The Young Children’s Book” exhorts its readers to “make no promys bot it be gode,” going on to admonish “God & þi neybores lufe all wey . . . so þou kepys All þe lawe.”17 The narrator asserts that speaking truthfully will keep both earthly and heavenly laws, and that it is also neighborly, perhaps reflecting the association of neighbors with legal testimony. This passage resembles confessional texts in its presentation of false witnessing as a failure of the Christian imperative to “love your neighbor.” Conduct books and confessional handbooks showed that legal witnessing was seen to influence and be influenced by larger concerns about speech, emotions, and neighborliness. The fact that discussions of witnessing occurred frequently in texts that are not primarily legal is itself evidence of a wide-­ranging interest in the topic in the period. The meanings of the term “witness” in the York Plays are informed as much by the popular reputation of witnessing expressed in confessional manuals, sermons, and conduct books as they are by specific legal texts and procedures. Like these texts, the York Plays often depict legal witnessing without clearly identifying canon or common law, borough or royal courts, or making other careful legal distinctions of interest to professional lawyers. For example, the plays often use the term “witness” in pageants featuring both canon lawyers and secular rulers but do not refer directly to the jury system of the common law courts. Instead, the plays synthesize and reformulate legal terms and concepts, reimagining them in the service of promoting civic values. The meanings of witnessing in the York Plays are also shaped by the performative practices and forms of the plays themselves, which were staged in a series of pageants at stations along the streets of medieval York. At times, the plays directly signal the role of literary forms in constructing the meaning of witnessing. For example, the inset lyrics in York’s “Crucifixio Christi” and “Doomsday” pageants draw on lyric paradigms of affective practice and use the contrast between lyric and dramatic forms to implicitly comment on their own performative practices. Although several scholars have identified particular legal procedures they believe are referenced in individual York Plays, my book focuses instead on the reciprocal construction of law and literature, making a more theoretical argument for an imaginative interaction between concepts of legal witnessing and theatricality in the York Plays.18 The York Plays engage not only with literary and legal traditions but also with the discussions of witnessing in a range of contemporary texts—including conduct books, confessional texts,

Introduction 5

sermons—that collectively point to the existence of what I call the “cultures of witnessing” in the period. My argument that the York Plays use legal concepts of witnessing to promote civic values also differs from scholars who claim that the depiction of the law in late medieval religious drama reflects the logic of sermons and confessional manuals by showing the corruption of the earthly courts. Indeed, contemporary sermons and religious writings often comment on the corruption of lawyers and use biblical stories, such as the trials of Christ, to criticize contemporary trial practices as unjust and corrupt.19 For example, a sermon by Bishop Brunton of Rochester compares contemporary English law to that of the Jews who condemned Christ: “The Justice of the English [is] as it was with the Justice of the Jews at the time of Christ’s Passion. For just as Christ has manifold testimony of his own justice from his opponents, namely from Pilate, Pilate’s wife, Judas the Betrayer, the thief and the centurion, yet contrary to all justice was betrayed to death, and Barabbas, the famous thief and murderer, was freed from death which he deserved.”20 Establishing a broad contrast between the failures of earthly law and the higher truths of divine justice, this passage claims that late medieval law’s dependence on witnessing led to injustice. As is common in confessional texts, Jacob’s Well levels its ire against legal professionals, including dishonest solicitors, secretaries, and judges, as well as against false witnesses, defendants, and jurors.21 The penultimate chapter of G. R. Owst’s classic, but still influential, study of sermons includes a chapter on medieval religious drama that depicts it as “out of the pulpit satires” of preachers.22 More recently, medieval drama critics have taken a similar view, arguing that the plays illustrate the corruption of earthly law in comparison with divine justice.23 The York Plays, too, acknowledge the corruption of the legal professionals who condemned Christ, and, like contemporary vernacular religious writing, they present biblical history, and the Passion story in particular, as relevant to legal practices in their own present moment. They also, however, depict God, Christ, and other figures as virtuous witnesses, using them and other legalisms to promote local civic values and authority. The actions of Christ and other virtuous witnesses are often contrasted in the plays with the bad behavior of the canon lawyers, Annas and Caiaphas. From this perspective, the bad reputation of law and lawyers in vernacular religious texts and sermons might be seen to evince competition between the institutions of church and law in the regulation of moral behavior and in the practice of citizenship. A similar contrast is drawn between virtuous witnesses allied with civic authority and the secular rulers, Pilate and Herod in the plays. Ultimately, the York Plays

6 Introduction

portray legal testimony and dramatic performance as allied ways to practice moral citizenship and shape the history of York.

Local Legal Culture in York Evidence for this view of the plays as using legal culture to promote local civic interests can be found in the York Memorandum Books, which, like the plays themselves, functioned as local history. As Ralph Hanna has shown in his study of medieval London, legal texts were often owned by city officials or were the property of civic associations; these tomes interpolated local materials into larger legal compilations in an effort to produce a “legal memory” and preserve the city’s ancient custom of legal rights from encroachments by monarchical authority.24 Like these London compilations, in addition to legal materials such as guild ordinances, trade legislation, and local court records, the York Memorandum Books contained in full Richard II’s city charters of 1393 and 1396, and they mentioned multiple earlier charters, including a charter granted by Richard I on March 25, 1200, and three charters of Henry III.25 The inclusion of so many charters in the York Memorandum Books, along with other civic records, suggests that urban officials of York saw them—-­and their construction of the city as defined by local legal rights—-­as crucial to civic identity. The history of the York charters is tied to a larger history of negotiations between York and medieval monarchs, which provides a crucial context for the depiction of legal witnessing in the York Plays. Richard II’s charter of May 18, 1396, significantly extended the liberties granted to York in earlier charters to hold courts in the guildhall and to exercise jurisdiction in all the main areas of the secular law, and generally granted extensive acquittances, privileges, franchises, liberties, and immunities to the city.26 These included making the town of York a county in its own right and prohibiting the sheriff of York from exercising his authority within city walls, effectively giving York’s citizens full internal self-­government, independent of county or realm.27 The charter linked practical legal privileges to the symbolic political capital of the city and specifically amplified the authority of the city in relationship to king and realm.28 Historians have seen the extensive rights granted to York in this charter as an expression of the prosperity and influence of the city and its elite in the late fourteenth century.29 York is referred to explicitly in a late fourteenth-­century petition as the “second city of the realm” (“la secounde cittee du roialme”) and

Introduction 7

as a “city of great repute” (“une cittee de graunde reputacion”).30 In comments from the late 1430s, which are included in the York Memorandum Books, Roger Burton, distinguished common clerk, casually described his city as “the chief place of all the north.”31 The famous mid-­century anonymous Gough map of the British Isles marks only the cities of York and London by writing their names in gold leaf.32 Modern historians reference York’s “constitutional” position as regional capital of the north. Citing the claim by chronicler Ranulph Higden, repeated by his translator John Trevisa, that “the language of the Northumbrians and especially the people of York” was incomprehensible to the people of the south, medieval historian W. M. Ormrod suggests that York seemed so clearly the symbolic center of the north as to be “almost synonymous with it.”33 The wealthy medieval mercantile elite saw the city’s exceptional constitutional status as an expression of the economic success reached around the time of the 1396 charter.34 In the period leading up to the York Plays, under the first three Edwards, the offices of the central government were periodically moved to York, amplifying the city’s national importance. Specifically, five times between 1298 and 1338 the exchequer and the court of common pleas were moved to York, in turn increasing the frequency with which the peripatetic court of the king’s bench and parliamentary assemblies convened there.35 Thus, the unusual power given to York in the 1396 charter correlates to the power of the city at that time and can be seen as an expression of its prestige. Sarah Rees Jones’s study shows that throughout the Middle Ages the city of York maintained its local identity, despite periodic attempts on the part of the king to make it a northern bastion of royal authority. She argues that “York, while an important administrative center for the crown, retained a strong and distinctive local character and a dynamic engagement with its rural hinterland, all of which enabled it to develop an economic and cultural autonomy that on occasion could foster resistance to the demands of royal governments based in the south.”36 Local uprisings in 1093, 1149, 1173–74, 1215–16, and 1319–22 testify to English kings’ ongoing struggles to maintain authority in the north, and to York’s ambivalent position as both independent and subject to the Crown.37 Although the king’s extensive patronage of York Minster and the 1396 city charter testify to King Richard’s investment in the city, Jones cautions that we should not overemphasize the importance of the royal government in the development of York, arguing that “the development of civic government and civic society was far from determined by the demands of royal government.”38 The York Plays should be seen in the context of the strength of York’s local political power at the time.

8 Introduction

The charter’s role in negotiating the relationship between monarch and city is also evident when, only nine years after the victory of the 1396 charter, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, King Henry IV withdrew York’s liberties when the city supported its own archbishop, Richard Scrope, in rebellion against the king.39 The Latin chronicles of York reported that when instructed by the king to pronounce a death sentence on the archbishop for being a traitor to the king, Sir William Gascoigne, then chief justice of England, replied: “Neither you, your Royal Highness, nor any of your liege in your name, have the lawful power according to the justice of royal authority to judge any bishop to death,” whereupon, the chronicle reports, the king ordered a knight to pronounce the death sentence instead.40 Although Archbishop Scrope quickly became a local martyr, evoking considerable devotion after his death, Henry IV did not delay in allowing the city to buy back its liberties for a fine of two hundred pounds. Overall, Scrope’s trial provides a particularly dramatic example of the ways that civic charters and legal jurisdiction featured in contemporary tensions between city and Crown in late medieval York. The York Memorandum Books record several test cases in which the city reasserted its legal jurisdiction after the restoration of liberties in 1406 that show that legal jurisdiction was continually negotiated. In a case from 1408, civic officials used the charter granted by Henry IV on November 28, 1399, to support their claim to be free from interference of royal officials and subsequently exercised their liberties by trying a case in court.41 This and other cases show the overlap in legal jurisdiction that was both cause and symptom of tensions between the king and the city of York. The fact that the York Memorandum Books include these cases of disputed jurisdiction points to the importance of the charter and the courts in the ongoing negotiation of the balance of power between city and Crown, providing particular examples of the law’s mediation of the relationship between local and national power. This brief history suggests that the city’s relatively strong local power potentially explains the York Plays’ preoccupation with law and their association of witnessing with urban power.

Legal Concepts of Witnessing In arguing that the depiction of witnessing in the York Plays promoted the performance of local civic values rather than a more centralized authority, my book’s argument diverges from that of historians who tie late medieval legal practice to the growth of central government. In addition, in contrast to a common narrative

Introduction 9

of the development of what has been called a more “modern” and “rational” proof in the later Middle Ages, I build on the work of other historians to show that concepts of witnessing and the jury trial relied as much on rumor or shared knowledge as they did on direct perception, and that medieval witness and jury trial theory, as expressed in both common law and canon law treatises, depicted even perception as simultaneously shared and individual. Complicating a now conventional case for the crucial role of law in the growth of documentary culture in the late Middle Ages, the growth of trials sustained a performative legal practice. Although testimony was recorded, witnessing was clearly defined as embodied speech, since witnesses and jurors were required to be present in court. Medieval legal theorists and other writers were concerned about how witnesses might be affected by the temporal gap between the moment in which they perceived events and the time when they subsequently testified to them in court and about how emotional states might influence testimony. These aspects of medieval witness theory and trial practices form the basis for this book’s argument about the ways that spatial, spoken, affective, and temporal aspects of witnessing interact in the York Plays. Legal historians agree that a shift toward the witness trial was part of what historian R. H. Helmholz has called “a genuine revolution in the law of proof ” in the late Middle Ages that shaped subsequent Western legal tradition up to the present day.42 In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council effectively banned ordeals in canon 18, including both bilateral ordeals (judicial duels) and unilateral ordeals (tests by hot or cold water or by hot iron), arguing that members of the clergy should not participate in bloodshed and forbidding them to consecrate the elements.43 Lateran IV’s canon 8 outlined the procedures of an inquest, “how and in what way (qualiter et quomodo) a prelate might enquire into and punish the offences of his subjects,” recommending that the names of witnesses and their depositions be presented to the defendant in person.44 These canons from Lateran IV set the stage for the development of the witness trial in the church courts and the jury trial in the common law courts, and helped to make inquisition, rather than accusation and denunciation, the most common kind of procedure. Legal historians have argued that Lateran IV should be understood in the context of a growing number of other canon law texts that took a stand against ordeal, promoting the witness trial and empirical observation.45 These included the influential text known as Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140), which became the standard text of canon law by the late twelfth century.46 Historians have shown that there was already an established interest in juridical procedure in Romano-­ canonical law in the years around 1215, exemplified by such texts as Tancred’s ordo iudiciarius. These ordines judiciarii, which outlined the entire course of a

10 Introduction

legal proceeding, had become a popular form of academic writing in twelfth-­ century Bologna, where what is known as the “Romano-­canonical procedural system” was developed by both civilians and canonists using sources from both common law and canon law.47 These kinds of treatises were commonly referred to by English ecclesiastical lawyers, and similar procedural works were produced in England in the late Middle Ages.48 Twelfth-­century Bolognese lawyers wrote on specific aspects of procedure, including short treatises on witnesses that were instrumental in the later development of the canonical witness and the secular jury both in England and on the Continent.49 Short tracts with such titles as “Those Things to Be Observed in the Examination of Witnesses” were frequently placed in the notebooks of English canon law proctors and showed the influence of Romano-­canonical writings on later English canon law practice.50 These texts illustrate a growing interest in and deployment of trial procedures centered on the examination of witnesses in ecclesiastical courts and on the secular jury in England. The focus on direct evidence emphasized in the Italian procedural treatises can also be found in the records of the late medieval ecclesiastical courts, including those in York, and the ordo iuris is also credited with giving rise to a common law of proof.51 A series of statutes in England, including the Statute of Gavelet of 1316, asserted that the truth of a matter was decided by witnesses who spoke of what they had seen and heard themselves (de plenu visu et auditu). In his discussion of the Grand Assize, in his twelfth-­century Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England, Ranulf de Glanvill describes a procedure in which jurors are summoned to testify. They must swear not to “declare falsely, nor knowingly suppress the truth. The knowledge required from the jurors is that they shall know about the matter from what they have personally seen and heard.”52 A similar set of phrases is used in the influential mid-­thirteenth-­century treatise De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, commonly known as Bracton, which argues that an appellor in a homicide case must be able to specify the “year, the place, the day and the hour” [de anno, de loco, de die, et hora], “speak of his own sight and hearing,” and “be consistent in . . . all circumstantial details.”53 Both Glanvill and the authors of Bracton describe what we would consider a mixed role of juries and witnesses in which they function as both evaluators and providers of the evidence. These ideas of proof seem modern to us, in the sense that they instructed that witnesses and jurors were to be examined to see if they were telling the truth about what they saw and heard themselves, and in their assertion that testimony should be grounded in direct sensory experience relevant to the crime.

Introduction 11

Although Lateran IV is most often discussed as evidence for a progression toward empiricism in the ecclesiastical and secular courts, canon 8 (the “Qualiter and Quando decree”) of the 1215 council also enabled criminal proceedings based not on sensory perception by an individual but on publica fama. In publica fama, the entire local community was the complainant and no act of direct observation of crime was required for testimony. This canon describes a mechanism in which a superior hears of problem “through an outcry or rumour” [per clamorem et famam]. In this case, the canon goes on to explain, “the superior should carry out the duty of his office not as if he were the accuser and the judge, but rather with the rumour providing the accusation and the outcry making the denunciation.”54 The prelate must be sure to consider the source of the rumor and to ensure that it has come “not from the malevolent and slanderous but from prudent and honest persons” [non quidem a malevolis et maledicis sed a providis et honestis].55 These principles were reflected in the later practices of the English church courts. Suspects could be charged by the public voice based on bad reputation (mala fama) among their neighbors, who would testify to a suspect’s reputation, not to the facts. Not only canon law but also English law considered reputation and status in testimony. For example, the authors of Bracton’s treatise on English law specified that people can be indicted by popular rumor but that it must originate from “good and respectable men” [apud bonos et graves] to be actionable.56 Publica fama was thus based on an assessment of the people giving voice to the accusations rather than on whether or not they had direct knowledge of the events relevant to the crime. Although the ordeal died out quickly in England after Lateran IV, compurgation in the church courts and trial by battle in the common-­law courts remained, complicating any teleological account of a progression toward empirical testimony.57 Canonical purgation required the accused to take a formal oath claiming innocence of the crime and to find compurgators who would support that oath by swearing that they believed the accused. Compurgators testified not to the facts but to their belief that the accused had sworn truly.58 Similarly, although it was no longer common, proof by battle lingered on after 1215. In his common-­law treatise, Glanvill mentions trial by battle as a possible and less desirable alternative to the use of witnesses in the assize, and even as a way to adjudicate a false judgment of the court or to prove a charter.59 Similarly, records of the English ecclesiastical courts show that, in practice, witnesses testified about matters about which they had no personal experience, such as common knowledge or community beliefs. This was more often the case when the issues at stake were not personal and specific, like marriage cases, but

12 Introduction

instead affected a large number of people or were less clearly defined. In one fourteenth-­century tithe case, for example, forty witnesses testified on one side, not to what they personally had seen or heard, but to the common understanding of the location of a parish boundary.60 Similarly, Glanvill’s common-­law treatise claimed that jurors could testify to “statements which their fathers made to them in such circumstances that they are bound to believe them as if they had seen and heard for themselves.”61 In other words, they could testify what was held to be true by local tradition. The ordeal, which was used in both civil and ecclesiastical suits, usually in difficult cases not easily resolved by other means, relied on a model of proof in which suspects were subjected to a physical test and the result was seen as the judgment of God rather than as empirical observation. The idea of God’s participation, however, was present in all late medieval witnessing because swearing an oath was required prior to testimony; oaths themselves were considered a kind of ordeal because it was believed that God could and would punish any perjury.62 This perspective on oaths was also part of the broad view that, in its true form, law was an expression of divine justice. Even Bracton’s treatise on the secular law of England subscribed to the broad principle that “Justice proceeds from God” [Item auctor iustitiae est deus].63 With careful procedures for witness trials, however, the courts attempted to ensure just legal practices on earth. Challenging the conventional narrative of a teleological progression toward a more empiricist “rational” proof, a number of legal historians have pointed to continuities in the understanding of proof post–Lateran IV, especially in England, where common-­law as well as canon-­law practices were arguably more continuous with earlier practices than they were on the Continent. Karl Shoemaker has argued that, in comparison with the Continent, the criminal law that developed in England retained much of the logic of the ordeal, in that it relied on an evaluation of status in the community rather than on an evaluation of facts.64 He notes that before the prohibition of ordeals in Lateran IV, the jury would decide who was required to undergo an ordeal and what ordeal it would be; the jury was also responsible for interpreting the results. Rebecca Coleman ascribes the lack of precise directions for conducting ordeals to an embrace of “the discretionary power of local communities,” while Peter Brown quips: “God might be believed to speak in an ordeal, but the human group took an unconscionably long time letting Him get a word in edgewise.”65 Shoemaker argues for the relevance of these jurors to later medieval common law, pointing to “the large responsibility of the community’s presentment jurors even when the king’s justices were present.”66 In a similar vein, tracing the deviation of practice in the

Introduction 13

English church courts from what he calls the “Romano-­canonic law of witness proof,” Charles Donahue shows that English practice demonstrates a pattern of people’s status playing more of a role in whether or not they can testify and of those who are not eyewitnesses testifying to “matters of which they have no personal knowledge.”67 In these ways, even post–Lateran IV, both canon-­law witnessing and the English criminal jury system of the later Middle Ages continued to rely on a logic that privileged the local community’s assessment of status, rather than strict empirical observation. Despite the ostensible involvement of God in acts of testimony, theologians, lawyers, and English court procedures reflected a preoccupation with false testimony, describing it as motivated by social emotions.68 Both academic treatises and English court procedures demonstrated concern with the ways that even reports of direct observation could potentially be colored by affect experienced in relation to others. The substance of the oath required witnesses to make a formulaic assertion that they would tell the truth and that they were not bearing testimony for a price or out of friendship or private hate.69 The reference to friendship suggests a social element of witnessing, and the reference to hate suggests that testimony was seen to have a social affective component.70 The terms of this standard oath can be found in Gratian’s Decretum, in the passage deploring the perversion of judgment “from hatred or friendship or for a gift or out of fear or by any other means whatever” and also condemning judgments perverted “from kinship, friendship, hostile hatred or enmities.”71 Concern with fear is specified as well by the authors of Bracton’s treatise on English law, when they mention the possibility that an appellor might forget what he has heard or seen, “since fear provides an excuse for his lack of knowledge” [cum metus in se iustam contineat ignorantiam].72 All of these examples acknowledge that testimony was not an unbiased report of empirical observation by an isolated individual; even a person’s report of a first-­hand experience of a crime was seen to be crafted by social emotions and relationships. English ecclesiastical treatises and practice required that the judge examine the witnesses’ relationships to other parties in the case and also consider their social status, instead of defining witnessing as an expression of one person’s individual subjectivity. Witnesses could be disqualified by condition, gender, age, discretion, reputation, fortune, and truthfulness, so not everyone could be a witness.73 Furthermore, at least two witnesses were needed to fully prove the guilt of the accused. The witnesses were to be examined separately, after the model of Daniel’s questioning of the elders, in order to compare their stories and thus protect against false witnessing.74 This biblical story was so paradigmatic of false

14 Introduction

witnessing that it is in a commentary by Chaucer’s Parson: “For false witnessyng was Susanna in ful gret sorwe and peyne, and many other mo.”75 Ecclesiastical court records suggest that the number of witnesses could be a factor in the success of a given case. The need for multiple witnesses illustrates that testimony was both collective and individual.76 The social element of medieval testimony is evident in the requirement that canonical witnesses or those testifying to common knowledge be drawn from the neighborhood or locality, elaborating a spatial definition based in geographically flexible proximity and providing an alternative concept of spatiality to the realm or the city. Before mentioning Susanna, Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale warns against “fals witnessing . . . for to bireve they neighebores goode name,” describing the witness as a neighbor of the accused.77 The connection between neighbors and witnessing was so strong that false witnessing was often linked to a violation of the injunction to love one’s neighbor, even though in the latter case the term was used metaphorically. The association of local knowledge with proof is also evident in common-­law treatises. For example, Glanvill specifies that in cases of inheritance, the determination of whether heirs are minors or full age should be based on “the oath of lawful men of the neighborhood.”78 In a discussion of trial by battle in property law cases, Glanvill poses a question of what should be done if twelve knights “from the neighborhood” cannot be found who “know the truth of the matter, posing this scenario: “Suppose that two or three lawful men or more (but less than twelve), claim to be witnesses of the matter and offer to prove it” by battle? In this passage, Glanvill clearly draws a link between witnessing and a local knowledge based on proximity.79 The identification of witnesses with the neighborhood linked the trial system to the assertion of local power in contrast to the centralized power of the royal legal system. As Paul Hyams, Karl Shoemaker, Thomas Andrew Green, and others have argued, the study of witnessing challenges a truism in histories of late medieval law, namely, that an increasingly centralized legal system was linked to the growth of nationalism in the period.80 Henry II’s Assize of Clarendon sought to institutionalize in twelve-­man juries the concept of neighborhood reputation used in England at least since the twelfth century and is credited by historian Frederic William Maitland with helping to make “the whole of English law . . . centralized and unified by the institution of a permanent court of professional judges and by the introduction of the ‘inquest’ or ‘recognition’ and the ‘original writ’ as normal parts of the machinery of justice.”81 He continues: “On the face of our English History we seem to see that the jury is intimately connected with royal power . . . the jury spreads outwards from the king’s own court.”82 Disagreeing with this paradigm,

Introduction 15

Hyams has argued that centralized legal authority met with powerful local resistance: “The sad fact is that this royal takeover of law and order enjoyed limited success at best” in the face of an “unholy alliance of neighborhood power.”83 Specifically, he claims that this resistance often occurred in the local courtroom around questions of evidence: “The phenomenon of judges questioning, if not hectoring, jurors before they would accept their verdict seems to enter the rolls during the second quarter of the thirteenth century. . . . They perhaps recognized (as most modern scholars have not) their own impotence to set the local standards of public behavior and order.”84 Similarly, Green has shown that juries subverted royal law by what he calls “the notion of truth according to conscience,” which was “sufficiently broad to cover misreadings of evidence and verdicts rendered knowingly against the evidence but inspired by mercy.” According to Green, criminal trial records show that late medieval juries used these strategies to resist royal authority and favor the values of their community.85 All of this suggests that, on balance, the legal theory and practice of witnessing and jury trials in late medieval England tended to support local authority. This association between legality and locality finds a broader expression in the preface to Bracton’s common-­law treatise, often cited as evidence for the link between nationalism and law. The authors of Bracton begin by framing the treatise as a discussion of English law, but then comment that England has many “local” customs—presumably in contrast to canon law—associating Englishness with locality. The text goes on to acknowledge those local practices within the realm, describing how “England has as well many local customs, varying from place to place, for the English have many things by custom which they do not have by law, as in the various counties, cities, boroughs and vills, where it will always be necessary to learn what the custom of the place is and how those who allege it use it.”86 It is in this context that the treatise makes its oft-­quoted comment that it is written “so that the unskilled be made expert” [ut rudes efficiantur subtiles].87 This passage suggests that law could operate in the service of local communities, rather than on behalf of the more centralized hierarchical bureaucracies of the nation headed by the king or on behalf of the church headed by the pope. The focus in Bracton’s treatise on the variability and localness that compose English laws is consistent with the ethos of large collections that compiled laws for local urban use in the period.88 Andrew Horn (active 1310–25), chamberlain of the city of London, compiled a massive collection of city documents, including the Liber Custumarum, which included local guild statutes as well as the records of the Eyre courts and accommodated royal law to the interests of London, and Liber Horn, both of which he bequeathed to the city.89 These texts demonstrate the

16 Introduction

importance of the copying of legal documents to local London interests. Hanna observes that the original charter of London (1191), seen by Londoners as coming from a golden age of rights, was preserved in the guildhall and copied three times by Andrew Horn, once in Old English and twice in Middle English.90 Various versions of London’s civic charter were copied into legal compilations, such as the Leges Henrici Primi.91 The inclusion of charters in local records of London, York, and other medieval cities confirms that urban officials saw them—and their construction of the city as defined by local legal rights—as crucial to civic authority. The records of the London Eyre court from 1321 in the Liber Custumarum show the ways that even the royal courts relied on the local community. These records contain evidence of resistance to royal law by London officials in ways that frustrated the royal justices.92 Whereas the justices tried to follow the standard procedures for a general Eyre, from its opening variations were introduced by the assertion of the traditional customs and privileges of the city, such as the right to appoint its own porters, ushers, and sergeants with rods, and the right to record citizens’ liberties orally, as the citizens claimed they had always traditionally be able to do; virtually all of these claims were challenged by the justices.93 One record of a tense exchange between civic and royal authorities over legal jurisdiction is especially dramatic. “The Mayor and aldermen, for themselves and for the citizens of London, claim that the custom of the said City from time immemorial is that cases begun in the London courts and pending there ought to be terminated there, without being brought elsewhere before any Justices of the lord King,” to which the man acting on behalf of the king’s sergeant responded: “By this claim the parties are setting themselves up against the lord King so as to take away the royal power and undo the common law.”94 These records show that urban liberties and local legal practices challenged royal authority in ways that have not been emphasized in broader histories of early common law. The fact that court records and civic charters were kept in guildhalls compiled along with guild ordinances and other legal records demonstrates that local legal practices could challenge royal authority and shows the close relationship between guilds, civic government, and legal practices.

Witnessing, Performance, and the York Plays The York Plays’ focus on witnessing not only engages the local history of medieval York, it also addresses the performative nature of medieval witnessing and points to the ways those elements may have shaped and been shaped by medieval theater.

Introduction 17

The performative nature of medieval witnessing is evident even in the canon most commonly credited with contributing to the rise of documentary culture. Lateran IV’s canon 38 famously required that written records be kept of trials, but these are clearly described as records of performances. The text specified that “the judge shall always employ either a public official, if he can find one, or two suitable men to write down faithfully all the judicial acts,” including “depositions of witnesses” [testium depositiones].95 The term “judicial acts” [iudicii acta] suggests an understanding of witnessing as action. The canon goes on to specify that things “ought to be written down in the correct order—stating the places, times and persons.”96 This phrase also closely resembles the unities of action, place, and time long associated with the drama and represents the text as a record of embodied action performed at a specific moment in time. The justification for the written record in canon 38 alludes to the fleeting temporality of the act of witnessing: “An innocent litigant can never prove the truth of his denial of a false assertion made by an unjust judge, since a denial by the nature of things does not constitute a direct proof.”97 This statement suggests that the text be a written record of an earlier speech act that can potentially be used in a future dispute. The canon specifies that these records should be given to the “parties in question” but that the “originals shall remain with the scribes,” so that “the truth can be established from the originals” and false judges punished.98 By mentioning “parties” in this passage and “persons” in the quotation above, the canon alludes to the legal requirement that witnesses be physically present in court. Thus, although Lateran IV’s imperative to document witness trials arguably contributes to a larger narrative of a movement from oral to written record, it can also be seen as part of the history of performance.99 Similarly, written civic records preserved in the York Memorandum Books and elsewhere have allowed scholars to reconstruct the way the York Plays were performed on the streets of the medieval city. Indeed, it is possible that the manuscript of the York Plays is a record of performance, rather than a script that was staged. Canon 38 of Lateran IV invites us to understand medieval witnessing as a practice that provides a means of understanding the performative nature of medieval religious drama. Breaking the performative aspects of witnessing into four interacting threads, my book traces the ways medieval witnessing provides a means of theorizing dramatic space, speech acts, affect, and temporality. Each chapter addresses one of these four aspects of witnessing in conjunction with readings of specific pageants and with evidence for local legal and dramatic practices drawn from the York Memorandum Books. Medieval witnessing provided a spatial model for the York Plays’ own dramatic practices. Processional staging created local spaces at each station, where

18 Introduction

audiences were brought together by what they could see and hear, constructing local knowledge essential to medieval witnessing and blending individual and collective perceptions.100 Just as the medieval witness blended empirical observation with knowledge of reputation, medieval theater blended material and subjective ideas of space. Theater is, of course, performed by bodies moving in space, but the spatial complexity of medieval theater was heightened by its processional staging.101 As the wagons moved around the city, each biblical place had to be reimagined at each new pageant station, and each station was sequentially and imaginatively reconceived as a series of biblical places as each wagon in the procession stopped at a given spot to play its pageant. Since, however, the plays were performed on the city streets, amid urban landmarks, material space and imagined space constructed each other. So, when, for example, the “Entry into Jerusalem” was performed at a station next to the gates of the medieval city of York, the play spoke to spatial understandings of biblical past and York present. Viewing medieval witnessing and medieval drama as spatial practices provides an alternative to critical discussion of the spatial practices of medieval drama focused on the city’s relationship to the imagery of Christ’s body and helps us see the ways that legal, material, and imagined spaces shaped each other.102 Chapter 1 argues that York’s “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem” shows that contemporary legal witnessing imagined space as distinctly social and associated knowledge with proximity, rather than with specific landmarks or empirically measured boundaries. The play’s depiction of Christ’s immanent arrival reflects the logic of the legal definition of the witness as neighbor, by associating knowledge of Christ with proximity to him. This paradigm of the neighborhood is linked to the city through the double role of the porter as both gatekeeper and witness to Christ. The play’s depiction of Christ being stopped outside the gates of Jerusalem also refers to another spatial legal paradigm, that of the city charter, which promoted local authority by granting citizens legal jurisdiction within the boundaries of York. The biblical story becomes a commentary on witnessing that promotes civic authority and engages the local history of York’s skirmishes with royal authority by referring to a royal entry staged to welcome King Henry IV after he suspended the city’s charter. The play engages the spatial paradigm of the witness as neighbor to reflect on the spatiality of its own dramatic practice of performing in the neighborhoods and streets of medieval York. This chapter argues that medieval understandings of space were shaped by the legal concepts of witness and charter, adding to recent scholarship on the subject focused on landscape, cartography, and travel literature.

Introduction 19

We have seen that confession manuals and other texts worried about false testimony and about the ways that the motives of speakers might affect their words. As the modern philosopher of language Richard Moran explains, the “transfer of knowledge through testimony” is “specifically linguistic” and requires “acquiring beliefs from what people say.”103 Indeed, the litany of complaints that echo through the pages of medieval writing on false witnessing points to the ways that the nature of witnessing as a speech act made it distinct from other kinds of evidence. The existence of laws governing defamation, slander, and perjury show contemporary institutional awareness of the vulnerability of the medieval legal system to false testimony, and a concern with its power to affect the speaker’s neighbors and other members of the community. Similarly, theater highlights both the embodied nature of speech and its potential to create its own reality. Stanton Garner argues: “Dramatic language draws upon modes of embodiment inseparable from language itself ” and has “a kind of representational autonomy, a rival mode of actuality” that can compete with the visual present.104 Because in theater an actor stands in for someone else, theatrical speech makes us especially aware of the role of speakers conveying the truth of their words.105 While any drama highlights the possibility for the first-­person subject position to be inhabited by multiple speakers, this aspect of theater was especially palpable in the York Plays, because multiple actors played a single biblical figure not only sequentially but also simultaneously on the day of the performance, as the various pageants were staged at multiple stations along the procession route in the streets of medieval York. Thus, in contrast to scholarship about the relationship between medieval theater and the law focused on the spectacle of punishment, this book’s attention to witnessing allows us to consider the drama’s meditation on performative legal language and draws attention to the theatricality of the courtroom.106 Grounded in an analysis of the series of trial plays (“The Conspiracy,” “The Trial Before Caiaphas and Annas,” “Christ Before Pilate I,” “The Trial Before Herod,” and “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgment”), Chapter 2 focuses on the depiction of witnessing as composed of performative speech acts that promote civic virtue. The plays present an idealized form of testimony performed by Christ as an example of good citizenship. This chapter considers Christ’s speech, and his reluctance to speak, in the context of the discussion of speech in contemporary conduct books, which discuss witnessing in the context of self-­regulation. Proper speech and proper testimony are also modeled by the Beadle, who testifies to the miracles performed earlier by Christ. A beadle was a local legal official like Andrew Horn who compiled laws for the London guildhall, like the York

20 Introduction

Memorandum Books. By contrast, the depictions of Pilate and Herod resemble the portraits of the tyrants in the genre of mirrors for princes, which link the excesses of speech to tyrannical governance. In contrast to the measured words of the B ­ eadle, Pilate’s uncontrolled rants mark him as a tyrant who uses the law to rule by personal passion and by force. Late medieval witnessing provides a means of theorizing the public speech acts that were essential to the performance of medieval religious plays on the streets of York. The York Plays both cite the legal authority of the speech acts that constitute testimony and illuminate the ways in which medieval witnessing was shaped by its nature as public speech. Understanding witnessing as a theory and practice of speaking that could promote civic virtues provides an alternative to existing studies of medieval speech focused on sermons and confessional discourse and to studies linking women with the vices of scolding and defamation.107 Witnessing also focuses our attention on the role of the body in speech, rather than on the body as symbol of the Christian community or as an engagement with religious ritual practices, especially those of the feast of Corpus Christi, on which day the plays were performed.108 Medieval legal theory and practice recognized that testimony was mediated through the speaker’s intention and emotion, acknowledging that the act of testifying was an affective performance. As defined in legal treatises, witnessing provides a model of what I call “legal affect,” which was poised between the social and the individual, understanding that perceptions and emotions could be shared, just as testimony itself could be to collective public knowledge as well as to first-­hand experience. As discussed above, witnesses and jurors in canon-­ law and common-­law courts were required to swear that they were not bearing testimony for a price or out of friendship or love or private hate. Furthermore, medieval witnesses could testify not only to what they had perceived through their own senses but also to the collective wisdom of the neighborhood, blending individual and collective knowledge and perceptions. Medieval witnessing was thus not based on uniquely individual prior experience but was instead an affective practice that can be usefully understood in conjunction with recent theories of affect emphasizing the collective and social nature of emotion. Offering “a critique of the psychologizing and privatization of emotions,” Sara Ahmed has argued that “emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices.”109 Ahmed characterizes emotions as performative actions and social practices, providing a useful framework for understanding the affect of witnessing and of dramatic practice. As anti-­theatrical texts demonstrate, the medium of theater was associated with the generation of emotion in the audience in the period. The reformist

Introduction 21

“Treatise of Miraclis Pleying,” for example, refers to theater as an affective form of witnessing. The text warns: “As þe weeping þat men wepen ofte in siche pley comunely is fals wittnessenge þat þei lovyn more þe lykyng of þeire body and of prosperite of þe world . . . than lykyng in God.”110 In this passage, theater is seen as problematic because it directs compassion to the body instead of to God.111 The passage deems the affective experience of theater “fals wittnessenge,” a term commonly applied to giving legal testimony in court. The legal affect of medieval witnessing can be used to theorize the performative affective practices of the York Plays and provides an alternative to the commonplace association of the plays with the meditative tradition of “affective piety,” an identificatory practice in which the subject imaginatively experiences Christ’s suffering on the cross. While critics often enlist the meditational tradition to explain the affective nature of the drama, conversely, they also often refer to the York Passion play in discussions of the performative aspects of medieval affective piety.112 By contrast, this book claims that legal ideas of witnessing help us theorize affect as a public practice poised between individual perception and collective experience. Chapter 3 argues that the York trial plays engage this view of witnessing as a model of legal affect poised between the social and the individual. Depicting canon lawyers Annas and Caiaphas as testifying against Christ out of hate, the plays reference the specific terms of the witness oath and demonstrate the role of affect in false justice. Although sources for the York Plays (including the Northern Passion, the Gospel of Nicodemus, and Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea) ascribe envy to Annas and Caiaphas and to Pilate, in their condemnation of Christ, the plays deviate from their sources in their emphasis on legal terminology rather than on the sin of envy, reframing this inherently social emotion in less individualized and more social and public terms. Putting the trial plays in the context of York’s “Crucifixio Christi,” this chapter also argues that the famous speech of Christ from the cross should be seen as testimony and considers that passage as an embedded Passion lyric that creates an instability between corporate and collective identification. By enlisting the members of the audience simultaneously as witnesses to the play and to the trials of Christ, the York play constructs legal affect as dramatic theory. Medieval confessors’ concerns about possible differences between testimony and evidence generated by affect centered around a recognition of a necessary temporal gap between the moments people saw or heard events that might be relevant to a given case and later testimony in court about those events. In some cases, multiple witnesses testified sequentially to the same earlier event or to a

22 Introduction

variety of earlier occurrences (as, for example, in a series of adulterous encounters). Like modern English, the Middle English term “witnessen” referred simultaneously to the act of observing and to the act of testifying in court, showing that witnessing demonstrated what Carolyn Dinshaw has called “asynchrony,” characterized by “different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment.”113 This notion of asynchronous legal temporality finds an analogue in drama: both testimony and theater recreate the past for an audience. The performance practices of medieval drama amplify the asynchrony that is inherent in theater. Since the pageants were performed at stations on the streets along a route that wound through medieval York, an individual pageant would have been played at the same time as pageants depicting other moments in the biblical narrative, producing a temporal instability. Medieval urban drama, with its processional staging and complex temporal modalities, amplifies the variability between one performance of a play and the next that is inherent in a dynamic living performance of multi-­temporality. The paradigm of medieval witnessing encourages us to see medieval religious drama not as anachronistic, as V. A. Kolve influentially claimed, but as asynchronous.114 Chapter 4 focuses on the York “Doomsday” pageant and discusses witnessing as public history that engages an asynchronous model of temporality. The popularity of the Last Judgment in the art and drama of the late Middle Ages is often explained by its function as a memento mori. Yet the frequent depiction of the Last Judgment as a trial points to the significance of witnessing in the act of communal remembering that we call “history.” As Shoshana Felman argues in her analysis of Holocaust trials, public trials show history not as a fixed hegemonic narrative but as public testimony that (re)make history in the present moment and use the law to actively (re)construct community and its values.115 Although medieval depictions of the Last Judgment are often associated with the typological model of history, I argue that the York “Last Judgment” play offers an alternative model of history as a collective act of bearing witness to the past.116 By showing the theatricality of the trial, the play identifies trials as cultural performances that involve acts of communal self-­examination in the process of rewriting history. The York “Last Judgment” engages its own asynchronous performance to make drama testimonial and, in doing so, asserts the trial as the central paradigm of history. The iterative and asynchronous nature of performance provides the possibility for theater and witnessing to do cultural work and to engage with shifting historical narratives. The presence of both dramatic and legal records in the York Memorandum Books that were kept in the city’s guildhall provides a context for my book’s

Introduction 23

examination of the centrality of legal concepts of witnessing to the York Plays, and for its argument that concepts of witnessing are both agents of local civic community and models of drama itself. The York Plays engage not only with legal treatises but also with the popular reputation of witnessing found in conduct books, mirrors for princes, confessional manuals, and elsewhere in the period. In tracing the ways that medieval theater and legal witnessing interact with each other, I am not arguing that they are analogous, or that legal witnessing can be found “in” medieval theater, but rather arguing that both practices generate mutually constitutive perceptual habits.117 The experiences of medieval witnessing and urban theater affected each other; in other words, the performative medium is integral to the meaning of both and helped shape the meaning and practice of being a citizen in York.

Chapter 1

Space and the Cultures of Witnessing in the York “Entry into Jerusalem”

As Martin Stevens claimed in a well-­known statement, the York Plays can be seen as “the city’s proud and solemn celebration of itself.” Noting that the “Entry into Jerusalem” was at the center of the York Plays, Stevens asserted that this pageant revealed the “core significance of the York cycle, the dramatization of the meaning of the feast of Corpus Christi.”1 Building on Stevens’s claim for the centrality of the drama to the construction of the city’s self-­image, this chapter argues that we should see the York Plays’ celebration of the city as grounded in its legal practices. Focusing on the pageant central to analyses of religious drama’s relationship to the city by Stevens and others, this chapter contends that York’s “Entry into Jerusalem” uses the legal paradigms of the civic charter, the witness, and the jury trial to promote civic authority and engage the local history of York’s negotiations with royal authority.2 York’s “Entry into Jerusalem” shows that the legal paradigms of the charter, the witness, and the jury trial promote civic and local authority through spatial concepts. York’s charters, several of which are included in the York Memorandum Books, grant legal jurisdiction to the city for the courts operating within city boundaries, in contrast to the more centralized authorities of county and Crown. The charters thus combine the material geography of the city’s boundaries with abstract concepts of legal rights and practices.3 Although the charters have long been of interest to historians of York, they are also crucial to theorizing medieval concepts of space and to understanding the meanings of space in the York Plays. Also employing spatial logic, medieval law defined witnesses as neighbors close enough to have seen and heard relevant events, or to have local knowledge



Space and Witnessing in “Entry into Jerusalem” 25

of reputation accorded by spatial proximity, blending a sensory paradigm of first-­ hand experience with more diffuse social knowledge. Witnessing also provided a spatial model for the play’s own dramatic practices. Processional staging created local spaces at each station, where audiences were brought together by what they could see and hear, constructing local neighborhoods of the kind essential to medieval witnessing.4 Just as the medieval witness blended empirical observation with knowledge of reputation, medieval theater blended material and subjective ideas of space. Since the wagons moved from one station to the next along the pageant route that wound through the streets of York, each biblical setting was represented in a series of specific locations in the city, and each station was sequentially imagined to depict first one and then another biblical place. I argue that legal concepts of the charter and the witness were instrumental to late medieval drama’s performance of urban authority and identity. York’s “Entry into Jerusalem” employs the logic of the charter, defining the city by its local liberties in contrast to monarchical prerogative. Similarly, the play shows that the legal concept of the witness promoted local rather than central authority and that the play’s own dramatic practices can be theorized through legal concepts. By engaging with contemporary paradigms of charter and witness, the “Entry” play draws attention to the crucial role played by the law in shaping late medieval concepts of space.5

The City Charter: Local Legality Sarah Rees Jones has argued of medieval York that “the acquisition and copying of charters . . . symbolically . . . multiplied and increased the praise and honor of the city.”6 Indeed, she argues in her study of York that development of towns in the period was “fundamentally dependent . . . on innovations of thought and practice associated with the development of the charter.”7 As we saw in the Introduction to this book, in addition to dramatic records, the York Memorandum Books contained numerous legal documents, including local court records, full texts of the city charters of 1393 and 1396, and references to multiple earlier charters in the rolls in Chancery, including the charter of Richard I granted on March 25, 1200, and three charters of Henry III.8 The York Memorandum Books show the extent to which guild and trade structures, long central to scholarship on medieval religious drama, are themselves subject to and shaped by legal procedures.9 Charters were instrumental in granting the city legal rights, promoting civic authority, and defining the space of the city.

26

Chapter 1

The York Memorandum Books include Richard II’s remarkable charter of May 18, 1396, which significantly extended the liberties granted to York in earlier charters, giving extensive “franchises, privileges, liberties and immunities” to the city.10 These included making the town a county in its own right and prohibiting the sheriff of Yorkshire from exercising his authority within the city walls, and replacing York’s traditional three bailiffs with two elected sheriffs. These privileges effectively gave the city’s citizens full internal self-­government, independent of county or realm. The sheriffs were to hold a monthly county court as well as the courts previously held by the bailiffs, adding new courts to a city already full of civic judicial sessions. Barrie Dobson has commented on the implications of the charter for legal practice in the city: “Never in the history of York have its residents (only 10,000 or less at the time) been subjected to such close and time-­ consuming judicial supervision as in the century after 1396.”11 The charter gave the mayor and these new civic sheriffs jurisdiction over the petty assizes and all pleas of land, trespass, and contract within the city of York. The city was also to be entitled to financial penalties imposed by the justice of the peace (roles given to the mayor and alderman in 1393) and for breaches of the assizes of bread, ale, and wine in the city.12 The generous nature of the charter made York, in Dobson’s formulation, “the best model available in England of fully articulated urban incorporation as a matter of legal principle.”13 Symbolically marking the importance of the city, the charter allowed the mayor and sheriff to have maces of silver or gilt decorated not with the city’s own arms but with those of England, signaling the importance of the city to the realm. The charter further specified that when the king and queen were in the city, the city’s mace bearers should exercise the same ceremonial duties as the royal men-­at-­arms. The mayor of York received the right to have his sword carried erect except in the king’s presence, suggesting that the mayor’s role was a local version of the king’s sovereignty.14 Commenting in the 1430s on the use of the city’s swords established by the 1386 charter, York’s distinguished common clerk, Roger Burton, wrote: “Every Mayor in his time should rejoice in the variety of so many principal swords and thence praise and honour to the citizens should multiply and increase and the people in passing might exclaim in praise: ‘behold the two swords of the city of York, the first of King Richard and the other of the Emperor.’”15 This passage exemplifies the ways that the legal rights granted to the city by the charter were tied to York’s sense of its own importance in the wider realm and beyond. Burton’s text was preserved in the York Memorandum Books and recalls an ordinance, also in that compilation, which I cited in the Introduction. The ordinance stated that the York Plays should be performed



Space and Witnessing in “Entry into Jerusalem” 27

“for the benefit of the citizens of the same city . . . and for the profit of the said citizens” (my emphases).16 Both the charter and the plays were thus seen to benefit the city of York in similar terms. As these practices show, the charter linked legal privileges to the symbolic capital of the city and specifically amplified the authority of the city in relationship to king and realm.17 As we will see later in this chapter, the York “Entry into Jerusalem” drew on the symbolic capital of the charter and was itself a means to promote the ideals of city and citizen. The 1396 charter expressed the relationship between the legal authority of the city and the more centralized authorities of county and Crown in spatial terms, revealing how legal constructions of space both shaped and were shaped by political power in the period.18 The charter grants that “the city called York with its suburbs and their precincts, (according as they are bounded very near the limits and boundaries which now exist and are contained within the body of the county of York) henceforth be separated from the same county entirely in all things and be exempt, on land as well as at sea; and that the city called York and its suburbs and their precincts be otherwise called the county itself and the county of the city of York in perpetuity.”19 The passage defines the city as both within the boundaries of the county and as itself a county, a construction that combines mappable space with abstract concepts of legal jurisdiction and rights. By referencing the boundaries that “now” exist, this passage calls attention to the fluidity of the city’s boundaries, while the repeated references to names and renaming indicates the potential for changes in the meanings of civic space. Extensively employing terms like “boundaries” (bundas) and “precinct” (procinctus), the lengthy preamble depicts the city as a locality within a larger geographical space, reflecting the distinctive status of York in the realm and showing the importance of legal concepts of space in the formation of the city. The charter defines the space of the city not only by material boundaries but also by its liberties, promoting local power at the expense of monarchical prerogative: “And [we grant] that the aforementioned sheriffs of the city of York hold their own county court in the same place each Monday of the month from month to month and just as our other sheriffs and our heirs’ sheriffs elsewhere in this realm hold and will hold their courts.”20 The charter grants the city sheriffs the rights typically granted to sheriffs of the realm, separating York from the nation and setting it above other counties subject to more direct royal jurisdiction. By focusing on individual courts, the charter promotes an even smaller scale of localism within the bounds of the city. This passage emphasizes the role of specific officials and their actions, defining the city through its legal practice and linking legal privileges with local urban spaces.21

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In this charter, space is defined by the action of holding court rather than by landmarks or geographical features, illustrating Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that “a spatial code is not simply a means of reading or interpreting space: rather it is a means of living in that space, of understanding it, and of producing it.”22 The charter authorizes a legal practice that shapes space, establishing the jurisdiction of legal authority and, concomitantly, a view of space as an authoritative local practice. Indeed, the active role of charters in shaping the city is clear from the fact that the physical boundaries specified by the charter are not identical to those of the parish, the wards, or the territory ridden by the mayor.23 This suggests that even the material boundaries of the city were not fixed but varied according to institutional contexts and practices. David Harvey argues in another context that “objective conceptions of . . . space are necessarily created through material practices and processes which serve to reproduce social life.”24 We should thus see the city as actively constructed by the legal practices of the local courts.

Witnessing and Local Space While York’s charters promoted local authority by granting to the city jurisdiction over its own courts, the medieval theory and practice of witnessing also supported local interests, challenging the well-­known claim that the development of the trial system in the late Middle Ages was intimately tied to the growth of the nation-­state.25 In their influential account of the history of English law, Frederick Pollack and Frederic William Maitland credit Henry II’s Assize of Clarendon as the moment when “the whole of English law is centralized and unified by the institution of a permanent court of professional judges, by the frequent mission of itinerant judges throughout the land,” arguing that the jury promoted the centralized authority of England.26 By contrast, as we saw in the Introduction, a number of historians have challenged this idea, tying the witness and the jury trial to local interests. Thomas Andrew Green has shown that juries subverted royal law by “the notion of truth according to conscience,” which was “sufficiently broad to cover misreadings of evidence and verdicts rendered knowingly against the evidence but inspired by mercy.” His study of criminal trial records shows low conviction rates, factual recitations that paved the way for pardons, and other kinds of “principled nullification” were deployed by juries to bring the law in line with the values of the local community, demonstrating that criminal trials were sites of resistance to royal authority in the late Middle Ages.27 Similarly, Paul R. Hyams



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has argued that in the reign of Henry II the power of local neighborhoods successfully deterred attempts of the monarchy to take over the authority of the law, because trial juries could be shielded from judicial interference and potentially follow a local agenda even when it differed from royal law.28 Medieval legal theorists insisted that witnesses and jurors be drawn from the neighborhood, a geographically flexible concept of proximity, in contrast to the more specific boundaries outlined in city charters. In his influential Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angli qui Glanvilla vocator (c. 1189), Ranulf de Glanvill specifies that in cases of inheritance, the determination of whether heirs are minors or full age should be based on “the oath of lawful men of the neighborhood.”29 In a discussion of trial by witnesses as an alternative to trial by battle in property law cases, Glanvill says that twelve knights are to be chosen “from the neighborhood . . . who know the truth of the matter” to testify, linking witnessing to proximity.30 Defining witnesses as neighbors rested on the legal theory that proximity enables knowledge. Both secular and ecclesiastical legal theory embraced this paradigm. The ordinary gloss on Gratian’s Decretum says: “We are presumed to know of the acts of neighbors.”31 Similarly, the heading of a Gregorian collection asserts: “Notice of local facts is presumed from locality.”32 In these cases, neighbors were presumed to have common knowledge of facts whether or not they had any first-­hand experience.33 This shows that even the perceptual aspects of witnessing were defined by spatial practices. Common law requirements for witnessing date back to the practice of vicinage (from “vicini,” or neighbors) in Old English and Anglo-­Norman legal codes and were based on the concept of the hue and cry.34 In the hue and cry, a shout or blow of the horn or ringing a bell summoned those who could hear to pursue the criminal, constructing the local space through a collective and first-­ hand sensory experience of sound.35 In the late Middle Ages, anyone within earshot who didn’t respond to the cry could be punished by the local courts.36 This practice, and the later medieval practice of witnessing that grew out of it, created a provisional, temporary neighborhood out of shared experience in a specific moment rather than from stable or preestablished material boundaries, in contrast to fixed concepts of place, such as the parish or the boundaries of the city outlined in the York charter.37 As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have argued, “sonorous or vocal components are very important” for organizing space or territory.38 A shared experience of sound defined neighbors in medieval witness theory, associating proximity with first-­hand experience. The legal definition of witness as neighbor thus relied both on the idea that proximity provided access to common knowledge of facts and on the idea

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that proximity made first-­hand experience accessible. Charles Donahue Jr. has shown a preference for eyewitness testimony in twelfth-­and thirteenth-­century witness treatises, such as Tancred’s Gratiae libri de iudiciorum ordine (c. 1215), which were very influential on subsequent English legal practices in both church and secular courts. These treatises required that witnesses be examined to see if they were telling the truth about events that they saw and heard for themselves.39 Preference for eyewitness testimony was widely evident in subsequent English legislation, such as the 1316 Statute of Glavelet, which specified that witnesses testify in court to their “own sight and hearing” [de plenu visu et auditu].40 In his commentary on property rights mentioned above, however, Glanvill blends a view of testimony as based in first-­hand experience with one based in common knowledge: “The knowledge required from the jurors is that they shall know about the matter from what they have personally seen and heard, or from statements which their father made to them in such circumstances that they are bound to believe them as if they had seen or heard for themselves.”41 The medieval concept of the witness thus blurs a distinction made in modern courts between experiential perception and indirect knowledge of facts. Evidence for this combination of meanings can also be found in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “witness” for the late medieval period first as “knowledge, understanding, wisdom” and second as the “attestation of a fact, event or statement; testimony, evidence” or “the action of being an observer of an event.” The neighbor was seen to have access to both the knowledge and the evidence that defined a medieval witness.42 A marriage case from the ecclesiastical court of the pontificate of Archbishop Hubert Walter shows that the idea of the witness as neighbor could link common knowledge and experiential perception. The record begins by listing the names of thirteen people who testified to the question of the couple’s affinity. Next, it asserts: “All these say the same thing about the affinity, to wit, that Agnes, the wife of Stephen, was the daughter of Elia’s mother’s sister. The whole neighborhood testifies to this, and it is well known to all.”43 Commenting on this case, Donahue says: “We are closer here to the inscrutable testimony of neighbors than we are to specific witnesses of particular transactions.”44 The document proceeds, however, to ascribe particular claims to named individuals. It names four people who saw the woman’s child baptized, another who reported the child’s name, and yet another who reported the name of the chaplain. This case and others show that witnesses who provided individual details of fact from personal experience could also be understood collectively as neighbors who testified to what was “well known to all.” Although modern testimony is often seen as an expression



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of individual subjectivity, the medieval neighbor-­witness expressed collective perception or shared knowledge.45 Indeed, the term “neighbor” itself puts pressure on the concept of witness as an autonomous subject because it generates its meaning from spatially expressed relationships between people. All of these examples suggest that neighborhood came into being as a source of local knowledge. As Pollock and Maitland explain of the witness trial, “The verdict of the jurors is not just the verdict of twelve men; it is the verdict of a pays, a ‘country,’ a neighborhood, a community.”46 This quotation points to the role of the witness in the constitution of locality and shows that the practice of the trial helped to produce a shared identity. Reflecting the role of the “neighebor” in constituting shared political identity, the Middle English Dictionary’s first definition of the term is “one who dwells nearby . . . a fellow citizen; an inhabitant of a nearby town or country.”47 This definition also illustrates that both witness and citizen were defined as neighbors. By associating a witness’s proximity with a knowledge based both on first-­hand experience and on reputation, the medieval witness trial constructed local community in spatial terms.48 Edward Soja has argued that “social relationships become real and concrete, a part of our lived social existence, only when they are spatially ‘inscribed’—that is, concretely represented—in the social production of space. Social reality is not just coincidently spatial, existing ‘in’ space, it is presuppositionally and ontologically spatial.”49 Within the medieval city, one of the ways that the neighborhood was constructed was through the practice of witnessing.

Legal Space in York’s “Entry into Jerusalem” The York “Entry into Jerusalem” has long been understood as emblematic of the drama’s relationship to civic space, but critics have, for the most part, emphasized the pageant’s connections to royal entries and liturgical processions rather than to legal spatiality. Connecting the play both to royal entry ceremonies and to the civic liturgical procession of Corpus Christi when parish clergy entered the city with the host, Stevens argues that the “Entry into Jerusalem” is the “ultimate York play” because it transforms the city into a stage, collapsing any distinction between the material space of the city and the imagined space of biblical Jerusalem: “The place is York. And yet the spectators recognize they are really in Jerusalem.”50 Pamela M. King has argued for the influence of the Palm Sunday liturgy on the play and for an analogy between the role of the gatekeeper in the play and the priest in the liturgy of the Mass.51 Building on this understanding

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of the play as emblematic of the drama’s relationship to civic space, I argue that the play promotes legal concepts of space in the service of civic authority. Specifically, the depiction of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem reflects both the discourse of witnessing in its focus on proximity and the charter’s definition of the city by legal jurisdiction and practice.52 York’s “Entry into Jerusalem” defines the city through legal rights, reflecting the logic of the civic charter. Searching for an ass for Christ to ride on the way to Jerusalem, Peter spots “bestis” nearby, asserting that the two of them can “vnbynde” (53) the animals “frely” (54), and Phillip says: The beestis are comen, wele I knawe, Therfore vs nedis to aske lesse leue; And oure maistir kepis þe lawe. (57–59)53 Peter uses the term “comen,” referring to the law of common property in which the citizens have rights to use animals, and he justifies taking the animals on the grounds that Christ is lawful. The gatekeeper responds by stopping the disciples at the gates and challenging their authority to use the ass: “Saie, what are ȝe þat makis here maistrie / To loose þes bestis withoute leverie?” (64–65). Since the disciples do not have any livery to mark them as citizens, he suggests, they do not have legal access to the shared property of the city. The gatekeeper forms the spatial boundary of the city socially by distinguishing these outsiders from the citizens inside the gate who benefit from legal shared property rights. His question centers on the identity of Christ instead of on precise location, using the citizen rather than geographical space to define the city. As Ruth Nisse has noted, although not present in the biblical story, the gatekeeper depicts a municipal official as described in the York custumal: a wise man chosen by the mayor and council whose role it was to “keep the keys for each of the city gates, [and who] must be ready every day to do whatever the mayor and the commons command them.”54 The York gatekeeper fulfills this role by consulting a group of burghers who resemble the council in York.55 Recounting the story of the ass, he says: “And all þis matter þai me tolde / Right haly as I saie to ȝou, / And þe ass þei haue right as þei wolde” (196–99, my emphasis). The gatekeeper poses the question of Christ’s entry into the city as a problem of legal rights and practices. This scene reflects the logic of the city charter, which uses the boundaries of the city to circumscribe legal rights, granting it authority over the courts within it. The play also identifies Christ with the presence and proximity that are crucial to the legal culture of witnessing. In the opening passage, Christ addresses



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“My dere discipulis þat ben here” (2, my emphasis), explaining that “My fadirs wille forsoth it is, / þat sent me hedyr” (11–12, my emphasis) and announcing that the “prophi[tes] clere menyng / May be fulfillid here in þis place” (24–25, my emphasis). These phrases identify Christ through his location relative to those he addresses. Responding to the disciples’ demand for an ass at the beginning of the play, the gatekeeper asks: “What man is þat ȝe maistir call / Swilke priuelege dare to hym clayme?” (78–79). On being told his name, he quickly follows with another question about his whereabouts: “Sirs, of þat prophette herde I haue, / But telle me firste playnly, wher is hee?” (85–86, my emphasis). The disciple Philip answers not with a precise location but with a phrase reflecting the relational concept of nearness: “He comes at hande” (87, my emphasis). Later in the play, a blind man asks the Pauper: “Declare me to / This myrþe I herde, what mene may it / Or vnderstande?” (304–5). The Pauper’s response is not an explanation but an announcement of Christ’s proximity: “Jesu [of grace] full, [þe prophite,] / Comys here at hande . . . He is right nere” (307–8, 313, my emphases). When the gatekeeper welcomes Christ at the end of the play, Christ’s presence “here” refers, as in the phrases cited above, simultaneously to the heavenly city and the medieval city of York where the play is staged: Behalde, where all þ[e] burgeis bayne Comes with wirschippe hym to mete; þerefore I will Late hym abide here in þis strete, And lowte hym till. (484–88) This passage links Christ’s proximity “here” to “þis strete,” depicting the holy city in neighborhood terms that validate the local culture of witnessing in medieval York and express the civic authority of “all þ[e] burgeis.” The play’s depiction of Christ’s imminent arrival draws on paradigms of witnessing that link shared knowledge to locality. The gatekeeper says he will openly declare the news of Christ’s coming: This tydyngis schall haue no laynyng, But [be] þe the citezens declari[d] till Of þis cité. (101–3) The term “tydyngis,” which refers to shared news, invokes the association of witnessing with common knowledge or testimony from the neighborhood, tying

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it to the social category of the citizen as well as to the spatial category of the city. Reflecting the logic of the legal definition of the witness, the play associates knowledge of Christ with proximity to Him. Continuing to comment on his delivery of the news of Christ’s imminent arrival, the gatekeeper says: And sen I will þei warned be, Both ȝonge and olde in ilke astate, For his coming I will h[e]m mete, To late þam witte, withoute debate. Lo, wher þei stande, Th[e] citezens cheff, withoute debate, Of all þis land. (106–12) Referring to the “citezens . . . Of alle þis land,” the gatekeeper suggests that shared identity is shaped by a collective act of witnessing to Christ, echoing the quotation by Pollock and Maitland cited above. The gatekeeper publicly foretells the arrival of Christ to the diverse elements of the civic collective, including both young and old. The phrases “both ȝonge and olde” and “withoute debate” suggest that the certainty of this knowledge builds unity from diversity, constructing community from news and reflecting the logic of defining witnesses as neighbors. The gatekeeper’s warning is a means to “witte,” or know, a term etymologically tied to witnessing. This shared local knowledge is specifically linked to the city in this passage, defining urban space as local. The gatekeeper prefaces his prophecy: Sirs, novelté, I can ȝou tell, And triste þame fully as for trewe: Her comes of kynde of Israell Att hande, þe prophette called Jesu, Lo, þis same day, Rydand on an asse. þis tydandis newe Consayue ȝe may. (120–26) The term “her” insists on spatial proximity, while the terms “novelté” and “tydandis newe” recall the local knowledge that is the basis for neighborhood witnessing in the period.56 The play invokes a familiar idea of witnessing based in shared knowledge communicated through the circulation of speech among neighbors, rather than through individuals’ first-­hand experience. This paradigm of the neighborhood is linked to the city through the double role of the gatekeeper as also witness



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to Christ and as gatekeeper. Thus, the boundaries of the city correlate with the networks of knowledge ascribed to neighbors in medieval witness theory. The play’s interest in imagining the city in the terms associated with local neighborhoods mitigates against imagining it as a homogeneous unified entity. Indeed, Sarah Rees Jones has argued that medieval York was in practice “not one city or one community but several, and each neighborhood was dominated by somewhat discrete social hierarchies. . . . The polyfocal character underpinned a complex economy in which goods and services were traded between different neighborhoods in the city” as well as with agricultural settlements.57 This historical context points to the possibility that the city might function in the play as an expression of local power and as an aggregate of small-­scale localities or neighborhoods. Indeed, while the jurisdiction accorded to the city by the series of charters applied only to courts within the designated boundaries and thus might seem to apply to a unified city, it enabled an even more local functioning of the courts and of individual acts of witnessing. As Bradin Cormack has argued, “jurisdiction constitutes the law’s authority by reflecting back the principle that judgment for truth is possible only as the assertion that in this case a judgment here is appropriate” (emphasis in original).58 Cormack points to the way that jurisdiction, while associated with broad geographical boundaries, in practice produces a much greater degree of spatial localism. In this way, the York charter contributed to a view of the city as constructed by specific courts and cases, and by the individual acts of witnesses and neighbors. Christ’s admission into the city is decided by the group of burghers who employ theological and legal concepts of witnessing to advise the gatekeeper on whether or not to let Christ into the city, a plot that makes the neighbor-­witness a figure of urban authority. Testifying that Christ is indeed king, one of the burghers says, “Oure awne lawe to it cordis will, / þe prophettis all bare full witnesse” (226). Invoking a conventional depiction of the Old Testament as “Law,” “oure awne lawe” refers simultaneously both to civic law and to Old Testament prophecies. The phrase employs a legal understanding of bearing witness as public act based in collective knowledge, here shared among the prophets who testify to the truth of Christ. In this context, the term “witness” predicts the future rather than observes the present or attests to the past. Both the biblical prophecies and the burghers’ acts of interpretation are constructed as acts of witnessing. The burghers’ speeches establish the Old Testament prophets as witnesses and depict witnessing as the act of speaking the truth of the Gospels.59 After citing all the prophets as witnesses to the fact that Christ will accord with their law, the burgher continues:

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Qwilke full of hym secrete gone [t]elle, And þus wolde say: “Emang youreselff schall come grete seele, Thurgh God verray.” (228–31) This passage draws on a familiar understanding of the biblical text itself as a testament that bears witness to God’s truth. Indeed, the Middle English Dictionary lists “proof by written authority” as one of the meanings of the term “witness.”60 That paradigm is revised in the play, however, and witnessing is depicted here as an act of speaking, rather than writing, in which the prophets perform the biblical story and publicly “telle” secrets and “say” their prophecies, reflecting the tendency to oral testimony in the medieval courts and potentially referring to the speech acts of drama itself. According to one of the burghers, who discuss Christ with the gatekeeper, even Christ acts as a witness who cites biblical precedent: ȝa, Moyses lawe he cowed ilke dele, And all þe prophettis on a rowe, He telles þam so þat ilke a man may fele, And what þei [s]ay interly knowe. (148–51) Echoing the language used to describe the prophets’ and the burgers’ witness to His own coming, in this passage Christ “tells” or narrates the law of Moses rather than reading it. The term “interly knowe” describes knowledge, a term etymologically tied to witnessing. By linking the burghers with Christ in His role as witness, the play uses legal constructs to validate local civic authority. In the “Entry” play, the burghers also reflect the role of civic authorities in the royal entry ceremonies employed in York and elsewhere who welcomed the monarch and rode with him into the city, where he was greeted with elaborate pageants, gifts, and speeches.61 In the York play, the burghers form a “processioun,” complete with “myghtfull songs” and elaborate decorations of “braunches” and “floures” (260–63), to meet Christ “Kyng of Juuys” (224) and “hym honnoure as we wele awe / Worthely tyll oure citee / And for oure souerayne lord hym knawe” (184–85).62 When the York play’s burghers tie Christ’s genealogy to Jesse, David, Solomon, and Christ’s “modir kynne” (242), they invoke the biblical iconography of royal entries. Henry VII’s entry into York in 1486, for example, included a moment when six kings appeared before the guildhall and passed a scepter to Solomon, who then passed it to Henry.63 The play’s depiction of Jerusalem as medieval York resembles the civic triumph that greeted Henry



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VI in 1432, which scripted the young king’s entry into London as an ascension into the celestial Jerusalem.64 Engaging the liturgical imagery of Christ’s final advent to the heavenly Jerusalem, royal entries often depicted earthly kings as Christ, but York’s “Entry into Jerusalem” reverses this logic by having Christ act the role of king.65 The play’s invocation of the paradigms of royal entries invites us to see the drama in a similar political context. Historical evidence shows that royal entries were used strategically by cities to negotiate for liberties and make financial requests. As Lorraine Attreed has argued, these ceremonies were valuable investments for towns “dependent on the English Crown for the liberties and privileges essential to self-­government” that often produced concrete benefits for the city, such as revenue granted by the king, and provided an occasion for the urban community to define itself.66 For example, after a ceremony greeting him in York on August 29, 1483, King Richard III granted York an annuity of forty pounds and gave the mayor 18.5 shillings per year for the honor of being his chief sergeant at arms. In this ceremony, the royal procession traced the path of the Corpus Christi plays, and the king attended plays during his visit, suggesting the role of dramatic performances in negotiations with the monarch.67 Similarly, Henry VII’s ceremonial entry into York in 1486 provided a way for the city to welcome the new monarch, compensating for its former loyalties to Richard III, who had been a strong patron of the city.68 Made to honor the monarch, the royal entry pageants also scripted the role of the king, presenting an opportunity to symbolically shape the monarch’s behavior. By establishing a parallel with royal welcomes, the York “Entry into Jerusalem” suggests that not only royal entry pageants but also biblical drama could play a role in negotiating between royal and urban authority. Even though Christ is referred to in the play as “king,” He is subject to civic jurisdiction and does not assert any monarchical prerogative. As we have seen, the gatekeeper initially questions the disciples’ legal right to use the beasts of the city, and he then holds Christ at the city gates until he has obtained the advice of the burghers. Although the burghers ultimately recognize Christ as their sovereign (“For wele I wot our kyng he is” [177]) and determine to “hym ressayne with grete rennowne / As worthy is” (207–8), He is subject to their jurisdiction. Christ’s admission into Jerusalem in the York play as a citizen is especially striking in comparison with the celebration of the king’s association with divine justice common in royal entries.69 In the triumph of Henry VII, for example, Solomon claims that his kingly authority to speak on justice comes from “god full or glorie eternal Sapience” (148). Solomon seeks to discuss with the earthly

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king “upon conscience yche iudicial cause . . . in ich iudiciall right this realme to be renewed.”70 Here justice is a personal characteristic of the king’s “conscience,” which applies to the “realm” as a whole.71 The York play invokes and revises this paradigm by locating justice within the boundaries of the city and in the practices of the citizen, rather than in the authority of the monarch. By admitting Christ into the city, the “Entry” play equates Christ’s New Law with civic law rather than monarchical legal prerogative and also draws on a theological model of the law as divine order. Earlier in the play, one of the burghers is concerned that Christ might threaten their law: In oure tempill if he prechid Agaynst þe pepull þat leued wrong, And also new lawes if he teched Agaynste oure lawis we vsed so lang. (141–44) This passage plays on a theological understanding of Christ as the new dispensation of Christianity and links the new dispensation to the local concepts of city and neighborhood rather than to the Old Law. When Zaché complains that “Oure pepill” follow Christ “thrugh strete and gate / . . . Oure olde lawes as nowe þei hatte, / And his kepis ȝare” (402–4), the mixing of Old and New Testament “law” is refigured spatially as a movement through fixed barriers and markers of space, such as gate and street. The last words of the play reiterate the spatial construction of the city and the identification of Christ’s New Law with the law of York. Addressing Christ, one of the burghers says: “Welcome of all abowte, / to owre ceté” (543–44). The word “to” implies a spatial boundary crossed only at the very end of the play, making the main action of the play the passing through the gates to enter the city. The term “citee” (185, 103, 283, and 212) and “felde and towne” (209, 433) are among the most commonly repeated terms in the play and are consistently paired with prepositions that suggest a movement across the boundaries of the city. Much anticipated and delayed, the action of Christ entering the city is the climax of the plot at the end of the play. In this last passage partially cited above, Christ’s entry into the city is legally constructed: “Hayll, domysman dredfull, þat all schall deme, . . . We welcome þe, / Hayll, and welcome of all abowte, / To owre ceté” (538–44). Christ is depicted as a judge who will preside in the court on Doomsday. Although Christian theology taught that all of humankind will be present at the End, this passage locates the court of the Last Judgment



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specifically in York, emphasizing Christ’s double identity in the play as both citizen and judge. In these ways, this passage defines the city boundaries through local legal jurisdiction, and through the practices of the citizen acting as witness, associating Christ with the legal practices and liberties of York.

Drama as Witnessing The legal paradigms of witnessing both support local authority and present a framework for understanding the space of medieval theater as constructed in performance.72 As is well known, evidence that the locations of the pageant stations were proscribed and regulated can be found in the civic records, such as the York Memorandum Books’ “ordo paginarum ludi corpis Christi” of 1415, which called for people to “frynges furth pacentes þat þai play at the places þat is assigned þerfore and nowere ells.”73 Similarly, a 1399 record asks the mayor and aldermen to ensure that the pageants be played “in the places to which they were limited and assigned by you and by the aforesaid commons previously” on pain of a fine paid to the city council chamber.74 Drawing on civic records, scholars of medieval drama have charted the pageant route in medieval York, studying the implications of that route for staging and for local politics. Instead of imagining medieval dramatic space as fixed by the material structure of a pageant route, we should consider space, as Donalee Dox has argued, as “an active participant in performance” that is “fluid, active, saturated with meanings, and always constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing an imagined reality.”75 This interaction between material and subjective imaginary space is evident in the civic drama of medieval York, as well as in the idea of the neighborhood so central to medieval concepts of witnessing. Established within the boundaries of the city of York, the performance stations construct a provisional temporary neighborhood for communal witnessing of the plays that draws on legal notions of spatiality. Individual pageants composing the York Plays were performed on wagons at twelve to fifteen predetermined stations in the streets of York, along a route that ran from Holy Trinity Priory just inside Micklegate Bar down the main streets of the city to end at the Pavement.76 Based on her experience of modern recreations of the York plays, Meg Twycross has argued that “in York, the streets curve sufficiently for every station to be just out of sight of the previous one [and] in any case, the wagons block the street so that the audience cannot see what follows.”77 This description

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suggests that the placement of the stations and the wagons themselves shaped discrete spaces for staging the pageants, and thus constructed the audience. As Twycross explains, each episode was played “over and over again to audiences which must have been relatively small—as many as can crowd into an ordinary shopping street around a pageant wagon, perhaps between one and two hundred.”78 The drama could be witnessed by a discrete group of people who could see and hear the drama, much like the way in which the neighborhood was provisionally defined by the hue and cry in medieval legal tradition, rather than by fixed or preestablished boundaries. In contrast to modern theaters in which architectural space shapes the audience, the use of wagons on the streets of York created an audience experience arguably closer to that of witnessing other events that might have taken place on the city streets. This analogy between the members of the audience and legal witnesses is encouraged by the absence of a fixed boundary between audience and performance space in the staging of medieval civic drama.79 Individual pageants were most likely acted on the streets as well as on wagons, which probably had a thrust stage surrounded by the audience on three sides.80 Like other medieval plays, the York “Entry into Jerusalem” contains multiple references to having been performed on the streets. Addressing the Pauper, Cecus instructs: “Sir, helpe me to þe street hastely” (314), and at the end of the play, Christ tells his disciples: “Vnto Jerusalem we schal assende” (462), suggesting that only then would the action move up from street level into the pageant wagon. Many plays begin with phrases that call for the audience’s attention, indicating that medieval drama was indeed street theater, and constructing the audience through an experience of shared hearing like the hue and cry was crucial to the development of medieval witness theory.81 The York “Entry into Jerusalem” begins with Christ asking for the audience’s attention: “To me takis tent and giffis gud hede, / My dere discipulis þat be here, / I schall ȝou telle þat shal be indede” (1–3).82 Christ addresses both his disciples and the members of the audience, who will share in the knowledge of His prophecy. Tracing the logic of medieval witnessing, the proximity of the members of the audience who are “here” allows them to share the knowledge conveyed by the play. This passage models the way that space was continually constructed and reconstructed subjectively over time through the collective act of witnessing the plays, just as neighborhoods were defined by shared knowledge rather than stable boundaries in medieval witness theory. The fact that the “Entry into Jerusalem,” like the other pageants, would have been performed at various stations around the city meant that the material referent of terms like “here” would have changed from one street to the next,



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staging a highly localized, performative, and subjective understanding of space. The imagined space of the pageant—in this case, the city gates of Jerusalem— would have had to be remade at the material location of each new pageant station. Despite his argument for an equivalence between Jerusalem and York in the play, Martin Stevens also acknowledges that any correlation between the specific stations and biblical place was disrupted by the processional staging: “The stations were stopping places for the pageants, with the result that the Creation play as well as the Conspiracy and the Resurrection, and all the others, played at each of the stations, and no episode became identified with a place per se in actual performance.”83 By contrast, Theodore K. Lerud has argued that “the York Entry takes on more significance to viewers if it is performed at the actual entry into town—Micklegate Bar, near Holy Trinity Priory.”84 The relationship between physical landmarks, such as the gates of York, and biblical landmarks, such as a gates of Jerusalem, would have been in a shifting relationship depending on whether the performance was at the city gates, the final station at the platform, or elsewhere. The complexity of this changing dialogic and performative relationship between material and imagined spaces would only have been amplified by any sets on the wagons themselves. Based on the script of the play, Pamela M. King has speculated that the wagon for the play contained sets representing Jerusalem, possibly a structure with “considerable vertical height, possibly like a city gate,” like those popular in royal entries.85 The register indicates that the Skinners who produced the pageant were one of the earliest guilds to have a pageant-­house in which to store stages, implying that they had a vehicle as early as 1387. If King is correct about the design of the pageant wagon, then a performance at the first station at the city gates would have engaged the audience in a complex spatial performance in which the visual representation of gates on the wagons, the verbal references to gates, and the material architecture would have all interacted. In sum, the staging of the play would have performed in a space that was both local and contingent, material and imagined. The processional format stages (and restages) the broad category of the local rather than identifying the play with specific places, as in the famous reference to “Watlyng strete” in the Towneley “Judgment” or the moment when the eponymous “Croxton Play of the Sacrament” announces itself in the opening as taking place “at Croxton on Monday.”86 In addition, each material location imaginatively became a different biblical place as a sequence of individual pageants moved through that pageant station. For example, a given neighborhood might first be the Garden of Eden and later Herod’s court. The processional staging of late

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medieval drama thus highlights interactions between material and conceptual space and engages the subjectivity of the audience in the space of performance. The processional staging of medieval drama also would have drawn attention to the deictic properties of the drama as the material referents of such terms as “here” varied their meaning as a given play was staged at a series of locations around the city. Theorists such as Keir Elam have argued that the effect of deictic expressions is amplified in theater.87 Elam explains that “dramatic discourse is always tied to speaker, listener and its immediate spatio-­temporal coordinates, but is at the same time dynamic to the extent that the participants and the time and location of utterance indicated undergo continual change.”88 More specifically, Elam argues that dramatic discourse is composed of “interpersonal dialectic” achieved by “references by the speakers to themselves as speakers, to their interlocutors as listener-­addressees and to the spatio-­temporal coordinates (the here-­and-­now) of the utterance itself by means of such deictic elements as demonstrative pronouns and spatial and temporal adverbs.”89 Looking back at Christ’s words in the very beginning of the play cited earlier in this chapter, we can see these characteristics: To me takis tent and giffis gud hede, My dere discipulis þat be here, I schall ȝou telle þat shal be indeed: My tyme to pass hense it drawith nere. (1–4, my emphases) As my emphases indicate, this passage is saturated with the personal and possessive pronouns “I,” “my,” and “ȝou” as well as spatializing adverbs (“here,” “nere,” and “hense”) that exhibit the spatial deixis that Elam and others see as essential to theater. This pattern is echoed by other speakers in the play with reference to Christ. For example, the Pauper says: “Loo, he is here at þis same place” (318). From this perspective, it can be argued that theater—especially medieval theater, with its processional staging—stages space that has no fixed reality but must be understood through point of view. Medieval theater, urban religious drama in particular, staged an intensified experience of the subjective and temporal aspects of space.90 As we have seen, this same passage invokes the spatial paradigms of legal witnessing, thus associating it with theatrical deixis. As Stanton B. Garner has argued, the relationship between visual and verbal components of theatrical space can operate in a complex and potentially competing relationship: “In theater, the mis-­en-­scène of language can exert such a powerful phenomenal impression that it will compete with or even eclipse the actuality



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of the visual present,” to the extent that there is sometimes a “displacement of the material by the verbal.”91 Alan H. Nelson has demonstrated the proliferation of terms designating space in medieval cycle texts, suggesting the potential for a gap between verbal and visual cues.92 Attempting to fill this gap, medieval drama critics have sometimes used the script’s references to specific places or landmarks as evidence for the staging of the pageants or the sets on the pageant wagons. For example, King’s speculation that “the pageant’s staging involves vertically elaborate thresholds and gateways” is based on the moments in the pageant when Jesus invites his disciples to “go togedir / Vnto ȝone castell” (15) and when He says, “Vnto Jerusalem we schall assende” (462).93 As we have seen, however, the gatekeeper marks the boundary performatively through his speech and actions. Indeed, the mis-­en-­scène created by the verbal references to “Jerusalem” and the repeated references to the “city” in the play might, in fact, have created a provisional space in dialogue with—or perhaps even at odds with—material spaces along the performance route. The 1399 ordinance preserved in the York Memorandum Books described the proscribed stations by references to a series of doors and gates: “First at the gates of Holy Trinity in Micklegate; second at Robert Herpham’s door; third at John de Gyseburne’s door . . . seventh at Henry Wyman’s door in Coney Street, ninth at Adam del Brigg’s door . . . tenth at the gates of the Minster of blessed Peter; eleventh at the end of Girdlergate in Petergate.”94 As the pageant was performed at these stations, these material doors and gates would certainly have been in a changing relationship to the city gates of Jerusalem repeatedly mentioned in the script of the play, and other spaces referred to in the dialogue, such as the “citee.” This potential and shifting disjunction between verbal, visual, and auditory constructions of space would have drawn the audience’s attention to the ways in which space was constructed, like witnessing, through subjective acts of perception. Furthermore, the proliferation of names in the descriptions of the pageant stations in the passage above suggests that the locations mentioned were defined socially by shared common knowledge of the whereabouts of specific neighbors’ homes, rather than by street names or other landmarks, and thus required the same sort of local knowledge that was essential to legal witnessing in the period. Based on her study of other records, Twycross comments that some of these people listed in the passage above were “neighbors” of one another.95 We have seen that legal witnessing provides a means of understanding the spatial practices of medieval drama. Processional staging meant that the local space of individual performance was defined temporally through what the members of the audience both individually and collectively could see and hear, just as

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in legal witnessing the neighborhood came into being in the actions of seeing, hearing, and sharing knowledge. As the pageant wagons moved to various stations throughout the city, the relationship between material and imagined space was dynamic; sets, words, and material structures (such as doors and gates and buildings) interacted to create the performance space. The “Entry” play described Christ’s location and His presence in deictic terms, such as “here” and “near,” just as medieval legal theory and practice defined witnesses as neighbors close enough to have seen and heard relevant events, or to have local knowledge of reputation accorded by spatial proximity. The emphasis on Christ’s proximity implies that the members of the audience are close enough to be His witnesses. Furthermore, the deictic terms highlight a quality of theater that defines space subjectively and temporarily through speech acts, as well as through material spaces. The “Entry into Jerusalem” demonstrates that both legal and dramatic concepts of space can be used to promote civic power, and that the law—specifically the law of witnessing—can be employed in the service of local rather than national power. We have seen that the legal practice of witnessing was grounded in locality and was crucial to the practice of citizenship. The fact that legal charters were compiled in the York Memorandum Books and kept in the guildhall of medieval York illustrates contemporary awareness of the crucial role of legal rights in maintaining civic authority in the face of monarchical power. Like the York Memorandum Books, York’s “Entry into Jerusalem” helped produce a “legal memory,” using witnessing to perform and construct civic authority and showing that legal witnessing shaped contemporary medieval understandings of neighborhood and urban space. The spatialized practice of witnessing put the neighbor and citizen—rather than king, cleric, or lawyer—at the center of legal practice. Witnessing did not depend on fixed boundaries or designated places but could be practiced in any neighborhood or any place within the neighborhood, promoting localism not just through elevating the city’s power in relationship to the realm but also on a much smaller scale. Defining the citizen and witness as a neighbor promotes an understanding of the city space as defined provisionally by social networks and by local affective experiences. Witnessing depended on social exchange rather than on fixed locale and was linked with performative and shifting practices of creating space. Legal witnessing gave to the ordinary citizen—not just to urban elites—power to shape the space and the meaning of the city. As we will see in Chapter 3, however, not all inhabitants capable of seeing, hearing, or knowing the business of neighbors of the city could be legal witnesses. By law, women, children, domestics, the poor, the infamous, and the criminal could not



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testify, nor could friends or enemies of the accused.96 Thus, the ideal of citizenship grounded in witnessing that is depicted in the York “Entry” play should be understood in practice as available only to a subset of those who lived in York. Nonetheless, by focusing on the witness as neighbor, the play provides an alternative to defining the space of the city in relation to the larger structures of nation or parliament.

Chapter 2

Witnessing as Speech

A host of medieval scholars have considered the collaborations between legal and literary textuality. When Lateran IV prohibited the ordeal, however, it promoted the witness and the jury trial and made oral testimony a crucial element of medieval legal practice, inviting a consideration of the relationship between law and literature in performative terms.1 The oral nature of witnessing is evident in the medieval and modern requirement that the witness make an oath “to speak the truth” before an audience. Understanding witnessing as a theory and practice of speaking provides an alternative to familiar studies of medieval speech that have focused on sermons and confessional discourse, as well as an alternative to historical studies of scolding and defamation.2 This chapter argues that medieval witnessing was performative in multiple senses—engaging testimonial speech, the character and social status of the speaker, and the authority of institutional practices—and that testimonial speech can be used to theorize the speech acts of medieval theater.3 Witnessing focuses our attention on embodied speech, rather than on the body as symbol of the Christian community, which is at the center of much medieval literary scholarship.4 In medieval theory and practice, witnesses must be physically present in court. The courts recognized the ways that testifying—whether truthfully or not—was a powerful action that could materially affect others through the power of the law. Medieval common and canon law understood the meaning of testimony as shaped not just by words but also by the speaker’s identity, reputation, intentions, and social standing, and thus presented a more elite and less inclusive view of the witness than was implied by the definition of the witness by proximity emphasized in the previous chapter. On the other hand, testimony was not entirely shaped by the speaker; it was also a public performance constructed by the audience. In this chapter, I argue that the



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sequence of six trial plays in the York compilation demonstrates the connections between dramatic and legal speech acts. The plays draw both on legal concepts and on the language of late medieval mirrors for princes and conduct books to make witnessing central to the linguistic self-­regulation that defines the citizen. The portraits of the tyrants in the plays engage the paradigms of mirrors for princes by linking the excesses of speech to tyrannical governance. By contrast, Christ is portrayed as an ideal witness and model citizen, who deploys legal and linguistic performativity in a moral way, reflecting the advice of conduct books. Like mirrors for princes and conduct books, the York Plays address concepts of law and testimony in broad terms that both engage with legal concepts and also move beyond them. Although often referred to as the “trial plays,” these plays are not staged in courtroom settings, and they draw on legal concepts rather than depicting specific legal procedures. As the title suggests, the “Conspiracy” functions as a prequel to the trials and features a broad cast of characters—including Judas, Pilate, and the two canon lawyers who plot against Christ. “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas” has courtlike public dialogue at the end but also features Caiaphas going to bed and reemerging, as well as an interval of dialogue between a woman, Peter, and a soldier.5 “Christ Before Pilate I: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife” begins using legal terms in a conversation between Pilate and Procula in the couple’s bedroom, perhaps allowing for product placement for the Tapiters and Couchers, who sponsored the pageant. The bedroom setting draws attention to the relevance of legal concepts to domestic life, and the play only later moves to a more public space. “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement” is the most trial-­like, but even this play does not represent contemporary legal practice with any accuracy. The play does not acknowledge jurisdictional distinctions essential to contemporary legal practice, since canon lawyers participate in a procedure presided over by Pilate, a secular figure, who plays the roles of both king and judge. Like the other plays, despite the fact that Pilate directs the action, “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement” refers to witnesses rather than to the jurors essential to the common law courts. Indeed, the continuity of ideas about speech and witnessing that runs through the plays—whether presided over by Pilate, Herod, or the canon lawyers—blends the distinctions between different legal courts and procedures, and essentializes concepts of witnessing and law. Whether presided over by a secular ruler or canon lawyers or featuring the beadle, a local legal official, the York trial plays conjure a fanciful version of legal practices, but they draw on ideas of witnessing central to a variety of court practices as well as on the broader reputation of legal witnessing in conduct books, confessional manuals, and other texts of the period. Indeed, the fact that the plays

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consistently engage with the term “witness” and lack direct references to the jury procedures of the secular courts links them to the broader conversations in these nonlegal texts about witnessing. While critics have noted an overdetermined number of legal terms and procedures mentioned in these plays, the York trial plays consistently draw our attention to the centrality of concepts of legal witnessing to medieval ideas about speech and performance.6 Providing their own theorization of these concepts, the plays demonstrate the intricate and intimate links between theatrical and testimonial speech acts, tying both to the performance of civic status and identity.

Witnessing and Speech Modern philosophers of language have observed that the epistemic status of testimony differs from evidence because of its nature as speech. Richard Moran argues that testimony should not be seen as “the presentation or acceptance of evidence,” because of the “specifically linguistic nature of the transfer of knowledge.”7 “Paradigmatic situations of telling cannot be thought of as the presentation or acceptance of evidence at all,” he explains. He argues, “One person tells the other person something, and the other person believes him . . . it is the speaker who is believed, and the belief in the proposition asserted follows from this.”8 For Moran, testimony is a social and intersubjective act in which the believability of testimonial speech is affected by the speaker’s intentional act of telling and also by the hearer’s response to—and trust of—the speaker. Speaking and testifying are “acts which require two distinct parties for their completion, each with their own role to play.”9 Unlike other body language, such as blushing, which might not be volitional but could possibility be taken as evidence, or other acts of speaking—such as exchanging marriage vows—that could be subsequently referred to as evidence in a court of law, the act of speaking testimony is mediated by the speaker’s intentions for its use and must be “freely and consciously undertaken by the speaker.”10 Similarly, medieval court procedures recognized the nature of testimony as a unique kind of speech tied both to the speaker and to the audience’s need to assess the believability of the witness. Medieval confessionals often expressed concern about the precarity of the truth of testimony and about the fact that witnessing could be injurious whether or not it was true.11 In commentary on the eighth commandment, against false witnessing, for example, the confessional manual Handlying Synne warned: “Wyl men swere falsly a sawe, / And bere wytnes of swyche a fals / To make a man hang



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be þe hals.”12 In this passage, false witnessing results in the unjust death of the accused.13 This passage is typical of the consternation expressed in confessional manuals that the act of false speaking in court could cause the miscarriage of justice and materially harm others. This text demonstrates the ways that confessionals and other religious texts often combined an understanding of witnessing in broader moral terms with the practices of the legal courts. A brief subsequent exemplary tale recounts a story in which a rich man goes to court over a dispute with a poor man over “a lytel land,” which would have been in the jurisdiction of the common law courts, but the story is focused on the role of the oath and on concepts of higher justice, rather than on the role of the jury. Furthermore, this passage illustrates the vulnerability of medieval legal courts to false testimony. The text describes the rich man’s witness oath in court: “Whan he was charged þe soþe to seye, / þat he ne shulde, for loue ne eye, / Ne for lefe, no for loþe, / But trew[e]ly to swere hys oþe.” When the man failed to tell the truth, God toke veniaunce apertly. . . . For whan he hadde hys oþe swore, And kest þe bole hem alle before, Vp ne ros he neuer more, But, lay dede hem þore.14 In this exemplum, justice relies on a deus ex machina when God intervenes to punish the false witness and exonerate the accused. The failure of the court to identify the rich man’s falsehood without the help of God implies that earthly human agents cannot reliably interpret the extent to which testimony should be taken as evidence based solely on oral testimony. This passage is symptomatic of a lack of confidence in the courts that is common in ecclesiastical writings. Medieval confessional texts gave responsibility for injurious speech, and for any potential gap between evidence and testimony, to the speaker, presenting false witnessing as a failure of individual morality. A representative example occurs in a section on envy in the well-­known Fasciculus Morum, which admonishes: “A person who knowingly lies with perjury . . . commits himself to the devil.”15 Depicting perjury as a conscious act, and emphasizing its private and internal aspects, the text acknowledges, rather than tries to solve, the problem of identifying false testimony on earth, warning that “perjury will be revealed openly on Judgement Day,” deferring the identification of falsehood until the end of time.16 Like the exemplum in Handlyng Synne, this text understands language as acting independently of truth and points to the inability of humans to

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properly evaluate testimony. Despairing of the moral reliability of legal professionals and institutional structures of law, confessional manuals gave to the inner conscience the imperative to regulate testimonial speech, seeking to motivate potential witnesses out of fear that God would inevitably recognize and punish any false testimony. Like confessional manuals, the church courts recognized that false testimony could be injurious, but instead of relying on an individual’s conscience and fear of judgment, they employed the crime of defamation and other procedures to protect the accused. Defamation was formalized in the Council of Oxford in 1222, which made it actionable in the church courts to “for the sake of hatred, profit, or favour, or for whatsoever other cause, maliciously impute a crime to any person who is not of ill fame among good and substantial persons, by reason of which purgation at the least is awarded against him, or he is harmed in some other manner.”17 The references to “hatred, profit, or favour” and to “maliciously” show that the words of the speaker were assessed primarily in terms of their intentions rather than by their content. As the above quotation demonstrates, defamation did not just rely on the speaker; it also required that a person’s words were injurious. The reference to “fame” illustrates that defamation cases were the natural corollary of a system of justice that allowed suits to be brought on charges of bad reputation. One way to respond to accusations by public rumor was to countersue for defamation, which was designed to restore to good reputation the person accused of mala fama. The close association between these two kinds of trials is suggested by the fact that public rumor and defamation were both described as diffamatio, attesting to the ease with which the roles of plaintiff and defendant could be reversed in such suits.18 Defamation law thus recognized that false public language could have material ill effects and showed the central role of public speech in testimony. Both common law and canon law courts attempted to limit the injustice caused by false testimony by routinely enlisting divine participation through requiring the witness oath, as illustrated in the exemplum from Handlyng Synne. The authors of Bracton’s treatise on English law described the oath taken by the twelve knights chosen to speak the truth in a plea of the Crown as a vow “to speak the truth . . . so help me God and these holy relics.”19 In common law as well as canon law, the oath was, in a sense, a mini-­ordeal that called for the assistance of God in ensuring the truth—or, as in this case, miraculously revealing the falsity—of the speakers’ assertions.20 The oath taken by witnesses and jurors complicates a well-­known teleological view of legal history that traces a clear progression from ordeal to modern witness trial. The miraculous intervention



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of God in the exemplum of the rich man in Handlying Synne makes the ordeal aspect of the oath visible and depicts speaking as a physical action with potential material consequences. The fact that the Middle English Dictionary lists “to swear by” as one of the meanings of “witness” (as, for example, in the phrase “God take I to witness”) suggests that witnessing was more broadly linked to swearing.21 Fasciculus Morum cited St. Augustine to the effect that any oath implicitly enlisted God: “For according to Augustine, to swear is to bring God as a witness.”22 The legal practice of requiring an oath from witnesses present in court, while itself a performative practice rooted in embodied speech, sought to validate the utterance of the witness by enlisting a divine authority that transcended the local and performative context and could assert the truth of the words themselves.23 Moran explains that, as opposed to testimonial speech, in which the speaker implicitly asks for the listeners to believe, “to present something as evidence is to present it as having its epistemic value independent of one’s own beliefs about it, or one’s presentation of it.”24 Only God can make testimony equivalent to other kinds of evidence and avoid the mediations of the witnesses’ presentation and the hearers’ beliefs. The scripted nature of the witness oath not only enlists divine participation, it also engages the authority of law by requiring the oath as a preface to specific testimony.25 In the exemplum from Handlyng Synne, the power of the witness to make a man hang does not rely solely on his own statements; it also relies on the ways that testimonial speech enlisted the authority of the law, even in the service of false testimony. In his discussion of J. L. Austin, Pierre Bourdieu argues that the “specific efficacy” of performative utterances “stems from the fact that they seem to possess in themselves the source of a power which in reality resides in the institutional conditions of their production and reception. Medieval witness law did not see the institutional authority of law—or the invocation of higher authority—as precluding individual intention on the part of the witness giving testimony. Similarly, in his famous theorization of the performative utterance, Austin understood the “circumstances of the utterance” to be essential to the “smooth” functioning of the performative.26 According to Austin, these circumstances included the existence of “accepted conventional procedure” and the appropriateness of “the persons and circumstances in a particular case,” criteria he applies to legal contexts, among other examples.27 Moran also acknowledges the “institutional” character of language as a broader context for his theory of testimonial speech, giving the exclusion of children, women and noncitizens from testimony as a specific instance of the ways that a speaker must be credited with the authority to perform any given speech act.28 While the witness oath

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provides a clear invocation of institutional and even divine legal authority, the same oath also enables individual witnesses to harness larger systems of power in intentional ways, as illustrated in the exemplum from Handlyng Synne. In addition to the oath, the legal protocol of both common law and canon law courts deployed another strategy for mitigating against false testimony: requiring witnesses to be examined separately. The biblical story of Susanna was widely presented as a point of origin for this practice in legal texts from the twelfth-­century canon law treatise Gratian’s Decretum to Bracton’s thirteenth-­ century treatise on English common law. The story was used the same way in popular texts, such as the conduct book The Book of the Knight of the Tower, which provides an extended account of the patriarchs’ threat to provide false testimony against Susanna. The patriarchs say: “That yf she wold not doo after theyr wylle / they wold bere wytnesse how that they had found her in the dede of lechery with a man. And so by cause she shold haue trespaced ageynste her lord & enfrayned her maryage she shold be stoned to dethe / This good lady wexed thenne moche abasshed / that sawe thorugh fals wytnesse her dethe.”29 This exemplum shares with the one in Handlyng Synne an abstract concept of witnessing not grounded in the specific procedures of either common law or canon law courts, and a concern that the words of witnesses, whether true or false, are potentially powerful, perhaps even fatal, to others. Both texts show the vulnerability of the accused to witnesses motivated by evil intentions such as the patriarchs in this tale, who suffer from the lust they ascribe to their victim. Indeed, Susanna is “iuged to deye” and only rescued by her prayer to God, implying that a miracle is necessary to reveal the falsity of testimony. The divine agent reveals the crime through non-­miraculous means, however, by interviewing the two priests separately. Discrepancies in the stories of the patriarchs reveal that they are lying. This exemplum implies that, in future, with the right procedure, the courts can function effectively, even when the false witnesses are powerful men, by replacing divine interventions with a practical and repeatable way to ensure the reliability of testimonial speech.30 Effective witnessing is depicted as an aggregate of speech by various witnesses that gains power from the similarity of one person’s testimony to another’s, mitigating rather than embracing the ability of testimony to express anyone’s subjective experience or private motives.31 The exemplum reflects this logic when Susanna’s false witnesses change their story after being sentenced to death: “Whanne they sawe that no remedye was but that they must dye / they told the trouthe of hit before alle the peple that were there.”32 The two false witnesses are combined into a single plural speaker (“they”) who speaks before “alle the peple.” The private threat of false testimony is thus transformed into a public



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act of true witnessing that enlists the collective participation of the audience in a theatrical performance of justice. Both canon law and common law treatises addressed providing evidence as a public and theatrical speech act in which the speaker’s interaction with the audience played a crucial role. Legal theorists developed strategies to assess the “believability” (to use Moran’s term) of witnesses and jurors through an analysis of their public performance, evaluating, for example, their ability to be precise and consistent. Similarly, the instructions for a criminal cause in a felony case in Bracton’s treatise require that the appellor “must be consistent in what he says and in all circumstantial details.” To be credible, “mention must be made in the appeal of the year, the place, the day and the hour. He must also speak of his own sight and hearing.”33 The use of this formula shows that evidentiary speech—on the part of witnesses, jurors, and appellants—cites authority, even when it also understood as expressing what individuals have seen or heard first-­hand with their own senses. This passage suggests that specificity of time and place can mitigate any potential gap between evidence and testimony, and thus reduce the role of the speaker’s intentions. Legal historians have shown that ordines judiciarii articulated the principles that guided late medieval English lawyers in courts of both church and state.34 Tancred’s twelfth-­century treatise, for example, specifies that testimony should not vary across time or audience: “Witnesses must generally give an oath of this kind: that they speak to the investigator (or to him whom the judge may have here appointed as the investigator) the whole truth that they know about the question for which they are led in until the end of the trial, however many times they are interrogated. [They swear] to introduce no falsehood and to tell the truth for both parties.”35 As this passage indicates, medieval legal theory, like modern practice, used consistency as a way to assess testimony, since witnesses should not change their testimony “however many times they are interrogated.” Specifying that the witness speak to the investigator, the treatise implies that the official status of the addressee, here validated by a chain of authorities, can help produce valid testimony. Unlike confessional manuals, this passage depicts witnessing not as an expression of interiority that can only be evaluated in heaven on Judgment Day but as an earthly public performance that can be analyzed for believability. Instead of deferring judgment to God, both canon law and common law courts enacted procedures that instantiated the belief that intentions could be interpreted by people on earth. If the motives of witnesses could be shown to be problematic, their testimony could be officially excepted from a case. A passage from the record of a 1367 defamation case from the York ecclesiastical court

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records illustrates this process. The record includes a claim that witnesses in the case were “evilly and maliciously pursuing this John Warner by indictments, conspiracies, and other injurious and guileful prosecutions, made up and fabricated by them on purpose for the confusion and subversion of the faculties and fortune of the said John Warner.”36 Although this passage employs a moral vocabulary to describe the alleged motives for false witnessing, it also shows that the courts believed internal motives could be inferred from public behavior. The passage describes the potential for material profit that might come to the witness if the testimony were accepted as true, and thus recognizes the potential of speech acts to have material consequences for speaker as well as subject. In medieval legal practice, the institutional authority of the law was deployed to limit the ability of the witness’s speech to cause injury. In addition to considering intention, medieval church courts and common law courts also evaluated the character and identity of witnesses. The Fourth Lateran Council’s canon 8 asserted that the charges and accusers should be known to the accused: “The names of witnesses as well as their depositions are to be made known to him so that both what has been said and by whom will be apparent.”37 Even the abbreviated records of English court cases frequently included long lists of the names of witnesses, which indicates that personal identity was a key aspect of testimony. Having a good name was a prerequisite for being a witness; testimony could be formally excepted during a trial if the accused could demonstrate that the witnesses were of bad character. For example, the 1367 case from the York ecclesiastical courts discussed above included an attempt to exclude witnesses on the grounds that they were “vile and abject persons.”38 Thus, medieval procedure correlates to the view of testimony expressed by Moran: “It is the speaker who is believed, and the belief in the proposition asserted follows from this.”39 Medieval law regulated who could act as a witness and thus who could enlist the authority of law to empower their assertions. Besides judging intention and character, medieval law made testimony a performance of social status. The full passage from the 1367 York defamation case claimed that some of the people testifying were “paupers, ignoble, vile and abject persons, who, unmindful of their salvation, were and are accustomed to, would, and will foreswear themselves and give false testimony for little.”40 As this passage illuminates, moral terms like “vile” and “abject” were linked to economic status (“paupers”); servile status could be grounds for dismissing a person’s testimony. Testimony by public rumor illustrates an even more systematic deployment of elitism. In this procedure, used by both ecclesiastical and secular courts, witnesses or jurors did not speak to their own firsthand experience; they spoke



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to the reputation of the accused. Charges by public rumor had to be brought by respectable men who were empowered to speak on behalf of the community.41 The authors of Bracton explain that in English law indictment can arise “when rumour originates among good and responsible men.”42 Both of these practices made access to testimonial language a class privilege. Conversely, the ability to bear witness constructed and performed social status. As the modern philosopher Rae Langton has argued, “the ability to perform speech acts can be a measure of political power . . . [and] authority.”43 In sum, the ability of a witness or juror to enlist legal authority was contingent on the believability of the utterance, on the court’s analysis of the speaker’s personal identity, and on reputation and social status. In these respects, witnessing was both an accumulation and deployment of symbolic capital.44 Legal concepts of witnessing were thus relevant to the performance of civic status inside as well as outside the courtroom.

Testimonial Speech in the York Trial Plays In the series of York trial plays, Christ is brought before Pilate, Herod, and the canon lawyers and accused of false speech and false witnessing. In the “Conspiracy,” Christ’s accusers include the canon lawyers and Judas, and in “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas,” the lawyers themselves solicit reports from soldiers and disciples and also add their own accusations. Both of these plays employ legal language, and in both plays Christ’s words are described as testimony, despite the fact that technically the accused in a court case could not serve as a witness. The pattern of identifying Christ as a witness while accusing him of false speech continues in plays presided over by secular rulers: “Christ Before Pilate I: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife” and “Christ Before Herod.” Although initially resistant, in the final trial play, “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement,” Pilate condemns Christ when he is told that Christ has been calling himself king. Each of the plays begins with a loquacious rant that recalls the depiction of tyrants in mirrors for princes. By contrast, Christ is admonished for speaking falsely yet also taken to task for his silence. This section argues that Christ’s few words, which can be seen as testimony, should be understood in the context of contemporary conduct books that recommend guarding against excesses of speech. In the trial plays, Christ exemplifies the virtues of a proper witness and citizen, as does the Beadle, a local legal official like those who compiled laws for the guildhalls of medieval cities like York. In the York trial plays, Christ’s words are explicitly described as testimony, and testimony is repeatedly defined as an act of speaking. Although in

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contemporary ecclesiastical court practice the accused would not also serve as a witness in the same courtroom, the York Plays often depict Christ in this role. After Christ speaks in “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas,” for example, Annas asserts that no other witnesses are necessary: “Nowe neds nowdir wittenesse ne counsaille to call, / But take his sawes as he saieth in þe same stede” (300–301). In this passage, the nature of testimony as speech is clear in the terms “sawes” and “saieth.” Whether or not his words are recognized as truthful, Annas understands that Christ’s act of speaking in itself constitutes an act of witnessing. When Annas commands his listeners to “take his sawes,” he recognizes the crucial role of the hearer in what constitutes testimony. Amplifying the mediations of speakers and audience in testimonial speech, Christ is asked to testify to earlier speech acts he performed when he preached in the temple. As discussed further in the final chapter of this book, witnessing was multi-­temporal because the speaker testified in the present to actions of the past that were themselves refigured in the present. In this case, Christ testifies to earlier speech, and his words are thus twice mediated by speakers and hearers. Recalling Moran’s formulation of testimony as a “specifically linguistic” act that relies on the listener’s response to the speaker’s believability, the play depicts testimony as shaped by both speaker and audience. In this play, Christ takes advantage of the mediation of testimony, using its repetitive nature to enable agency. When the canon lawyer Caiaphas commands Christ to speak: “Yf þou be Criste, Goddis sonne, telle till vs two” (292), Christ reflects Caiaphas’s language back to him, reshaping and reframing the meaning of his words: “Sir, þou says it þiselffe, and sothly I saye / þat I schall go to my fadir þat I come froo” (293). In these brief lines, Christ appropriates the language of his accuser and demonstrates that, as Judith Butler has argued, iteration can be a form of agency in which a repetition is also a reformulation, as testimony is mediated by the new speaker’s intentions. Commenting on an example of public testimony, Butler argues that the citation of others’ words by the witness “produces [a] possibility for agency and expropriation at the same time.”45 On the other hand, Christ’s assertion that he speaks truly (or “sothly”) is reminiscent of Moran’s assertion that testimony poses a problem of belief in which the hearer must trust the speaker. Perhaps recognizing that Caiaphas does not believe him, Christ takes another approach. When Christ says, “þou says it þiselffe,” He implies that Caiaphas’s corroboration of the claim confirms that the truth of the utterance does not arise from the intentions of one person. This logic resembles that of the requirement for multiple witnesses in the medieval courts and points to the tendency to take the agreement of multiple witnesses as



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proof of their truthfulness. Although the audience would obviously recognize the truthfulness of any testimony spoken by Christ, the depiction of the York Christ nonetheless shows the potential for legal witnessing to enable agency and thus provide the possibility for incremental change. Recognizing His speech as testimony that might be shaped by individual intention, the canon lawyers repeatedly accuse Christ of the crime of defamation, which would have been actionable in the ecclesiastical courts. After identifying Christ as a witness, Annas says: “He sclaunderes þe Godhed and greues vs all” (302), while Caiaphas says, “Thy fadir haste þou fowly defamed” (297). Describing that earlier moment when Christ was in the temple, Caiaphas asserts He “defamys fowly þe Godhed, / And callis hymselffe God sone of hevene” (50–51). By using the term “defamys,” the canon lawyers employ the technical legal term for that linguistic crime, in which the act of speaking is itself the criminal offense. As we have seen, defamation was used in the church courts to protect against false witnessing, so it is ironic that this accusation is leveled against Christ. In these phrases, the canon lawyers recognize testimony as affecting—and potentially harming—not only the speaker but also the community (“vs all”) and the family (“thy fadir”). Although casting the lawyers as witnesses does not correlate to historical practice, Christ’s response calls attention to the close relationship between witnessing and defamation that did exist in the ecclesiastical courts: “Sir, if my wordis be wrange, or worse þan þou wolde, / A wronge witnesse I wotte nowe ar ȝe” (328–29). Christ reverses the logic by which a witness’s character determines how his words will be received, suggesting instead that the words define the person. Christ counters with his own accusation and requests additional witnesses to corroborate His testimony about his earlier speech: “Go spere thame þat herde of my spekyng” (323). This phrase suggests that members of the audience of the legal court or of the York play were not just potential victims of injurious speech; they also helped construct its meaning. As C. A. J. Coady reminds us, “a full understanding of testimony would be incomplete without some explication of the characteristic part played by the hearer.”46 This play also features an analysis of Christ’s intentions, an essential element of defamation. Caiaphas says: “Oure lawe he brekis with all his myght, / þat is moste his desire” (43–44). In this phrase, the singularity of the possessive pronoun associated with Christ’s “myght” and “desire” are contrasted with the plural and collective pronoun “oure,” which makes the law the emblem of “oure” collectivity. All of these references to the legal crime of defamation recognize testimonial speech as an action that potentially is materially harmful to the community and link the audience of the plays to that community.

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In their conversation about the need to find witnesses to testify against Christ, in “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement,” Caiaphas, Annas, and Pilate refer not just to the communal nature of the audience but also to testimonial speech’s own potentially collective nature. Although the secular ruler Pilate directs the action in this play, there is no hint of the jury procedures specific to the common law courts or to the royal courts. Instead, the canon lawyers advise him, suggesting a blending of canon law and common law concepts and legal professionals in the play. Annas says, “Witness of þis wanes may be wonne” (106), while Caiaphas offers to summon up “a rable of renkes full right / Of perte men in prese, fro this place ar I pas, / þat will witnesse, I warande, þe wordis of þis wight” (108–10). In the phrase “rable of renkes,” Caiaphas alludes to the identification of witnesses with the neighborhood. This image of spatialized collectivity is amplified in the second portion of the quotation, with the association of the “rable” with “place” and the visual image of “men in prese,” a crowd compressed in a small space. Witnessing is constructed as a collective speech act: “Togithere / þer tales for trewe can they telle” (116–17). This corresponds both to the requirement for multiple corroborating witnesses and to the potential in medieval canon law for witnessing to be a collective act of testimony to what is commonly known, rather than a report of an individual’s firsthand experience. When the multiple referents of the pronoun “they” above are specified by Caiaphas, they resemble the lists of names in the medieval court records, as required by Lateran IV’s efforts at transparency for the accused, which recognize the ways that a witness’s identity was a crucial element of testimony. Caiaphas’s list of names—“Simon, ȝarus, and Judas, / Datan and Gamaliell, / Naphtalim, Leui and Lucas, / And Amys”—imply that personal identity can verify the truth of testimonial speech.47 Pilate insinuates that the witnesses are paid (“þer witnesse I warande þat to witness ȝe wage” [121]), but Caiaphas asserts that they speak truthfully: “þai are trist men and true þat we telle ȝou” (125), alluding to the assessment of the witnesses’ character in court. This phrase validates the testimony of the named speakers, making the canon lawyers implicitly part of an allegedly growing crowd of witnesses against Christ. Similarly, later in the play when Annas asserts, “Alle creatures þe accuses” (266) and invites Christ, “Deffende now thy fame” (267), he casts himself and Caiaphas not only in the role of lawyers but also in the role of the two witnesses who could testify in the ecclesiastical courts by public voice, speaking to a person’s reputation. In this way, the play enlists the medieval understanding of testimonial speech as validated both by a plurality of witnesses and by their specific names and identities.



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Reflecting one way the ecclesiastical courts attempted to assess the veracity of testimony by analyzing the identity of the witness, in “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas” Annas describes what is commonly known about Christ’s parents: I haue goode knowlache of þat knafe: Marie me menys his modir highte, And Joseph his fadir, as God me safe, Was kidde and knowen wele for a wright. (52–55) This passage employs the term “knowlache,” a term that resembles “wit,” which also means knowledge and is etymologically linked to “witness.” In this case, knowledge of Christ’s character is assessed through His parents’ names and His father’s job. As in legal procedure for both witnesses and jurors, the veracity of Christ’s testimony is determined not only by an analysis of His words but also through consideration of his reputation and identity and those of witnesses against him. Although Christ’s speech is identified as testimonial, He speaks infrequently in the trial plays, and much of the dialogue is directed to attempting to get Him to talk. Christ does not speak at all in “Christ Before Herod” despite repeated threats and direct commands from soldiers to do so. This dialogue continually draws audience attention to His silence. For example, one soldier demands: “Saie me nowe somwhat, þou saunterell, with sorowe. / Why standis þou as stille as a stone here? / Spare not, but speak in þis place here” (323–25). In this passage, the terms “saie” and “speak” reiterate the importance of speech, while the paired references to Christ’s silence and stillness remind us of the embodied nature of speech. Christ receives a more politely worded invitation from the king, in the form of a question posed in French: “Ne plesew et a parle remoy?” (146). The French language signals both the king’s elite status and the ways language marks the speaker’s authority. In “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement,” a soldier draws attention to the embodied nature of speech. He comments: “His lipps, ser, wer lame; . . . no speche walde he spell, / Bot domme as a dore gon he dwell” (62–64). Linking disability to silence, this passage implies that the capacity for speech is what distinguishes human bodies from objects, and testimony from evidence. The dialogue highlights Christ’s relative silence in the plays, although the potential power and importance of Christ’s words to those who persecute Him is evident in the escalating threats of violence if He fails to tell His “tayle,” Christ’s silence and refusal to testify could represent the common law ploy of

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rendering the court powerless by refusing to plead, but more symbolically it also shows the failures of the authorities who seek to control Him and distances His identity as a true witness from corrupt legal procedures. Although it might seem odd for the plays to present an ideal witness as reluctant to speak, parsing one’s words was a virtue in conduct books popular with urban elites such as those who performed and watched the plays on the streets of York. These conduct books depicted reluctance to bear witness as admirable and as a particular instance of a broader imperative to regulate one’s speech and other elements of one’s body and behavior. Despite repeated threats, Christ follows the advice articulated in “How the Wise Man Tauȝt His Son” to bear witness only when necessary: Neiþer fals witness þou noon bere On no mannys matere. . . . Þou were betere be deef & dombe Þan falseli to go upon a qweste.48 The term “qweste” refers to a trial (or “inquest”) and thus specifically frames “witness” in legal terms, while the reference to other men’s “matere” invokes the neighborly and social element of legal witnessing. In contrast to the York soldier who calls Christ “lame” or the one who compares Him to a “stone,” in this passage being deaf and dumb is a virtue (“beter”). In advising the son to remain deaf and dumb rather than bear false witness, the Wise Man connects testimony to a broader discourse on the regulation of speech. This connection is clear from the fact that the above warning against false witnessing is preceded in the text by a broader exhortation to watch one’s words: . . . where þat euere þou go, Be not to tale-­wijs bi no wey, þin owne tunge may be þi foo; þerfore be waar what þou doist say, Where, & to whom.49 In mentioning that one’s own tongue might be “thy foo,” the passage presents an image of a self-­alienated speaker whose body, rather than will, controls his words and who is in the public eye—and ear. Inverting the logic of witness law, which encourages the court to judge verbal testimony by assessing the speaker, but echoing the logic of the York Christ in the trial plays, this poem warns that



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the speaker will be judged by his words. The pairing of the second “where” with “to whom” evokes both the formula for presenting testimony and the mixing of spatial and social definitions of the neighbor that are associated with witnessing. Through the repetition of the term “where” and the phrase “where þat euere þou go,” this passage connects speech to the peripatetic and public nature of the urban citizenship. In this view of the world, one’s speech can be the subject of another’s testimony, and these roles are easily reversed. Not only Christ’s silence but also His words in the few times He speaks echo these instructions in conduct books and construct linguistic self-­restraint as a civic virtue. In “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement,” Christ says: Euery man has a mouthe þat made is on molde, In wele and in woo to welde at his will; If he gouerne it gudly like as God wolde, For his spirituale speche hym [thar] not to spill. And what gome so gouerne it ill, Full vnhendly and will sall he happe. (300–305) As Christina Fitzgerald has argued of this passage, “such words could have come directly from a conduct poem such as ‘Wise Man,’ particularly in its references to good and ill self-­governance.”50 In the reference to “mouthe,” Christ reminds us of the embodied nature of speech, giving power to the speaker to use his mouth, or shape words, “at his will.” The opening line of this passage is addressed to “euery man” and could be played to the urban audience on the streets of York, allowing urban audience members to identify with Him. Christ is often directly enlisted in conduct books as a model and teacher of courtesy. For example, The Babee’s Book ends a long series of instructions on manners—including admonitions against “Iangelyn” so that “yee shalle a name deserve / Off gentylnesse and of goode governauce”—by praying that “mygtefulle god, that suffred peynes smerte, / In curtesye he make yow so expert.”51 In this text, Christ’s lessons on linguistic self-­restraint are part of a broader agenda of teaching “curtesye” and “gentylnesse.” The York Christ practices the linguistic restraint He advocates. The only threat posed to those who fail to follow these instructions is a threat to peoples’ own spiritual health posed by their own actions. Christ does not boast of His ability to rule over others but advises all men to “governe” (a term used twice in three lines) their own mouths and themselves, invoking the lessons of bodily self-­regulation taught in conduct books.52 The universalizing term “euery” makes all men equal in their ownership of a mouth and, by extension, in

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their access to speech. In this way, the plays link witnessing to a broader social politics of promoting citizenship. Creating a foil for this civic linguistic regulation modeled by Christ, each of the York trial plays begins with a ruler—or canon lawyer in the case of “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas”—who demonstrates excesses of speech that are tied to tyranny and false justice. The first of the trial plays, “The Conspiracy,” begins with a bombastic speech by Pilate that grounds his legal authority in a hierarchical model of governance and establishes a political context for the play: Vndir þe ryallest roye of rente and renowne, Now am I regent of rewle þis region in reste, Obeye vnto bidding bu[s] busshoppis me bowne, And bolde men þat in batayll makis brestis to breste. To me betaught is þe tent þis towre-­begon towne, For traytoures tyte will I taynte, þe trewþe for to triste. (1–6) Unlike Christ, who does not create a hierarchical distinction between Himself and those He addresses, Pilate asserts emphatically that both the bishops and the soldiers must “obeye” his “bidding,” aligning himself with violent authoritarian military might. The especially aggressive alliteration in this passage links Pilate’s language to his authoritative assertions. Although Pilate says that the town is entrusted to his care (“to me betaught”), the phrase “towre-­begon” paints an image of a city resisting military invasion by just the sort of “bolde men” who are said to obey Pilate in the previous line and establishes his rulership as a threat to the city and its values. In the redundant alliterative phrase “ryallest roye,” Pilate identifies himself as a “rent of rewle,” or deputy ruler in the region. In the Bible, Pilate was governor or prefect of the Roman province of Judea, but this phrasing invokes the spatial paradigm of the jurisdiction of the king’s sheriffs or justices of the peace over the “region” or shire.53 As discussed in the previous chapter, York’s charter stipulated that the city had independent legal jurisdiction within its city walls comparable to that of the king’s sheriffs. York’s walls were potentially invoked for the audience by the turreted city walls mentioned in the dialogue, and by the visibility of York’s walls from many of the pageant stations located around the city. In this opening passage, Pilate immediately lays claim to a more significant centralized legal power than York’s charter allowed. Deploying two legal terms in the next line, Pilate says: “For traytoures tyte taynt will I.” According to the Middle English Dictionary, the term “taynte” has a legal meaning: to “bring to justice, arraign; convict,” while “traytoures” is a legal term that refers



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to “treason against the king, realm or people.”54 This line suggests that Pilate will use the law as an oppressive instrument of royal authority. The term “for” (6) implies these traitors will be found within the town walls mentioned in the previous line and depicts the townspeople as subject to a legal tyranny beyond that suffered by medieval York, except during the Scrope’s rebellion when the king revoked the city’s charter.55 This passage establishes Pilate’s authority and his violently assertive language as a threat to the integrity of the town and its values, which are exemplified by true witnessing. Pilate’s legal authority is located in his person, rather than in larger institutional structures or procedures. In the passage above, Pilate uses multiple first-­ person pronouns (“I rente,” “I taynte,” and “to me”). He later employs a possessive pronoun to assert that “þe lawe lyes in my lotte” (68), making the personal nature of his claim to legal authority overt. This paradigm of legal power grounded in the ruler is often associated with kings in mirrors for princes, such as the Secretum Secretorum, which asserts monarchical control over the law, as in the assertion: “Law is the reame that the kyng gouerneth.”56 Like the charter, this phrase depicts the law spatially, linking it with territorial jurisdiction. Pilate makes a similar claim to legal authority in the bombastic opening speech of another trial play, “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement.” He commands: “Lere at my lawe— / As a duke I many dampne ȝou and drawe” (4–5). As in the opening speech of the “Conspiracy,” Pilate deploys a personal pronoun (“my”) to modify “lawe” and focuses on the law’s potential to enact violent punishment rather than to ensure justice. The phrase “I dampe ȝou” puts Pilate in the role of a judge whose condemnation of the accused accomplishes what it signifies, recalling one of Austin’s defining ­examples of the “performative utterance.”57 Although the reference to his role as duke acknowledges a social context for the performativity of his utterances, and the power of his words is grounded in the broad institutional authority of the law, by deploying the terms “my lawe” and the first-­person “I . . . dampne,” Pilate asserts that this performativity stems from his personal power and intention. Here the play is closer to the abstract discussions of the relationship between kings and justice found in mirrors for princes than to the practices of the royal courts, which would have been presided over by judges. Both opening speeches depict legal language as a potentially oppressive instrument of power grounded in the person of the king or ruler, as opposed to the legal rights granted by civic charters and to the ethical testimonial speech of Christ.58 In “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgement,” Pilate misuses his knowledge of the law. He also makes the right to speak an expression of legal authority grounded in his person, while silencing those around him. He commands: “Loke

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to your lord here, and lere at my lawe” (4), thereby linking his knowledge of the law, and the ability to teach others, to his identity as a “lord.” By contrast to Christ, whose pedagogy works by encouraging His audience to identify with Him, in this opening speech Pilate literally commands an audience, instructing his listeners to look at him and be silent: “Talkes not, nor trete not of tales” (22). He also tells them not to move: “Do stynte of ȝoure stalkyng” (14), possibly alluding to peripatetic tendencies cultivated by staging the plays on the city streets. Pilate spices his commands with threats of violence if audience members respond with levity instead of solemnity: “For þat gome þat gyrnes or gales, / I myself sall hy[m] hurte full sore” (23–24). Unlike Christ’s speech, which refers to mouths as a way to promote equality between Himself and the members of His audience, in Pilate’s speech the body is potentially subject to a violence that is a physical expression of his power over others. Pilate’s verbal authority is grounded both in legal knowledge and in the threat of violence, making his words a counterexample of ideal testimonial speech. Similarly, in “Christ Before Herod,” Herod commands an audience by claiming knowledge of the law, while threatening violent reprisal by his own hand to those who fail to obey him. He says: “ȝe that luffis youre liffis, listen to me / As a lorde þat is lerned to lede you be lawe” (21–22), linking his knowledge of the law both to his status as “lord” and to his authoritarian threat of violence. His threats include graphic images of the injured body: “þis brande þat is bright schall breste in youre brayne . . . with þis blad schal ye blede. / þus shall I brittyn all youre bones on brede, / ȝae, and lusshe all your lymmys with lasschis” (4, 9–11). Here he threatens to make others’ silent bodies visual signs of his power. In contrast to Christ’s speech in which He imagines all mouths capable of measured speech like His own, here the ability to speak is enabled only by rulership, and others are relegated to silence. Like the other trial plays, this play opens with Herod’s demand for the audience’s silence: “Pes, ye brothellis and browlys in þis broydnesse inbrased” (1). Herod casts the members of the audience in the role of silent subjects and draws attention to the public nature of speech. In both plays, a broadly construed legal authority ostensibly justifies an extensive speech that disenfranchises others from speaking and uses the threat of violence to establish a hierarchy of speaker over audience. The similarity between Pilate and Herod encourages us to see them not only as individual characters but also as broader representations of kingship. Members of the audience are cast in the role of passive subjects rather than of active citizens whose testimonial speech could be valued in a court of law. A similar opening speech in “Christ Before Caiaphas and Anna” implicates clerical authority in this pattern of tyrannical speech, establishing a contrast



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between clerical discourse and the ideals of witnessing and citizenship, and framing its depiction of witnessing in the same terms as in the courts supervised by Pilate and Herod in the other plays. Like the other trial plays, this one opens with the canon lawyer Caiaphas asserting superior legal knowledge to justify silencing the audience: Pees, bewshers, I bid no jangelng ȝe make . . . For I am a lorde lerned lelly in youre lay. By connyng of clergy and casting of witte Full wisely my wordis I welde at my will, So semely in seete me semys for to sitte, And þe lawe for to lerne you, and lede it by skill. (1–8) Like Herod, by alluding first to his learning “in youre lay,” or law, and then to his knowledge (“witte,” which is a root of “witness”), Caiaphas implies that the wisdom of his words emerges from his legal authority and justifies his command that others be silent. As in the other plays, Caiaphas’s claim to legal authority is grounded in his invocation of hierarchical authority: “I haue þe renke and þe rewle of all þe ryal[té] . . . Wherefore take tente to my tales, and lowt[e] me” (18, 22). Like Pilate in the earlier play, Caiaphas makes his status the basis for his power to speak and silence others and links his misuse of the law to tyranny. In this way, both clerical and royal legal authority are depicted as threats to proper witnessing and good citizenship. The plays deploy the villains Pilate, Herod, Annas, and Caiaphas as loquacious counterexamples of civic virtue and proper speech, using similar terms for both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The term “jangling” in Caiaphas’s speech above has the derogatory sense of “prating” or “chatter” and is often warned against in conduct books of the period.59 For example, the “Little Report of How Young People Should Behave” instructs: “Don’t jangle,” and the “ABC of Aristotle” advises: “Don’t jangle too much.”60 The Babees Book provides a more extensive explanation of the benefits of avoiding jangling: “From Iangelyng your tunge al-­wey conserve, / For so ywys yee shalle a name deserve / Off gentlyness and goode governaunce / And in virtue al-­wey youre silf avaunce.”61 Proper regulation of speech is a personal “virtue” tied to “name,” or public reputation, which is a prerequisite for serving as a witness.62 This and other conduct books imagine a public audience for speech and warn of the social implications of public speaking. These texts make the moderation of language essential to an

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individual self-­governance that is both symptom and cause of social status. Like the speeches of rulers in other trial plays, Caiaphas’s speech is long compared to the rest of the dialogue in the play, suggesting that he, like Pilate and Herod, cannot practice the verbal restraint he commands of others. They all model an undesirable loquaciousness linked to failures of governance that would disqualify them from acting as witnesses in contemporary legal courts. “Christ Before Pilate I” invites a consideration of testimonial and other kinds of speech in a domestic context, enlisting a familiar paradigm of the household as a microcosm of the public sphere, and indicating the broad relevance of witnessing to a range of people in the audience. The play begins in the bedroom, where Pilate ends a long opening speech by claiming his legal authority “to justifie and juge all þe Jewes” (24); in the next line, Pilate greets his wife: “A, luffe, here lady? No lesse? / Lo, sirs, my worthely wife, þat sche is, / So semely” (25– 27). Here the play enacts a common feature of conduct books, in which marriage is a matter of governance that engages the vocabulary and problems of the public sphere on a smaller scale. In a well-­known example, the late fourteenth-­ century Menagier de Paris instructs wives: “Obey your sovereigns and be good subjects to them.”63 York’s Procula repeatedly uses the terms “sovereign” (184) and “lord” (43, 45, 49, 68, 91, 98, 102, 178) to refer to her husband, emphasizing the analogy between the rule of household and of realm. Procula is the immediate audience for her husband’s initial rhetorical display of sovereignty. She blends her confirmation of her husband’s public authority (“was nevir juge in þis Jurie of so jocounde generacion” [29]) with a concern with her complexion and her “richesse of robis” (42), echoing the sartorial concerns of conduct manuals and linking hierarchical rulership with excesses of finery as well as speech. In locating Pilate’s claim to enact justice in the context of quotidian conduct, the play suggests that justice is not exclusively for monarchs but is also for the bourgeois consumers of conduct books and, more broadly, for the urban audience of the drama. This scene dramatizes the idea that justice is embodied in the actions of everyday life, rather than in abstract principles or in the exclusive prerogatives of kingship. Although the interactions between Pilate and Procula occur in the private space of their bedroom, the view of witnessing as a quotidian practice that is expressed in their dialogue corresponds to what Marjorie McIntosh and Shannon McSheffrey have identified as a growth in the power and jurisdiction of local church courts in the period, and to a preponderance of defamation suits, the legal recourse for false witnessing. This play presents legal witnessing as relevant on the local scale of the individual household, while also crucial to the broader politics of life in the medieval city of York.



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The analogy between wife and subject, familiar from conduct books, is elaborated in the play by comparisons between Procula and the Beadle, who is depicted as an ideal citizen and witness. Indeed, the script invites a split stage, with the space of Pilate’s court juxtaposed with Procula’s bedroom. The dialogue suggests a porous movement and an analogy between the two spaces, showing the law relevant to both.64 A series of parallels in the dialogue also establishes this comparison between Procula and the Beadle.65 Echoing Procula’s first speech, the Beadle hails Pilate as “my liberall lorde, o leder of lawis” (55) and refers to him as “my souerayne . . . gentill juger and justice of Jewes” (57, 59). Early in the play, Pilate says that Procula is “full buxhome and baiyne” in bed (52), while later Soldier I says, “All bedilis to [Pilate’s] biding schulde be boxsome and bayne” (317). Similarly, the play’s dual portrait of Procula and the Beadle shows them acting as counselors, a role given to wives in the Menagier, which advises, “Be wise when your husband acts foolishly . . . and dissuade him gently and sensibly from his follies.”66 At one point the play references this analogy between wife and counselor, when Pilate responds to his wife’s suggestion that he start drinking by saying: “I assente to your counsaille so comely and cle[r]e” (100). These parallels show the reach of law into the domestic sphere and illustrate the ways in which the household is a model for public politics and the practice of law.67 Ultimately, by showing the virtues of the Beadle’s acts of witnessing, the play suggests that justice is the province of the subject rather than the king, laying the groundwork for an association of witnessing with the urban citizen. The linguistic self-­restraint that Pilate, Herod, and the canon lawyers lack in the York trial plays is required not only for witnesses, subjects, and citizens; it is also specifically recommended for kings in the popular genre of mirrors for princes, which commonly advised rulers to moderate their speech. For example, the Secret Secretorum asserts: “Full faire and honourable it is a kynge to absteyne hym fro moche speche, but yf need asketh it.”68 Considering delivery as well as the words themselves, voice is counted among the qualities important for good rulership: “Whos voice is meene betwix grete and smale, his is wise, redy, trew and just.”69 By alluding to a middle range between “grete” and “smale,” this passage echoes the moderation in the production of speech itself. Speech is seen as an expression of wisdom, as in the claim that Caiaphas makes for himself—“fulr wisely my words I welde at my wille”—in the passage above. Wisdom is etymologically tied to witnessing, while “trew” is a common preoccupation in discussions of testimony. This implies that the meaning of testimonial speech lies in the voice that utters them as well as in the words themselves. Despite the apparent specificity of the address to rulers, mirrors for princes were widely read and

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their advice easily adapted for a broader audience. This is evident, among other places, in Caxton’s conduct book, The Book of Curtesye, one of the first printed texts in England. This text was addressed both to aristocrats (“grete lords gentilemand”) and to newly powerful urban elites (“marchauntes”), and recommends Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes to its own readers.70 This supports a view of the York Pilate and Herod not only as images of rulers but also as counterexamples of good witnesses and citizens. More specific evidence for the relevance of mirrors for princes to the civic legal culture of York can be found in the inclusion of Bruno Latini’s mirror for princes, Li Livres du Tresor, by the London chamberlain Andrew Horn in his Liber Custumarum. This compilation from the 1320s of guild ordinances, charters, and trade regulations closely resembles the York Memorandum Books.71 The comparable text, York’s Liber Albus, does not survive, but some of York’s records were copied directly from London texts, suggesting a close link between York and London civic records.72 In the Liber Custumarum, Horn adapts the terminology to fit urban civic government. In the London Tresor, public speech is listed among the twelve qualities of a good ruler, to be considered in the election of a governor or mayor: “It is important for a governor to speak better than anyone else because everyone considers the person wise who speaks wisely.”73 Like conduct books, this passage identifies speech as a crucial means of defining the speaker’s place in the social hierarchy and gives the audience power to judge the speaker. A subsequent section instructs the mayor on how to conduct himself while in office: “But strictly you ought to guard yourself from talking too much. For he who talks well and little is held for a wise man; and much talking is never without fault.”74 The same passage advises him to show “a serious countenance, more especially when he is sitting to hear pleas.”75 This passage links linguistic self-­control to the proper process of law, while reminding the mayor of the audience’s reception of this speech and of the role of his facial expression in generating that response. The Liber Custumarum provides evidence that the advice to rulers in mirrors for princes was adapted for a civic audience like that watching the York Plays and invites us to judge Pilate, Herod, and the two canon lawyers, Caiaphas and Annas, for their mutually constituting failures of speech and governance. This adaptation of the mirror for princes in the London compilation suggests that we should understand the depiction of witnessing in the York plays as political performance in which a person’s skill at governance can be assessed by an analysis of his speech. The York Beadle’s role in “Christ Before Pilate I: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife” is similar to that of the historical figure Andrew Horn who collected civic and legal documents for the London guildhall. Pilate himself refers to the Beadle



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as the keeper of laws: “He knawis all oure custome” (71).76 Although these words are spoken in a conversation with his wife in their bedchamber, the term “custome” was used by the mayor and alderman of London in their claim on behalf of the citizens of London, to the consternation of royal justices, that local traditions of the city be practiced in the London courts of Eyre in 1321, providing a context for the play’s depiction of “oure custome” as local legal tradition. The play’s embrace of local legality is also evident in the fact that a positive image of testimonial speech is provided by the Beadle, not the rulers or canon lawyers. Like Christ, later in the play, the Beadle acts an idealized witness, publicly reporting his firsthand experience of encountering Christ in Jerusalem: And þen þis semely on an ass was sette, And many men myldely hym mette; Als a god in þat grounde þai hym grette, Wele semand hym in waye, with worschippe lele. “Osanna,” þei sange, “þe sone of Dauid.” (339–43) The Beadle testifies to Christ’s public reputation based on the evidence of what “many men” are singing about Him. He continues: Sir, constrew it we may be langage of þis lande, as I leue, It is als moche to me for to meue— Youre prelatis in þis place can it preue— Als, “oure sauiour and souerayne, þou saue vs we praye.” (348–51) The Beadle testifies on behalf of a collective “we” to what constitutes the “langage of þis lande.” This phrase depicts testimony as a vocal performance, in which the voices themselves unite as one in song generated from the land itself. The Beadle enlists clerical authority to validate this collective act of bearing witness locally (“in þis place”), rather than invoking a larger-­scale idea of nationhood. His words remind us of the doubleness of witnessing, in which an earlier act of hearing and seeing is later reported in an act of embodied speech. The ideals of law are upheld in the play not by canon lawyers, judges, or rulers but by the B ­ eadle in his role as keeper of civic law and as public witness to Christ. This close relationship between civic authority and testimony, evident in the plays and the York Memorandum Books, is also demonstrated in guild regulations. The Acts of the Mercer’s Court of London, for example, included an ordinance on perjury, which levied fines and a recommendation to the major

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and alderman that the person be expelled from liberties of the city of London. The ordinance prohibits members from delivering false bills to customers: “If any suche parson so delyueryne his bill & not true, and making untrue othe” and if this is proven by the wardens, the person will be fined an amount based on previous offenses; on the “iij” time “he shall than be dismissed & put owte of the felishipp of the Mercery. And ouer that the Wardens & felyshipp for to shewe the said mater of periury unto the Mayre & aldermen and them to requyre the said periured parson to be dismyssed of the liberties & Franches of the Citie of London for euer &c.”77 By mentioning liberties and franchises, the text refers to the legal rights granted to citizens within the city boundaries by civic charters. Although the ordinance carefully distinguishes between the jurisdiction of the guilds and that of the city courts, it enlists both in the regulation of its members’ speech, defining perjury as antithetical both to guild membership and to civic status.78 We have seen that the York trial plays promote witnessing as an expression of civic virtue. In the plays, witnessing is linked to linguistic moderation and self-­ government, and to shared speech and community values. These values are modeled by Christ and by the Beadle, who is a figure for local urban law. By contrast, Pilate and Herod’s lack of linguistic self-­regulation is grounded in authoritarianism and personal entitlement, which parodies the idea of monarchical legal prerogative. Their speech is the opposite of the kind promoted in contemporary mirrors for princes and conduct books. Furthermore, the trial plays depict the theatrical aspects of testimonial and other speech as crucial to its meaning, identifying both the role of the audience and the identity and motives of the speaker as essential.

Public Speech and Theater Theater has in common with the trial an institutionalized set of practices that contribute to the performative qualities of its language. In contrast to poststructuralists who emphasize scriptocentricism, Stanton B. Garner argues that speech is essential to drama. He asserts: “Dramatic language draws upon modes of embodiment inseparable from language itself.”79 This paradigm of dramatic language is particularly apt for medieval civic drama, since it is possible that, unlike modern drama, which tends to move from script to performance, medieval dramatic scripts recorded performances. The York manuscript was likely to have been compiled from small booklets or prompt copies held by individual guilds rather than copied from an earlier complete record.80 The manuscript of



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the “Ordo Paginarum,” which lists the pageants and their order, shows evidence of alterations reflecting changes to the arrangements of the pageants in performance over time; it thus provides an example of a written record of the drama that was altered to reflect performance, rather than the other way around.81 A dynamic relationship between text and performance is also suggested by differences between the “Ordo Paginarum” written in 1415 by Roger Burton, Common Clerk of the city of York, included in the York Memorandum Book, and the form taken by the plays in the extant manuscript (datable to 1463–77).82 Furthermore, the temporal gap between the earliest documented evidence for the existence of a Corpus Christi play in York, which appeared in 1377, and the extant manuscript leaves open the question of the relationship between any lost manuscript and performances. It is thus possible to see the manuscript of the York Plays as a record of embodied speech acts, much as trial records document embodied acts of witnessing, or at least to see a movement back and forth between page and stage. The “Ordo” includes only a very brief account of each pageant, typically describing only the characters and the crucial action. For example, the Glovers/Gaunters­pageant is listed as “Abel and Cain offering sacrifices,” while another pageant is concisely described as “Jesus harrowing hell, twelve good and six evil spirits.”83 In most instances, the crucial action is an act of speaking. For example, the Cardmakers pageant is listed as “God forbidding Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of life,” the Shipwrights pageant as “God warning Noah to make an ark from smoothed boards.”84 The entry for the pageant now known as “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas” reads: “Bowyers, Fletchers Jesus, Annas, Caiaphas, two counselors, and four Jews accusing Jesus.” In this case and several others, the sole action described is a legal speech act, which suggests that speaking—in this case “accusing”—was seen as action. With its lists of sponsoring guildsmen and the characters played, the “Ordo” invites us to consider dramatic speech in phenomenological terms. We have seen that medieval court records listed the given names of individual witnesses, since personal identity was crucial to medieval witnessing. The “Ordo” shows that profession was also essential to defining the speech acts that constituted the main actions for “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas.” As the specification of the sponsoring guildsmen for each pageant in the “Ordo”’s highly abbreviated entries indicate, and as so many medieval drama scholars have argued, the pageants were understood by contemporaries as a performance of the collective identity and authority of the sponsoring guild.85 In the brief entries quoted above, the guilds are identified as a group of people rather than by a collective

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noun (the “Fletchers,” not the “Fletcher’s guild”), inviting us to connect the speech acts of the characters in the play to their sponsors. The “Ordo”’s description of the pageants reflects the link between speech and social status, as in witnessing. Dramatic speech was seen as an expression of guild prerogative, just as good manners are depicted in conduct books as demonstrating social status. In this text, dramatic speech expresses the social status of the sponsoring guild members; conversely, only those with guild status would have been able to perform the plays—including the trial of Christ—on the streets of medieval York. Evidence suggests that there were conventions for playing individual biblical characters, which indicate that characterization was accomplished by the sound of speech and accompanying movement as well as by the words themselves. A well-­known example is in the prologue to Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, a tale thought to allude to religious drama, when the drunken Miller “in Pilate’s voys gan to crie, and swoor, ‘By armes and by blood and bones, I kan a noble tale for the nones.’”86 This suggests a dramatic convention of using a loud ranting voice to portray the character of Pilate.87 Similarly, later in the tale, Absolon “pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye” in order to “shewe his lightnesse and maistrye.” This indicates that physical movement as well as sound would have played a role in dramatic characterization.88 A rubric in a Coventry Play alludes to a convention of bringing voice and movement together in portraying Herod: “Here Erode ragis in the pagond and in the street also.”89 The tradition was still current by the time of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the titular character warns the Player King not to wave his hands too much, continuing: “O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-­pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings . . . it out-­ Herods Herod.”90 This passage suggests that—in addition to wild gestures—sheer volume was common in the delivery of lines by those playing Herod, and that, at least by Shakespeare’s time, the figure of Herod was synonymous with overacting. Discussing the separation of Herod’s first word, “pes,” in York’s “Christ Before Herod” from the metrical pattern that follows, Clare Wright argues that “such a sudden outburst would ensure that the actor would not be consumed by the noise of the city and the other pageants close by, making him prominent within the soundscape and so a central figure within the performance space itself.”91 Indeed, an entry in the House Book dated 1476 confirms that voice was seen as important to the Corpus Christi drama. This text requires that those who would be players first be auditioned to confirm that they are able “in connyng, voice [and] personne” to act to the honor of the city and their crafts.92 The noise associated with Herod would have been especially notable in a sequence of plays



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in which Christ’s silence is so often discussed, and it indicates that voice was integral to characterization in medieval dramatic speech. Theatrical speech—even first-­person speech—is not an expression of the subjectivity of the speaking subject but instead highlights the possibility for the first-­person subject position to be inhabited by multiple speakers.93 As Stanton Garner puts it, in theater “I is always, to some degree, generic, even fictional; there is, to some extent, an ‘impersonality of the personal.’”94 This “impersonality” is especially tangible in theater when an actor stands in for someone else. The actor playing a given role might change sequentially over time, as the play is staged from one time to the next, perhaps from one year to the next on Corpus Christi Day when the plays were performed. This “impersonality of the personal” would have been especially palpable in the York Plays, because multiple actors would be playing a single biblical figure, such as Christ, not only sequentially but also simultaneously on the day of the performance as the various pageants were staged at multiple stations along the procession route in the streets of medieval York. In these respects, the multiple actors inhabiting a single speaking position both over time or simultaneously resemble those testifying collectively to the public reputation of the accused in the medieval courts. If theater amplifies the impersonal element of the speaking subject, it also highlights the potential of language to create its own reality. As Garner explains, “dramatic language” has “a kind of representational autonomy, a rival mode of actuality” that can compete with the visual present.95 For example, the audience might be invited to imagine a material feature that is not physically present in the stage sets or props used for the performance. Erika Fischer-­Lichte elaborates on this aspect of language in theater: “If the actor’s words refer to nonexistent objects as if these nevertheless existed, then they do in fact exist for the audience. . . . Whatever can be perceived by the sense according to the actor’s words can thus be perceived by the audience.”96 This ability of theatrical language to conjure worlds is a quintessential example of a general principle of linguistic representation. As Umberto Eco observes, that fact that sign-­vehicles always “convey a content, even when there is no verifiable referent, is what makes it possible to lie.”97 Elsewhere he elaborates on the close relationship between truth and falsity in speech acts: “If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely, it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot be used ‘to tell’ at all.”98 Eco’s comments invite us to see false witnessing as participating in and problematizing a broader principle of spoken language. It is arguably this aspect of speech that is at the heart of medieval concerns about witnessing. It is not possible to distinguish truth from falsehood in speech

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without a divine miracle, because truth—or falsehood—does not adhere in the words themselves; the words have the potential to be used to either effect. The theatricality of false witnessing can potentially be “world creating” for its audience, whereby the witness’s words establish an “alternate mode of actuality” for listeners in the moment that may or may not correspond to the reality of the accused’s prior actions. We have seen above that testimony purports to be truly independent of speaker and situation, and yet, paradoxically, testimony is also an embodied speech act, necessarily voiced by a speaker at a specific time and place, and, in turn, defined by the witness’s relationship to the audience. The theatrical aspect of testimony is precisely what distinguishes it from evidence. Revising Austin’s claim that performative speech acts are void when performed on stage, W. B. Worthen argues for an intimate connection between theater and speech acts. Although Eve Sedgwick and Andrew Parker have not considered their work on performance relevant to the theater, Worthen nonetheless builds on their scholarship to argue that stage performances “operate citationally, less as an uttering or iterating of a text than as an iterating of the conventions of performance,” for example, through gesture, action, and speech, “which accumulate ‘the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practices.’”99 This analysis supports the case for the relevance of both speech act and performance theory to theater. Medieval theater and witnessing can be seen in similar terms. Medieval theater “misappropriate[es] the force of speech from . . . prior contexts” to tell biblical stories in a way that performs the virtues of civic speech and promotes the values of medieval York. As we have seen, conduct books located witnessing in a broader rubric of linguistic conduct, itself seen as a marker of individual morality and as a performance of class status. This approach to linguistic performance is also relevant to the production of the biblical stories by sponsoring guilds. As the “Ordo” and other documents indicate, the plays performed guild status and identity by restaging biblical stories, making the ability to speak in the performance of biblical drama on the streets of York a marker of guild status. When Caiaphas begins “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas” by silencing the audience, “Peace, bewsheres, I bid no jangeling ȝe make” (1), he claims to have the words to wield at his own “will,” but his authority also resides in his citation of the authority and in the conventions of both theater and law. The extent to which audience members might fall silent is the extent to which they recognize the conventions of the theater. Each of the various tyrants that start the trial plays—including Pilate and Herod—address the audience directly, commanding their silence and boasting of their legal authority. Through speech,



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these plays create a parallel between play and court authority. Against the assertions of individual speakers, such as Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, this authority to command an audience is based not in individual words or will but in the conventions of theater. Nonetheless, insofar as the audience might quiet down, the audience members also cast themselves in the role of subjects to the authority of this canon lawyer or these tyrants. By contrast, when Christ speaks later in the play, He recasts the members of the audience in a role similar to His own: as witnesses who speak rarely but are not silent observers, because they can testify later to what they have seen and heard on the streets of York. Although the audience may (or may not) have been quiet while watching the plays on the streets of York, the plays’ emphasis on witnessing as a two-­stage process that includes both seeing and hearing reminds us of the double nature of witnessing in which observation of the goings-­on on the streets of York always carries the potential for becoming the grounds for future testimony. Christ’s speech in the play shows the extent to which any act of public speech could potentially empower the listening audience. By casting audience members in the role of witnesses, Christ gives them access to empowered speech, to potentially performative utterances undergirded by the authority of legal discourse that confirm and produce civic status and identity. The York Plays thus use the discourse of legal testimony and the drama itself in the service of promoting civic values. Although medieval religious drama does not enlist the participation of God as directly as the witness oath, it nonetheless has its own broad claim to being undergirded by divine truth. According to the Middle English Dictionary, one of the meanings of the term “witnessen” is to “affirm the truth of the Christian faith; affirm the teachings of God.” Insofar as the plays stage the Christian story, they engage this broader sense of witnessing along with specifically legal meanings of the term. The York Christ’s direct instructions to the audience to control their mouths and their speech also links the plays themselves—and the audience’s role in witnessing them—to divine authority. In this way, Christ’s authority validates the power of medieval testimonial speech and, in doing so, aligns Christ with citizenship and with regulated speech, while associating rulership with tyranny.

Chapter 3

Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Trial Plays

Meditations on the Passion by Richard Rolle, Nicholas Love, the Pseudo-­ Bonaventura, and others have played a key role in the characterization of medieval affect as devotional and individualistic. For example, Sarah McNamer’s influential book, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Compassion, is centered on “affective meditations on the Passion,” which she characterizes as “a private drama of the heart,” a body of texts that “teach their reader, through iterative affective performance, how to feel.”1 Although recent work has drawn attention to the collective and sometimes public nature of emotion, this model of inward devotion continues to be seen as crucial to understanding medieval drama.2 A representative example of this conventional wisdom is Clifford Davidson’s assertion that the York Plays are “congruent with the intense spirituality that is found in such writings as Nicholas Love’s adaptation of the popular Latin Meditations on the Life of Christ.” For Davidson, the “plays were designed to promote emotional involvement with the events being staged.”3 Davidson cites Love’s insistence on identifying personally with Christ on the cross: “Such identification [must] be felt ‘inwardly’ in one’s thoughts through ‘trewe ymaginacion and inwarde compassion of the peynes and the passion’” of Christ.4 In this way, Davidson and others argue, medieval drama participates in the construction of a subjectivity generated by the individual’s experience of emotion. This chapter proposes that legal theories of witnessing and proof provide an alternative way to consider medieval affect and to understand the affectivity of late medieval religious drama.5 Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed and Sianne Ngai, I argue for a model of “legal affect” poised between the social and the individual. Late medieval religious plays are not, in McNamer’s words, “a private



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drama of the heart,” but a public affective experience.6 As I will demonstrate, the plays employ legal ideas of witnessing to explore the relationship between individual perception and the collective experience of emotion. Medieval practices, such as allowing prosecution by reputation and requiring multiple witnesses, made even a witness’s first-­hand perceptions social. Both canon lawyers and common law theorists understood the somatic elements of testimony to be affected by socially generated emotions such as love and hate. Although many critics argue that the York trial plays portray law and affect in the same terms as sermons and confessional handbooks do, I demonstrate that the plays deviate from those texts and from their immediate sources in omitting envy as a crucial motive for the condemnation of Christ and in embracing a legal discourse of emotion.7 Often seen as the focus of the affective practices of late medieval religious culture, the Passion was also depicted legalistically in late medieval sermons and confessional manuals and was even directly referred to in legal treatises. A representative sermon by Bishop Brunton of Rochester uses the trial of Christ to comment on false judges, identified as “the powerful men of the world today,” arguing that they are swayed by earthly concerns: “It is the same with the Justice of the English as it was with the Justice of the Jews at the time of Christ’s Passion.”8 The Passion is often specifically linked to problems of proof that are frequently characterized as witnessing. The confessional text Jacob’s Well claims that false swearing, including “whanne men seryn fals wytingly, & beryn fals wyttnesse” is “werse þan iewys” when they crucified Christ.9 The legal problems illustrated by the condemnation of Christ are frequently depicted as relevant to the contemporary practice of law. Bracton’s De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae uses the story of the Passion to warn judges to explore the intentions of jurors, who might be swayed by negative emotions to pave the way to false justice.10 Reflecting this legalistic version of the Passion, the York Plays contain an extended sequence of five pageants devoted to the trial of Christ, in contrast to one pageant devoted to the Crucifixion. The York Plays’ depiction of the Passion specifically associates the blending of perception and emotion, and of individual and social elements, with acts of witnessing. Drawing on the discussion of witnessing in late medieval legal treatises, the first part of this chapter argues that theories of proof construct a model of what I call “legal affect.” Although the plays draw on the depiction of false witnessing in confessional manuals, in contrast to those texts, they represent it not as an individual sin but as simultaneously personal and collective. The second portion of this chapter uses the York trials of Christ as a case study, demonstrating that the plays enlist a model of affect based on legal concepts of witnessing and proof.

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The third portion addresses a prominent moment in which Christ’s words from the cross in the “Crucifixio Christi” employ the generic paradigms of the Passion lyric, linking the affective practices of that genre to witnessing. The play makes affective experience central to its own theatricality and shows the close ties between the literary forms of both lyric and drama and the affective practices of witnessing. By casting the audience simultaneously as witnesses to the play and to the trials of Christ, the York Plays construct a performative model of affect that engages both legal and literary traditions. The plays use legal ideas of witnessing to shape an ethics of affect that is, like the drama itself, potentially civic and communal, in contrast to the devotional tradition of “affective piety” more commonly associated by critics with medieval drama. In this way, I argue against the prevailing wisdom that the trials of Christ in medieval drama are primarily a criticism of the corruption of contemporary legal practices.11Although clearly those who condemn Christ show the vulnerabilities of the court system and the ways that false witnessing can quickly lead to false justice, the plays depict witnessing in broad affective terms that both respond to and exceed legal concepts, and embrace witnessing as a potentially ethical practice that can elevate civic values and create urban community.

Witnessing and Legal Affect Jacques Derrida famously claimed that “testimony is always autobiographical: it tells, in the first person, the sharable and unsharable secret of what happened to me, to me, to me alone, the absolute secret of what I was in a position to live, see, hear, touch, sense and feel.”12 In this well-­known passage, Derrida makes witnessing the quintessential example of a subjectivity defined by unique first-­hand sensory experience. Similarly, in another influential account, Giorgio Agamben asserts: “To be a subject and to bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same.”13 Indeed, as Andrea Frisch has argued, the “paradigm of witnessing-­as-­ experiential knowledge” is often tied to “the consolidation of the modern subject.”14 By contrast, medieval legal theory and practice, although focused on the somatic elements, did not construct witnessing as a private discourse of uniqueness or individualism. Instead, witnessing was seen as an affective testimony poised between the collective and the individual, an idea that is demonstrated in the York Plays’ use of legal affect in the construction of civic identity. While accounts of medieval witnessing have tended to describe a teleological progression from ordeal and proof by battle to modern eyewitness testimony,



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in both secular and ecclesiastical courts of late medieval England, more “modern” notions of witnessing as firsthand experience existed at the same time as “traditional” modes of proof that relied on the group rather than the individual and on knowledge of character rather than sensory perception.15 These included compurgation, in which people testified to their faith in the reliability of defendants and prosecution by mala fama, or reputation. These modes of witnessing were designed to establish what Richard Firth Green terms an “ethical truth” based on social consensus, rather than on an individual’s firsthand experience of the facts, suggesting that medieval witnessing was collective and even intersubjective.16 As we saw in the Introduction, by the time that the Fourth Lateran Council officially outlawed the ordeal in 1215 and established witness procedure as the official policy of the ecclesiastical courts, the theory of witnessing was already well established by both canonists and civil-­law theorists.17 According to Charles Donahue Jr., there was relatively little innovation after the twelfth century, when treatises on witnessing proliferated and became sources for later witness theory and court practices in both the secular and the ecclesiastical courts of England. Following Gratian’s Decretum, these texts claimed that vocal testimony was the best form of proof, superior to either written documents or bodily proof in ordeal or battle.18 Richard Helmholz, Donahue, and other historians have argued for the influence of Italian ordo judiciarii on subsequent English practices of witnessing and jury trials. One treatise of the kind that influenced later English law was Tancred’s Ordo from Libri de iudiciorum ordine (c. 1215), which outlines the standard overall form for the course of judgment. Tancred’s Ordo required that witnesses be examined to see if they were telling the truth about events that they saw and heard for themselves.19 Preference for eyewitness testimony was widely evident in a variety of specific subsequent legislation, such as the 1316 Statute of Glavelet, which specified that witnesses testify in court to their “own sight and hearing” (de pleno visu et auditu).20 According to Helmholz, witness depositions became, in practice, the most common form of proof in late medieval English church courts and were also widely deployed in English common law courts.21 Although this emphasis on what an individual saw and heard might seem to confirm Derrida’s idea of the witness as a mode of subjectivity, a standard requirement for at least two witnesses in the medieval courts demonstrates that witnessing was not understood as an individualized activity. In his analysis of marriage cases in York, Donahue claims that even the number of witnesses on each side could play a role in the case.22 Ecclesiastical court records often do not give the full depositions of witnesses who repeat previous testimony; the clerk simply indicates that they repeat it.23 Furthermore, witnesses were allowed to

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discuss the matter with each other before they testified, accounting for some of the notable agreement in cases.24 The fact that slaves, women, those under fourteen years old, the poor, the infamous, and the criminal were not permitted to testify indicates that social status played a role in witnessing. Similarly, children and domestics could not testify, nor could friends or enemies of the accused.25 The exclusion of these people from testifying shows that witnessing—like being a juror—was not an inclusive practice that empowered any able-­bodied person capable of seeing, hearing, or knowing the business of neighbors but required as well a degree of social status, effectively also restricting the category of the citizen to which the witness was tied in the York Plays. All of these rules indicate that the role of the witness was constructed in social terms. The standard oath used for medieval witnesses shows the belief that even somatic elements of witnessing were affected by socially generated emotions. Paul R. Hyams has argued that the oath formula recurs in routine administrative records and documents throughout late medieval England and may have derived from Gratian’s widely circulated Decretum.26 In a passage that explores the corruption of human judgment, the Decretum includes the perversion of judgment “from hatred or friendship or a gift or out of fear or by any other means whatever [vel quolibet modo] or “from kinship, friendship, hostile hatred or enmities [cel hostile odio vel inimicitiis].” The instructions in Tancredi’s Ordo echo those of the Decretum: “Witnesses must generally give an oath of this kind: [They swear] to introduce no falsehood . . . ; and [they swear] both that they will tell the truth for either party and that they do not come to bear testimony for a price or out of friendship, or for private hate, or for any benefit they might receive from it.”27 The list structure of this passage gives grammatical equivalence to price, friendship, private hate, and benefit. The terms “pretio” (price) and “commodo” (benefit), which refer to exchanges of capital, are implicitly compared to the emotions of “amicitia” (friendship) and “odio” (hate), suggesting that those emotions circulate between people. As Ahmed argues, emotions, especially hate, “work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity but is produced as an effect of its circulation . . . ‘the subject’ is simply one nodal point in the economy rather than its origin and destination.”28 Instead of depicting emotion as privatized self-­expression, Ahmed argues that emotion is a “social form.” Her theory of emotion helps us see that medieval witnessing was not a discourse of individuality, as Derrida and other witness theorists would have it, but a circulation of affect that illustrates the “sociality of emotion.”29 Furthermore, the circulation of affect could be problematic, since it could cause false testimony and false justice.



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Despite the existence of treatises promoting the eyewitness, in practice medieval courts gave the reports of neighbors and firsthand experience similar weight. In both common law and ecclesiastical courts, neighbors testified not to what they had seen but to what the community believed. Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angli qui Glanvilla vocator (“Glanvill,” c. 1189) proposed an alternative to battle, in which neighbors are called to testify to what they already know. Glanvill explains: “The knowledge required from the jurors is that they shall know about the matter from what they have personally seen and heard, or from statements which their father made to them in such circumstances that they are bound to believe them as if they had seen or heard for themselves.”30 In other words, jurors could either be eyewitnesses themselves or judge the words of others to be reliable. In contrast to modern procedure in which jurors are selected for presumed impartiality and lack of prior knowledge about the case, in late medieval law, witnessing required interpreting the evidence. In his study of records of late medieval church courts, Donahue concluded that the collective knowledge of the neighborhood was widely accepted, especially in difficult cases.31 In a case heard before the archbishop of Canterbury’s court of audience, for example, when the judge decided to supplement the allegations of both parties, he “decided to inquire by thirteen or twelve men from among the faithful neighbors of the [parties] who were not suspect to either, as to which of the parties was guilty of the aforesaid dissension and dispute.”32 Accordingly, witnessing was often defined as a collective act of observation, which blended the communal with the perceptual. Although collective observation was acceptable in both secular and church courts, where it was embraced as a means for the courts to gain knowledge of a case, this collective aspect of witnessing also enabled social emotions such as hate or greed to become part of witnessing in a problematic way. A passage from Bracton’s treatise shows how the emotions of individuals can move thorough a social chain to influence jurors and negatively affect their ability to promote proper justice. The title of this section from Bracton is “Careful inquiry must be made from whom they have learned what they say, for some lie from hatred, some from greed.”33 The use of the plural “they” and “some” indicates that acts of testimony are collective, while the references to “hatred” and “greed” convey emotional content. The passage begins by advising that the judge “ought . . . to inquire . . . from what man or men the twelve jurors have learned what they put forward in the veredictum from one of their fellow jurors; having heard their answer he may readily decide if any deceit or wickness lies behind it.”34 In its use of “man or men,” this passage also moves between plural and singular agency. Personal

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motivation is detached from the individual when it becomes part of legal procedure in the form of the veredictum. Next, the passage traces the process by which one person’s deceit becomes integral to a collective act of testimony in a jury trial: “For perhaps one or a majority of jurors will say that they learned the matter put forward in their veredictum from one of their fellow jurors, and he under interrogation will perhaps say that he learned it from such a one, and so by question and answer the judge many descend from person to person to some low and worthless fellow, one in whom no trust must be in any way reposed.”35 Information is passed along a chain of people who then collectively employ it in an act of witnessing. The language of this passage, with its vacillation between “one or a majority” of jurors, also suggests that witnessing is simultaneously an individual and collective action. The passage concludes with a representative example that links the collective act of testimony to the circulation of misinformation colored by hatred and other emotions: “It sometimes happens that a lord accuses his tenant, or causes him to be indicted and a crime imputed to him, through a greedy desire to secure his land . . . or one neighbor accuses another through hatred and the like.”36 The emotions of “greedy desire” and “hatred and the like” defining improper witnessing in this passage are social crimes experienced in relationship to “tenant” or “neighbor.” The emotion of hatred threatens to form a social bond that undermines or competes with the vision of community and neighbor defined by proper witnessing, reflecting Ahmed’s argument that hatred plays an active role in creating the collective. Indeed, this description of the circulation of the misinformation generated by the emotions of the “lowly fellow” resembles Ahmed’s account of the ways in which emotions themselves are what she calls “sticky”: “Emotions are not ‘in’ either the individual or the social but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they were objects. The objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation.”37 In other words, counter to modern notions of objective legal procedure and ethics, the medieval law of witnessing shows that, as Ahmed has written, “emotion and perception are not easily separated.”38 Bracton’s treatise ties this concern about the effect of affect specifically to the biblical trial of Christ, warning judges who value their reputations to inquire into witnessing of this nature so “that it not be said, ‘Jesus is crucified and Barrabas delivered.’” This influential text links problems of witnessing to biblical precedent and suggests that the Passion of Christ should be seen not just as an instance of an individualized affective piety but as a crucial example of the risks of collective emotion, as legal affect can be generated in exchanges of testimony.



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Confessional Manuals and False Witnessing As we have seen, the centrality of witnessing to late medieval culture is evident not just in legal texts but also in confessional handbooks. At least since Michel Foucault, modern criticism has emphasized this individualistic nature of medieval confessionals, identifying them as the locus classicus of medieval subjectivity, echoing the critical emphasis on witnessing as crucial to the construction of the subject.39 Like legal texts, confessional handbooks link problematic emotion to legal witnessing, but they represent false witnessing as a private problem of regulating a person’s emotion rather than as an integral part of public collective acts of testimony. In confessional handbooks, false witnessing is consistently associated with the sin of envy and identified as a motive for the condemnation of Christ. In the fourteenth-­century Book of Vices and Virtues, for example, envy is defined as “whan a man werrieþ a-­noþer mannes gostly good, as þe Iewes werriede Ihesu Crist for þe good þat he dide.”40 In Fasciculus Morum, the “evil Jews who preferred the thief Barabbas to Christ” [pessimis Iudeis qui latronem Baraban Christo pretulerunt] represent flatterers, a subset of envy.41 Indeed, Fasciculus Morum includes an extensive account of Christ’s Passion in the section on envy.42 Mirk’s Festial includes a Passion sermon that explains that “þe Iewys and þe Sarsynnes hadden swyche envye to hym, for encheson þat he told hem her vyses and repreuid here wykked lyfving” that they “fully asentud for to done hym to dethe.”43 This sermon points to the envy of the Jews and “Sarsynnes” as a key motive in their condemnation of Christ. Although envy is defined as an emotion experienced in relation to another people, and although these ethnically constructed Others are grouped together in their condemnation of Christ, their envy is experienced individually as a result of “encheson” being castigated for their “wykked lyfving” by Christ. These texts and sermons tie the Passion to the sin of envy rather than to the more collective and public view of emotions we saw in the commentary in Bracton’s treatise. Not only is envy associated with the trials of Christ, it is also often broadly linked with false witnessing in confessional texts. For example, Handlyng Synne depicts the eighth commandment against false witnessing in legalistic terms: “False traitours & feloune, —that falslyche, for enuye, / On here neghburs wyl gladly lye.”44 “Traitours” and “feloune” allude to crimes, while “neghburs” invokes the legal definition of witness in the period. Similarly, the concern in Bracton’s treatise that “one neighbor accuses another through hatred and the like” reflects the same equation between juror and neighbor bound by chains of emotion.45 Like witnessing, in confessors’ handbooks envy was depicted as a

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fundamentally social sin committed against neighbors, as a perversion of caritas, the Christian imperative to love. Confessional texts construct witnessing in the same terms as envy. Fasciculus Morum, for example, asserts: “If you love your neighbor, you will not . . . give false witness.”46 In this way, the emotion of envy is itself a sin, and people’s emotions influence their ability to testify. Although confessional manuals have a striking resemblance to legal treatises in their discussion of false witnessing in terms of amicitia and in the context of the biblical trial of Christ, unlike legal treatises, they attribute the love and hate of false witnessing and false judging to the individual’s response to others rather than to collective emotion. The Book of Virtues and Vices, for example, warns about “fals justises and juges, þat hongeþ more touward þat o syde þan þat oþere for ȝiftes, or for bihestes, or for biddynges, or for loue or for hate, or for drede, and delaien and tarien þe quereles wiþ wrong, and makeþ men spende grete.”47 This has a notable similarity to the witness oath discussed above. In contrast to the Bracton passage, where love, hate, and money moved through a chain of p­ eople ending with the judge, here, although the emotions are experienced in relationship to others, the fault is ascribed to the justices as individuals. Similar terms are invoked in a long passage from Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale that warns against false witnessing “for ire, or for meede, or for envye,” ending with the exhortation: “Ware yow, questmongeres and notaries.”48 The use of the second-­person pronoun asks the listener to self-­identify as a “questmonger,” or false witness, and thus take personal responsibility for the emotions of false witnessing. Similarly, the commentary on legal abuse in Jacob’s Well lists twelve kinds of abuse of the law under the category of “couvetousness,” and these are characterized by a list of people who are evildoers, including false plaintiffs, false pleaders, solicitors, secretaries, false witnesses, and judges who do “more wrong þan evynhed in iugement, for auantage.”49 This passage ascribes fault to bad people who occupy roles in the legal system rather than to the structures of the legal system itself. While recognizing envy and covetousness as social sins, confessional texts ascribe responsibility for the experience of that emotion to the individual, in contrast to legal affect’ that is generated more collectively. As The Book of Vices and Virtues explains, the internal experience of emotion is the sin, not just its undesirable effect on others. In this text and others like it, although emotion is abstracted and allegorized, making it impersonal, a sinful emotion ethically defines the person experiencing it. A passage at the beginning of the section on envy illustrates this tension between individual and collective emotion: “Enuye is modre of deeþ, for bi enuye of þe deuel come deeþ in-­to þis world. Þis is þe synne þat makeþ a man or woman most like to þe deuel



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his fadre.”50 The first part of this passage personifies envy, giving it independent agency. This affect then comes to define the ethical integrity of a person, either a man or a woman. Later in the same passage, the experience of envy is internalized, where it affects a person’s perceptions of others: “þe herte of þe enuyous is so enuenymed and so mys-­turned þat he ne may see no good do to a-­noþer . . . and [that which] he heereþ and seeþ, he takeþ euer-­more in euel vunderstondyng.”51 In this passage, as in Bracton’s text, the ability to perceive is shaped by emotional experience, but the problem is imagined as experienced within the “herte” or body of a single person, indicated by the pronoun “he,” which is repeated three times in the short passage. As Jessica Rosenfeld has argued, envy is defined as a rejection of compassion, “a simultaneous emotional and behavioral refusal of the command to love one’s neighbor,” and is thus “necessarily social” but is nonetheless “an inwardly experienced sin.”52 Although medieval confessional texts acknowledge the social nature of the sin, they do what Sianne Ngai has observed in a modern context: they make envy a matter of the individual psyche. “Instead of seeing it as a way to respond to social disparities,” she explains, “we tend to perceive envy as designating a passive condition of the subject rather than the means by which the subject recognizes and responds to an objective relation.”53 According to Ngai, this subverts a potential for political engagement. She argues “that the dominant cultural attitude toward this affect converts its fundamentally other-­regarding orientation into an egocentric one, stripping it of its polemicism and rendering it merely a reflection of deficient and possibly histrionic selfhood.”54 Although it is well known that concepts of selfhood were central to the religious controversy and reformism that challenged traditional religious practices in the period, and were thus by no means inherently conservative, the York Plays emphasize the potential of recognizing the sociality of emotions for political change.55 By framing false witnessing not as an individual experience but as poised between individual and social, as I will argue, the York trial plays show the political potential of the legal affect of witnessing and oral proof for promoting civic values.

Legal Affect and the York Trial Plays Given the common association of envy in the confessionals with the Jews who condemn Christ and with legal crimes more generally, it is notable that the York trial plays do not give it a central role. This is an important omission given the persistent association of legal corruption with envy and covetousness in confessional

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manuals and sermons. Furthermore, the sources for the York Plays, including the Northern Passion, the Gospel of Nicodemus, and Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, all ascribe envy to the canon lawyers Annas and Caiaphas and to Pilate in their condemnation of Christ. A representative example is in the Northern Passion when Pilate initially cannot find fault with Christ, “þan þe Jews bigan to cry / To him ogaine with grete enuy.”56 Similarly, in the Gospel of Nicodemus, when he first hears the accusations against Christ, Pilate says: “’Me thynke þis is envye; / Walde þai þus deme a man / ffor his gude dedys to dye?’” and also claims the accusations are motivated by “hatred.”57 The York trial plays do not entirely omit the discourse on sin; instead they link a view of individualized emotion to the morally suspect figures Pilate and his wife, Procula, and assign to them the more emphatically individualistic sin of pride. In fact, the York Plays pit a familiar view of legal abuses as a problem of individual self-­regulation against a legalistic model of witnessing and oral proof that treats affect as public and social. Furthermore, the plays associate legal corruption and unregulated emotion with Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas, while they use a legalistic model of witnessing, practiced by Christ and the Beadle, to embody civic virtues and values. In “Christ Before Pilate I: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife,” Pilate’s boasting rant employs the emotional category of pride familiar from confessional texts. The play begins, not with the trial of Christ, but with a soliloquy by Pilate that deviates from the play’s immediate sources and serves as a prologue addressed to the audience. In a long speech that establishes his authority to judge the Jews, Pilate alludes to his pride four times in the space of seven lines, concluding, “I haue schewid you in sight, / Howe I am prowdely preued ‘Pilatus.’ / Loo, Pilate I am, proued a prince of grete pride” (17–19). This passage equates “I” with an abstract expression of vice, participating in the dynamics of self-­definition key to the confessional. Indeed, pride is perhaps the quintessential example of self-­directed emotion. According to Fasciculus Morum, pride is “love of one’s own superiority” and includes “pride in one’s power and rank” and “pride in the nobility of our blood,” characterizations specifically invoked by the speech of the York Pilate.58 As the short passage above indicates, Pilate is relentless in his repetition of the first-­person singular, the grammatical expression of his pride. By focusing on pride, in contrast to the social sin of envy more commonly associated with this biblical story in sermons, confessional manuals and the sources for the York Plays, the trial plays emphasize the individualistic element of Pilate’s emotions and of the confessional. “Christ Before Pilate I” frames Pilate’s opening speech politically through the invocation of the language of monarchical legal prerogative. Immediately



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before the passage quoted above, Pilate invokes his pedigree, asserting: “Sir Sesar was my sier and I soethely his sonne, / That excelent emperoure exaltid in hight” (10–11). He claims that his name comes from his mother’s parents, using his genealogy as “grounde . . . To justifie and juge all þe Jewes” (24). By linking his genealogy to his role as judge, York’s Pilate refers to the idea, common in legal treatises and mirrors for princes, that the king’s role enables him to employ law as a means to govern. Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, for example, asserts: “A kyng is maad to keepen and maynteene / Justice.”59 Pilate initially hesitates to condemn Christ, seeming to uphold his role as a just ruler. He asserts that “His liff for to lose þare longes no lawe, / Nor no cause can I kyndely contryue / [Why þat] he schulde lose þus his liffe” (435–37). After discovering that Christ claims kingship and is thus a threat to his own power, Pilate condemns him. In doing so, York’s Pilate fits the familiar paradigm of a tyrant who values his own singular profit over the common good. John Salisbury’s widely circulated Policraticus, for example, asserts that what distinguishes a king from a tyrant is that the former is “obedient to law . . . because the authority of the prince is determined by the authority of right.”60 The play’s portrait of Pilate thus rejects the paradigm that the king is necessarily just, by linking legal corruption with the monarchy and aristocratic genealogy. This passage depicts the dangers of understanding law as personal expression rather than as a social act. The portrayal of Pilate in the play establishes a parallel between false witnessing and tyranny: just as a tyrant is defined by his use of law for his own personal interest, the false witness allows personal motives to distort his testimony. By linking Pilate’s assertion of royal prerogative to pride, the play shows the potential for an individualized view of emotion to have an implicit politics, associating it with the uses of law for monarchical power rather than justice. “Christ Before Pilate I” not only associates Pilate with the penitential sin of pride, it also employs a language of internality in its depiction of the temptation of his wife, Procula. While in bed, Procula is visited in a dream by the devil, who tries to get her to prevent Christ from being unjustly judged. The devil seeks to save Christ for the wrong reason: he is worried that Christ’s death will bring redemption. He tells Procula that she should save Christ or otherwise her “richesse shall be refte” (174), attempting to persuade her to save Christ to protect her possessions, and invoking the law against bearing witness for a price. Although she speaks to what she perceives as her husband’s virtues, Procula does not ultimately function as a witness in the play, even in the broadest sense, perhaps reflecting the fact that, as a woman, and as one marked by vanity and lack of self-­restraint, she is not the kind of person who would have had the requisite status required to be

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a legal witness. Although Ruth Nisse has argued that this scene should be understood in the context of women’s visionary literature, it also invokes a conventional use of dreams of the devil to describe evil desires and internal motivations.61 Handlyng Synne warns that some dreams “beyn the fendes temptacyoun.”62 Fasciculus Morum links the devil to sleep itself: “When the devil attacks man, he does . . . things similar to what people do when they want to rest and sleep.” Just as people shut the door, turn out the light, and seek quiet when going to sleep, the text instructs, so the devil closes the window of the soul, extinguishes the light of God, and stops man’s ears to God’s word.63 When York’s Procula reports that she has had a “dreme” (176), the devil’s speech can be read as an abstract representation of Procula’s state of mind, as an abbreviated psychomachia that recalls the terms of the passage from The Book of Vices and Virtues cited earlier. Although morality plays explore the implications of using personification to represent sin, including the tension between individual and universalizing tendencies, the York “Christ Before Pilate I” ascribes this discourse exclusively to Procula’s internal imaginings, much as modern critics have linked confessional discourse to individual subjectivity. The devil’s speech does not use the vocabulary of sin; instead, it is framed as testimony to Christ’s power.64 Although Diabolus calls Him “gentilman, Jesu, of cursednesse he can” (160), he is forced to recognize that “Be any syngne þat I see þis same is Goddis sonne” (161). Whereas in Towneley’s “Last Judgment” juridical procedure is figured as diabolic in contrast to the truly just and merciful jurisdiction of God’s representative, the priest, over the soul, the York play inverts that paradigm by associating the devil with the characters Pilate and Procula and with the language of the confessional, not just with the sins themselves.65 The York “Christ Before Pilate I” associates confessional language with Procula and Pilate, who misuse the law, but it also provides a more positive legal discourse of witnessing.66 The York trials of Christ do not so much illustrate the sin of envy as they portray the perils of false witnessing. “Christ Before Caiaphas and Annas” recasts Peter’s betrayal as a failure to bear witness for Christ, a role instead taken up by Malchus, who publicly testifies to the miracles Christ has performed. Although a lawyer would not act as a witness in ecclesiastical court practice, Christ Himself calls Caiaphas a “wronge wittenesse” (329) when the canon lawyer accuses Him of being a traitor. Similarly, Annas and Caiaphas bear false witness against Christ in “Christ Before Pilate I” when they bring Him before judge Pilate, but the Beadle testifies to the miracles he has seen Christ perform. The Beadle is a figure for civic law who instructs Pilate’s wife, Procula, in what “langis to our lawes” and whom Pilate acknowledges as a repository of legal knowledge: “He knawis all oure custome” (71), demonstrating the



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play’s employment of an imaginative mix of figures from local, royal, and church courts. In “Christ Before Herod,” Herod acts as judge, while others are enlisted to “beris wittenesse” (376) against Christ. “Christ Before Pilate 2” features the canon lawyers Anna and Caiaphas acting like witnesses—even in the presence of a secular authority—and then offering to provide a crowd of people who, they claim, will provide additional “witnesse” (106, 110) to the false traitorous acts of Christ. In contrast to penitential texts that treat false witnessing as a branch of envy, the York pageants depict the condemnation of Christ by a mixture of ecclesiastical and secular authorities as the effect of public acts of false witnessing. In “Christ Before Pilate I,” Caiaphas alludes to the collective aspect of the contemporary practice of witnessing. Deflecting attention from his own motives, he claims he can find others who can testify against Christ, enacting an act of witnessing by many people at the same time: “The greeteste” number of people “of this werke beres witnesse” (510, 512). Caiaphas suggests that the sheer number of witnesses should play a role in the condemnation of Christ. As we have seen, the mere number of witnesses on a particular side did play a role in court cases of the period. Furthermore, Caiaphas’s words treat perception and recollection as potentially collective acts, reflected in such practices as allowing testimony by reputation. The York trial plays engage the specific terms of the witness oath not to testify “for a price or out of friendship or for private hate.”67 In “Christ Before Caiaphas and Annas,” Annas tells Caiaphas they should bring Christ to Pilate, tell him “how ye hym hate” (342), and ask if he will “helpe hym or haste hym to hyng” (343), demonstrating the role of hate in false justice. In “Christ Before Pilate I,” Annas explains that Christ “werkis whane he will, wele I wote, / And þerefore in herte we hym hate” (420). In the same play, Pilate quizzes the two lawyers about their “entente” (498) and repeatedly accuses them of “malice” (483) and of lying for a “price” (455). Similarly, in “Christ Before Pilate 2,” Pilate accuses Caiaphas and Annas directly of being false witnesses motivated by hatred (122, 325). They attempt to testify against Christ and are rejected by Pilate in terms that reflect the legal concern with witnessing being tainted by emotions: þer witnesse I warande þat to witnesse ȝe wage. Some hatred in ther hartis agaynes hym have hent, And purpose be this processe to putt doun þis page. (121–23) Although the play uses the term “witness” rather than referring to the jurors who would have been used in common law courts, this passage echoes the terms of

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the warning by the authors of Bracton when they caution judges about jurors who hate, lest it lead to the miscarriage of justice. Although Pilate initially rejects the testimony of Caiaphas and Annas on the grounds of their hatred, the play’s depiction of Pilate’s change of heart traces the terms of the warning for judges in Bracton’s treatise against the ways false testimony generates emotion through a chain of people. Pilate asks, “What harmes has þis hatell here haunted? / I kenne to co[n]vyk hym no cause” (293), and later: “Why suld I deme to dede, þan, withoute deseruyng in dede? / But I haue herde al haly why in hertes ȝe hym hate. / He is fautles in faith” (324–26). When Caiaphas responds that Christ claims to be king (329), Pilate immediately promises violent punishment “for wo to he be wepying” (338), which indicates that the canon lawyers’ hatred has generated a similar emotion in Pilate. In this way, the play recognizes the ways that emotions can be “sticky” and take shape in the circulation between people. Like the depiction of jurors in Bracton’s treatise, the play characterizes the circulation of emotion in acts of false witnessing as responsible for the condemnation of Christ, showing the ill effects of “sticky emotions” by linking the biblical trial to contemporary witness theory. Although both confessional and legal texts use the trials of Christ to discuss the failures of contemporary witness trials, the York Plays also draw on legal language to generate an idealized affective model of witnessing. In “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas,” Peter refuses to testify for Christ, claiming: “I saw hym neuere are” (129) and “I was neuere with hym in werke þat he wroght / In worde nor in werke” (154–55). In these lines, Peter simultaneously eschews both his role as eyewitness and his role as compurgator who might testify to Christ’s character, an act Malchus identifies as a perversion of “oure lawe. . . . / Thus hath he denyed hym thryes” (160–61). These lines construct Peter’s betrayal as a refusal to bear witness and identify witnessing as a rejection of both perception and bonds of affection. Instead, Malchus performs this public role of witness, asserting: “I schall preve to ȝou pertly / and telle you my tale” (133–34). Taking on the role of an eyewitness, Malchus says: “I was presente with pepull whenne prese was full prest” (135). He reports on the miracles of healing that Christ has performed, asserting: “Of tokenyng of trouth schall I telle yowe” (139). In this last phrase, Malchus claims that perception has a role in conveying larger theological truths to the local community. In “Christ Before Pilate I,” the Beadle plays a similar role, testifying that he saw Christ working miracles on the way to Jerusalem. The canon lawyers Annas and Caiaphas try to persuade Pilate to condemn Christ, warning him that Christ is a threat to their laws. Like Malchus in the other play, the Beadle accuses Annas



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and Caiaphas of being “false frawdes” (241), identifying them as bad witnesses. In this way, although historically beadles did not act as judges in medieval courts, in the play the Beadle plays the role of a good judge who roots out bad witnesses before they have an adverse effect on the community and its legal process. The Beadle himself is a good witness, in that he is moved not by hate or price but by “wirschippe . . . for wytes þat wer wiser þan I . . . worshipped þe full holy on hy / And with solempnité sang Osanna” (311–15). In this case, not hate but worship is generated in a chain of emotion passed between people. In his gloss, the Beadle merges his words with those of the men he has seen and heard sing “Osanna.” This passage reflects a contemporary legal ideal of witnessing in which eyewitnesses could be individual or communal. In his next speech, the Beadle elaborates on those who sing “Osanna”: “Riche men with þare robes þei ranne to his fete, / And poure folke fecched floures of þe frith” (344–45). This passage emphasizes the range of social classes participating in the singing. It is the legal civil servant, however, who bears witness for them, not the poor, who are typically disqualified as witnesses by medieval courts. Although the courts would not exclude rich men from testifying, in the play the Beadle, a civil legal authority, testifies for them, using the representation of the law to promote civic virtue over wealth. Responding to Pilate’s command to fetch Christ, the Beadle prefaces his witnessing speech by saying that he is “fayne [moued in myn herte]” (307), identifying his emotion as a source for his testimony. The play draws attention to the ways that legal discourse of witnessing provided a theory of affect in which both emotion and somatic experience are poised between the collective and the individual. The legal theory of witnessing serves as both an agent of civic community and a model for the drama itself.68 The plays establish a parallel between witnessing the drama and watching a trial. For example, in “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas,” when Malchus says, “I schall preue to ȝou pertly and telle you my tale” (133–34), he addresses both those present within the play and the larger audience on the streets of York. Furthermore, in his emphasis on telling the tale “pertly” or openly, Malchus constructs his act of witnessing as a public act of telling, as opposed to either a private meditation or a documentary approach to proof. The parallelism between the play’s legalistic dialogue and drama draws attention to the theatricality of the courtroom and shows how testimony is a performative act requiring an audience, not simply a private act. The members of the audience watching the play are also witnesses in a different sense, elaborated in Chapter 1, of those who both collectively and individually see what transpires in the neighborhood and who may be summoned later to testify in court. The role of audience members as spectators combines

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two elements of legal witnessing: they see and hear the spectacle firsthand and build the collective local knowledge that could be the basis for later testimony in the courts. The audience is constructed by the space of the neighborhood and located within the jurisdiction of the city as articulated by the city charter, but this space also enables the individual and collective experience of legal affect. The fact that the drama is the story of Christ’s life plays on an extralegal sense of the witness that addresses the Bible as testament. One of the meanings for “witness” in the Middle English Dictionary is “one who attests to the validity of the Christian faith.”69 For example, Dives and Pauper asserts of preachers that they “schuldyn ben witnessys of Christ þat is souereyn trewþe” and “ȝif þey techyn oþirwyse þan Crist tauȝte & lyuyn nout as Crist lyuede, þey ben false witnessys to Crist.”70 By staging the trials of Christ, the York Plays simultaneously engage the legal sense of bearing witness and the sense of witnessing as testifying to the Christian faith. In this way, they identify legal witnessing as a potentially moral action in contrast to sermons and confessional handbooks, which conventionally employ legal practices to exemplify sinful emotions. The Beadle’s narration of Christ’s past actions also makes him a model for the York drama, which itself tells of Christ’s life. The play establishes the Beadle’s acts of witnessing as a model for the audience members, who participate collectively in a somatic and emotional experience of the play and, like the Beadle, act as witnesses to biblical events that can potentially be sequentially retold or reenacted. If the Beadle acts as a model for proper witnessing, he also invokes the work of the actor who voices his speech, itself a somatic and emotional act of witnessing. By inviting the audience to witness, the play signals that its own medium can potentially embody the truth by speaking not just to what the people in the audience see and hear but also to what they know as neighbors and members of the community, drawing on legal affect for dramatic theory. The famous passage in the York “Crucifixio Christi” when Christ invites the members audience to behold his suffering body can be seen as an invitation to them to bear witness, directly involving them in the action of the play.71 Christ says: Al men þat walkis by waye or strete, Takes tente ȝe schalle no trauayle tyne. Byholdes myn heede, myn handis, and my feete, And fully feele nowe, or ȝe fyne, Yf any mournyng may be meete Or myscheue mesured vnto myne. (253–58)



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In this passage, Christ addresses the audience directly, asking the viewers to act as eyewitnesses to His Crucifixion and to experience somatically (“fully feele”) what they see. By calling on “al men” passing on the street to “byholdes” His crucified body, York’s Christ invites the audience members, who would have been watching the pageants in the streets of York, to bear witness collectively and publicly, rather than privately as individuals. In referring to the “waye or strete,” the play invokes the spatial concept of neighborhood that is crucial to the definition of medieval witnessing. By calling on “al men,” this passage of the York “Crucifixio Christi” unsettles any association of “beholding” with female compassion, perhaps instead evoking the court’s bias for male witnesses. In her analysis of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Sarah NcNamer has argued that the term “behold” has a gendered meaning in which the Virgin’s “holding” of Christ’s body “establishes a foundation for the compassionate beholding” of Christ’s body in the Passion.72 Although this passage from York is often compared to Love’s Mirror, the latter text instructs the reader to contemplate the Passion internally rather than publicly and communally: “Make þe þere present in þi mynde . . . and so wiþ the innere eye of þi soule beholde” the Passion. In this passage, the reader’s act of seeing is experienced by the soul, and the “eye” is metaphoric, linking perception to the imagination.73 The reader is told to have “inward compassion of þe peynes & þe passion of oue lorde,” but, unlike the York “Crucifixio Christi,” this identificatory affective practice is neither theatrical nor collective.74 Thus, although this scene from the York play is often read as a quintessential example of medieval drama’s engagement with an individualized and feminized tradition of late medieval “affective piety,” legal affect provides an alternative model consonant with the public and corporate element of performance. When the members of the audience of the York “Crucifixio Christi” are asked to “fully feele” the body of Christ, they are invited to identify with an individual body and with a singular speaking position. This act of group identification with a single person is compatible with Ahmed’s theory that affect is constructed through an interaction between individual and collective experience. This model of affect is consistent with the theology of Christ as simultaneously one man and the embodiment of all humanity, and thus makes the Passion central to legal affect. In addition, each member of the audience is asked to identify simultaneously with two subject positions: with Christ while He is in the act of testifying against them, and also with observers of the spectacle of crucifixion. This double identification merges two key elements of witnessing that are temporally separate: the act of perception and the subsequent testimony about what was previously perceived or known.

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The impetus for the audience to identify with Christ’s body as well as see it mitigates against a well-­known interpretation of the play as a spectacle of suffering.75 In York’s Crucifixion play, the wounded body of Christ is not merely presented as evidence of the power of secular and religious authorities (Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, and Annas) to exert their authority. Although His body is the object of the audience’s gaze, Christ also uses His body to speak, to embody His own voice, and to provide the power to bear witness to His experience and emotions. In this way, the play models the ways affect can be deployed politically, as we saw earlier when Pilate is associated with pride at the beginning of “Christ Before Pilate I.” York’s “Crucifixio Christi” presents witnessing as a tactical means of speaking out against one’s oppressors, rather than as a confirmation of existing power structures. As Michel de Certeau has argued, a tactic is a “way of operating” within the structures of power that does not necessarily conform to institutional power.76 In a different context, Lauren Berlant has argued for a “space of moral action that seems juxapolitical,” deploying institutional power without replicating it.77 The York “Crucifixio Christi” and the trial plays suggest that the legal practice of witnessing could deploy the institutional authority of the law to promote civic values without necessarily replicating the royal and religious powers that traditionally undergirded the law. Rather than the monarchical or ecclesiastical authority portrayed by characters such as Pilate, Herod, Annas, and Caiaphas, the witnessing in the York trial plays promotes civic authority and suggests that affect can be tactically deployed.

Staging Lyric Passion It is widely noted that Christ’s words from the cross in the York “Crucifixio Christi” when He bears witness to the sins of humanity closely resemble many Middle English lyrics. I argue that this moment links the lyric to the legal practice of witnessing and provides a means of investigating the relationships among literary form, affective practice, and the cultures of witnessing. Seeta Chaganti recently argued for considering poetic form as “constituted in . . . perceptual habits” and has contended that it is “an experience rather than an entity.” She recuperates the category of “experience” and “habituation,” arguing that doing so helps us understand “the potential for an audience to deploy . . . ingrained perceptual practices and expectations in other encounters.”78 Building on this idea, I argue that the play’s inclusion of a Passion lyric to express Christ’s words



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from the cross invokes the “perceptual habits” of lyric as well as those of legal witnessing. If lyric practice generates “perceptual habits” that affect the experience of witnessing, this suggests that the habits generated by form may play a role in cultural practice. Conversely, the cultural practice of legal witnessing also informs the experience of medieval lyric.79 In turn, the perceptual habits of these linked lyric and legal practices both shape and are shaped by the theatrical experience of affect. Like witnessing, medieval lyrics were frequently associated with the subject of Christ’s Passion.80 According to Rosemary Woolf, the Passion is “the dominant theme of the lyrics.”81 Complaints by Christ from the cross are widely recognized as a subset of the category of Passion lyrics.82 Passion lyrics are found in diverse contexts, such as sermons, preacher’s handbooks, and commonplace books (both religious and secular), suggesting that the audience of the York Plays would have been familiar with the genre. Siegfried Wenzel has shown that Christ’s words from the cross are the most common subject rendered into verse in medieval sermons.83 A lyric closely resembling the words spoken by Christ from the cross in the York “Crucifixio Christi” is contained in the commonplace book of John Grimestone, most likely a friar, whose name occurs frequently in the local Yorkshire records among the craft guilds and small householders, linking the book— and the Passion lyric contained in it—to the social context of the urban religious plays of York.84 The words of Christ from the cross in York’s “Crucifixio Christi” have been identified with a subset of Passion lyrics that adapt the biblical text of Lamentations 1:12.85 The fact that the Passion was a common topic both in late Middle English lyrics and in discussions of medieval witnessing connects formal literary and legal practices. Because of this close association of witnessing and lyric with the subject of Christ’s Passion, recent scholarship on the mutability of lyric voice can be useful for understanding the performance of legal affect, in which one testifies to both one’s own and others’ experiences, and for analyzing the interpolation of affective lyric practice into dramatic performance. Just as scholars have often claimed that witnessing is an expression of individual subjectivity, critics have traditionally seen the lyric as especially appropriate for expressing individual subjectivity. Recent scholarship has unsettled this long-­standing association of the lyric “I” with individual subjectivity by arguing for an instability of the speaking position in medieval lyrics.86 Judson Boyce Allen claimed that the first-­person pronoun of medieval lyrics is easily “plagiarized” because medieval authors presume “a certain interchangeability of speakers, that is, they presume that certain kinds of statements which include the first person pronoun may be validly made by anyone.”87 He maintains another

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kind of universality, however, by arguing that the individual ego is sublimated to the “lyric ego.”88 A. C. Spearing has promoted a view of the lyric “I” as an empty space waiting to be occupied by the reader.89 Critiquing the stability of voice and subject suggested by these critics and others, and embracing a performative model of lyric, Ingrid Nelson cautions that there is “not a single lyric ‘speaker’ but rather voices for lyric reader, performers and audiences.”90 We can understand Christ’s speech from the cross in the York “Crucifixio Christi” as an engagement with the mutability of voice—and other performative practices of the lyric—that would have been familiar to the medieval audience. The instability of lyric voice can be traced through an analysis of inset Passion lyrics in the preaching handbook Fasciculus Morum; one of these lyrics closely resembles the words spoken from the cross in the York “Crucifixio Christi.” This lyric is prefaced with a discussion of citation: “Therefore Christ could rightly speak the words of Lamentations: ‘O all you who pass by the way.’”91 Christ is described as speaking the words of the Bible, as if it were a dramatic script. This quotation is from a biblical passage describing the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians, voiced by a survivor who has lost her city and her children, and because of her suffering was often read typologically in the late Middle Ages as the voice of Christ.92 This passage from the Bible, which is spoken by Christ, is in turn cited in the subsequent Middle English poem that was inserted into the Latin prose sermon in the handbook. The text thus frames the lyric “I” of the poem as a sequence of voices rather than an as expression of personal subjectivity. Following the Middle English Passion lyric, the sermon reverts back to Latin prose to instruct devout Christians to speak for Christ: “But all these aforementioned pains do not grieve him so much as the ingratitude of man whom he has loved so much and still does. Therefore, a devout person reproaches man in Christ’s stead as follows.”93 In this passage, the sermon exhorts listening Christians to quote the words of the poem, and thus to inhabit the subject position of Christ by speaking for Him in reproaching man. The sermon explicitly asks the observer to identify with Christ by voicing the subsequent verse, but it also presumes that the speaker has just heard the lyrics and the subsequent instructions to repeat them. This shift from listener to speaker correlates to the experience of witnessing in which people first observe something and then report their observations. As we saw earlier, testimony could include repeating words personally overheard or collective knowledge of the neighborhood. The passage forges a double and simultaneous identification with the “devout person” who voices the role of Christ and with the “man” who is the third-­person addressee. The mobility of subject and speaking positions is



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amplified in this case by the fact that “devout” Christians are addressed in the passage above only after the citation of the lyric to which they are instructed to give voice. A “devout person” who follows instructions by repeating the poem would participate in a chain of citation by quoting the preacher, who is in turn quoting a lyric, which cites Christ quoting another voice in the Bible, composing at least five layers of citation. This layering of citation presents a series of past speech acts as voiced in the present moment and thus imagines a circulation of voices, a phenomenon that I will call “citational lyric.” The mutable voice of the lyric “I” instantiates an experience of lyric affect that, in Ahmed’s phrase, “takes shape as an effect of circulation” and thus exceeds the bounds of individual experience. This suggests a correlation between form and affect in the lyric. Eleanor Johnson has introduced a model for linking form and feeling, advocating “a way of thinking of genre as a formal leveraging of consonant affective and cognitive states.”94 The close association of voice and affect was implicit in a conventional connection between an individualized lyric subjectivity and a similarly individualized model of affect. In his classic Glossary of Literary Terms, for example, M. H. Abrams defines lyric as “any fairly short poem consisting of an utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought and feeling.”95 If we build on this conventional link between lyric voice and lyric affect but revise accepted models of both, we can see that the mutable voicing of the lyric “I,” in which a single subject position is inhabited by a sequence of speakers, can “leverage” a comparable practice of affect that is sequentially inhabited by a series of subjects. The pairing of the circulation of voice and affect is evident in the Latin commentary in the Fasciculus Morum that frames the inset Passion lyric. In the passage cited above, the substitution of speakers (“devout person” for Christ) is said to be motivated by that person’s perception of Christ’s grief over the “ingratitude of man” and by people’s failure to value Christ’s own affect because “he has loved [them] so much and still does.”96 The “devout Christian” who repeats the lyric to accuse fellow sinners is thus motivated by the speaker’s perception of Christ’s emotion. The chain of speakers who voice the lyric express this intersubjective affective experience. In the words of Ahmed cited earlier, affect is “produced as an effect of its circulation,” since ‘“the subject’ is simply one nodal point in the economy rather than its origin and destination.”97 This recalls the chain of affect that the authors of Bracton’s treatise worried could travel through a chain of jurors and obstruct the proper course of justice, as was done, the treatise says, at the time of Christ’s Passion. In the case of the lyric voicing of Christ’s words, however, lyric affect is deployed for moral purpose.

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The consonance between citational lyric and the sociality of emotion in the text engages with paradigms of legal affect. The Middle English Passion lyric framed by Fasciculus Morum’s Latin commentary links perception and emotion in a way that signals the affective habits of medieval witnessing: A ȝe men þat by me wendenn Abydes a while and loke on me, ȝef ȝe fyndenn in any ende Suche sorrow as here ȝe se on me.98 In these lines, “sorrow” is an experience that “men” can see when they “loke,” combining perception and emotion. The text promotes intersubjectivity by suggesting that one person can see another’s feelings. By instructing the listener to look for others who are sorrowful, the verse implies that emotions are visible in ordinary human bodies, as well as in Christ’s body. Christ instructs those who observe Him to compare His grief to that of others, to people in the immediate vicinity of a person standing before Him. In this way, locality is folded into the perception of affect, as in the medieval legal practice of drawing witnesses from the neighborhood. After a brief commentary, the Passion lyric continues by combining voice and affect as they move together between singular and collective, expression and experience, as is also characteristic of legal affect. The poem is presented first in Latin and then in Middle English: Homo (inquit), vide quid pro te pacior, Si est dolor sicut quo crucior. Ad te clamo qui pro te morior. Vide penas quibus addicior. Vide clav(o)s quibus confodior. Cum sit dolor tantus exterior, Set interior tamen planctus gravior, Dum tam ingratum te experior. Byholde, mon, what I dree, Whech is my payne, qwech is my woo. To the I clepe now I shal dye. By-­se the wel, for I mot go. Byholde þe nayles þat ben withoute,



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How þey me þorlenn to þys tre. Of all my pyne haue I no doubte But ȝif vnkynde I fynde the.99 In this passage the first-­person pronoun “I” and second-­person pronoun “the” repeat and alternate to construct a close relationship between speaker and audience. Similarly, Christ voices the active verbs “dree” [suffer], “dye,” and “fynde,” but He is the object of the verb “þorlenn,” and his “payne” and “woo” take on a grammatical agency of their own, which abstracts them and thus detaches them from individual experience. At the same time, the audience of the lyric and of the sermon is commanded to “byholde” the sensations of suffering and pain, making sight a means of somatic empathy, thus promoting a circulation of affect among Christ, speaker, and audience. The York Plays invoke the affective conventions of lyric practice, drawing not just on what the audience members see and hear but also on what they know about lyric. This is a self-­referential moment in the text in which the information shared by the audience is a collective knowledge of the literary tradition of the lyric, just as witnessing is based in the information shared by neighbors. Returning to the York “Crucifixio Christi,” we can see that the speech of Christ from the cross closely resembles the inset lyrics of Fasciculus Morum and engages the perceptual habits of that genre by practicing a shared mutability of voice and affective experience: Al men þat walkis by waye or strete, Takes tente ȝe schalle no trauayle tyne. Byholdes myn heede, myn handis, and my feete, And fully feele nowe, or ȝe fyne, Yf any mournyng may be meete, Or myscheue mesured vnto myne. (253–58) The verse commands the audience (“al men”) to “fully feele” by identifying with the body of Christ, blending singular and collective affective experience. In doing so, the play simultaneously participates in a lyric practice that evokes affective experience and also instantiates the theology of Christ as both a single man and the embodiment of “al men” who compose the Christian community. Like the inset lyrics from Fasciculus Morum, this passage asks the audience to identify simultaneously with Christ, who voices the lyric, and with those who observe His body. Members of the audience are told to “byholdes” Christ’s body,

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emphasizing their separation from Christ, and next to “feel” his “mournyng,” an instruction that conversely suggests an intersubjective experience of emotion. The passage is a recognizable example of the well-­known genre of Passion lyric, cueing the affective practice associated with that form. In Christ’s speech, the formal practice of lyric is linked to the social practice of witnessing by the blending of perception and emotion, and by a socially generated experience of affect. As we have seen, in medieval witnessing, individual perception could merge with collective knowledge, since both what witnesses had seen and heard themselves and what they knew as part of a community were accepted as valid evidence in court. Medieval testimony might be voiced by an individual who spoke on behalf of a neighborhood. The instability of voicing and mobility of affect among people that were associated with the lyric tradition were enhanced by the multimedia nature of lyric practices; lyrics were often sung and frequently included in both plays and sermons, making the lyric a performative practice as well as a textual form.100 Noting that lyrics were performed as “song, hymn, carol, virelai, roundel, lament, pastourelle, and so forth,” Jessica Brantley observes that “this poetry is an art of sound.”101 According to Brantley, even silent private reading of lyric texts “took place against a background of performance . . . that conditioned the poems’ reception, and, ultimately, their meaning.”102 Lyric engaged with the practices of medieval dance as well as with music. For example, lyric poems that were ­carols were accompanied by dance, but they also existed independently as poems shaped by the perceptual habits of dance.103 Also emphasizing the ability of medieval forms of performance to shape each other, in her analysis of lyric, Nelson has argued that we should think of performance “less as a distinctly demarcated event than a mode or habitus that was available within a range of medieval activities, from socializing in the town center to private reading.”104 Ardis Butterfield has pointed out that “short pieces of medieval verse are often thoroughly embedded in larger structures of thought, meditative practice, exposition or exegesis.”105 The instability of lyric voice is facilitated by a mobility among media and the accompanying performative traditions, which makes it especially relevant to the inset lyric in the York “Crucifixio.”106 Critics have identified the shifting voicing of lyrics with its dramatic qualities, which would have been enhanced by the insertion of lyrics into a play. For example, Carleton Brown described a Passion lyric as “compressed drama,” while Rosemary Woolf argued that the connection between lyric and drama is “not because the plays were lyrical, but because the lyrics are dramatic. The Crucifixion play, for instance, publicly enacted what could proceed privately within a man’s



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imagination.”107 For Emily Steiner, the York “Crucifixio Christi” “proposes the lyrical-­liturgical address to be the very essence of the dramatic mode.”108 The voicing of the Passion lyric would have been further destabilized in the play by the presence of an actor playing the role of Christ. In the staging of medieval Corpus Christi drama, the words of Christ from the cross that compose the play’s Passion lyrics were spoken by a sequence of actors in successive annual productions on Corpus Christi Day. In addition, multiple men played the role of Christ simultaneously in any given performance of the plays in concurrent pageants staged across the medieval city, producing a network of voices that stretched across time and space and was accompanied by a circulation of affective experience. Nelson has pointed to the importance of the audience in the construction of lyric practice, but this role would be even more pronounced in a dramatic citation of lyric tradition. Just as Fasciculus Morum exhorted the devout listener to take on a speaking role, instructing those hearing the sermon to perform the Passion lyrics, in the York “Crucifixio Christi” those in the street are directly invited to “byholde” and to “feele” Christ’s body and thus to participate in His experience. Christ’s words from the cross invoke the practice of lyric and exaggerate the instability of lyric voice and affect through the play’s own performative medium, which is in dialogue with the performativity of lyric practices. By citing lyric practice, the play not only cues the affective practice and mutable voicing associated with that lyric, it also provides metatheatrical commentary. As Nicolette Zieman has argued, “literary theory [can be] expressed in ‘literary form.’” Specifically, she claims that “juxtaposed forms often dialogue and comment on each other, both across texts and within them.”109 The lyric testimony provided by Christ implicitly provides a theory of audience participation in a dramatic practice that engages both the social practice of medieval witnessing and the formal practice of lyric. As Bert O. States asserts, theater depends on the individual’s “own perceptual encounters with it,” on participation rather than passivity.110 States argues for a “collaborative mode of performance” that “uses some kind of ‘you’ address in its relation to the audience. One could think of this as a ‘we’ voice in the sense that the audience joins the actors in the stage enterprise, but I prefer to retain the strict sense of ‘you’ as the spoken to in the act of speech.”111 This paradigm applies to Christ’s complaint from the cross in the York play, which invites the audience to inhabit both the “I” position of observing and the “you” position of feeling His pain. As Herbert Blau said in a different context, the audience of a drama can “see feelingly.”112 Blau identifies as a necessary part of theater the blending of perception and emotion that led the authors of Bracton to caution judges about proper jurors whose ability to recite

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words spoken earlier or report other evidence is potentially influenced by their affective experiences. Blau goes further than States in his emphasis on the role of the audience in dramatic performance: “The audience . . . does not exist before the play but is initiated or precipitated by it; it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed.”113 This suggests that the audience members are “initiated” and that their affective experience as witnesses is “precipitated” by Christ’s words from the cross in the York “Crucifixio Christi.” Theater itself models the sociality of affect essential to medieval witnessing. If the performance of both lyric and drama is constructed by the audience and by the performers as well as by the script, then we cannot understand the author as an autonomous subject who expresses an equally autonomous affect. Just as we drew on the scholarly critique of the autonomous subjectivity of lyric, we can also build on recent scholarship on lyric authorship to theorize a performative model of dramatic authorship. Butterfield has shown that medieval lyrics have “networks of textual traces” that extend between languages, chronologies, and genres, in which groups of lines, couplets, and quatrains are “anonymously recycled.” Texts were often broken up into “citational fragments in order to re-­ assemble them in a . . . creative process.”114 The citation of lyric poetry in sermons and the inclusion of lyrics in commonplace books, such as Grimestone’s, which gathered materials from various sources, challenge the idea of a single author. In addition, the “o vos omnes” passage of Lamentations, commonly used in Passion lyrics, was part of the liturgy of Good Friday, showing a mobility between lyric and liturgical practices that illustrates the extent to which the lyric was embedded in larger institutional practices.115 By inserting the lyric into the play, York’s “Crucifixio Christi” also participates in the “networks of textual traces” and performative practices cued by the genre. The York plays deployed literary and cultural performative traditions tactically to promote a vision of legal affect in line with civic interests. The interpellation of the practices of lyric, liturgy, and legal witnessing into the York manuscript encourages a view of the plays as an affective practice that draws on and is shaped by existing formal and legal practices rather than as the style or product of an individual authorial sensibility. The strongest case for a single author of the York manuscript, known as the “York Realist,” was shaped by an acknowledgment of emotional engagement in the York Passion sequence. In a well-­known argument, Clifford Davidson claimed that the plays were characterized by a “kind of realism in which the smallest details become of intense interest and the source of emotional response.”116 In his reference to “emotional response,” Davidson pointed to the role of the audience in the affective practice



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of the play. An alternative to the association of affect with authorial style can be found in the paradigm of citing the practices of lyric and witnessing within the York Plays. As we saw in the previous chapter, the manuscript of the York Plays provides evidence for collaborative authorship and for the relevance of the affective habits of witnessing to the York Plays. The “register,” or manuscript of the plays maintained by the city corporation in about 1463–77, differs from the “Ordo Paginarum,” which records audience reception because it is based on the city clerk’s observations of annual performances of the plays.117 In addition, the later addition of elements—such as music—suggests a continual effort of revision in light of embodied sensory elements of performance as well as a process of compiling legal and dramatic records. The inclusion of the “Ordo” in the York Memorandum Books, along with records pertaining to the staging of the plays, shows a parallel between the processes of compiling legal records and the process of compiling dramatic records, and thus provides a context for understanding the plays as engaging the affective practices of medieval witnessing. This chapter has argued that the practice of witnessing, which was culturally central during the period in which the York Plays were staged, is crucial to understanding the affective experience of late medieval religious drama. In contrast to the private meditations outlined by Nicholas Love and others, the York Plays engage a legal model of witnessing that blends somatic aspects of firsthand experience with collective knowledge of character and reputation. Like the description of the emotions affecting a chain of testimony in Bracton’s treatise, the plays show how emotions are generated like capital, by circulating among people. The York trial plays construct their own audience as a community of neighbors acting as virtuous witnesses, like Malchus and the Beadle within the plays, who defend the law against corrupt ecclesiastical and royal authorities. The legal affect of witnessing, defined by the “neighborhood,” thus provides a new theory of late medieval religious drama that blends individual and social, emotion and perception. If we accept Richard Beadle’s point that “Jesus’s speech from the raised cross . . . forms the centerpiece of the pageant, and one of the climaxes of the cycle as a whole,” then the tactical act of witnessing, and legal affect that is part of that practice, are at the center of the York Plays.118 Just as the performative qualities of lyric are amplified when that lyric is in a play, so, too, the citation of lyric amplifies the performative qualities of drama and provides a vantage point for theatrical metacommentary. The York trial plays cite lyric practice and the cultural practice of witnessing, linking formal and legal practices. The words of Christ in the York “Crucifixio Christi” also provide a way to describe the

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performativity of affect and thus to consider the affect of dramatic practice. In other words, theatrical practice informs the affective practice of witnessing and helps construct legal affect. Medieval witnessing contributes both to the history of affect and—by providing a performative theory of affect—to the history of theater. Since medieval witnessing differed from the modern practice specifically in its open acknowledgment of the ways that individual affective experience shapes perception and is both collective and individual, it provides a key perspective from which to consider the history of affect. While recent scholarship on medieval affect has focused on piety, this chapter has suggested ways that even religious plays are shaped by secular models of affect as well as by devotional practices and traditions.119 We have also seen that legal affect played a role in shaping an affective practice that was at once individual and social, and that it was deployed tactically to promote civic values.

Chapter 4

Witnessing and Asynchronous Temporality

V. A. Kolve made an influential case for the temporal unity of medieval civic drama, characterized by an anachronistic and typological model of history that “stag[ed] the past as though it were largely identical with present time.” For Kolve, and for many subsequent critics, York’s “Doomsday” was paradigmatic of medieval drama because the “plays called Corpus Christi imitated all time.”1 Kolve argued that the temporality of the Corpus Christi drama should be understood theologically: “Time concerns us because we are alive in it and because God’s plan for redemption can be worked out only in its terms. But man’s real business is eternity, and the drama exists to remind him of that.”2 Taking the play Kolve saw as paradigmatic of medieval drama and of medieval concepts of temporality as my defining example, I argue in this chapter that York’s “Doomsday”—and medieval religious drama more generally—was not anachronistic but asynchronous and performed disjunctions of temporal scale.3 Identifying these disjunctions of temporal homogeneity shows the potential for medieval drama to function politically in the service of civic values. Central to understanding the temporality of York’s “Doomsday” is its legalistic focus on witnessing, which should be seen as a conjunction of asynchronous temporalities in the act of testimony. Among many meanings, to witness refers to the act of seeing and hearing a crime and also to the later act of testifying to ­ iddle those perceptions in court.4 The preoccupation with false witnessing in M English sermons, confessionals, and elsewhere, which I discussed in previous chapters, was essentially a concern about what can happen in the temporal gap between the initial act of observation and the subsequent testimony in a court of law to cause a difference between what was observed and what was reported. Medieval witnessing was a performative practice that spoke to past experience but always occurred in the present, bringing together at least two distinct

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temporalities. Witnessing is thus characterized by the asynchronous temporality Carolyn Dinshaw has described as “different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now.”5 Building on Dinshaw’s work, in my analysis of the complex temporalities of medieval witnessing, I also invoke the scholarship of modern memory theorists who emphasize that recollections are inevitably shaped by the subjective experience of the present moment of recollection. Thus, rather than, as in Kolve’s influential analysis, seeing the Last Judgment as a teleological “progress toward millennial release from time and history,” the centrality of witnessing to medieval representations of the Last Judgment alerts us to the possibility of seeing this central biblical event as part of a complex network of temporalities.6 The acts of bearing witness featured in the York “Doomsday” address the judgment of good and bad souls, of humanity for the collective crime of the Passion, and of Christian history. In my analysis of the play’s use of the Last Judgment to comment on collective identity and history, I draw on the work of Holocaust scholars such as Shoshana Felman, who argued that the theatricality of the public trial, whether for an individual or for a collective crime, plays a crucial role in the (re)shaping of history in the service of current local values.7 The focus of the York “Doomsday” on witnessing in the trial setting of the Last Judgment promotes a performative model of history in which different times touch and fold back on each other, complicating and unraveling paradigms of anachronism and typology. I argue that the York “Doomsday” deploys the asynchronous temporality of witnessing tactically to construct a Christian history that promotes the local power of the city of York.8 The complex asynchronies of medieval witnessing provide an implicit theory of the temporality of medieval drama. Theater is inherently iterative as plays vary each time they are performed. As Marvin Carlson has argued: “Performance, however highly controlled and codified, is never exactly repeatable.”9 As we saw in Chapter 2, differences between the 1415 “Ordo Paginarum” (included in the York Memorandum Books) and the form taken by the plays in the extant manuscript (1463–77) suggest not just variations between individual performances of the play but also shifts over a longer period of time.10 The unrepeatable nature of drama is exaggerated in the case of the York Plays’ annual performance on Corpus Christi Day and by the multiple performances of each pageant along the processional route, both of which add to the iterative nature of theatrical performance. Since pageants were performed simultaneously at different stations around the city, one moment of performance could correlate to multiple episodes in biblical



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time. In this way, the staging practices of the York Plays suggest that Christian history, which exists on the broadest temporal scale, is constantly remade in individual moments of “now.” Medieval drama does not feature “figural relationships between events”—what Erich Auerbach influentially called “vertical” time—or linear time but rather embraces a nonpurposive view in which history is constantly reshaped in the present and correlations between past and present are shifting rather than static.11 The asynchronous nature of medieval drama invites a tactical mode of interpretation that not only conveys theology but also promotes the city and an idealized image of the witness as citizen.12 Although performed annually on Corpus Christi Day in accordance with the liturgical calendar, the asynchronous temporalities of the York Plays exemplified by witnessing also link formal aspects of performance, legal procedure, and social life.13

Witnessing, Asynchrony, and the Last Judgment It is well known that the Last Judgment is frequently associated with legal culture in late medieval traditions. A colorful example is the demon Tutivillus in the Towneley “Judgment,” when he responds to the trumpet of Doomsday by showing the other demons his bag of “rolls” or parchments, full of writings recording the sins of unrepentant souls, and proudly announces that he is a “courte roller,” a clerk or scribe of a legal court.14 For drama scholar Lorna Hutson, the popularity of the figure of Tutivillus, whom she calls “the writing demon,” is emblematic of the “increasing use of writing as a form of legal evidence in English local and royal courts from the thirteenth century onwards.”15 The bad souls of York’s “Doomsday” briefly invoke this tradition by alluding to their “wikked werkis . . . / Appertely may we se þem wreten” (129, 132), referring to the memory technology of the written document. Many late medieval sermons and other accounts present this biblical event as a trial in which God the Father plays the role of chief justice, often presiding over a court that adheres to surprisingly contemporary procedures.16 This invites a consideration of how legal and theological paradigms of the Last Judgment constructed each other.17 Although Hutson and others have emphasized the documentary nature of evidence in the trial of humanity at the Last Judgment, witnessing, with its asynchronous temporality, is also central to the depiction of this biblical event. The Legenda Aurea’s account of the Last Judgment in the “Advent of Our Lord,” for example, features a sequence of witnesses. The text predicts that each person

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“will have three witnesses against him. One will be above him, namely, God who will be judge and witness: ‘I am judge and witness, says the Lord’ ( Jer. 29:23). Another will be . . . his conscience. . . . A third witness will be at his side, his own angel assigned to be his guardian; and the angel, knowing everything he has done, will bring testimony against him.”18 A sequence of verb tenses including future (“will have”), present (“I am”), and past perfect (“he has done”) is used to depict witnessing. In the last sentence, the depiction of the angel brings together two aspects of the Middle English word to “witness”: to know (“knowing”) and to testify (“will bring testimony”) in court. The former term suggests prior experience, while the latter refers to the subsequent reporting of that experience. The Legenda Aurea explicitly describes Judgment Day in temporal terms as the “moment” that “all the crimes and misdeeds of the condemned will then be known and manifest. . . . The case cannot be deferred. Nothing done there is subject to delay: everything will be accomplished in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”19 This passage illustrates what Penelope J. Corfield has termed “diachromesh,” a “seamless linking of the momentary with long duration,” a combination of synchronic and diachronic time, which she believes is essential to the human understanding of time.20 In this passage, the instantaneousness of final judgment (“in the twinkling of an eye”) is embedded in a diachronic account featuring the approach of this future event. The depiction of the witnesses who will testify at the Last Judgment illustrates “diachromesh” by portraying the instant in the future when the meaning of past events will be publicly revealed and future time is no longer possible. A Wycliffite Middle English sermon uses a similarly complex conjunction of temporalities in its comparison of earthly courts to the heavenly court of the Last Judgment: “Day of þe Lord is day of doom, whanne he schal iuge all maner men. Day of man is þanne heere, whonne man iugeþ by mannys lawe; and þis iugement mot be reuersud, ȝif it owt reuerse reson. But at þe laste day of doom al schal stonde to Godis iugement; and þus þis is day of þe Lord, for al schal be þanne as he wole; and þis iugement schal not be contraryed, for no þing may reuerse it” (my emphases).21 This passage not only uses a variety of verb tenses but also repeats the term “then,” which is an instance of temporal deixis, a word or phrase that shifts in relationship to the present time of the utterance. The passage expresses the superiority of divine law by characterizing God’s judgment as unchanging, in contrast to the potential of earthly law to be reversed and thus to change over time. This apparently simple opposition between timelessness and variability of earthly courts is complicated, however, by references to Doomsday in both future and present tenses. This is arguably an instance of “diachromesh,”



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because the day of doom is embedded in a framework of a diachronic narrative, with the first “whanne” marking the future time of Judgment Day, while the use of present tense to mark both present and future is synchronic. This shows that the Judgment Day was not imagined only in anachronistic comparisons to earthly courts or merely as a future event but as simultaneously engaging multiple models of temporality. Although the Last Judgment was consistently represented as occurring in the future, invoking a linear eschatological model of time, medieval devotional objects and literature frequently asserted that anticipation of the final judgment could affect the behavior of people in the present, suggesting a more complex interaction between periods of time. A passage inscribed on John Baret’s cadaver tomb at Bury St. Edmunds, for example, includes this direct entreaty to visitors: “Wt yor god prayeris I prey yu help me.”22 This inscription implies that the living reader can affect the future of someone who is already dead, and also ascribes agency to the dead man by suggesting he can affect the present moment from the grave. At Baret’s head, another inscription exhorts readers to contemplate the fact that only time separates them from the entombed, and encourages them to reform their present lives accordingly: “He that wil sadly beholde one with his ie / May se hys owyne merowr and lerne for to die.”23 Far from teleological, the tomb suggests both that the living can affect the dead, changing the meaning of the past, and that the dead can change the lives of the living by generating contrition in the present that can potentially lead to an improved moral practice of life in the future. Avery F. Gordon captures the potential immediacy of this reciprocal interaction between the living and the dead: “The need of the dead to be remembered and accommodated . . . is inseparable from the needs of the living. In other words, the ghost is nothing without you.”24 Countering Johan Huizinga’s famous characterization of the medieval cult of the dead as exemplifying the morbidity of the period, Eamon Duffy has argued that Baret’s cadaver tomb and other devotional objects—including tombs and donated objects that were dedicated to remembering dead patrons—were “a means of prolonging the presence of the dead within the community of the living,” with the goal of preparing for their own trials at Judgment Day.25 The repeated return of the dead in the lives of the living is evident, for example, in the obsequies celebrated for each departed soul on the seventh and thirteenth day after burial, and on the first anniversary, which were called the week’s, month’s, and year’s “mind” or remembrance.26 This suggests that concepts of time were integral to the iterative and asynchronous aspects of death practices and that these practices engaged a view of time in which the past could be made present and change the future.

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A deliberate parallelism between deathbed judgment and the final judgment of all humanity was common in sermons, devotional texts, and devotional objects, whereby the moment of death of an individual person was seen to anticipate Doomsday.27 For example, Thomas Wimbledon’s Redde rationem sermon includes this instruction: “For in what state so evere a mannes laste day fyndeþ hym whan he goþ out of þis world, in þe same state he bryngeþ hym to his dom.”28 In his study of late medieval eschatological literature, J. M. Moreau notes a familiar pattern in which “medieval audiences were reminded that God’s judgment is always present in everyday human interactions, and that the time of judgment is always now.”29 This formulation fulfills Dinshaw’s characterization of “asynchrony,” cited above, which she characterizes as “different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now.”30 It is well known that remembrance of the Passion was central to devotional texts seeking to generate contrition in readers and hearers; less well recognized is the frequency with which remembrance of the Passion was located at the Last Judgment, putting that process of remembering in a legal context. Immediately following a passage describing Christ’s account of the Passion in the Last Judgment, for example, the “Advent Sermon” in Mirk’s Festial situates that moment of testimony simultaneously at the end of time and in the earthly present. Alluding to the fact that people will regret swearing when they get to the Last Judgment, the sermon predicts: “þen sory may þay ben þat han be wond to swere by hys hert and oþur lymes of God.”31 The Second Coming of Christ was temporally complex, since it marked the future return of the Crucified Christ on earth, who then made the earlier events of his Passion present to earthly understanding. The sermon further complicates any linear sense of time—or any sense of cyclical time shaped by the liturgical calendar—by framing this account of the Second Coming as a restaging of the “þe furst coming of Crist into þys world,” as is appropriate for an Advent sermon.32 The same sermon describes the moment of the Last Judgment as it will occur in the future: “þen shal Ihesu Crist, very God and mon, come to þe dome wyth hys angeles and schewe hys wondes, fresch and new bledyng as þat day þat he deyed on þe cros. And þer schal þe crosse be al blody, þe spere, þe scorges, þe nayles and alle þe instrumentes of hys passyon.”33 Resembling the warning to swearers, this passage depicts a future time (“þen shal Ihesu”) in which past events (“þat day þat he deyed on þe cros”) will be remade in the present moment, when the wounds will be “fresch and new.” This paradigm in which the dead are given new life and in which the past comes alive in the present was crucial both to depictions of individual death and to representations of the collective judgment of humanity in the Last Judgment.



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The layering of temporalities of the “dom” (a term that refers to both ordinary trial and Last Judgment) resembles the ways modern scholars have theorized the temporality of memory.34 Jonathan Boyarin has argued: “Memory is neither something preexistent and dormant in the past nor a projection from the present, but a potential for creative collaboration between present consciousness and the experience or expression of the past.”35 Augustine’s well-­known formulation in the Confessions is strikingly similar to Boyarin’s description of memory in its emphasis on the ways that the past is experienced in the present moment. Augustine argues: “It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception; and the present of future things is expectation.”36 For Augustine, temporality is a function of individual consciousness rather than a public or shared experience. In this passage, all three times, including the past and future, are experienced in the minds of individuals in the present moment, suggesting that all three temporalities touch each other. By depicting the “present of things past” as “memory,” Augustine’s influential formulation resembles the claim by modern theorists that memory is a collaboration between present and past. Similarly, Mirk’s “Advent Sermon” exhorts individual listeners to consider the future and their own past behavior in the present moment by reflecting on the Last Judgment.37 On a larger scale, the Last Judgment, itself a collective return to the past for all humanity that will occur at a future moment, also relies on testimony consisting of memories of the past. Memory is integral not only to the Last Judgment but to all acts of witnessing, because it requires reporting an earlier experience or knowledge about the past in the present moment. Witnessing refers both to the act of perceiving a crime and to the later action of testifying about it in court, opening up a temporal gap that could be potentially filled by bad intentions. As we saw in the previous chapter, the authors of Bracton and other medieval legal theorists believed it was crucial to avoid a situation in which affect intervened in the truthfulness of testimony, as when “one neighbor accuses another through hatred and the like.” Medieval procedure allowed for jurors to be removed if there were “enmities between some of them and the indicted man.”38 Similarly, as we saw in Chapter 2, confessors embedded warning against false witnessing motivated by envy or covetousness in their discussions of the perils of false speech. These concerns from both confessors and legal theorists about false witnessing stemmed from the double temporality of witnessing.

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Witnessing engaged collective as well as individual memory. As we have seen, testimony need not be about what an individual has personally seen or heard; it could also be about what was collectively known or remembered by the community. In the words of the Fourth Lateran Council, there were cases in which “rumour provid[ed] the accusation and the outcry ma[de] the denunciation.”39 By definition “rumour” was information that had circulated among members of the community. This formulation fits the well-­known definition of “collective memory” by Maurice Halbwachs: “There is no universal memory. Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time.”40 Employing a more dynamic understanding of identity formation, Jonathan Boyarin builds on and revises Halbwachs’s work to argue: “Both collective memory and collective identity are . . . the effects of intersubjective practices of signification, neither given nor forced but constantly re-­created.”41 This suggests that the act of testifying by rumor would not only have drawn on the shared memory of the community but also have helped to constitute it as a community. The record of a marriage case in late medieval York articulates a similar connection between testimony and collective identity, based in the legal concept of testimony by public voice: “These things are true, public, notorious and manifest in the towns and places aforesaid and other surrounding places, and about these things before the present suit was brought, there was and is at work publica vox et fama” (my emphases).42 The phrase “publica vox” reminds us of the public and collective nature of testimony, which make it compatible with the concept of “collective memory” associated with “towns and places.” This passage supports the understanding of trials as drawing on and producing a shared memory that both creates a community (of enfranchised witnesses) and is a result of it. The above quotation associates witnessing with the delimitation in space (“in towns and places . . . and other surrounding places”) and time (“before the present suit was brought, there was and is”) that Halbwachs uses to define collective memory, while it also invokes the spatial association of witnessing with the neighborhood. The record refers to witnessing in both the past tense (“was,” “before”) and the present (“is”) tense. This record acknowledges a potential for collective understanding of past events to change even while it asserts that a consistency between past events and present moments of testimony is desirable. In addition to invoking the two meanings of witnessing as both the act of perception and later court testimony to those perceptions, depictions of witnessing at the trial of the Last Judgment engage both individual and collective memory, whereby events and experiences of the past are reconstituted in the present moment. As we will see, the York “Doomsday” demonstrates the



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centrality of the witness trial both to defining individual identity and to the acts of collective memory that we call “history.”

Witnessing in the York “Doomsday” The York play stages the “Last Judgment” as a trial, combining theological and legal meanings of witnessing, and engaging their complex temporalities. The play emphasizes the process of giving testimony, rather than the act of separating the good and bad souls. The act of division, often featured in contemporary accounts, is described only briefly by an angel over the course of eight lines (169–76). The York play’s preoccupation with time, and the close analogies between earthly and divine courts, are notable in contrast to other contemporary accounts of the Last Judgment, such as The Pricke of Conscience, which depicts God coming down “On þe erthe for to sitte in dome, / Bot up in þe ayre he sal sitte, / On a whyte cloude” in the “vale of Iosaphat,” which is “Bytwene þe mount of Olyvet / And Ierusalem, on þe other syde.”43 The Pricke of Conscience depicts God as a judge, but the emphasis is on space rather than time, and the details about the location serve to separate the heavenly court of the Last Judgment from any similarity to earthly legal procedure. Representing the Last Judgment as in some ways similar to an earthly trial, the York “Doomsday” depicts an angel bringing the souls to the Resurrection: “I am sent fro hevene kyng / To calle ȝou to þis grette assise” (93–94). “Assise” is a legal term specifically employed for courts deliberating civil actions such as land disputes. When the angels instruct the people to “rise and fecche youre flesh” (86), they simultaneously summon them to a court of law and articulate the theology of bodily resurrection. Medieval law required witnesses and accused to be physically present, just as medieval theologians taught that dead souls would be reunited with their bodies for judgment at the end of time. The double nature of the summons in the York play invites a consideration of interaction between these meanings of bodily presence and draws attention to the ways theology and law constructed each other. Invoking a familiar paradigm, the play uses the language of contemporary earthly court procedure in its portrayal of the Last Judgment. When the first soul responds by saying he must “come before þe high justise” (100), he casts God in the role of a judge, a connection confirmed by sound and motion as evident in the stage directions that instruct God to go to “the seat of justice” [ad sedem iudicij] with the song of angels. Reflecting the comparisons between earthly and heavenly courts common in sermons, God overtly contrasts His true

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justice to that of the corrupt earthly court that condemned Christ, referring to the time “whanne ȝe wer sette as sirs on benke” (327), while “I stode þeroute, werie and wette” (328). Although the York “Doomsday” depicts the Passion, which is sometimes seen as the result of the failure of the contemporary earthly legal system that condemned Christ, it also uses the terms of earthly courts to express the workings of God’s justice and to teach the theology of the Last Judgment, implying that earthly law has the potential to be deployed in the service of true justice. In the York “Doomsday,” even the bad souls understand the process of judgment as a legal trial, specifically as an act of bearing witness to the past: Before vs playnly bese fourth brought þe dedis þat vs schall dame bedene; þat eres has herde, or harte has þought, Sen any tyme þat we may mene, þat fote has gone or hande has wroght That mouthe hath spoken or ey has sene. . . . (161–67, my emphases) By emphasizing the perceptions of the senses—eyes, ears, and mouth—this passage refers to the legal idea of eyewitness testimony as based in firsthand sensory evidence. The presence of deeds themselves in court collapses the customary temporal gap between perception and reporting common to witnessing. The ascription of agency to the deeds (“þat vs schall dame bedene”) bypasses the human agency and memory that play a crucial role in earthly human acts of witnessing. In this passage, witnessing is a collective and intersubjective experience, drawing in the members of the audience to identify both as the “vs” subject to judgment and as those people who possess the senses that make them potential witnesses.44 The personal pronouns “vs” (used twice) and “we” create a grammatical collectivity of the accused that could potentially expand to include the audience. This effect of that collectivity is amplified by the personification of the deeds (which are the subjects of active verbs in this passage) as though people’s actions could accuse them without further agency, like the practice of witnessing by public reputation. In contrast to the penitential vocabulary of personification allegory employed in the morality plays to dramatize the inner workings of the mind, in the York “Doomsday” what “harte has þought” is made public to the community through the public testimony of the deeds in court.45 The description of deeds being “fourth brought” in material ways that can be experienced directly by the senses expresses a theatricality that alludes



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to the play’s own medium. When God instructs the angels to call “Leerid and lewde, both man and wiffe, / Ressayue þer dome þis day þei schall; / Ilke a leede þat euere hadde liffe, / Bese none forgetyn, grete ne small” (67–70), He addresses a diverse cross section of the community that invokes the audience. This passage resembles a number of others in medieval urban drama, like the opening of N-­Town’s “Trial of Mary and Joseph,” in which the audience are summoned simultaneously to the play and to the fictional court within it.46 The fact that the audience is implicated in the trial adds to the collective nature of the judgment. The audience members’ identification with the souls on trial at the Last Judgment would have been an asynchronous experience, in which they participated imaginatively in a present experience of an event to come in the future. God’s testimony to the virtues of the good souls toward the end of the pageant also demonstrates the unstable temporality of witnessing. As is characteristic of other late medieval accounts of the Last Judgment, rather than featuring the Apocalypse, God’s testimony is based on Matthew 25:31–46, which depicts the Corporeal Acts (or Works) of Mercy.47 Drama scholars often tie the invocation of these acts in the pageant to the guild that sponsored and staged it: the Mercers’ guild, the wealthiest and most powerful guild in medieval York. For example, Kate Crassons enlists York’s attention to the Corporeal Acts of Mercy in her argument that the play focuses on charity: “Locating Christ’s discussion of the works of mercy (Matthew 25) . . . within the actual moment of the last judgment, the pageant places special emphasis on the absolute importance of aiding the hungry, sick, and naked who make appeals for help. The Last Judgment thus shows that the criteria for salvation center around one’s response to poverty and need.”48 For Clifford Davidson, this passage is emblematic of the overall purpose of the pageants as a whole as expressed in a 1399 entry in the York Memorandum Books, which claimed that the purpose of the pageants was to be a “work of charity for the benefit of the said commons.”49 Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano argue that the Mercers’ pageant advertised the Mercers as “purveyors” of corporate charity that was potentially connected with their patronage of Trinity Hospital.50 These readings of the play are consistent with the work of historians who have documented a broader preoccupation with charity in the contemporary lay devotional practices of medieval York. For example, P. J. P. Goldberg noted the concern with charity in York wills, while Sarah Pederson observed the focus on charity in York stained glass.51 This evidence supports a reading of the pageant as an expression of a broad contemporary interest in ­charity as a devotional practice.

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In the opening of the York “Doomsday,” God links acts of witnessing to the civic value of charity and draws attention to the nature of His words as speech: Mi blissid childir, I schall ȝou saye, What tyme þis dede was to me done: When any þat need hadde, nyght or day, Asked ȝou helpe, and hadde it sone. Youre fre hartis saide þem neuere nay, Erely ne late, mydday ne none, But als ofte-­sithis as þei wolde praye, þame thurte but bide and have þer bone. (309–16, my emphases) The wording of the above passage ties charity and testimony together and associates both with shifting temporalities. This passage adds temporal markers—such as “ofte” and “never”—and the pairs of opposites “erely” and “late,” “night” and “day”—that are not found in the biblical passage in Matthew on which the York Christ’s speech is based.52 Indeed, the word “whanne” is frequently used in the York “Doomsday,” occurring seventeen times, along with a plethora of other temporal diction.53 The phrases “What tyme þis dede was to me done” and “I schall ȝou saye / What tyme” invoke the specificity of witnesses whose credibility is believed to be confirmed by their ability to recall specific times of the event for which they testify in medieval as in modern courts.54 These phrases might also point to a distinction between the memory of a past experience of time and the appropriate legal vocabulary for expressing that time in court. Paul Brand has shown that the degree of temporal specificity that was required of witnesses varied from one kind of court to another and depended on the kind of case being tried.55 Several of the modes of specifying time that Brand found in court records are in the York God’s speech, including the terms “midday” (one of several temporal terms referring to the motion of the sun) and “nyght” (one of Brand’s examples of broad temporal categories). Precise memory of time was crucial for witnessing, and the form of temporal expression was essential to effective testimony. Furthermore, God’s promise to specify, not in the moment of speaking, but in the future (“I schall ȝou saye”) the time at which the sin was committed adds to the temporal complexity. The demand for temporal specificity from witnesses and the centrality of time to medieval courts are potentially evident in a series of questions from the good souls in the pageant. After Christ enumerates the good deeds of the “blissid



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childre on my right hande” (277), even the good souls have a lot of questions. One good soul directly asks Jesus when exactly the good souls helped him: Whanne was’te þat we þe clothes brought, Or visite þe in any nede, Or in þi sikenes we þe sought? Lorde, when did we þe þis dede? (305–8, my emphases) The souls’ attempt to understand the process of judgment prompts Christ to play the role of a good witness by specifying the time when the event He mentioned occurred. This passage also portrays the souls’ difficulty in understanding the process of judgment as temporal confusion.56 Similarly, the bad souls each reply with an almost frenzied repetition of the term “when” (three times each in their four-­line speeches) (349ff., 353ff.). The first bad soul tries to understand the nature of the crime of which he is accused in these terms: Whan had þou, lorde, þat all thing has, Hungir or thirste, sen þou God is? Whan was [þat] þou in prisoune was? Whan was þou naked or herberles? (349–52, my emphases) This series of questions both allude to the acts of mercy and attempt to understand God in corporeal human terms. The questions are framed as being about time, rather than as direct theological questions, as if a specification of time would illuminate these larger abstract questions. God’s final speech begins by asserting these behaviors happened “ofte” (357) and ends by stating, “Nowe is fulfilled all my forþoght” (373). God validates the bad souls’ attempt to understand their sins in temporal terms but resists a teleological answer. The York “Doomsday”’s focus on the issue of specifying time depicts the heavenly court as materially resembling earthly legal process rather than as existing outside time. In contrast to the bad souls’ failure to recollect and understand the timing of past events, Christ’s testimony against the bad souls conveys temporal certainty. He begins by asserting, “I schall ȝou saye / What tyme þis dede was to me done” (310), and His speech concludes with three stanzas featuring “whan” as the first or second word. In this way, the play presents Christ as a reliable witness who can specify the time that the crimes of the accused took place. Unlike the

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souls being judged, in His clear understanding of the past Christ expresses His knowledge, a term etymologically tied to the word “witness” through the Middle English term “wit.” The focus on time in the play and the repetition of the question “when?” by the good and bad souls should also be seen in the broader context of the role of time in the civic culture of medieval York. Chris Humphrey has examined the depiction of time in guild ordinances contained in the York Memorandum Books and other local records and noted a blend of references to daylight hours and to clock time, as well as mentions of specific bells in the city. These include references to the bells of York Minster and St. Mary’s Abbey, church bells used in the regulation of secular labor, and references to the common bells installed on the Ouse Bridge and the Foss Bridge by the city. Humphrey argues that these common bells “gave the citizens the ability to ring times of common interest themselves,” providing an alternative to church bells. After the city acquired a clock in the late fourteenth century or early fifteenth century, that clock served as the reference point for the civic bells. Rejecting a system of “temporal hours” in which daylight and nighttime were divided into equal parts, York’s civic clock promoted hours of equal length, hours that were “‘of the clock’ and signaled by their own clock.” Humphries explains: “Here was a means of creating a new ‘mean time’ that was public and city-­owned, both for the practical purpose of organizing daily life and as symbolic of a distinctive urban identity.”57 The Common Clerk, who compiled the register of the York Plays, occupied an office adjacent to the Council Chamber on the Ouse Bridge, where the civic bell was located.58 Although the York “Doomsday” does not employ clock time, Humphrey’s work on the expression of time in the York Memorandum Books and other civic documents provides a context for understanding the depiction of the asynchronous time of witnessing in this play as a legalistic expression of civic identity. The York “Doomsday” draws on this contemporary view of civic time as expressed in the contrast between civic and church bells, associating the play’s preoccupation with time with civic values—including charity—and with contemporary ideas about the legal practice of witnessing. The play draws attention to the asynchronous nature of witnessing both in the earthly courts and in the Last Judgment. The ability of witnesses to remember the specific times that events occurred helped them appear reliable, while the form of expression of time reflects the varying degrees of specificity required by various legal courts, and also shows that legal practice and forms of language shaped each other. The “Doomsday” play emphasizes the theatricality of testimony, pointing to its nature as embodied speech performed before an audience and to its reliance on



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the ability to see and hear as well as report shared knowledge. As we will see, not only the text of the speeches in the play but even the theatrical medium itself reference witnessing, identifying it as a civic practice. The complexities of temporal instability draw both on legal practices and on the conventions of representing the Last Judgment, providing another example of the ways that theology and law constructed each other.

Lyric Passion Remembered Not only the civic practices of bell ringing but also the “perceptual practices” of lyric are central to the depiction of time and witnessing in the York “Doomsday,” and they help to highlight the role of form in theatrical and legal practices. As in the York “Crucifixio Christi,” Christ’s testimony in the York “Doomsday” invites a consideration of medieval lyric practice in the analysis of the temporalities of medieval drama. The inset Passion lyric in this pageant intensifies and draws attention to the performative repetitions and variations inherent in dramatic practice. The presence of Passion lyrics in both the “Crucifixio Christi” and the “Doomsday,” which are located at different times in the biblical story, creates a recursive effect. Noting the lyric form in York’s staging and restaging of the Passion in separate pageants, Woolf claims that the “complaint in York in particular effectively binds the Last Judgment to the Passion sequence.” Complaints of Christ at the Last Judgment are a familiar topic of lyrics and were often embedded in medieval sermons. Like the inset lyric in the “Crucifixio Christi,” many Complaints of Christ were based in the biblical text of Lamentations 1:12, and many of those were acts of witnessing by Christ at the Last Judgment.59 Woolf draws on the close relationship between the lyrics in these two plays to make a case for the centrality of recollection to the “Doomsday” pageant: “The plays usually begin with a complaint in which Christ for the last time recalls the sufferings that he endured for man” (my emphasis).60 By mentioning the “last time,” Woolf inserts memory into a purposive diachronic framework, but she also identifies Christ’s words in the York “Doomsday” as a recursive act of remembering. Christ’s testimony to the Passion is a public act of remembering that stages the multi-­temporality of witnessing in lyric form.61 Like His words from the cross in the Passion play, and like the passage from Lamentations 1:12 on which it is based, Christ’s lyric testimony in the York “Doomsday” features a direct address to a plural audience. At the end of a long speech addressing the failures of the bad souls, Christ says:

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Here may ȝe see my woundes wide, þe whilke I tholed for youre mysdede. Thurgh harte and heed, foote, hande and hide, Nought for my gilte, butt for youre nede. Beholdis both body, bak and side, How dere I bought youre brotherhede. þes bittir peynes I wolde abide, To bye you blisse þus wolde I bleede. (245–49, my emphases) As predicted in Mirk’s “Advent Sermon” mentioned above, Christ uses His body as present proof of humankind’s past misdeeds. To the extent to which His body is an object, it can function as material evidence in the courtroom, but here Christ’s body is also referenced in spoken testimony, which explicitly demands a response from the audience. As we saw in Chapter 2, Richard Moran argues that testimony is “categorically different” from evidence because it is grounded in this relationship between speaker and audience.62 The direct command to the audience, “Beholdis,” makes the witness’s demand for a response overt, placing a claim on the members of the audience and demanding their response to Him. This passage can be understood in terms of Stanley Cavell’s idea that “acknowledgment” of someone else’s pain “goes beyond knowledge . . . in its requirement that I do something or reveal something.”63 Christ’s command that the audience “beholde” His body also resembles the inscription on John Baret’s transi tomb, in its direct enlistment of the audience (“I prey yu help me”) to “beholde” his body in the present moment. Unlike the carved stone body on Baret’s stone tomb, the body of the actor playing Christ is potentially expressive and contributes to the relationship between speaker and audience in any given moment of performance.64 The use of the present tense in the passage above reminds us that the embodied and theatrical act of witnessing is not a repetition of a past event— or a figural, exegetical, or typological reference—so much as a remaking of the past in the present moment.65 This passage calls attention to the present moment through the present tense imperative “beholdis” but suggests that this present act can apprehend a past event (“How dere I bought”), and signal the beginning of a future action (“I wolde abide . . . wolde I bleede”). This remaking of the past in the present reflects Boyarin’s notion of the dual temporality of memory that I argued earlier was crucial to the process of testimony and provides an alternative to viewing this moment in the play as a reference to a theological age of mercy.66 Indeed, Christ’s testimony in both the “Crucifixio Christi” and the “Doomsday” invites the provisionary and tactical identification with the pronoun “you”



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that Ingrid Nelson has associated with the practice of medieval lyric.67 In the “Doomsday” pageant the audience is commanded to “see” and “beholdis” “here” Christ’s body as the material evidence of a past event. The second-­person subject position is constructed contingently in the moment of practice and in the space of local performance. Indeed, the audience might be seen as hailed into existence through its collective identification with the second-­person plural pronoun at the moment that the imperatives “you” and “those” are uttered.68 Although the Middle English does not distinguish second-­person plural and singular, the text would have been familiar from liturgical tradition in which the Latin “omnes” clearly signals plural and collective identity. Christ testifies to the past crimes against Him, while the members of the audience are simultaneously invited to witness by using their senses in the present moment. Their collective act of seeing the evidence of Christ’s crucified body, and hearing the words of His testimony, points to the ways that witnessing could blend individual perceptions with those of a larger collective, such as the neighborhood or local audience at a pageant station on the streets of medieval York. The audience members act as witnesses to Christ’s testimony against humanity, echoing Christ’s own role as a witness; this suggests that His testimony is a model for the audience members in their experience of the play. This passage thus blends in one moment two senses of witnessing that usually occur sequentially: the act of observation and the subsequent act of testimony in court, making time seem to fold back on itself. This passage also draws attention to the nature of testimony as embodied speech, which, as discussed in Chapter 2, is essential to both theater and legal witnessing. The emphasis on Christ’s body in His Last Judgment testimony instantiates the idea that witnesses must be physically present to speak at court. In his discussion of the Creation in his Confessions, Augustine comments on the temporality of speech: “It was speech with a beginning and an end. Each syllable could be heard and then died away, the second following after the first and the third after the second, and so on in sequence until the last syllable followed all the rest and then gave place to silence.”69 In this formulation, voice exists ephemerally in time at the moment that the words are spoken, making temporality crucial to the performance of both lyric and drama.70 Returning to Christ’s testimony in the “Crucifixio Christi,” we can see that even the words of that passage signal the specificity of its lyric temporality. When Christ hails “al men (th)at walkis by waye or street” and commands them to “beyholdes myn heede, myn handis, and my feet,” he continues by instructing, “And fully feele nowe” (256). The term “now” is a defining example of temporal deixis. Deictic meanings depend on context; they denote

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times that are relative to the moment of the utterance. Carolyn Dinshaw explains: “The problem with ‘now’ is that it’s . . . now. Or it is now. Or it’s right now. The denoted moment shifts, it slips, it is deferred, potentially infinitely, along an endless timeline of moments.”71 Temporal deixis is often found in Passion lyrics such as the inset lyric in Fasciculus Morum discussed in the previous chapter: Byholde, mon, what I dree, Whech is my payne, qwech is my woo. To the I clepe now I shal dye.72 In this passage the deictic term “now” refers alternately to “clepe”—that is, the act of speaking—or to the act of dying, suggesting an instability of temporal referent. The transitory act of speaking and the lyrics have their own time.73 All of this suggests a connection between the performative and asynchronous temporalities of lyric, witnessing, and theater. The action of judging in the court of the Last Judgment is associated in the York “Doomsday” both with the present moment and with temporal deixis. The bad souls say, “Now wakens all oure were!” (153, my emphasis), and later in the play Diabolus 3 says, “Now schall all þe soth be sought” (226, my emphasis). In one of God’s speeches the term “now” occurs in a description of the action of the play: þis woffull worlde is brought till ende, Mi fadir of heuene he woll it be; þerfore till erþe nowe will I wende Miselue, to sitte in magesté. To deme my domes I woll descende. (177–81, my emphasis) The temporal instability of “now” is emphasized by the fact that God’s speech begins in the present tense (“is brought”) but shifts to the future tense (“woll it be”), then to “nowe,” and then back to the future tense. A similar effect occurs in the repeated assertion that the Day of Judgment has arrived. For example, God asserts in his first speech: “þis day þer domys þus haue I dight” (79), and He later pronounces: “Comen is þe day of jugement” (235). The act of judgment is thus associated with temporal deixis, as the moment of judgment is alluded to at different times within the play. Furthermore, these two phrases indicate a shift in temporal scale from “now,” which is a moment, to a “day,” which, of course, contains multiple moments.



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Drama theorists such as Keir Elam have argued that the effect of deictic expressions is amplified in theater.74 This suggests that the instability of lyric temporality would be greater when Christ’s complaints were performed as part of a play. As I argued in Chapter 1, the processional staging of medieval drama drew attention to the spatial deixis of the drama as the material referents of terms such as “here” varied their meaning as a given play was staged at a series of locations around the city. The referents of deictic terms like “now” would have simultaneously shifted as the play was staged sequentially first in one place and then in another. The close connection between spatial and temporal deixis is expressed by Elam: “Dramatic discourse is always tied to speaker, listener and its immediate spatio-­temporal coordinates, but is at the same time dynamic to the extent that the participants and the time and location of utterance indicated undergo continual change” (my emphases).75 In this passage, Elam indicates a continual tension between the time referenced by the words of the actor and the time experienced by the audience. More specifically, Elam argues that dramatic discourse is composed of “interpersonal dialectic” achieved by “references by the speakers to themselves as speakers, to their interlocutors as listener, addresses and to the spatio-­temporal coordinates (the here-­and-­now) of the utterance itself by means of such deictic elements as demonstrative pronouns and spatial and temporal adverbs” (my emphasis).76 Elam’s formulation suggests that spatial and temporal deixis build on each other; as we will see, Elam’s work helps theorize the spatial and temporal deixis of the practice of medieval witnessing. We have already seen lyric practice at work in the York Christ’s testimony to the Passion in the “Crucifixio Christi.” Similarly, in the “Doomsday” pageant, lyric and dramatic practices engaged shared “habits of perception” among viewers and listeners. As Seeta Changati has argued, the “perceptual practices” of one medium can be brought to bear on other “collaborative media,” and “habits of perception” can be experienced “across medial categories.”77 Similarly, the verbal and material components would have interacted within theatrical practice. The “Mercer’s Indenture,” a document dated 1433, lists the unusually elaborate props and technology used in the staging of the “Doomsday” play, including “vij grete Aungels halding þe passion of god,” presumably the instruments of the Passion.78 Although these tools are not mentioned in the words of the York Christ, references to them were common in lyric Complaints of Christ. A lyric from John Grimestone’s Commonplace Book, for example, refers to these instruments of the Passion: “þe nailes, þe scourges & þe spere, / þe galle, & þe þornes sarpe— /Alle þese moun witnesse bere.”79 In the York “Doomsday,” these instruments would have also functioned to “witnesse bere” by providing material evidence

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to the past action of the Crucifixion, supplementing the verbal testimony of Christ.80 This raises the question of when this material evidence appeared in relationship to the timing of the verbal testimony spoken by the actor playing Christ. Did the tools used in the Passion appear before, after, or during the speech? Any disjunction between the timing of the presentation of material and verbal testimony would have added to the already complex mix of temporalities. Although the visual effects of medieval drama are often compared to contemporary paintings, the Mercers’ document reminds us of the importance of movement in embodied dramatic performance, and of the ways it undoubtedly produced additional temporal asynchrony.81 The lyric forms of Christ’s Complaints in the York “Doomsday” and the “Crucifixio Christi” may have also invoked a different kind of movement through their association with the practices of dance.82 Other items listed in the “Mercer’s Indenture” provide evidence of some of the most dynamic and complex medieval stagecraft on record, including a “brandreth of Iren þat God sall sitte vppon when he sall sty vppe to heuen” and “a lang small corde to gerre þe Aungels renne aboute ij shorte rolls of tre to putte forthe þe pageant.”83 The play’s unusual special effects would have provided the potential for a temporal disjunction between visual and verbal media. Chaganti has argued that “temporal ambiguity exists not exclusively in the difference between one medium’s time and another; rather, their interactions multiply those instabilities of time.”84 As we have seen, this “temporal multivalence” is also crucial to testimony, because it relies on memory, in which the past is remade in the present moment, and, as we will see, to theater, which is itself an iterative and recursive practice.85

Theater as Return In addition to the temporal complexity generated by the multimedia elements, the York “Doomsday” presents the possibility that theater itself resembles and has the complex temporalities of a memento mori. Near the end of God’s opening speech is a passage that closely resembles Baret’s tomb in its suggestion that contemplating one’s future death and judgment can ameliorate present behavior. God says: Men seis þe worlde but vanité, ȝitt will no manne beware þerby;



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Ilke a day þer mirroure may þei se, ȝitt thynke þei noȝt þat þei schall dye. (49–52) This passage uses the visual image of a “mirroure” that viewers can look at to experience their own mortality.86 To some extent this image resembles the one in the sermon for funerals in Mirk’s Festial, which uses the mirror to exhort listeners to examine their own lives. In this sermon, the mirror refers to a corpse: “As ȝe alle [se]n, here is a myrroure to vs alle: a corse browth to þe chyrch.”87 In the York God’s speech, by contrast, the mirror is not a material object, such as an effigy or corpse, but the “day” of judgment.88 The passage suggests that contemplation of a temporal category can instigate remorse and contrition, and, by implication, that the play itself, with its staged acts of witnessing, can change the course of the audience members’ lives by reminding them of their own immanent death and subsequent judgment. Similarly, Bracton’s On the Laws and Customs of England states the reason for writing the treatise in terms strikingly similar to depictions of the Last Judgment: The general intention is to treat of law that the unskilled may be made expert, the expert more expert, the bad good and the good better, as well by the fear of punishment as by the hope of reward, according to this [verse]: Good men hate to err from love of virtue; The wicked from fear of pain.89 In this passage, law serves a pedagogical purpose that resembles that of dramatic depictions of the Last Judgment: by encouraging people to improve their behavior in the present out of anticipation of future judgment.90 The passage above and God’s opening summary of Christian history that precedes it imply that drama enables a return to past actions. The recursive nature of the theatrical medium is aptly illustrated by an often-­quoted passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Referring to the ghost of King Hamlet, Marcellus asks: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” Theater theorist Freddie Rokem argues that Marcellus’s question “implies that the repressed ghostly figures and events from that (‘real’) historical past can (re)appear on the stage in theatrical performances. The actors performing such historical figures are in fact the ‘things’ who are appearing again tonight in performance. And when these ghosts are historical

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figures they are in a sense performing history.”91 By this logic, all the actors in the York Plays can be seen as ghostly figures who represent the biblical past and have the potential—as the ghost of Baret expressed in his cadaver tomb—to encourage the members of the audience to decide in the present moment to alter their future behavior. This effect of ghostly return would be amplified by the return of a previously crucified Christ within the “Doomsday” pageant to testify to his own death. Similarly, the good and bad souls who are on trial in the play have also returned from the dead in accordance with the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Marvin Carlson builds on Rokem’s work to argue that “ghosting” is essential not only to the representation of historical figures in plays but also to the theatrical medium itself. Carlson argues that both actor and “all the accoutrements of theater” are “appearing again tonight at the performance” and that these “are the ghosts that have haunted all performances.”92 The passage from the York God’s speech cited above is not just analogous to momento mori; the medium itself is also ghostly. In the York “Doomsday” both the lyric restaging of the Passion by Christ and God’s testimony to Christian history that precedes it engage in a ghostly return of the past in the present through the words of testimony and also through the theatrical medium. Alice Rayner has described theater in terms strikingly like medieval momento mori. She writes, “Theatre itself is a ghostly place in which the living and the dead come together in a productive encounter. Theatre is thus fundamentally a human space where we humans encounter not only the dead who have gone before but also the images of our own mortality.”93 Building on the work of Herbert Blau, she argues that “the actor embodies and gives life to a nonliving thing and essentially erases the differences between the living and the dead to produce an uncanny spectacle in which the animate and inanimate coalesce.”94 Ghosting is not so much a representation of the “identical thing that [audiences] have encountered before” as an uncanny invocation of the realm of uncertainty itself. For Rayner, ghosting is not an object that can return but a “form of consciousness.”95 Although her formula resembles Augustine’s characterization of past, present, and future as all experienced within the mind, she acknowledges the nature of theater as a public performance in which audience experience is both individual and collective. The temporal dynamics Rayner describes in her work on modern theater become even more complex in medieval drama because of the processional staging, which allowed for multiple simultaneous performances around the city of York on Corpus Christi Day. As discussed in Chapter 1, the material referent



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of spatially deictic terms like “here” would have changed from one street to the next. At the same time, the meaning of temporally deictic terms like “now” would have changed as the “Doomsday” pageant was staged sequentially at designated stations along the pageant route, simultaneously producing temporal as well as spatial locality. A viewer staying at one station all day would have experienced the biblical episodes diachronically.96 By contrast, a viewer who wandered around the city could have experienced the pageant in a in a nonlinear sequence that did not trace the purposive narrative of Christian history. The processional staging also meant that each individual pageant, such as the York “Doomsday,” which takes place in the imagined time of the future, would have been played at the same time as pageants depicting past moments in the biblical narrative, such as “The Building of the Ark” or the “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgment.” The deictic “now” articulated several times in “The Entry into Jerusalem” (lines 384, 403) might have been spoken simultaneously—or slightly before or after—a “now” in the “The Fall of the Angels” pageant (25, 153), producing the potential for a shifting sequence of synchrony. Perhaps the “now” spoken by Christ in the “Crucifixio Christi” could have been spoken at the same time as the “now” of His testimony in the “Doomsday” pageant. Even the possibility of such an occurrence destabilizes any clear temporal progression, including the linearity of eschatological time, and points to the fundamental asynchrony integral to the performance of the York Plays. The effect of such multiple temporal convergences and divergences would have been heightened in relationship to “Doomsday,” since that play not only recalls Christ’s complaint from the cross in the “Crucifixio Christi” but, in its opening summary of Christian history, also restages all of the other pageants that had been and were being performed in the streets of York that day. This play and the processional staging of the pageants suggest that drama embraces a model of history that is constantly being remade in moments of temporal locality. The emphasis on the present moment “now,” which points to a local and contingent experience, occurs within the broader framework of Christian history and in the broader context of the liturgical calendar’s feast of Corpus Christi, when the pageants were performed annually.97 In both of these ways, the plays would have produced disjunctions of temporal scale. The York Plays’ mapping and remapping of the Christian story onto the civic time and space of the medieval city of York over the course of the day would have called attention both to temporal scale jumping and to the temporal asynchrony in which its own medium plays a central role.

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Witnessing as Asynchronous History The structure of the “Doomsday” play demonstrates the role of witness trials in the construction of public history and shows how public history can be constructed—like the York Memorandum Books—for local use in the space and time of medieval York. The play begins with God’s narration of the story of Creation, the Fall, Christ’s descent to earth, the Passion, and the Harrowing of Hell. This narrative touches on and returns to many of the episodes depicted in other York Plays, including the “Crucifixio Christi,” and ends with the Second Coming; in this way the pageant gives a brief recapitulation of previous episodes that brings the audience up to date before the main action of the play and condenses those earlier episodes to a smaller scale, making this pageant a diminutive, if powerful, version of the whole compilation of episodes that constitute the York Plays.98 Just as Christ bears witness to his own experience of the Passion in the inset lyric, the play as a whole is shaped by God’s larger scale story, which also serves as His testimony to the crimes of humanity. By linking God’s recollection of the history of the world from Creation to Doomsday to witnessing, the speech makes the trial proceedings part of a broader temporal framework and invites us to consider the witness trial’s role not only in telling the stories of individuals but also in making a local history for the city. Although the temporal complexities and disjunctions quickly become evident, the “Doomsday” begins by framing its content—and biblical history itself— as a large-­scale purposive narrative, not as an expression of divine timelessness. God says: Firste when I þis worlde hadde wroght— Woode and wynde and wateris wan, And all-­kynne thing þat nowe is oght— Fulle wele meþoght þat I did þanne. (1–4) Alluding to the “worlde” and “all-­kynne thing,” the first lines situate the action of the play on a global scale. “Firste” establishes an expectation of a long narrative that will enumerate individual events sequentially, while the first four lines establish a correlation between narrative and global perspectives. The expectation of sequential narrative is soon thwarted, however, as God’s past action, when He “þis worlde hadde wrought,” is immediately put into dialogue with the present through the deictic term “nowe.” This creates a vertigo of disjunctive temporal scale as the longue durée of Christian history is juxtaposed with the



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instantaneous moment of “nowe,” which has passed—and become “past”—by the time the term itself is spoken. Simultaneously, this disjunction can also be seen as a reference to the continuing presence of God’s Creation since its inception so long ago. “Nowe” is immediately contrasted with another temporally relational term, “thane,” as God asserts that He used to think He did well in creating the world but no longer holds this view. The density of temporal markers (“firste,” “whenne,” “nowe”) (1, 5, 9, 3, 54, 55) and tense shifts (“I . . . hadde wrought,” “he wende,” “men seis,” “I haue tholed”) (1, 17, 49, 57) throughout God’s speech places Creation in a realm of shifting temporalities, and changing temporal scales, rather than in a stable or abstract realm of timeless eternity. Any sense of the transcendence of time is undermined by shifting meanings of “now” throughout the play. First associated with Creation, by the end of the play, “now” is attached to the Last Judgment, and thus with ending rather than with beginning: “Nowe is fulfilled all my forþoght,” says God, “For endid is all erthely thyng” (373–74). The finality of the Judgment, which correlates to an eschatological and linear understanding of time, is undermined by its iteration multiple times during the course of the play, producing a sense that even the completion of judgment is constantly being recreated. Before the angels’ summons, God says: “The tyme is comen I will make ende” (64), while the last stanza of the play begins with God asserting: “Nowe is fulfillid all my forþoght” (373). The play calls attention to the ways that “now” is always redefined by context; some time would have passed between the actor speaking the first and last “now” in the play, but obviously not as much as the span of time being described in that speech, which ranges from the beginning to the end of time. The play thus engages a disjunction between the time it takes to tell the story (what Seymour Chatman has called “discourse time”) and the time taken for the events in the narrative to transpire (Chatman’s “story time”).99 In this case, the “discourse time” of God’s speech would have been radically shorter than the long history from Creation to Doomsday that he traces in it. The temporal complexities of God’s speech would have been amplified by the insertion of this discourse into a performative context.100 In the case of the York “Doomsday,” God’s story of the past serves as a prologue for the rest of the play, which takes place in the future. This temporal complexity is compounded by a tension fundamental to theater between the perception or physical sensation of time experienced by the audience and the representation of time within the play. Using a broad account of Christian history to begin a play depicting the Last Judgment suggests that the witness trial participates in the making of history. Like the witnesses in ordinary earthly courts, the figures of God and Christ

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in this final pageant remember and publicly bear witness to earlier events in the court of the Last Judgment. Making a similar connection, Walter Benjamin famously argued that crimes are constitutive of history. Just as inscriptions on medieval tombs and religious objects ask the living to remember their donors in prayer, so, for Benjamin, history is a haunting claim that the dead have on the living to remember them and protect them from misappropriation: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”101 His view of history is reminiscent of Baret’s transi tomb and of medieval perpetual chantries in its characterization of the ongoing ghostly interaction between past and present, and in his view of history as flashes of memory, rather than as a static or objective record. Benjamin’s historiography is ultimately eschatological; he claimed that “only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour—and that day is Judgment Day.”102 The York Plays use Judgment Day as an occasion for investigating the role of the witness trial in reconstructing history in the present moment. Benjamin’s view of the past as fully “citable” only on Judgment Day traces the logic of the model of history staged in the Corpus Christi drama in which all previous pageants are cited in the York “Doomsday.” Shoshanna Felman builds on Benjamin’s work to argue that law is “an organizing force of the significance of history” and that trials are a mechanism through which law stages the (re)creation of that history.103 We have seen that legal witnessing relies on individual and shared memory of the past that is (re)shaped by the present moment. For Felman, trials are “theater[s] of justice” that deploy “collective memory” and can fundamentally change what constitutes history.104 She argues that even a trial of an individual’s private life, such the O. J. Simpson case, engages larger national histories, such as the histories of battered women and African Americans in the United States. Similarly, Felman argues that the Eichmann trial, in which multiple individual witnesses testified to the collective crimes of the Holocaust, was a “conscious legal effort” to give Holocaust victims “a voice and a stage” through which a “collective story” can be created.105 This view suggests that the trial stages an enactment of “collective memory” that potentially (re)forms a group and its history. Reflecting on the turn away from seeing history as objective, Peter Burke says: “Current studies of the history of history writing treat it much like Halbwach treated memory, as the product of social groups such as . . . Benedictine monks, university professors and so on.”106 Allan Megill encourages us to take this one step further, by arguing for attention



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to the “project of constructing memory with a view to constructing identity itself.”107 Taking these ideas together, we can see that the trial engages a process of shared memory making that is central to the construction of history; both history and memory construct and are constructed by social groups and identities. The York “Doomsday” draws attention to the ways that witness trials publicly engage with the memory of individual witnesses and with the “collective story” that forms and is formed by a shared civic identity. This vision of the trial as a collective act of remembering is expressed at the end of God’s opening speech in the York “Doomsday,” in a passage that emphasizes the inclusivity of the Judgment. When God instructs the angels to summon people to the Last Judgment, He says: Ilke a creatoure for to call, Leerid and lewde, both man and wiffe, Resseyue þer dome þis day þei schall; Ilke a leede þat euere hadded life, Bese none forgetyn, grete ne small. Ther schall þei see þe woundes fyve þat my sone suffered for þem all. (66–72) Through the repetition of the term “ilke” and the catalogue of opposites— learned and “lewde,” great and small—this passage emphasizes the comprehensiveness of those summoned, identifying the trial with inclusivity of the diverse urban population. With “þei” and “all,” the second portion of the passage suggests that all will be witness to the evidence of Christ’s testimony and that all are complicit in the condemnation of Christ. In this way, York’s “Doomsday” recognizes testimony as participating in a paired process of constructing history and collective identity for the city of York.

Temporality and the Citizen as Witness The York “Doomsday” shows the role of the trial in shaping Christian history to the values of the contemporary city of York, tactically promoting civic values. In the York “Doomsday,” the performative nature of the trial is crucial to its role in a view of history as politically dynamic rather than static.108 Building on the work of Victor Turner, an anthropologist whose work is often enlisted to theorize medieval drama’s deployment of eucharistic symbolism to enact a

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sacramental vision of corporate civic community, Mark Osiel, in his study of recent trials for mass atrocity, argues instead that public trials are “social dramas: cultural performances involving the wholesale disruption, self-­examination and reconciliation of a society by means of legal or other ritual procedures.”109 Osiel sees the trial as a secular ritual that is not doctrinal but instead enables social change. Just as memory revisits past events in the present, in public trials, societies and groups do not simply reconfirm existing values; they reconstruct their identities in the trial. Osiel argues that public trials look “to the past to provide the narrative content of what is to be shared in memory” but are also “directed to the future, where enhanced solidarity is sought.”110 He articulates a view of trials that puts their asynchronous temporality—uniting past and future in the present moment—at the center of politics. The York “Doomsday” demonstrates that the complex temporalities of the public witness trial provide an alternative to eucharistic and corporeal models for understanding the construction of civic identity in the late medieval period and helps us theorize the distinctive performativity of drama itself.111 The centrality of legal concepts of temporality to this civic drama suggests that constructions of time might be as essential as space to medieval ideas of the city and the citizen.112 In addition to showing the role of trials in making shared local history, the York “Doomsday” highlights the role of witnesses in practicing citizenship. We saw in earlier chapters that the public and affective practice of witnessing was poised between individual and collective, as witnesses could testify to what they had personally seen and heard, or what they had heard from others, and witnesses were defined socially as “neighbors.” Although all of humanity is on trial at the Last Judgment, citizenship is represented in the play by the practice of legal witnessing as modeled by God and by Christ, who is both an individual and an embodiment of the Christian community. By portraying citizenship as witnessing, the play defines the city through the social bonds between individuals and neighbors, and through performative social practices, rather than through material walls or fixed boundaries. By representing Christ as a citizen and witness, the play also focuses on the practice of embodied public speech.113 To be sure, the depiction of Christ and God as idealized witnesses reflects a standard belief that, in the words of the authors of Bracton, “Justice proceeds from God . . . justice lies in the Creator,” but, as we have seen, the play depicts the moral force of law in specific terms.114 Christ’s testimony to the Passion and God’s testimony to the larger scale of Christian history dignifies witnessing as an admirable and moral practice. In contrast to the ordeal outlawed by the Fourth Lateran Council, in which God played a material role in the determination of justice in the earthly



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courts, the York “Doomsday” play shows God’s own justice enacted in the legalistic terms and practices of those courts.115 Like the “Entry into Jerusalem,” this final play does not emphasize royal legal prerogative by depicting God and Christ as kings, despite the designation of the common law as the “king’s law” and the church’s jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical courts.116 The “Doomsday” play and other York Plays elevate the figure of the witness, rather than that of the lawyer, showing law as a tool accessible not just to those in positions of authority but also to a broader range of enfranchised citizens who might use the law to obtain justice.117 As we saw in earlier chapters, the ecclesiastical lawyers Annas and Caiaphas, and the rulers Pilate and Herod, are the villains, not the heroes, of the plays’ legal story. Although a certain degree of social status was required to testify in court, the play judges good and bad souls, featuring moral rather than social hierarchies in its depiction of the witness trial. “Doomsday” suggests that both within and outside the biblical story the enfranchised citizen could participate in the formation of local history and civic community through public testimony. In these ways, the York Plays engage the temporalities of the practices of drama and legal witnessing tactically to promote the local values of the city and the citizen. In addition to the temporal construction of legal witnessing and dramatic practices, as Michel de Certeau has argued, “a tactic depends on time.”118 He explains that “tactics are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time—to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action.”119 Certeau’s theory is relevant to the possibility of political transformation and also to the ways iterative performances of witnessing and theater can produce alterations to space that might occur in a small-­scale “instant” but produce broader alterations to a “situation” over time. De Certeau’s concept of tactics is relevant to the ways that the iterative and asynchronous nature of the performative practices of witnessing and theater can enable change through complex interactions between smaller and larger scales of time. As we have seen, York was defined by through legal jurisdiction granted by the charter, inviting a consideration of the York Plays’ asynchronous temporalities and their mapping of Christian history onto the city streets in that local and legal context. York’s civic franchise, as we saw in Chapter 1, encompassed the whole city, and the citizens paid a yearly fee to the king for it. The boundaries of the city were defined not only by the walls themselves but also by the city’s charter, which gave legal jurisdiction to the space inside the walled city and also

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included some additional city parishes and some open tracts of land to the south and west.120 By mapping the large-­scale time of biblical history onto the much smaller time frame of the performance of the plays within the jurisdiction of the city over the course of a day, the plays make bearing witness a civic expression of local legal history. The plays suggest that it is a civic duty and a moral obligation to act as a witness, thereby participating in local governance. Despite parallels between legal witnesses and the members of the audience of the plays on the streets of the city, in practice not all those in the audience were citizens or potential witnesses or jurors. As we saw in Chapter 3, the exclusion of these people from testifying—such as slaves, domestics, poor people, children—shows that witnessing was not an inclusive practice that empowered any able-­bodied person capable of seeing, hearing, or knowing the business of neighbors; it required a degree of social status as well.121 In fourteenth-­century York the civic franchise extended to only between a quarter and a third of adult males.122 Although immigrants were considered free once they had lived within the boundaries of the city for a year and a day, freemen were not automatically citizens; they had to take a formal oath. The oath of citizenship in fifteenth-­ century York was made to “my lord mair Chamberleyns & gude men,” reflecting the idea that citizenship itself was both elite and inclusive.123 When York’s mayor and aldermen petitioned Richard II in 1393 seeking their elevation to the position of justices of the peace, their request was made in the name of “fellow citizens” (concitezeyns), a term that formed a community out of elite and non-­elite citizens.124 Similarly, witnesses were meant to be respectable people who spoke on behalf of the neighborhood and local urban community. It is in this context that we should understand the York Plays’ depiction of witnessing as a civic duty and a contribution to local history. Like the York Plays, the York Memorandum Books deploy a legal and performative model of history in the service of civic values. They include a custumal, the city’s own codification of customs that grew out of local needs, records of the mayor’s and sheriff ’s courts, and civic charters that granted jurisdiction to the city over local courts, guild ordinances, and multiple entries about the pageant plays themselves. As is well known, the York Memorandum Books have been used by scholars of medieval drama as a resource for discussing the York Plays’ relationship to civic government, merchants, and artisans. As we have seen, however, the York Memorandum Books can also be regarded as a legal compilation for local use. Similarly, the plays themselves, also documented in the same books, can be seen as a compilation of biblical history for local consumption. This compilation



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of dramatic and legal records—both records of performances—were kept in the guildhall and testify to events that occurred over a range of time. Like the Corpus Christi pageants themselves, the compilation does not tell one coherent story but works through fragments of individual trials and other legal documents. Although loosely organized chronologically, there are multiple instances in the York Memorandum Books where that temporal system is disrupted, as, for example, where a “quitclaim of certain tolls” from 1253 is found after an “ordinance of the Plasterers” from 1390 and before a document from “1401/2.”125 Furthermore, the compilation invites a tactical practice because the smaller units of documentation make them modular, and readable in different orders, and allow local variations in their relationships to the normative institutions of law, guilds, and government. At the same time, the recorded events were performed locally, and their records were collected together and kept in the guildhall for the benefit of the city. This indicates that the York Memorandum Books present a “legal memory” (to use Ralph Hanna’s term) for the city of York, rather than promoting national unity or a larger-­scale image of the Christian community. As Osiel has argued, “myths of founding and refounding” of nations can “often center on legal proceedings or the drafting of legal documents,” such as the Magna Carta (for Britain), the trial of King Louis XVI (for France), and the Declaration of Independence (for the United States).126 We can see the York Plays, and the York Memorandum Books, in their shared focus on the construction of the city of York through the public practice of civic witnessing in this context. Both in the York Plays and in the York Memorandum Books the use of legal proceedings to construct community functions on a smaller scale as the citizen is defined in relation to the city and to the local neighborhood, rather than to the nation. As we saw in Chapter 1, witnesses were neighbors who defined space locally through collective and individual acts of perception, not through collective identification as subjects of the realm.127 A native English tradition of citizenship grounded in the legal practice of witnessing can be found in the plays and in civic documents, providing an alternative both to the classicizing tradition of citizenship found in Italian republicanism often featured by historians and to the corporate imagery that has been at the center of medieval drama studies. Christian D. Liddy has argued that in England “citizenship was a concept and a practice peculiar to towns and cities” and was found in civic documents. Citizenship provided an alternative to civic humanism, which was felt more in a monarchical context, and to recent scholarly views of the medieval city as defined by community, oligarchy, or populism.128 As we have seen, the

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June 7, 1417, ordinance from the York Memorandum Books provides evidence of the fact that the York Plays were seen by medieval contemporaries to perform citizenship. The ordinance states that “all the pageants of the play called Corpus Christi should be maintained and brought forth in their order by the crafts of the said city for the benefit of the citizens of the same city . . . and for the profit of the said citizens” (my emphasis).129 The use of legal witnessing in the York Plays to promote civic values engages this concept of citizen that was present in the civic documents and seen at the time to be expressed in the plays. Indeed, the concept of citizenship helps explain why legal and dramatic documents were found together in the York Memorandum Books. The use of medieval concepts of witnessing to promote civic values was both specific to York and part of a larger culture of witnessing in late medieval England. When Lateran IV outlawed ordeals, it paved the way for the increased use of the witness trial. We have seen that legal witnessing provides a theory of drama that highlights the performative roles of local spaces like the civic neighborhood, of speech acts, of asynchronous temporality, and of a legal affect that was poised between individual and social experience. Conversely, the York Plays reveal the performative nature of the legal practice of witnessing. As I indicated in the Introduction to this book, I have taken York and the York Plays as my case study because the relative power of this large northern city in relationship to monarchical authority made it especially hospitable to a view of the medieval witness as citizen. Because of the relative power of York, people were able to imagine the citizen apart from the subject, and city as distinct from the realm that contained it. The York Plays recognize the ways that legal witnessing can be deployed to bolster a growing civic authority. Similarly, although the degree of interest in legal concepts, specifically legal concepts of witnessing, are unusual in the York Plays, those interests can be found to a lesser degree in the dramatic compilations from other urban centers of the period. In other words, the York Plays are both a representative and a best example of a broader cultural concern with the practice of witnessing in England in the late Middle Ages. This English tradition of witnessing is relevant to modern American notions of citizenship in which bearing witness to a variety of social ills, whether through social media or the courtroom, is seen as a potential means of social change. One need not look further than the television set to find evidence of our long-­running interest in witnessing and recognition of the intimate relationships between the performative nature of drama and courtroom.130 The relatively recent phenomenon of recording by cell phone the violations of human rights by police provides ongoing evidence of the ways that law and media shape each other—and of the



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ways they both complicate boundaries between public and private, individual and communal practices— arguably formulating and reformulating the meaning of citizenship. As in contemporary America, when social media platforms operate politically, media, form, and content interact in the portrayal of legal witnessing in medieval drama. Medieval legal concepts of witnessing provided a theory for contemporary drama, while the York Plays showed the ways that legal witnessing was itself a kind of civic drama.

Notes

Introduction 1. Alex Horton, “Christine Blasey Ford says her Kavanaugh testimony ‘was simply doing my duty as a citizen,’ ” Washington Post, November 18, 2019. 2. The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, ed. Richard Beadle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 and 2013 for 2011), vols. 1 and 2, EETS s.s. 23 and 24. All quotations are from this edition and are cited in the text. 3. Influential examples of scholarship on the devotional aspects of drama include: Pamela M. King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 2006), Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in The York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1984). One article that does address legal witnessing in the drama is Olga Horner, “‘Us must make lies’: Witness, Evidence and Proof in the York Resurrection,” Medieval English Theatre 20 (1998): 24–76. On the relationship between drama and law, see especially Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) and The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the trial plays and the Scrope’s trial, see Pamela M. King, “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999), 200–216. 4. Although my focus is on the York Plays, a positive view of legal witnessing is evident to a lesser extent in other compilations of medieval religious drama. For example, in the Chester trial play, Jesus characterizes his own mission as an act of testimony: “In world I cam to beare wytnes / of soothnes” (279–80), and Caiaphas expresses frustration that witnesses exonerate rather than condemn Jesus, threatening to do without witnesses altogether: “Wytnes of all this compenye / that falsely lyes hee! / Ye hearen all what he says here. / Of wytnes nowe what neede were” (51–55). The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), vol. 1, EETS s.s. 3, 286. The N-­Town compilation includes not only the trial of Christ but also the “Trial of Mary and Joseph” for adultery, in which the Virgin calls, “God to wyttnes, I am a mayd” (211), a phrase also employed by the York Virgin in “Joseph’s Troubles About Mary,” when she tries to assuage Joseph’s doubt about the Incarnation. The N-­Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D. 8, ed. Stephen Spector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 1, EETS s.s. 11, 145. 5. York Memorandum Book A/Y in the Guildhall Muniment Room, ed. Maud Sellers, Part 1 (1376–1419) Surtees Society vol. 120 and Part II (1388–1493) Surtees Soceity vol. 125 (Durham: Andrews, 1912–15), and York Memorandum Book B/Y, ed. Joyce W. Percy, Surtees Society, vol. 186 (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1973).

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6. The reproduction of civic and dramatic records in Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), inspired decades of drama criticism. Studies of the York Plays and guild culture include: Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and R. B. Dobson, “Craft Guilds and the City: The Historical Origins of the York Mystery Plays Reassessed,” in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. A. E. Knight (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 91–105. On the York (and Chester) plays and artisan culture, see Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2015). 7. Omnes pagine ludi, vocati, Corpus Christi play, sint sustentate et producte suo ordine per artifices dicte civitatis . . . et comodum civium pedictorum. The York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part 2, 63. For translation, see Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, vol. 2, 713. 8. On this topic, see Christian D. Liddy, Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 21. For a study featuring populism, see David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 9. A classic book in the first vein is Hans Baron, The Crisis of Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), and a classic essay in the second vein is Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama and the Social Body in the Late Medieval Town,” Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29. 10. On confessional literature, see Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006). 11. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, “Finding Language for Misconduct: Jurors in Fifteenth-­ Century Local Courts,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-­Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 87–122, and Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). McIntosh’s study of small towns charts a steady increase in local trials for wrongdoing during her period of study. Also see Shannon McSheffrey, “Jurors, Respectable Masculinity, and Christian Morality: A Comment on Marjorie McIntosh’s Controlling Misbehavior,” Journal of British Studies 37:3 (1998): 269–78. In The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Lorna Hutson embraces a different time line, arguing that the medieval drama was sacramental, and that English drama did not engage an evidential culture until later. For a similar view, see Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 12. For a discussion of how witnessing offered vernacular writers “a language and framework to examine . . . community,” see Jamie K. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 2. While consistent with my argument, this study uses a broader concept of community and does not include medieval drama, focusing on texts rather than on performance. 13. The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the Somme le Roi of Lorens D’Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), EETS o.s. 217, 5. See a similar set of concerns in sermons in Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation, trans. Siegried Wenzel (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 150. 14. Sermon from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MA Laud misc. 200, fols. 139–42 (L-­38). Printed in Preaching in the Age of Chaucer, trans. Wenzel (150), where it is identified as a sermon for the sixth Sunday after Easter written by “a Wycliffite preacher.”



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15. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwit or Remorse of Conscience in the Kentish Dialect, 1340 A.D., ed. Richard Morris (London: N. Trübner, 1866), EETS o. s. 23, 39. A similar passage can be found in Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, ed. Ralph Hanna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), vol. 1, EETS o.s. 331, 222–23. 16. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwit 65. 17. The Babees Book, ed. Frederick James Furnivall (London: N. Trübner, 1868), EETS o.s. 32, 19. 18. See note 3 in this chapter. 19. A sermon for the “Sixth Sunday After Easter” (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc., 200, fols. 139v–142 [L-­38)), for example, discusses “testimony of speech” (in addition to testimony “of scripture,” “of good life,” “of conscience,” and “of good reputation”), citing Exodus 20:16 to warn against bearing false witness against your neighbor. See Preaching in the Age of Chaucer, trans. Wenzel, 144–53. 20. MS Harl. 3760, quoted in G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 339. On Pilate’s unjust use of the law, also see the “Good Friday” sermon in Preaching in the Age of Chaucer, trans. Wenzel, 114 and 117. 21. A similar list of legal officials can be found in Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis (London: K. Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1900), EETS o.s. 115, part 1, 130–31. Also see, for example, Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, part 1, EETS o.s. 119, 95, and 141, The Book of Vices and Virtues, which defines the eighth commandment as “þou schalt seye no fals wittenesse aȝens þi neiȝebour” (5), and William of Nassington, Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, ed. Ralph Hanna, EETS, o.s. 331 and 32 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), lines 6521–78. For a discussion of the Speculum’s critique of legal officials, see Taylor, Fictions of Evidence, 38, and Kathleen E. Kennedy, Maintenance, Meed and Marriage in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 90–92. 22. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 471-547. 23. See, for example, King, “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle.” In a nuanced version of this paradigm, Beckwith argues that the York Plays “have an account of the law in which humanly administered law will itself be judged eschatologically.” See Signifying God, 103. On the depiction of law in the York Plays as a critique of contemporary legal practices see Elza C. Tiner, “English Law in the York Trial Plays,” Early Drama, Art and Music Review 18:2 (1996): 103–112. 24. Ralph Hanna, London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 54–59. 25. Dates of the charters are May 17, 1256; May 18, 1256; and March 9, 1262. For the charters of 1393 and 1396 see York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part I, 143–45, 157–63. Although these are the only two charters included in their entirety, the York Memorandum Books include multiple references to other charters; these references are compiled by Maud Sellers in her introduction (li). 26. York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part I, 157. For an account of the development of the city’s franchise developed over a series of royal charters, see E. Miller, “Medieval York,” in A History of Yorkshire: The City of York, ed. P. M. Tillott (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 69, and Sarah Rees Jones, “York’s Civic Administration, 1354–1464,” in Sarah Rees Jones, ed. The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter. 108–40. Borthwick Studies in History 3. York: University of York, 1977. 112–20. 27. Barrie Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City, 1396–1461,” in The Government of Medieval York, ed. Jones, 45.

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28. Indeed, the 1396 charter is arguably still tied to the civic pride of York, as shown by a series of public lectures by local medieval historians on the occasion of the charter’s six hundredth anniversary, published as essays in the The Government of Medieval York, ed. Jones. The preface to this volume describes the lectures being delivered in the Guild Hall and the Council Chamber on that occasion, and the ceremonial sword and mace of the city carried in a civic procession on the evening of the first lecture (v). 29. See Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City,” 34–55; R. M. Ormrod, “York and the Crown Under the First Three Edwards,” in The Government of Medieval York, ed. Jones, 14– 33, and Sarah Rees Jones, York: The Making of a City, 1068–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14–33, and “York’s Civic Administration,” 108–39. 30. York City Archives, D1, fol. 348v, and York Memorandum Book B/Y, ed. Percy, 124. See discussion in Ormrod, “York and the Crown Under the First Three Edwards,” 33, and Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City, 1396–1461,” 46. 31. York Memorandum Book B/Y, ed. Percy, 124. See Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City, 1396–1461,” 46. 32. Edward John Samuels Parsons, The Map of Great Britain Circa A.D. 1360 Known as the Gough Map, Royal Geographical Society Reproductions of Early Manuscript Maps, 4 (Oxford, Royal Geography Soceity, 1958), and Nick Millea, The Gough Map: The Earliest Map of Great Britain? (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007). On these maps, see Ormrod, “York and the Crown Under the First Three Edwards,” 15, and Jones, York: The Making of a City, 7–8. 33. Ranulph Higden, Polychonicon, II, ed. C. Babington, Rolls Series (London, 1869). Cited and discussed in Ormrod, “York and the Crown Under the First Three Edwards,” 15–16. 34. Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City,” 42–43, and Nigel Saul, “Richard II and the City of York,” in The Government of Medieval York, ed. Jones, which comments on the role of York as a “leading textile center” (6–7). 35. Ormrod, “York and the Crown Under the First Three Edwards,” 16. 36. Jones, York: The Making of a City, 21–22. 37. Jones, York: The Making of a City, 85–86. However, “all the evidence for York suggests an initial thoroughgoing attempt to create an infrastructure that could have turned York into a royal capital in the north, but also that this investment was not sustained.” Jones, York: The Making of a City, 102, Christian D. Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns (London: Royal Historical Society, 2005) and “Urban Conflict in Late Fourteenth-­Century England: The Case of York in 1380–81,” English Historical Review 118: 475 (2003): 1–32. 38. Jones, York: The Making of a City, 2. 39. On this dramatic reversal of fortune, see Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City,” 47–49. In “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” King claims that John Capgrave’s contemporary account shows that the Scrope rebellion spoke to the interests of the urban community that put on the plays in York; she argues that the York trial plays may be a direct allusion to the Scrope’s trial, but Dobson cautions that the rebellion may have been a populist movement and not necessarily supported by the civic elite. See John Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, ed. Peter Lucas, EETS o.s. 285 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), and Peter McNiven, “The Betrayal of Archbishop Scrope,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 54:1 (1971): 173–213. 40. Historians of the Church of York and Its Archbishops, vol. 11, ed. James Raine, Rolls Series 71B (London: Longman, 1996) cited in King, “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” 214. 41. In another case a woman was arrested by the sheriff of York Castle, but when the mayor heard about the case he sent messengers to the sheriff demanding she be released on the grounds



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that she lived in the liberty of the city. In a victory for civic authority, she was eventually released. (see Sellers introduction, York Memorandum Book A/Y, Part 1, liii, and 203–4). The York Memorandum Books also contain an extended account of a case of disputed jurisdiction between the court of pleas in York and the admiralty court, which was finally referred to Parliament and ended with a victory for the civic courts (Sellars, York Memorandum Book A/Y, Part 1, liii, 225–34, and translation lxxvi–xxxvi). Also see York Memorandum Book A/Y, Part 1, 175–76, 203–4, and lii–liii. 42. R. H. Helmholz, The Oxford History of the Laws of England: Volume I: The Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 313. For a teleological account of the development of increasingly “rational” proof, see R. C. Van Caenegem, Legal History: A European Perspective (Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1991), esp. 71–113. 43. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 244. 44. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, ed. Tanner, 238. 45. Influential examples of the view of developing rationalism include John W. Baldwin, “The Intellectual Preparation for the Canon of 1215 Against Ordeals,” Speculum 36:4 (1961): 613–36, and Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). In Charles Donahue Jr., “Proof by Witnesses in the Church Courts of Medieval England: An Imperfect Reception of the Learned Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally A. Scully, and Stephen D. White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 129, Donahue notes that the Roman law studied by Bolognese glossators in the twelfth century dealt mainly with “rational” methods of proof such as witnesses and instruments, rather than with ordeal, battle, and compurgation. Historians who oppose this view of increasingly “rational” procedures include Paul Hyams, who argues in “Trial by Ordeal: The Key to Proof in the Early Common Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England, that the decline of the ordeal was a product of social forces, not the result of an intellectual development toward greater empiricism, and Finbarr McAuley, who argues, in “Canon Law and the End of the Ordeal,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 26:3 (2006): 473–513, that the shift should be attributed to church reformers who wanted to establish a clear division between ecclesiastical order and the secular world. 46. Recent scholarship has shown the Decretum to be a compilation of texts, not all of which were authored by Gratian, suggesting that it should not be understood as “a unified product of one author.” For this phrase, and for a detailed study of the manuscript history of this important text, see Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11. 47. In “Proof by Witnesses,” Donahue describes these texts as “a most popular form of Romano-­canonical writing” in the period. Indeed, Donahue’s account of the development of witness law in the medieval church courts emphasizes the interactions between Bolognese jurists and theorists of both canon and civil law. He argues that academic legal study at Bologna in the twelfth century “was the joint development by both civilians and canonists, generally using sources from both laws, of what has come to be known as the Romano-­canonic procedural system” (127–28). In turn, he argues, the influence of Bolognese learning on the English church courts in the twelfth century was evident in their deployment of facts, and later developed into the canonical witness and the secular jury. Furthermore, mid-­twelfth-­century documents show what later developed into the canonical witness and the secular jury (136). Also see Helmholz, Oxford History, 313. 48. Helmholz, Oxford History, 313. For example, Speculum iudiciale of William Durantis (d. 1296) and the short manual Praxis civilis of Robertus Maranta (d. 1540) were known to have

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been consulted by ecclesiastical lawyers in England, while English procedural works included an early thirteenth-­century procedural work by William Drogheda and a later work by Francis Clerke in the 1590s, Praxis in curiis ecclesiasticis. 49. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 136. Donahue notes that contemporaries saw a close connection between jurors and witnesses and that medieval English church courts closely followed the “Romano-­canonical system of witness proof,” 141. 50. Helmholz, Oxford History, 339. 51. Helmholz, Oxford History, 313. 52. The full passage in Latin reads: Iurare autem quilibet eorum debet qui ad hoc uocati sunt quod non falsum dicent inde nec ueritatem tacebunt scienter. Ad scientiam autem eorum qui super hoc iurant inde habendam, exigitur quod per proprium uisum suum et auditum illius rei habuerint noticiam, uel per uerba partum suorum et per talia quibus fidem habere teneantur ut propriis. Latin and English translation in The Treatise on the laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, ed. and trans. G. D. G. Hall (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 34–35. 53. De anno, de loco, de die, et hora. . . . Loqui oportet et de visu et de auditu . . . constans sit . . . in omnibus circumstantiis. Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), vol. 2, 388. In Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Thomas J. McSweeney has demonstrated that a group of justices in England’s central courts wrote the treatise. 54. Non tamquam sit actor et iudex, sed quasi deferente fama vel denunciante clamore, officii sui debitum exequatur. Latin and English translation in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, ed. Tanner, 238. 55. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, ed. Tanner, 238. 56. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Thorne, vol. 2, 403. Also see R. H. Helmholz, Select Cases of Defamation (London: Seldon Society, 1985), xxiii. 57. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 158. 58. R. H. Helmholz, “Crime, Compurgation and the Courts of the Medieval Church,” in Canon Law and the Law of England (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 131. As Donahue and others have argued, the persistence of compurgation suggests a faith in the community’s ability to resolve cases. See “Proof by Witnesses,” 158. On the social role of compurgation in maintaining public peace, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 103. On the compurgatory oath as “a species of ordeal,” see McAuley, “Canon Law and the End of the Ordeal,” 485. 59. The Treatise on the laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, 180. 60. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 15. 61. Et auditum illius rei haberint noticiam, uel per uerba patrum suorum et per talia quibus fidem habere teneantur ut propriis. Latin and English translation in The Treatise on the laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, 35. 62. Paul Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 93. 63. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, vol. 2, trans. Thorne, 22. For an analysis of the relationship between local English courts in York and canon law, see Charles Donahue Jr., “Roman Canon Law in the English Church: Stubbs vs. Maitland Re-­examined After 75 Years in Light of Some Records from the Church Courts,” Michigan Law Review 72 (1974): 647–716. 64. Karl Blaine Shoemaker, “Criminal Procedure in Medieval European Law: A Comparison Between English and Roman-­Canonical Developments After the IV Lateran Council,” Zeitschrift



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der Savigny-­Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 85:1 (1999): 174–202, at 184. For a similar view, see Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,” Daedalus 104:2 (1975): 133–51. 65. Rebecca V. Coleman, “Reason and Unreason in Early Medieval Law,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History IV: 4 (1974): 571–91, at 589; Brown, “Society and the Supernatural,” 137. Noting that the ordeal was usually used when “the human group” had “reached deadlock,” Brown argues that the ritual of the ordeal was itself “reassuring and peace-­creating” (138). Making a similar point, Coleman compares the ritual of the ordeal to a morality play (“Reason and Unreason in Early Medieval Law,” 590). 66. Shoemaker, “Criminal Procedure,” 143. 67. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 145. 68. For cases in which pattern of questioning suggests the witnesses were thought to be lying, see Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the Province of Canterbury, c. 1200–1301, ed. Norma Adams and Charles Donahue (London: Seldon Society, 1981), 18–23. 69. Helmholz, Oxford History, 340. 70. Gratian. Decretum Magistri Gratiani, ed. Emil Friedburg (Leipzig: Bernard Tauchitz, 1879), C. 11.3.79. Donahue cites a case in which the defendant seeks to reject a witness, claiming he was “joined” to the accused “with too much familiarity and friendship.” See Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 145. 71. This passage quotes the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, who listed four ways human judgment is perverted: fear of another’s power makes it difficult to tell the truth, corruption through hope of gain or reward, hatred against the enemy, and love on behalf of a friend. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation, 40–41. A similar list from the prologue to the Inquest of Sheriffs of 1170 warns judges that witnesses might not be frank “for love of anyone or from hatred, or for payment or reward [vel precio vel praemio], or out of fear, from any promise or for any other reason.” See Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History: From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, ed. William Stubbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 176. 72. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, vol. 2, trans. Thorne, 395. 73. Helmholz, Oxford History, 340. 74. Bernard Jackson, “Susanna and the Singular History of Singular Witnesses,” Acta Juridica 37 (1977): 37–54, and Taylor, Fictions of Evidence, chapter 2. 75. Geoffrey Chaucer,“ The Parson’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 315. 76. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 154. 77. “The Parson’s Tale,” Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 315. 78. De uisneto . . . per legales homines de uisneto et per eorum sacramentum. The Treatise on laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, 83. 79. The Treatise on laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, 37. 80. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation; Shoemaker, “Criminal Procedure”; Thomas Andrew Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). For an important example of the argument for the centralized state, see R. C. Van Caenegem, “The Law of Evidence in the Twelfth Century,” in The Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, ed. Stephan Kuttner and J. Joseph Ryan, 297–310 (Vatican: S. Congregatio de seminariis et studiorum univeritatibus, 1965). 81. Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. 2, 138.

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82. Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, vol. 2, 140. 83. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation, 169. 84. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation, 170–71. 85. Green, Verdict According to Conscience, 27. Green focuses on cases of homicide for which the only penalty was death, arguing that “for the most part, those few who were condemned had especially offended against the standards of the community. By discriminating between them and the many who committed homicides of a less serious nature, the jurors were creating a de facto classification roughly similar to the later legal distinction between murder and manslaughter” (33). He claims that juries provided elaborate stories of self-­defense (39), showing “willingness to alter the facts in favor of th defendant” (47), concluding that “from the outset of the common law period, trial juries were prepared to voice a sense of justice fundamentally at odds with the letter of the law” (52). 86. Sunt etiam in Anglia consueudines plures et diversae secumdum diversitatem locorum. Habent enim Anglici plura ex consuetudine quae non habent ex lege, sicut in diversis comitatibus, civitatibus, burgis et villis, ubi semper inquirendum erit quae sit illius loci consuetudo et qualiter consuetudine qui consuetudines allegant. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, vol. 2, trans. Thorne, 19. 87. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, vol. 2, trans. Thorne, 20. 88. Hanna, London Literature, 54–59. 89. Munimenta Guildhallae Londoniensis, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860). 90. Hanna, London Literature, 56. 91. Hanna, London Literature, 56. Leges Henrici Primi, ed. L. J. Downer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 92. Shoemaker, “Criminal Procedure”: “Royal justices brought the dignity of the crown to oversee proceedings where the accusation, trial and resolution of felonies remained rooted in community understanding” (183). 93. The Eyre of London: 14 Edward II, A.D. 1321, ed. Helen M. Cam (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1968), Seldon Society: Year Books of Edward II, vol. XXVI, vol. 1, xxv and 14–17. The reports of the London Eyre of 1321 are the only reports of an urban Eyre (xi); there are no extant Eyre records for medieval York. 94. The Eyre of London, ed. Cam, 57. Maior et aldermanni, pro se et ciuibus Lond’, clamant quod consuetudo ciuitatis predicte, a tempore quo non extat memoria, quod loquele in curiis London’ incepte er ibi pendentes ibidem debent terminari, absque hoc quod alibi ponatur coram aliquibus Justiciariis domini Regis . . . dicit quod in isto clamio faciunt seipsos partem adversus dominum Regem, et ad auferendum regiam potestem, ne communis lex deberet fieri . . . 95. Iudex semper adhibeat aut publicam, si potest habere, personam, aut duos viros idoneos, qui fideliter universa iudicii acta conscribant. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, ed. Tanner, 252. 96. Et caetera quae occurrunt competenti ordine conscribenda, designando loca, tempora et personas. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 ed. Tanner, 252. 97. Quoniam contra falsam assertionem iniqui iuducis innocens litigator quandoque non potest veram negationem probare, cum negantis factum per rerum naturam nulla sit directa probation. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, ed. Tanner, 252. 98. Omnia sic conscripta partibus tribuantur, ita quod originalia penes scriptores remaneant. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, ed. Tanner, 252. 99. Most famously documented in T. M. Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993) and featured in important studies



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emphasizing the reciprocal influence of legal and literary texts, such as Emily Steiner’s Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval England Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Wendy Scase’s Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For an alternate view, emphasizing canon 38’s development of a written tradition of witnessing, see Taylor, Fictions of Evidence, 18. 100. On the staging of the York Plays, see Anna J. Mill, “The Stations of the York Corpus Christi Play,” Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 37 (1948–51): 492–502; Meg Twycross, “‘Places to Hear the Play’: Pageant Stations at York, 1398–1572, REED Newsletter 2 (1978): 10–33; and Eileen White, “Places for Hearing the Corpus Christi Play in York,” Medieval Theatre 8:2 (1986): 23–63. 101. See Stanton B. Garner Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Rainer Warning and Hans-­Robert Jauss, “The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature,” New Literary History 10 (1979): 181–227; Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 102. Jody Enders, “Dramatic Memories and Tortured Spaces in the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 199–222; Beckwith, Signifying God and “Ritual, Theater and Social Space in the York Corpus Christi Cycle,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-­Century England, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 63–86; and James, “Ritual, Drama and the Social Body in the Late Medieval Town.” For a view of medieval drama as engaged with theological as well as material concepts of space, see Donalee Dox, “Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of Imagination: Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Hanawalt and Kobialka, 167–98. 103. Richard Moran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” in The Epistemology of Testimony, ed. Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 293 and 274–75. A revised version of this essay is in Richard Moran, The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 36–75. Also see Benjamin McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Frederick F. Schmitt, “The Assurance View of Testimony,” in Social Epistemology, ed. Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 216–42. 104. Garner, Bodied Spaces, 123 and 137–38. Also see States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. According to States, theater “mak[es] itself out of . . . speech, sound, movement, scenery, texts, etc.” and depends on the individual’s “own perceptual encounters” with it (1). 105. For a well-­known account of dramatic first-­person speech as an expression of “inner life,” see the discussion of Hamlet’s soliloquies in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-­Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 87. 106. For example, Enders, The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty, and Claire Sponsler, “Violated Bodies: The Spectacle of Suffering in Corpus Christi Pageants,” in Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 136–60. 107. In Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Edwin D. Craun argues that Middle English writers engaged with pastoral discourse about the sins of the tongue. In Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999),

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Karma Lochrie focuses on the association between women and gossip, emphasizing connections between confession and gossip in a range of late medieval texts and featuring the legal concept of covert de baron in her last chapter. On gossip, see Susan E. Philips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), and Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). For sermons disparaging lawyers, see Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 294, 339–49. 108. See especially King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City, which shows that the plays are shaped by Corpus Christi and other portions of the liturgical calendar, such as Palm Sunday ritual. Also see James’s influential essay “Ritual, Drama and the Social Body in the Late Medieval Town.” 109. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 9 and 12. 110. Tretise of Miraclis Pleying: A Middle English Treatise on the Playing of Miracles, ed. Clifford Davidson (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981). On the relationship between this text and the York Plays, and on the affective practice of medieval drama, see Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 144–45. 111. In less pejorative terms, modern drama theorists have similarly identified watching theater as affective practice of witnessing. For example, Garner argues that “the witnessing of pain” in theater is “a vicarious reexperiencing of pain, a mimetic inhabiting of the suffering body” that “exceeds the attempt to depict it objectively.” Garner, Bodied Spaces, 182–83. Describing the York Crucifixion pageant, Beckwith in Signifying God takes a different position on the relationship between audience and the actor’s body but also argues for the affective engagement of the audience: “We are asked not to merge with Christ in the identificatory theater of passion, not to become him, or to enter or be at one with him, but to bear a terrible witness as we ourselves are addressed as participants at the scene of crucifixion” (70). On affect theory as a means to explore the role of audience in theater, also see Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 112. In Performance, Theory and Devotional Culture, for example, Stevenson discusses the York Passion in the devotional context of the mirror, which, she argues “reinforced the notion that vision offered lay people opportunities for bodily participation in, and identification with, the divine” (134). 113. Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 5. 114. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 105. 115. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 116. Viewing the temporality of medieval religious drama from this perspective provides an alternative to the influential case for the temporal unity of medieval civic drama, characterized by an anachronistic and typological model of history, made by Kolve in The Play Called Corpus Christi, 105. 117. The term “perceptional habits” is from Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3 and elsewhere. Arguing for the interaction between the experiences of medieval poetic form and dance, Chaganti describes “a perceptual bridge between one medium and another rather than as a point of correlation between them” (77).



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Chapter 1 1. Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual and Critical Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 17 and 51. 2. For an account of witnessing practices and medieval vernacular writing, which does not discuss drama, see Jamie K. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). On the analogy between the roles of jury and audience in the York “Resurrection,” see Olga Horner, “‘Us must make lies’: Witness, Evidence and Proof in the York Resurrection,” Medieval English Theatre 20 (1998): 24–76. On the relationship between drama and law, see especially Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) and The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the York trial plays as an engagement with contemporary heresy trials see Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 103–11. On the trial plays and the Scrope’s trial, see Pamela M. King, “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999), 200–216. 3. My thinking about space in this chapter as both material and subjective has been shaped by the work of cultural geographers, especially Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1984); Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-­and-­Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996) and Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 4. Anna J. Mill, “The Stations of the York Corpus Christi Play,” Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 37 (1948–51): 492–502; Meg Twycross, “‘Places to Hear the Play’: Pageant Stations at York, 1398–1572,” REED Newsletter 2 (1978): 10–33; Eileen White, “Places for Hearing the Corpus Christi Play in York,” Medieval Theatre 9:1 (1987): 23–63. 5. Although considerable recent scholarship has addressed the construction of medieval space, the role of law has not been featured. See, for example: Place, Space and Landscape in Medieval Narrative, ed. Laura Howes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007); Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Sense of Place in Western Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, ed. Clare A. Lees and Gillian Overing (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006); and Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and the English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 6. Sarah Rees Jones, “York’s Civic Administration, 1354–1464,” in The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, Borthwick Studies in History 3 (York: University of York, 1977), 113. 7. Sarah Rees Jones, York: The Making of a City, 1068–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 16. 8. For the charters of 1393 and 1396, see Memorandum Book, Lettered A/Y in the Guildhall Muniment Room, ed. Maud Sellers (Durham: Andrews Society, 1912), Surtees Society, vol. 120, Part I, 143–45, 157–63. Although these are the only two charters included in their entirety, the York Memorandum Books include multiple references to other charters. (See Sellers’s introduction, li.) The original charters of 1393 do not survive in the city archives, but an exemplification of the charter made in 1682 is still kept there. See William Giles, Catalogue of charters, house books, freemen’s rolls . . .

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Notes to Pages 25–28

and other books, deeds and old documents belonging to the Corporation of York (York: Corporation of York, 1909), and on the records of the charters see Jones, “York’s Civic Administration,” 109. 9. On guilds and the York Plays, see especially Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Beckwith, Signifying God, 42–55. 10. York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part I, 157. For an account of the development of the city’s franchise developed over a series of royal charters, see E. Miller, “Medieval York,” in A History of Yorkshire: The City of York, ed. P. M. Tillott (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 69, and Jones, “York’s Civic Administration,” 112–20. 11. Barrie Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City, 1396–1461,” in The Government of Medieval York, ed. Jones, 45. 12. Compare to the charter of 1393 in York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part 1, 143–46. 13. Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City,” 38. 14. York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part I, 157–63. On the significance of these details, see Nigel Saul, “Richard II and the City of York,” in The Government of Medieval York, ed. Jones, and Dobson, “The Crown, the Charter and the City, 1396–1461,” 34–55. 15. York Memorandum Book B/Y, ed. Joyce W. Percy. Surtees Society, vol. 186 (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1973), 124. 16. Omnes pagine ludi, vocati, Corpus Christi play, sint sustentate et producte suo ordine per artifices dicte civitatis, ad honorem precipue et reverenciam Domini nostri Jesu Christi et comodum civium pedictorum. The York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Maude Sellers (Durham: Andrews, 1915), Part 2, Surtees Society 125, 63. For translation, see Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 713. 17. York Memorandum Book B/Y, ed. Percy, 123. Cited and translated in Jones, “York’s Civic Administration,” 113. Indeed, Burton begins his essay by commenting on the importance of writing down the history of the swords given to York so that “what is worthy of commendation should be reduced into writing, so that by frequent perusal it might obtain more serious attention, and by the aid of consideration this present slight written memorial may be impressed upon the minds of posterity.” York Memorandum Book B/Y, ed. Percy, 123. 18. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre comments that space “represents the political . . . use of knowledge . . . an ideology designed to conceal that use” and is also “a means of control, and hence of domination, of power” (9 and 25). 19. Quod dicta civitas Ebor’ cum suburbiis suis ac procinctu eorundem, (juxta fines et bundas prout limitantur, que infra corpus comitatus Ebor’ jam existunt et continentur,) ab eodem comitatu separata sint ex nunc penitus in omnibus et exempta, tam per terram quam per aquam; et quod dicta civitas Ebor’ ac suburbia ejusdem ac eorum procinctus sint decetero comitatus per se et comitatus civitatis Ebor’ nuncupatus imperpetuum. York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part I, 157. Translations are my own. 20. Et quod predicti vicecomites civitatis Ebor’ comitatum suum ibidem per diem Lune de mense in mensem teneant eodem modo et prout alii vicecomites nostri et heredum nostrorum alibi in eodem regno comitatus suos tenant et tenebunt. York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part I, 158. 21. See “Space: Boundaries,” in Christian D. Liddy, Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 51–85. 22. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 47–48.



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23. See P. M. Tillott and K. J. Allison, “The Boundaries of the City,” in A History of Yorkshire: The City of York (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 315–18. 24. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 204. 25. Some influential examples include Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), esp. 250–331; and Robert C. Palmer, The Country Courts of Medieval England, 1150–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). For an opposing view, see Paul R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 155ff., and Mike MacNair, “Vincinage and the Antecedents of the Jury,” Law and History Review 17:3 (1999): 537–90. 26. Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 1:138 and 140. 27. Thomas Andrew Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 27. Green focuses on cases of homicide for which the only penalty was death, arguing that “for the most part, those few who were condemned had especially offended against the standards of the community. By discriminating between them and the many who committed homicides of a less serious nature, the jurors were creating a de facto classification roughly similar to the later legal distinction between murder and manslaughter” (33). Green claims that juries provided elaborate stories of self-­defense (39), showing “willingness to alter the facts in favor of the defendant” (47), concluding that “from the outset of the common law period, trial juries were prepared to voice a sense of justice fundamentally at odds with the letter of the law” (52). 28. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation, 170 and 184. 29. Per legales homines de uisneto et per eorum sacramentum. The Treatise on laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, ed. and trans. G. D. G. Hall (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 83. 30. De uisneto . . . qui rei ueritatem inde sciant. Treatise on laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, ed. Hall, 37. 31. Vincinorum facta praesumimur scire. Gloss Nescire to C. 23 q. 1, in Decretum Gratiani Universi Iuris Canonici Pontificas Constitutiones (Venice, 1567), 841. Cited in MacNair, “Vicinage,” 140. 32. Ex vicinitate praesumitur notitia facti loci vicini. X. 2. 23. 7; Decretum Gratiani. Quoted in MacNair, “Vicinage,” 577. 33. Medieval witnesses could testify to common knowledge of facts, to a person’s bad reputation, or to a belief that the accused’s oath was reliable (compurgation). See Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially 100–106; R. H. Helmholz, Select Cases on Defamation to 1600 (London: Seldon Society, 1985) and “Crime, Compurgation and the Courts of the Medieval Church,” in Helmholz, Canon Law and the Law of England (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 119–44. 34. Vicinage also relied on the idea that proximity enabled knowledge of the accused’s reputation. See MacNair, “Vicinage,” and responses in the same volume of Law and History Review 17 (1999) by Charles Donahue Jr., “Biology and the Origins of the Jury,” and Patrick Wormald, “Neighbors, Courts and Kings: Reflections on Michael MacNair’s Vincini.” Also see Taylor, Fictions of Evidence, 95–104, esp. 96. 35. On the history of the hue and cry, see Musson, Medieval Law in Context, 90–91.

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Notes to Pages 29–31

36. Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 34–41. Bardsley has argued from the evidence of medieval court records that the hue and cry was a means for ordinary people to get a crime to court that did not rely on money or political clout. 37. Michel de Certeau explains that, in contrast to the fixity of “place,” space is a practice with a temporal component: “Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . . In short, space is a practiced place.” The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 38. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari give the example of “a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it. . . . Radios and television sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too loud) . . . the bird sings to mark its territory.” See A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 311. 39. Iudices hoc addunt adcautelam: quod ita dicent veritatem, sicut sciunt, quia quod sciunt per visum, dicent de visu, et quod per auditum, dicent de auditu; nec dicent de credulitate, quod sciunt pro certo, vel e contra. Pilii, Tancredi, Gratiae libri de iudiciorum ordine, ed. F Bergmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck et Ruprecht, 1842), 88–316. On Tancred and other theorists of witnessing, see Charles Donahue Jr., “Proof by Witnesses in the Church Courts of Medieval England: An Imperfect Reception of the Learned Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Morris S. Arnold et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 127–58. 40. Statutes at Large from the Magna Carta to the End of the Reign of King Henry the Sixth, 18 vols., ed. Owen Ruffhead (London: M. Basket, 1763–1800), I:173. This statute concerns rents. 41. Ad scientiam autem eorum qui super hoc iurant inde habendam, exigitur quod per proprium uisum suum et auditum illius rei habuerint noticiam, uel per uerba patrum suorum et per talia quibus fidem habere teneantur ut propriis. Treatise on laws and customs of the realm of England commonly called Glanvill, ed. Hall, section 11.17, 34–35, and William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1903), 317. 42. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. witness, nn. 1 and 2. Definition 2 lacks a distinction between evidence and testimony that has been important to the work of modern philosophers on testimony. See, for example, Richard Moran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” in The Epistemology of Testimony, ed. Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 272–306. Medieval jurists and preachers did warn against false testimony, and medieval witnesses were required to swear that their testimony was not generated out of love or hate. See Pilii, Tancredi, Gratiae libri de iudiciorum ordine, ed. Bergmann, section 3.9, 236. 43. Omnes isti de affinitate idem dicunt, videlicet quod Agnes uxor Stephani fuit uxor Helie coci, et Ysabel quondam concubine St. fuit filia matertere ipsius Helie. Idem attestatur tota vicinia et est omnibus notissimum. Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the Province of Canterbury c. 1200–1301, ed. Norma Adams and Charles Donahue Jr., Seldon Society, vol. 95 (London: Seldon Society, 1981), 29. 44. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 140. 45. In The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Andrea Frisch argues that in contrast to a modern vision of the testimony as an expression of first-­person experiential knowledge, medieval testimony was understood in social and ethical contexts. The relationship between individual and collective acts of perception in medieval witnessing is explored further in Chapter 3. 46. See Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, vol. 2, 624.



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47. The Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “neighebor.” Kenneth Reinhard builds on the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself ”—also central to medieval ethical ideals of Christian community—to argue that the neighbor is a key figure through which the subject enters the social world and, beyond that, the political world. For Reinhard, the neighbor’s ambivalent status of being like and unlike the subject (in George Edmundson’s gloss), “undercuts the fantasy of intersubjective relation on which community is founded.” See Kenneth Reinhard, “Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11–75, and George Edmundson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccacio, Henryson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), esp. 1–36. 48. Harvey argues that “space can[not] be assigned objective meaning independently of material processes. . . . Objective conceptions of . . . space are necessarily created through material practices and processes which serve to reproduce social life.” The Condition of Postmodernity, 204. 49. Soja, Thirdspace, 46. 50. Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 52. 51. Pamela M. King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 137–43. 52. King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City, esp. 137–43. For other discussions of the depiction of space in the play, see especially Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 52; Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009); and Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 97–103. 53. The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, ed. Richard Beadle, EETS s.s. 23 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), vol. 1, 197. All other references are to this edition and are identified in the text by line number. 54. . . . la garde des clieffs de chescune porte de la citee, lesquelx doyvent tous jours estre prestez de faire ce que lour serra commande par la maieur et la communalte. York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part II, 261. For translation and discussion of the relevance of this passage to the York Play, see Ruth Nisse, Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 35 and 162n57. Nisse draws on the York Memorandum Books to read the pageant as promoting the virtues of civic government, arguing that the play enlists exegetical language in the service of these values. 55. On the York civic council, see Miller, “Medieval York,” 77–78. 56. A similar connection between hearing news and neighborly proximity can be found in Chaucer’s House of Fame, where the narrator associates hearing news with neighbors and proximity: “Ther no tyfynge cometh to thee, / But of thy verray neyghebores, / That duellen almost at thy dores” (II, 644–59). The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 3rd ed., 356. 57. Jones, York: The Making of a City, 82–83. 58. Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 101. 59. These figures can also be seen to represent the doctrine of the Jewish witness, propagated by Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, in which Jews were seen to have a testimonial function as “living letters of biblical law,” and thus to confirm the triumph of Christianity. See Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3. 60. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “witnes(se),” n. 3(b).

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Notes to Pages 36–39

61. On the analogy between the genre of the royal entry and the York “Entry,” see Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 50–60; York House Books, 1461–1490, ed. Lorraine C. Attreed (London: Alan Sutton, 1991), 482–85; York: The Making of a City, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, 146–52; commentary in Lorraine Attreed, “The Politics of Welcome: Ceremonies and Constitutional Development in Later Medieval English Towns,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 221–22, and Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theater, Liturgy and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998), 136–37. 62. A similar passage in which a citizen welcomes Christ to Jerusalem by saying, “Late vs þan welcome hym with flowrys and brawnchis of þe tre” (448) can be found in an abbreviated “Entry into Jerusalem” portion of play 26 of the N-­Town compilation, which the editor names “Prologues of Satan and John the Baptist; The Conspiracy; The Entry into Jerusalem.” See The N-­Town Play: Cotton Vespasian D.8, ed. Stephen Spector, EETS s.s. 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 1, 263. There is no “Entry” play in the Chester or Towneley play collections. 63. York House Books, ed. Attreed, 482–85; York: The Making of a City, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, 146–52; commentary in Attreed, “Politics of Welcome,” 221–22, and Kipling, Enter the King, 136–37. 64. Kipling, Enter the King, 143. 65. Royal entries such as London’s “reconciliation” triumph celebrated Richard’s identity as the earthly image of Christ the King, scripting his entry as analogous to the Magi witnessing the epiphany of the savior. See Kipling, Enter the King, 119. 66. Attreed, “The Politics of Welcome,” 208–9. For the ceremonies in York for Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who became King Richard III, see Attreed, 21–28. 67. On underwriting of the spectacle, see York House Books, ed. Attreed, 290–92; on annuities granted by the king, see York House Books, 729, and discussion in Attreed, “The Politics of Welcome,” 217–18. On the parallels between the speeches and scenes from the Corpus Christi pageants, see John C. Meagher, “First Progress of Henry VII,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 1 (1968): 53–55, and York Plays, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885, reprint London: Russell and Russell, 1963), 10–20. 68. York House Books, ed. Attreed, 137–42, and Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, vol. 1, 137–52. 69. For an opposing view of Christ in the York Plays as both king and traitor, see Theresa Tinkle, “York’s Jesus: Crowned King and Traitor Attainted,” Speculum 94:1 (2019): 96–137. This article does not discuss the “Entry” play. 70. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, 146–52. 71. Also see John Lydgate’s poetic account of Henry VI’s triumphal entry into London in John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010). 72. In contrast to my argument here, the space of medieval drama has often been read iconographically, or as a picture sequence analogous to the illustrations of Books of Hours or stained-­ glass windows. For example, Lerud, Memory, Images, and the Corpus Christi Drama, esp. 63–94, and Theresa Coletti, “Devotional Iconography in the N-­Town Mary Plays” in The Drama of the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Davidson, C. J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, 1982), 249–71. Also see Patrick J. Collins, The N-­Town Play and Medieval Picture Cycles (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1979), and Clifford Davidson, Drama and Art: An Introduction to the Use of Evidence from the Visual Arts for the Study of Early Drama (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1977).



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73. For the “ordo paginarum” see Records of Early English Drama: York, ed Johnston and Rogerson, vol. 1, 16–26. 74. . . . en les lieux quelles furent limitez et assignez par vous et les communes suisditz ces hours . . . For the French original, see York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellers, Part I, 51. For the translation cited here, see Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, vol. 2, 697. 75. Donnalee Dox, “Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of the Imagination: Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 182. 76. For a useful overview of the staging of medieval drama, see Meg Twycross, “The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, revised edition (Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a specific analysis of the stations for the York plays, see Twycross, “‘Places to Hear the Play’”; Mill, “The Stations of the York Corpus Christi Play”; and White, “Places to Hear the Play in York.” 77. Twycross, “Theatricality,” 30. 78. Twycross, “Theatricality,” 31. 79. In “The N-­town passion at Toronto and late medieval passion iconograph,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981): 181–87, Kathleen Ashley and Theresa Coletti recall a performance in Toronto: “Acting space and audience space were coterminous. . . . Staging the play in and around the audience quite literally transformed the spectators into active participants in the Passion story” (187). Also see Stanley J. Kahrl, “The Staging of Medieval English Plays,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama, ed. Eckehard Simon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and “Medieval Staging and Performance,” in Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 80. Twycross, “Theatricality,” 37. 81. Twycross, “Theatricality,” 44. 82. Similarly, the N-­Town “Trial of Joseph and Mary” begins when the Summoner addresses the members of the audience directly and calls them to court: “I warne ȝow here all abowte / That I somown ȝow, all þe rowte!” (5–6), and a few lines later, “Fast com away. . . . / The courte xal be þis day!” (29, 33). The N-­Town Play, ed. Spector, vol. 1, 139–40. 83. Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 62. 84. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama, 102. Lerud argues for a more stable relationship between the material place of York and the performance of biblical space than I do, claiming that individual pageants became identified with particular town structures and places and, more broadly, that the Corpus Christi plays “reveal a sensitivity on several levels to space, border and background” (63) generated by the memory of images from liturgical ceremony and illuminated Books of Hours. 85. King, The York Mystery Cycle, 137–38. King argues that the wagon would have also had a “castell” as referred to in line 15 of the pageant. 86. The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, EETS s.s. 13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vol. 1, 406. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, ed. John T. Sebastian, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012), 37. 87. See Alesandro Serpieri et al., “Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text,” Poetics Today 2 (Spring 1981): 163–200; Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980); and Stanton B. Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 124. 88. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 138.

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89. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 139. For further discussion of the role of the speaker in medieval drama and in medieval witnessing, see my Chapter 2. 90. The temporal aspects of medieval processional theater and its relationship to legal concepts of witnessing are discussed in Chapter 4. 91. Garner, Bodied Spaces, 141 and 143. 92. Nelson also comments that “medieval staging conventions” were characterized by a distinction between “named localities” and “the rest of the playing area [which . . .] was regarded as undifferentiated space” (117), a formulation relevant to my claims for the local nature of medieval staging. See Alan H. Nelson, “Some Configurations of Staging in Medieval English Drama,” in Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual, ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 116–47. 93. King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City, 138–39. 94. In primo ad portas Sancte Trinitatis in Mikelgate. Secundo ad ostium Roberti Harpham. Tercio ad ostium Johannis de Gyseburne. . . . Septimo ad ostium Henrici Wyman in Conyngstrete. . . . Nono ad ostium Ade del Brigg. Decimo ad portas monasterii beati Petri. Undecimo ad finem de Girdlergate in Petergate. York Memorandum Book A/Y, ed. Sellars, Part I, 51–52. For translation, see The Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, vol. 1, 696–97. 95. Twycross, ‘“Places to Hear the Play,” ’ 10. 96. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 130–32.

Chapter 2 1. See, for example, Sebastian Sobecki, Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549 (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2015); Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 2. In Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Edwin D. Craun argues that Middle English writers engaged with pastoral discourse about the sins of the tongue. In Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Karma Lochrie has focused on the association between women and gossip, emphasizing connections between confession and gossip in a range of late medieval texts and featuring the legal concept of covert de baron in her last chapter. On gossip, see Susan E. Philips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), and Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). For sermons disparaging lawyers, see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 294, 339–49. 3. In Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Jody Enders has addressed the relationship between drama and legal speech from a different perspective, arguing for “stunning generic modulations between forensic rhetoric and drama itself ” (5), and for similarities between actors and orators, also deploying anthropological theory to argue for the fusion of the rituals of law, theater, and reality (103).



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4. For an argument especially relevant here, see Pamela M. King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), which shows that the plays are shaped by Corpus Christi and other portions of the liturgical calendar, such as Palm Sunday ritual. An influential argument was made by Mervyn James several decades ago: “The theme of Corpus Christi is society seen in terms of body. The concept of the body provided urban societies with a mythology and ritual in terms of which opposites of social wholeness and differentiation could be both affirmed and brought into creative tension, one with the other. The final intention of the cult was, then, to express the social bond and to contribute to social integration”(4). See “Ritual, Drama and the Social Body in the Late Medieval Town,” Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29. 5. I have chosen to standardize the spelling of “Caiaphas” in my text although Beadle’s edition uses the spelling “Caiaphas” in the title of the play “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas” but uses the spelling “Cayphas” in the dialogue of that play and of “Christ Before Pilate I” and “Christ Before Pilate 2” with an occasional use of “Caiphas” (268, 309–13, 315, 320). See The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, ed. Richard Beadle. 2 vols. Early English Text Society, s.s. 23 and 24. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 and 2013 for 2011). 6. In “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999), Pamela M. King describes the trial plays not as reflecting the practices of the contemporary courts but as “assuming an understanding of certain contemporary practices relating to the operation of law” (201). She argues for references in the plays to the crimes of “group intransigence directed at a social superior” (206), failure to pay tribute (208), and treason (209), as well as to broader theological “juridical principles” (202). 7. Richard Moran, The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony and Intersubjectivity (Oxford University Press, 2018), 38. 8. Moran, The Exchange of Words, 38. 9. Moran, The Exchange of Words, 5. 10. Moran, The Exchange of Words, 48. 11. A false promise still performs the action of making a promise just as false testimony is still an act of testimony. For commentary on the promise, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 11. 12. Robert of Brunne’s “Handlying Synne,” ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1903), EETS o.s. 123, part 1, 95. 13. Similarly, Austin explains that the performativity of speech is not connected to its veracity. He explains that performative utterances “do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ . . . are not ‘true and false.’” Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 5. 14. Handlying Synne, ed. Furnivall, 96. 15. Quod scienter menciens cum periurio primo obligat se diabolo. Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-­Century Preachers Handbook, ed. Siegfried Wenzel (University Park: University of Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 164–65. 16. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 345. 17. Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church II: 1205–1313, ed. F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), part I, 107. See discussion in Select Cases on Defamation to 1600, ed. R. H. Helmholz (London: Seldon Society, 1985), xiv–vi. 18. Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1981), 32 and 64.

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Notes to Pages 50–53

19. Vertitatem dicam . . . sic me deus adiuvet et haec sancta. Latin and English translation in Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 329. 20. On oaths as ordeals, see Paul Hyams, “Trial by Ordeal,” in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris S. Arnold et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 90–123, esp. 92. 21. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “witness(se).” 22. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 167. On divine participation in witnessing in the N-­Town trial play, see my “Language on Trial: Performing the Law in the N-­Town Trial Play,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 115–35. 23. The necessity for an oath implies that truth lies outside speech itself, an observation consistent with Derrida’s association of law with language rather than justice. See Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14–15. 24. Moran, The Exchange of Words, 64. The quotation continues: “To offer some phenomenon as evidence is to present it as belief-­worthy independent of the fact of one’s presenting it as belief-­worthy.” 25. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 111. 26. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 14. 27. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 15. 28. Moran, The Exchange of Words, 6 and 8n3. 29. The Book of the Knight of the Tower, trans. William Caxton, ed. M. Y. Offord (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), EETS s.s. 2, 130. 30. Chaucer’s Parson provides further evidence for the familiar association of the tale of Susanna with false witnessing, when he warns: “Ware yow, questemongeres and notaries! Certes, for fals witnessyng was Susanna in ful gret sorwe and peyne, and many another mo.” See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 3rd ed., 315. On the depiction of Susanna as a victim of false witnessing, see Jamie K. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 55–85. For the legal history of use of Susanna to justify the separate examination of witnesses, see Bernard S. Jackson, “Susanna and the Singular History of Singular Witnesses,” Acta Juridica 37 (1977): 37–54. 31. The tale shows that testimonial speech inevitably exemplifies the ways that speech is always shaped by speakers and hearers. This model is fundamentally different from Derrida’s linking of testimony with deferral and linguistic instability, because it recognizes the embodied nature of speech and the roles both of speakers and of hearers. He claims that law, unlike justice, is “essentially deconstructable, whether because it is founded, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual strata (and that is the history of law).” Derrida, “The Force of Law,” 14–15. 32. Handlying Synne, ed. Furnivall, 131. 33. Debet mentio de anno, de loco, de die, et hora. Loqui oportet et de visu et de auditu. Item quod appellans constans sit in dicto suo et in omnibus circumstantiis. Latin and English translation in Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Thorne, vol. 2, 388. 34. Helmholz, The Oxford History, 312. “The ordines judiciarii treatises . . . outlined the elements of procedure to be used in the courts of church and state and gave procedural guidance



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to lawyers practicing in them.” On this topic, see Charles Donahue Jr., “Proof by Witnesses in the Church Courts of Medieval England: An Imperfect Reception of the Learned Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally A. Scully, and Stephen D. White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), and Karl Blaine Shoemaker, “Criminal Procedure in Medieval European Law: A Comparison Between English and Roman-­Canonical Developments After the IV Lateran Council,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-­Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 85:1 (1999): 174–202. 35. Tale iuramentum debent praestare testes generaliter: quod dicent indici vel ei, cui iudex hoc commiserit inquirendum, totem veritam, quam sciunt de quaestione, super qua inducuntur, usque ad finem litis, quotiens interrogabuntur; et nullam falsitatem interponent. Pilii, Tancredi, Gratiae libri de iudiciorum ordine, ed. F. Bergmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck et Ruprecht, 1842), section 3.9, 236. My translation. This passage is also discussed in Chapter 3. 36. Cum suis hostibus conversantes ipsumque Johannes Warner per indictaciones, conspiraciones et alias iniurosas et subdolas prosecuciones fictas et fabricates ispsorum proposito quasi in confusionem seu subversionem facultatem et fortunarum dicti Johannis Warner. York, Borthwick Institute, CP. E. 92/1. Cited and translated in Charles Donahue Jr., “Proof by Witnesses,” 145. 37. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (London and Washington, D.C.: Sheed and Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1, 238. 38. York, Borthwick Institute, CP. E., 92/1. Cited in Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 145. 39. Moran, The Exchange of Words, 38. 40. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 145. 41. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation, 32–33. 42. Imprimis si fama oriatur apud bonos et graves. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Thorne, vol. 2, 403. 43. Rae Langton, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22:4 (1993): 293–330 at 314–15. Cited in Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 86. 44. On symbolic capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 16. 45. The case is that of Anita Hill. Butler, Excitable Speech, 87. Butler’s view of agency is ultimately more limited than that of medieval witness law. Butler argues that “speech is finally constrained neither by its specific speaker not its originating context. . . . The political possibility of reworking the force of the speech act against the force of injury consists in misappropriating the force of speech from those prior contexts” (40). 46. C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 46. 47. Coady, Testimony: “When we believe testimony, we believe what is said because we trust the witness” (46). 48. The Babees Book, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (New York: Greenword Press, 1969, reprinted from London: N. Trübner, 1868), EETS o.s. 32, 49. According to Middle English Dictionary, “queste” or “qwhest” means “judicial inquiry, an inquest, trial”; to “gon on” a quest means to “attend or participate in an inquest.” The term can also refer to person serving at an inquest or on a jury. 49. The Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, 49. 50. Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 151. Fitzgerald argues that in this passage the York Christ is an “ideal urban male subject.”

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Notes to Pages 61–68

51. The Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, 8–9. 52. On conduct books and medieval drama, see Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity, and Kathleen Ashley, “Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct,” in The Ideology of Conduct, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), 25–38. On the trial as conduct, see Ruth Nisse, “Grace Under Pressure: Conduct and Representation in the Norwich Heresy Trials,” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 207–25. 53. Richard Beadle notes that “of ” may have been dropped from this line between “regent” and “rewle.” He claims: “A contemporary audience in York would have understood Pilate’s position as roughly equivalent to that of a king’s justice of peace in the north, usually a local magnate (such as the Earl of Northumberland) who exercised the crown’s ultimate jurisdiction over cases of blasphemy, heresy, sorcery and treason.” The York Plays, ed. Beadle, vol. 2, 213–14. 54. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “taynte.” 55. For Scrope and the York trial plays, see Chapter 1; King, “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” 200–216; and Theresa Tinkle, “York’s Jesus: Crowned King and Traitor Attainted,” Speculum 94:1 (2019): 96–137. 56. Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), EETS, o.s. 276, vol. 1, 71. 57. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 152–54. 58. Also in contrast to the practice of the royal courts, which would have been presided over by a judge. 59. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “jangling.” 60. The Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, 68. 61. The Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, 8. 62. The Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, 14. 63. The Good Wife’s Guide, Le Menagier de Paris: A Medieval Household Book, trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 105. 64. On the split stage in this play, see Ruth Nisse, Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 50. 65. On Procula and the Beadle as different potential images of the city itself, see Kimberly Fonzo, “Procula’s Civic Body and Pilate’s Masculinity Crisis in the York Cycle’s ‘Christ Before Pilate 1: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife,’ ” Early Theatre 16:2 (2013): 13–32. 66. The Good Wife’s Guide, ed. Greco and Rose, 149. 67. Lynn Staley, The Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 68. Secretum Secretorum, ed. Manzalaoui, 37. 69. Secretum Secretorum, ed. Manzalaoui, 106. 70. Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: N. Trübner, 1868), 35. 71. Liber Customarum, in Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, ed. Henry T. Riley (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), vol. 2, part I. 72. On York’s Liber Albus see the introduction to York Memorandum Book Lettered A/Y in the Guildhall Munumaent Room, ed. Maud Sellers, Surtees Society vol. 125 (Durham: Andrews, 1915) Part II, viii. 73. Car il affiert a gouvenour qil parole mieuz qe nul autre; pur ceo qe touz li moundes tient a sage qi sagement parole. Liber Customarum, ed. Riley, vol. 2, part 1, 18. English translation adapted from the one provided in Liber Customarum, ed. Riley, vol. 2, part 2, 520.



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74. Mais mout te dois garder de trop parler. Car qi parle bien et poy len le tient a sage; et mount parler nest ja saunz peche. Liber Customarum, ed. Riley, vol. 2, part 1, 22. English translation adapted from the one provided in Liber Customarum, ed. Riley, vol. 2, part 2, 525. 75. Lee le visage, meemement quant il est assis a oir plet. Liber Customarum, ed. Riley, vol. 2, part 1, 22. English translation provided in Liber Customarum, ed. Riley, vol. 2, part 2, 525. 76. Spector notes in the EETS edition that the Beadle is an adaption of the messenger mentioned in the Gospel of Nicodemus, a revision that shows the play’s interest in legal figures (255) 77. Acts of the Court of the Mercers’ Company, 1453–1527, introduction by Laetitia Lyell and Frank D. Watney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 139–40. 78. The line between guild and civic jurisdiction was not always clear. See Ben R. McRee, “Religious Gilds and the Regulation of Behavior in Late Medieval Towns,” in People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 108–22, at 113, and George Sayles, “The Dissolution of a Gild at York in 1306,” English Historical Review 55 (1940): 83–98. 79. Stanton B. Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 123. 80. Introduction to York Plays, ed. Beadle, xx. 81. See The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290: Together with a Facsimile of the Ordo Paginarum of the A/Y Memorandum Book, ed. Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1983); Meg Twycross, “Forget the 4.30 A.M. Start: Recovering a Palimpsest in the York Ordo Paginarum,” Medieval English Theatre 25 (2003): 98–152; and “The Ordo Paginarum Revisited, with a Digital Camera,” in “Bring Forth the Pageants”: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 105–31. 82. For an alternate perspective, see Sheila Lindenbaum, “Drama as Textual Practice,” in ­Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford University Press, 2007), 386–400. 83. Translation in Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 708. 84. Translation in Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, 703. 85. See especially Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2015), and Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity. 86. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson (lines 3124–26), 67. Also see 842n3124. 87. I use the term “voice” in the physical sense. For an analysis of literary voice, see David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 88. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson (lines 3383–84), 71, and commentary 845n3384. 89. Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. H. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1957) 2nd ed., EETS, e.s. 87. 90. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 2, 3–14. 91. Clare Wright, “Acoustic Tyranny: Metre, Alliteration and Voice in Christ Before Herod,” Medieval English Theatre 34 (2012): 3–129, at 8. 92. York House Books 1461–1490, ed. Lorraine C. Attreed (Phoenix Mill, U.K.: A. Sutton for Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1991), 1:29–30. Also see Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, 109. 93. For a well-­known account of dramatic first-­person speech as an expression of “inner life,” see the discussion of Hamlet’s soliloquies in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-­Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 87.

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Notes to Pages 73–77

94. Garner, Bodied Spaces, 137. 95. Garner, Bodied Spaces, 137–38. Also see Bert O. States, Great Reckoning in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). According to States, theater “mak[es] itself out of . . . speech, sound, movement, scenery, texts, etc.” and depends on the individual’s “own perceptual encounters” with it (1). 96.  Erika Fischer-­Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 20. 97. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 116. 98. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 7 and see 59. 99. Performativity and Performance, ed. Eve Sedgwick and Andrew Parker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 51, and W. B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity and Performance,” PMLA 5: 113 (1998): 1093–1107 at 1104.

Chapter 3 1. Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), ix and 2. 2. See, for example, Stephanie Trigg’s introduction to an issue of Exemplaria devoted to emotion, “Introduction: Emotional Histories—Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory,” Exemplaria 26:1 (2014): 3–15. 3. The fact that this citation is from a teaching edition of the plays is further evidence for its conventional nature. See “Introduction” in The York Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Clifford Davidson, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 10. 4. York Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Davidson, 10. For other examples of the meditational tradition exemplified by Nicholas Love as central to the drama, see Richard Beadle, “‘Devoute ymaginacioun’ and the Dramatic Sense in Love’s Mirror and the N-­Town Plays,” in Nicholas Love at Waseda, ed. Shoichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 1–17; Gail McMurray Gibson, Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), esp. 5. Also see Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. 49–50. 5. On emotion as performative, see McNamer, Affective Meditation, 12. 6. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 7. For an opposing point of view, that the seven deadly sins provide an interpretive framework for the plays, see Sally Mussetter, “The York Pilate and the Seven Deadly Sins,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 81 (1980): 57–64. 8. Sermon by Bishop Brunton of Rochester, MS Harl. 3760, fol. 236. Cited by G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 339. 9. Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise of the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis, part I, EETS o.s. 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1990), vol. 1, 153. This is because each act of swearing crucifies Christ repeatedly, in contrast to the Jews, who only did it once. A number of scholars have studied the role of the Jew in Christian devotional representations of the Passion. See especially Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 145–68.



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10. Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), vol. 2, 403–4. Latin text ed. George E. Woodbine. 11. See Pamela M. King, “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999), 200–216, and The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 184–203. King notes parallels between the Scrope’s trial (York’s “man of God”) and the York Plays. Also see R. H. Nicholson, “The Trial of Christ the Sorcerer in the York Cycle,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16:2 (1986): 125–69. On the York Plays as a reflection of heresy trials, see Elza C. Tiner, “English Law in the York Trial Plays,” Early Drama, Art and Music Review 18:2 (1996): 103–12, reprinted in The Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, ed. Clifford Davidson (New York: AMS Press, 2005), 140–49; and Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in The York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 103–13. 12. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 43. 13. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 158. 14. Andrea Frisch, “The Ethics of Testimony: A Genealogical Perspective,” Discourse 25:1–2 (2004): 36. For a representative example of the association of witnessing with first-­person testimony, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Frisch notes that the eyewitness is often privileged in travel accounts. 15. For an example of the teleological view, see John Marshall Mitnick, “From Neighbor-­ Witness to Judge of Proofs: The Transformation of the English Civil Juror,” American Journal of Legal History 32:3 (1988): 201–35. 16. Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 100–106. 17. On the similarities of church and common law of witnessing, see Charles Donahue Jr., “Proof by Witnesses in the Church Courts of Medieval England: An Imperfect Reception of the Learned Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally A. Scully, and Stephen D. White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 136n49, and R. H. Helmholz, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vol. 1: The Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 596 to the 1640s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 316. 18. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 129. Also see John W. Baldwin, “The Intellectual Preparation for the Canon of 1215 Against Ordeals,” Speculum 36 (1961): 613–36, esp. 619–26. In Pilii, Tancredi, Gratiae libri de iudiciorum ordine, ed. F. Bergmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck et Ruprecht, 1842), 88–316. Hereafter cited as Tancred, Ordo. 19. Iudics hoc addunt adcautelam: quod ita dicent vertitatem, sicut sciunt, quia quod sciunt per visum, dicent de visu, et quod per auditum, dicent de auditu, nec dient de credulitate, quid sciunt pro certo, vel e contra. Tancred, Ordo. 20. Statutes at Large from the Magna Carta to the End of the Reign of King Henry the Sixth, vol. 1, ed. Owen Ruffhead (London: Mark Baskett, 1769), 173. This statute concerns rents. 21. Helmholz, Oxford History, 328. 22. In “Proof by Witnesses,” 149, Donahue notes a case in which multiple witnesses are used “to support the parties’ position in the case rather than bring out the facts.” For additional examples

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from York, see Charles Donahue Jr., Law, Marriage and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments About Marriage in Five Courts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 23. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 138. 24. See Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the Province of Canterbury, c. 1200–1301, ed. Norma Adams and Charles Donahue Jr. (London: Seldon Society, 1981), 175. 25. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 130–32. 26. Paul R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 40–42. Gratian, Decretum Magistri Gratiani, ed. Emil Friedburg (Leipzig: Bernard Tauchitz, 1879), C. II.3.78 dpc and C. II.3.79. 27. Tale iuramentum debent praestare testes generaliter . . . et nullam falsitatem interponent; et pro utraque parte veritatem dicent et quod nec pretio, nec amicitia, nec private odio, seu commodo aliquot, quod inde habituri sint ad dicendum testimonium ipsum accedunt. Tancred, Ordo, section 3.9, 236. My translation and emphasis. 28. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 46. 29. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8. 30. Ad scientiam autem eorum qui super hoc iurant inde habendam, exigitur quod per proprium uisum suum et auditum illius rei habuerint noticiam, uel per uerba patrum suorum et per talia quibus fidem habere teneantur ut propriis. Latin and English translation in The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill, ed. G. D. G. Hall (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), section 11.17, 33–34. Also see William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1903), 317. 31. Donahue, “Proof by Witnesses,” 140. 32. Helmholz, Oxford History, 337. Furthermore, as Helmholz explains, the Fourth Lateran Council allowed trial by public rumor, in which the collective played the role of an individual witness, “with the rumor providing the accusation and the outcry making the denunciation.” 33. Diligenter inquirendum a quibus didicerint id quod dicut quia quidam mentiuntur per odium, quidam propter cupiditatem. Latin and English translation in Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Thorne, vol. 2, 404. 34. Debet inquirere . . . a quo vel a quibus illi duodecim didicerint ea quae veredicto suo proferunt de indictato, et audita super hoc eorum responsione de facili perpendere poterit si dolus subfeurit vel iniquitas. Latin and English translation from Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Thorne, vol. 2, 404. 35. Dicet forte aliquis vel maior pars iuratorum, quod ea quae ipsi proferunt in verdicto suo didicerunt ab uno ex coniuratoribus suis et quilibet interrogatus dicet forte quod illud didicit ab alio tali, et sic descendere poterit interrogatio et responsio de persona in personam usque ad aliquam vilem et abiectam personam, et talem cui non erit fides aliquatenus adhibenda. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Thorne, vol. 2, 404. 36. Evenit quidem quandoque quod dominus tenentem suum indictat, vel indictare facit et ei crimen imponi ob cupiditatem terram suam habendi in dominico, vel vicinus vicino propter odium et huiusmodi. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Thorne, vol. 2, 404. 37. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 10. 38. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 6. 39. See, for example, Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006). 40. Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the Somme Le Roi of Lorens D’Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis, EETS, o.s. 217 (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 24.



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41. Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-­Century Preachers’ Handbook, ed. Siegfried Wenzel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 171. 42. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 200ff. 43. Dominica is passione domini: sermo ad parchianos: hoc modo. In John Mirk’s Festial: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A. 11, ed. Susan Powell, EETS, o.s. 334 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), vol. 1, 97. 44. Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, part I, EETS, o.s. 119 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1901), 48–49. 45. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Thorne, vol. 2, 404. 46. Si autem diligis proximum. . . falsum testimonium. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 176–77. On envy and neighbors, also see 150–51, 156–57, 160–61, 172–73. Also see discussion on witnesses as neighbors in Jamie K. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 86–114. 47. The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. Francis, 36. In the passage that precedes this one, false witnessing is associated with the sin of avarice: “Fals witnesses and fals questmongers þilke it beþ that bynemeþ men here heritages, and doþ many oþer wronges, and so feele wikkednesses and harmes þat no man myȝt amende it; and aldoþ þei þat for gret couetise” (35). Even though the sin of couetise clearly affects others, it is nonetheless located within the individual. 48. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 315. 49. Jacob’s Well, ed. Brandeis, part 1, 130–31. 50. The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. Francis, 22. 51. The Book of Vices and Virtues, 22. 52. Jessica Rosenfeld, “Compassionate Conversions: Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Problem of Envy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42:1 (2012): 83–105. 53. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 128. 54. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 129. 55. An example especially relevant to the discussion here is Little’s Confession and Resistance, which demonstrates the centrality of the language of selfhood to Wycliffite sermons and polemical writings. 56. The Northern Passion, ed. Frances A Foster, 2 vols. EETS o.s. 145 and 147 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1916), vol. 1, 95. See The Middle English Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. William Henry Hulme (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), EETS e.s. 100; and Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 57. The Middle English Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. Hulme, 43. 58. The Latin phrases are headings to different sections in the text: “amor proprie excellencie,” “superbiendum in potencia et dignitate,” and “de generis nobilitate non est gloriandum.” Although “superbiendum” and “gloriandum” are gerunds (“strutting,” glorifying”), Wenzel translates them as “pride,” presumably to emphasize the parallelism of these portions of the text. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 37–39, 54–55, and 56–57. 59. Thomas Hoccleve: The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1999), 113. 60. John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 28–29. 61. In The Book of Vices and Virtues, envy is the sin that “makeþ a man or a woman most like to þe deuel” (22). See Ruth Nisse, Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 47–74.

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62. Handlying Synne, ed. Furnivall, 25. 63. Et nota quod diabolus hominem invadens . . . facit sicut solent homines facere quando volunt quiescere et dormire. Latin and English translation in Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 603–5. 64. For an alternate reading of this scene as a result of the political striving, envy, and treachery his cunning has successfully taught the human community, see John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30–31. 65. The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, EETS s.s. 13, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 401–25. 66. Whereas the legalism of the York trial plays has been widely noted, the plays’ specific preoccupation with witnessing and the extent to which they draw on the specific legal understanding of contemporary witnessing has not previously been examined. See note 5 in this chapter. 67. Tancred, Ordo, 236. 68. Also analyzing the parallels between the York Resurrection Play and legal witnessing, in “‘Us must make lies’: Witness, Evidence and Proof in the York Resurrection,” in Medieval English Theatre 20 (1998): 24–76, Olga Horner argues that “arriving at the essential truth of the Resurrection was exactly like serving on a jury,” since jurors, like the characters in the play, must make sense of conflicting accounts. 69. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “witness(se)” n. 7(a). 70. Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, EETS o.s. 280 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), vol. 1, part 2, 226. 71. On this point see Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 262. 72. McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 137. 73. In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3–4, 111–140, Michelle Karnes has shown that Bonaventure’s Meditations build on Aristotle’s idea that knowledge originates in the senses and is available to the intellect via the imagination (3–4). 74. Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005), 174. 75. For example, in Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Claire Sponsler argues that the pageants “draw the spectators into [a] pattern of sadistic pleasure,” but that the broken body is a site of resistance as well as a spectacle of suffering, featuring the Crucifixion play in her analysis (150). In The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), Jody Enders discusses how “acts of violence blur the boundaries between drama and law” in both drama and the spectacle of public execution, which together are part what she calls the “medieval theater of cruelty” (190). 76. As Michel de Certeau explains in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix, a “tactic” does not depend on a “border-­line distinguishing the other as a visible totality” or a “spatial or institutionalized location” but instead “belongs to the other” and is provisional and temporary. On the application of this paradigm to medieval lyric, see Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Although Chela Sandoval does not use de Certeau’s notion of “tactics,” my reading here also builds on Sandoval’s proposal for a “science of oppositional ideology,” which argues for individual agency whereby the “subject-­citizen”



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can “marshal the knowledge necessary to ‘break with ideology,’ ” while also speaking in and from ideology. See “U.S. Third World Feminisms: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (1991): 1–24. 77. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 224, building on Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 78. Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 12, 21, and 45. Chaganti is discussing the ways that familiarity with dance shapes poetic practice, but I argue that her paradigm can be applied to the ways witnessing and lyric shaped each other. 79. Also linking lyrics and law, in Documentary Culture and the Making of Middle English Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 61, Emily Steiner argues that the words of Christ from the cross in York engages the “Charters of Christ” lyrics, which were themselves deeply invested in “the law’s textual apparatus, in the formal and material processes by which legal documents come into being.” 80. See, for example, Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 44. As Nelson observes in Lyric Tactics, however, the term “lyric” did not enter English until the sixteenth century (3 and 19). 81. Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, 20. For a survey of lyrics on the Passion, see 19–66. 82. Woolf ’s The English Religious Lyric devotes a chapter to the topic of Passion Lyrics. Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), ed. Carleton Brown, includes sections on “Hymns and Songs of the Passion” (131–50), “Appeals to Man from the Cross” (151–62), and “Complaints of Christ” (162–77). 83. Siegfried Wenzel, Verses in Sermons: Fasciculus Morum and Its Middle English Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1978), 98. 84. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. Brown, xvii. See “O vos omnes” lyrics, # 74 (90): “Ye that passen by the way / Abideth a little stound! / Beholdeth, all my fellows, / If any me like is found. / To the tree with nails three / Well fast I hang bound; / With a spear all through my side / To min heart is made a wound.” 85. The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, ed. Richard Beadle, EETS s.s. 24 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 for 2011), vol. 2, 324. 86. For an account of the critical history of the lyric, and the tendency to see it as an expressive of “the inner experience of the solitary and autonomous subject,” see Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 22. 87. Judson Boyce Allen, “Grammar, Poetic Form, and the Lyric Ego: A Medieval A Priori,” in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. Lois Ebin (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984), 205. On Allen’s work, and the interchangeability of speakers within the lyric as a way to think about the “truth-­claims of the documentary ‘I’,” see Steiner, Documentary Culture, 67. 88. Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 42 89. A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–36, 174–210. 90. Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 32. 91. “(Bene) ergo potest Christus dicere illud (Trenorum)”: “O vos omnes qui transitis per viam” etc. Latin and English translation in Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 216–17. 92. Isabel Davis, “‘Ye that passen by þe weiye’: Time, Topology and the Medieval Use of Lamentations 1.12,” Textual Practice 25:3 (2011): 437–72, at 437.

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93. Et certe omnes pene predicte non tantum illum gravant sicut ingratitudo hominis, quem tantum dilexit et diligit. Et ideo quidam devotus hominem ingratum loco Christi sic redarguit. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 216–17. 94. Eleanor Johnson, “Horrific Visions of the Host: A Meditation on Genre,” Exemplaria 27:1–2 (2015): 150–66, at 150. 95. Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms, s.v. “lyric.” 96. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 216–17. 97. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 46. 98. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 216. 99. Fasciculus Morum, ed. Wenzel, 216–18. The following passage is presented by the editor as part of the facing-­page translation: Man, behold what I suffer for you, If there is any pain like the one that torments me. To you I call who die for you. Behold the pains by which I am afflicted. Behold the nails with which I am pierced. Yet while my external suffering is so great, My inner lament is still more grievous, Because I find you so ungrateful. Byholde mon what I dree. . . . 100. See Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 4; Ardis Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?” English Literary History 82 (2015): 319–43; and Nicolette Zieman, “Imaginative Theory,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 226–27. 101. Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 123. Also see Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 21. 102. Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 166. 103. Early English Carols, ed. Richard Leighton Greene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 2nd ed., xxxviii–xliv; and Chaganti, Strange Footing, 23, 227–76. 104. Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 9. 105. Ardis Butterfield, “The Construction of Textual Form: Cross-­Lingual Citation in the Medieval Insular Lyric,” in Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: 1: Text, Music, and Image from Machaut to Ariosto, ed. Yolanda Plumley, Giulino Di Bacco, and Stefano Jossa (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011), 41–57. 106. Lyric verse may have been associated with songs that blend individual and collective voice. Although there is no evidence that Christ’s speech from the cross was sung in the York “Crucifixio Christi,” the manuscript includes music elsewhere. For example, the register of the York “Assumption of Mary” includes three songs in two different settings each, thought to be original compositions for that play, in which the two voice parts begin and end on the same note but cross in between, modeling the complexities of voice that we have been discussing, in which voices are both individualized and united. The mutability of lyric voicing is arguably amplified by the variety of media for lyrics, an effect perhaps intensified for lyrics inset in sermons and theater. 107. Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. Brown, xxiii, and Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, 19.



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108. Steiner, Documentary Culture, 62. My argument for the York play’s engagement with lyric practice as a metatheatrical commentary provides an alternative to Steiner’s focus on documentary forms, although she theorizes a performative component of documents. 109. Zieman, “Imaginative Theory,” 226–27. 110. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 1. 111. States, Great Reckonings, 170. According to States, this is one of three modes in which the actor may speak to the audience: the actor (“I” or self-­expressive mode), the audience (“you” or collaborative mode), and the character (“he” or representational mode) (160). 112. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 177. 113. Blau, The Audience, 25. 114. Butterfield, “The Construction of Textual Form,” 55–56. Butterfield argues that lyrics should be seen in context, not as autonomous works. 115. Bruce Holsinger has cautioned against trying to draw a clear line between liturgy and lyric, positing instead a “vernacular lyricism.” See “Liturgy,” in Middle English, ed. Strohm, 305. For a discussion of the musical setting for the liturgical use of Lamentations, see Nils Holger Petersen, “Liturgical Representation and Late Medieval Piety,” in Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of C. Clifford Flanigan, ed. Eva Louise Lillie and Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1996), 181–204. 116. Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 125. More recently, critics have separated out plays by the “York Realist” from those by the “York Metrist.” See Paul A. Johnston Jr., “Notes on the Dialect of the York Corpus Christi Plays,” in The York Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), TEAMS, 535–57. 117. Also see list of pageants in Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 1:25–26. 118. The York Plays: A Critical Edition, ed. Beadle, vol. 2, 324. 119. On this point, see “Introduction” and essays by Holly A. Crocker and Patricia DeMarco in Medieval Affect, Feeling and Emotion, ed. Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Chapter 4 1. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 101. 2. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 123. Kolve also argued for typology as key to the selection of episodes in the play cycles. 3. Although scale has become an important category of analysis in cultural geography, shifts in temporal scale have not received the same attention. On geographical scale, see Clare Newstead, Carolina Reid, and Matthew Sparke, “Cultural Geography of Scale,” in Handbook of Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson et al. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002), 485–97. For a consideration of temporal scale and scale jumping, see Catherine Sanok, New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 15–19 and 93–98. 4. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “witness” means both “evidence given in a court of justice” and “the action or condition of being an observer of an event.” Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “witness.” Similarly, the Middle English Dictionary lists six meanings for “witnes(se),” including “testimony” 2a and “a first-­hand observer” 5a.

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5. Carolyn Dinshaw, What Time Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 5. 6. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi,108. 7. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 8. A growing body of work addresses the connections between temporality and “the Jew,” arguing, in Lisa Lampert-­Weissig’s words, that “medieval Christian theology attempted to subsume and subordinate Jews and Judaism into a temporal frame that supported Christian triumphalism,” but that this was complicated by interactions between actual Jews and Christians. See “The Time of the Wandering Jew in the Chronica Majora and the De Brailes Hours,” Philological Quarterly 96:2 (2017): 171–202. Also see Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and “The Times of Conversion,” Philological Quarterly 92 (2013): 19–39; and Anna M. Wilson, “Similia similibus: Queer Time in Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich,” Exemplaria 28 (2016): 54. 9. Marvin Carlson, Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 4. 10. For an alternate perspective, see Sheila Lindenbaum, “Drama as Textual Practice,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford University Press, 2007), 386–400. 11. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76. This account has been influential for many medievalists, including Kolve, who understood typology as a central organizing principle for the pageants. Another example is Clifford Davidson’s claim in “Space and Time in Medieval Drama: Meditations on Orientation in the Early Theater,” in Word, Picture, and Spectacle, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984), 39–93 that “typological arrangement was part of the stock-­in-­trade of the medieval playwright, who quite simply understood the function of typology to be the revealing of verifiable relationships between earlier events and their later fulfillment” (50). For a more recent argument for the centrality of typology—or “tropology”—to the York “Doomsday,” see Ryan McDermott, Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2016). 12. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), as discussed in previous chapters. 13. My reading is compatible with—but provides an alternative to—theological readings of the play. For example, Pamela M. King argues that the play is “an enacted Host miracle” in which “Corpus Christi does descend among the people.” See The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 27–28. Ryan McDermott sees in the play “the dialated temporality of the tropological ‘now’ . . .” in the “Eucharistic anticipation of the Last Judgment” (341). He argues that the play incites “a sense of eschatological emergency, the sense that this is my last chance to love before the end” (368). See McDermott, Tropologies, 291–370. 14. The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley (Oxford University Press, 1994), EETS s.s. 13, line 310, p. 410. Compared to the York “Doomsday,” the Towneley “Judgment” devotes considerably more time to the characterization of the demons, which are linked to legal writing, including such terms as “written” (235), “bill” (224), and “rolls” (553). In the Chester “Judgment,” the devils function as prosecuting attorneys. See The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Oxford University Press, 1974), vol. 1, EETS s.s. 3, 438–63. In the York “Doomsday,” the treatment of the devils is abbreviated, containing only twelve lines. On the depiction of devils in the Judgment plays, see John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27–29. For another example



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of play containing a demon with documents, with “a gret sacche full of ȝoure ydell woordys,” and in which readers are told that the “feend hath a gret book aȝens ȝou, wretyn of ȝoure ianglynges in cherch,” see Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis, vol. 2, EETS o.s. 335 (London: K. Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1900), 114–15. The “In Die Sepulture Alicuius Mortui” sermon in Mirk’s Festial describes how the Virgin Mary is ready to comfort people at the moment of death when the fiends show the dead man “wryton alle þe synnes þat he hath done, ȝolling on hym and þreting þat þei wil drawon hym to helle wyth hem.” See John Mirk’s Festial: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A. 11, ed. Susan Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), EETS, o.s. 334, vol. 2, 259. J. M. Moreau, Eschatological Subjects: Divine and Literary Judgment in Fourteenth-­Century French Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 26. 15. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25. 16. In his vast study of medieval sermons, G. R. Owst notes the commonality of this theme, citing this passage from a sermon in MS Lincoln Cathedral Library A. 6.2 fol. 82b.: “At the awful doom, God the Father himself is regularly pictured ‘as chefe-­justice, sittyng in his mageste all this worlde demyng.’” Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 116. 17. In “The Devil at Law in the Middle Ages,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 228:4 (2011): 567–86, Karl Shoemaker argues that by the twelfth century “the rise of legal science fostered canonists’ and theologians’ attempts to define the mystery of divine justice using the rules of procedural law” often reflected in trial stories opposing Mary. For a discussion of the “presence” of canon law at the Last Judgment, see 568–72. 18. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 12. Also see “Sixth Sunday After Easter,” in Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation, trans. Siegfried Wenzel (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 152. 19. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger, vol. 1, 12. 20. Penelope J. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), xv. 21. “Dominica iij in aduentu. [Epistola.] Sermo 3,” in English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), vol. 1, 488. 22. Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Suffolk (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 144–45. 23. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Suffolk, 144–45. 24. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 179. Discussed in Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xix. A similar passage occurs in the Castle of Perseverance, when the Good Angel warns Mankind: “þynke on þyn endynge day . . . Whanne þou schalt be closyd vnder clay!” (407–8). The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind, ed. Mark Eccles, EETS o.s. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 15. 25. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 303. Duffy draws an analogy between the depiction of death in these devotional objects and in Corpus Christi drama (309). Asking readers to adjust their present lives in consideration of the Last Judgment was common in a genre of writing popular in the period known as the Ars Moriendi. In an argument that supports my own, Amy Appleford has

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claimed this genre was “a vital aspect of civic culture, critical . . . to the practices of cultural memory, institution building, and the government of the city itself ” as well as to “the individual’s experience of interiority.” See Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1. 26. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 327. 27. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 303 and 309. In Eschatological Subjects: Divine and Literary Judgment in Fourteenth-­Century French Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), J. M. Moreau emphasizes “the trope of the eschatological scene as a commentary on the nature of authorship” (8) and the individual’s conscience in the face of judgment (8). 28. Thomas Wimbledon, Wimbledon’s Sermon: Redde rationem villicationis tue: A Middle English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Ione Kemp Knight, Duquesne Studies, Philological Series 9 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967), lines 758–60. See discussion in Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 19. 29. Moreau, Eschatological Subjects, 26. 30. Dinshaw, What Time is Now? 5. 31. Mirk’s Festial, ed. Powell, vol. 1, 6. 32. The liturgy for Advent is dependent on eschatological readings, because to prepare for Christ’s birth is also to prepare for His return. See David Bevington, “Introduction,” in Homo, Memento Finis: The Iconography of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama, ed. David Bevington (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 2; and Patrick Cowley, Advent: Its Liturgical Significance (London: Faith Press, 1960). 33. Mirk’s Festial, ed. Powell, vol. 1, 5. 34. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “dom.” 35. Jonathan Boyarin, “Space, Time and the Politics of Memory,” in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 22. 36. . . . sed fortasse proprie diceretur, ‘tempora sunt tria, praesens de praeteritis, praesens de praesentibus, praesens de futuris.’ sunt enim haec in anima tria quaedam et alibi ea non video, praesens de prasteritis memoria, praesens de praesentibus contuitus, praesens de futuris expectatio. Augustine, Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 1, 157. For English translation see Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-­Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 406. For discussion of this passage, see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol.  1, chapter 9; and Dinshaw, What Time Is Now?, 13. 37. Mirk’s Festial, ed. Powell, vol. 1, 5. 38. Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 404–5. 39. Quasi deferente fama vel denunciante clamore. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1, 238. 40. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Veda Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 84. Subsequent scholars have critiqued Halbwach’s notion of history as ostensibly objective. See Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 188 and 97–110. 41. Boyarin, “Space, Time and the Politics of Memory,” 23. In this formulation, Boyarin also cites the work of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990),145. Similarly, in “History, Memory, and Identity,” Allan Megill critiques Halbwach’s notion that memory is determined by an identity that is already well established, arguing



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instead for attention to the “project of constructing memory with a view to constructing identity itself.” See The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Olick, Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Levy, 194. 42. Charles Donahue Jr., Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments About Marriage in Five Courts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191. 43. The Pricke of Conscience: A Northumbrian Poem by Richard Rolle de Hampole, ed. Richard Morris (Berlin: A. Asher, 1863), 140–41. 44. The identification of the audience with the judged souls would have been enhanced by the performance of this last pageant at the last station: the Pavement, which was a large plaza that was both a market and a site of public assizes and executions, and was bordered on one side by the jail. See Angelo Raine, Mediaeval York: A Topological Survey Based on Original Sources (London: J. Murray, 1955), 178–79. Also see McDermott, Tropologies, 294. 45. In The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), Rosemary Woolf notes that while Christ’s welcome to the blessed accords with Matthew 25, the rejection of the wicked on the grounds that they had not performed the seven works of mercy conflicted with the penitential classification of the seven deadly sins (297). 46. The N-­Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D. 8, ed. Stephen Spector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), EETS s.s. vol. 1, 139–52. 47. On the Acts of Mercy, see John Thornsbury, The Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. Thomas ­Frederick Simmons and Henry Nolloth, EETS o.s. 118 (London: K. Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1901), 20. 48. Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 250. The same passage is featured in Maren L. Donley’s case for the play as presenting a “mercantile ideology of salvation” that conflates “spiritual and economic judgment” (338). See “Mercers, Mercantilism and the Maintenance of Power: The York Last Judgment and the York Register,” Exemplaria 18:2 (2006): 327–66. 49. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 1:11 and translation 2: 698. See citation and comments in Clifford Davidson, Corpus Christi Plays at York: A Context for Religious Drama (New York: AMS Press, 2013), 167. 50. Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 220–27. 51. Systematic attention to the fulfillment of the corporeal acts of mercy has been found in significant proportion of late medieval York wills in a survey of two thousand of them by P. H. Cullum and P. J. P. Goldberg, “Charitable Provision in Late Medieval York,” Northern History 29 (1993): 24–39, at 28. Also see Sarah Pederson, “Piety and Charity in the Painted Glass of Late Medieval York,” Northern History 36 (2000): 33–42. 52. Matthew 25:31–46 does repeat the temporal terms “when” and “then” but does not have the density of temporal markers found in this passage from the York “Doomsday.” 53. When has a grammatical fluidity, as it can be used as an adverb, conjunction, pronoun, and noun. 54. For examples of depositions featuring the times events took place, see Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London, ed. Shannon McSheffrey, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995). A representative example is the testimony by Nicholas Maryot, who testified to the validity of a marriage contract, specifying that “around five o’clock in the afternoon” the two parties exchanged vows (the wording of which he specifies) and that subsequently “on the same day between seven and eight o’clock” he saw “both members lying in a bed in a certain upper chamber of the house” (44–45).

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Notes to Pages 116–121

55. Paul Brand, “Lawyer’s Time in England in the Later Middle Ages,” in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 73–104. Some cases required reference to saints’ days or festivals, while in other cases, more general temporal categories (such as morning or night) were considered adequate. Brand cites a homicide case of 1291 in which one of the grounds given for quashing an appeal was that a widow “failed to specify whether the feast of St. Andrew on which the killing had occurred was the feast of his Passion or his Translation” (89). 56. Also noting the souls’ confusion, Sarah Beckwith argues that what distinguishes good and bad souls in this pageant is not an enumeration of deeds but instead “the direction of their wills . . . their sense of the availability of [God’s] mercy . . . an awareness of their own sin.” See Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 112. 57. Chris Humphrey, “Time and Urban Culture in Late Medieval England,” in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Humphrey and Ormrod, 116–17. 58. On the location of the Common Clerk’s office, see “Introduction,” in The York Plays, ed. Beadle, The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, ed. Richard Beadle, EETS, s.s. 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), vol. 1, xiii. 59. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 36. 60. Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, 297. 61. Compare this with a poem in Harley MA 4212 in which Christ exclaims, “Take hede of mee! / Loke, what payne I suffer for the. / sinfull man, to the I crie, / only for the I die.” Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 158. On this lyric’s similarity to the words of Christ in the York “Doomsday,” see Davidson, Corpus Christi Plays at York, 180. 62. Richard Moran, The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony and Intersubjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 40. 63. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 257. On Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment, see Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 196–221. 64. Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, 206. 65. In “Figura,” Auerbach says: “Figura is something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical. The relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity” (29). 66. Boyarin, “Space, Time and the Politics of Memory,” 22. Furthermore, the passage above is preceded by the line describing the possible words of a worried man who might say, “Allas, þis daye is sene” (244). This phrase leads into the passage above, and the repetition of the word “seen” ties the sensory experience of seeing Christ’s wounds to the temporal category of the “day.” For the scene of judgment as inaugurating the age of mercy, see Bevington, “Introduction,” 2, and Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi. 67. Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre and Practice in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 68. For an alternate reading of this passage as a suspension of time, see Isabel Davis, “‘Ye that pasen by þe weiye’: Time, Typology and the Medieval Use of Lamentations 1.12,” Textual Practice 25:3 (2011): 437–72, at 454.



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69. Illa enim vox acta atque transacta est, coepta et finita. Sonuerunt / syllabae atque transierunt, secunda post primam, tertia post secundam, / atque inde ex ordine, donec ultima post caeteras, silentiumque / post ultimam. Book XI, chap. 6, 8, The Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), vol. 1, 150. Translation from Augustine, The Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-­Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 388. See discussion in Davis, “‘Ye that pasen by þe weiye,’ ” 442. 70. Similarly, David Lawton has recently argued that literary voice in medieval literature is characterized by “unstable reproducibility” that can be iterated without fidelity to an original. See Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. 306. 71. Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? 2. 72. Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-­Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. Siegfried Wenzel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 216. 73. Commenting on Jerome’s translation of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Giorgio Agamben gives a “concrete example” of a model he claims has its origins in “Romance Lyric”: “The poem is therefore an organism or temporal machine that, from the very start, strains towards its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself. But for the brief time that the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality, it has its own time.” See The Time That Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 54. 74. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980); Alesandro Serpieri et al., “Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text,” Poetics Today 2 (Spring 1981), 163–200; and Stanton B. Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 124. 75. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 123. I also cited this passage in Chapter 1 in my discussion of spatial deixis. 76. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 124. 77. Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 43 and 76. 78. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), vol. 1, 55–56. 79. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 92. For a visual analogue, see the Arma Christi painted glass panel now in All Saints Pavement. See Clifford Davidson and David E. O’Connor, York Art: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art, Including Items Relevant to Early Drama (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1978), 77–80, fig. 22. 80. Compare to the Legenda Aurea, which describes the insignia of the Passion being present at the Last Judgment as “evidence.” Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger, vol. 1, 10. 81. For a reading of the Corpus Christi plays in conjunction with illuminated Books of Hours, see Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), esp. 63–94. For the plays as inspired by wall paintings and manuscripts, see Patrick J. Collins, “Narrative Bible Cycles in Medieval Art and Drama,” in The Drama in the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Davidson, C. J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, 1982), 118–39. For an emphasis on iconographical connections between visual art and drama, see Homo, Memento Finis, ed. Bevington. 82. On dance and lyric forms, see Chaganti, Strange Footing, esp. 189–276. 83. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, vol. 1, 55–56. See Margaret Dorell and Alexandra F. Johnston, “The York Mercers and Their Pageant of Doomsday,

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Notes to Pages 124–129

1433–1526,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 6 (1972): 11–35, which includes a speculative diagram of the wagon (10). These items have been widely understood by scholars as an expression of the wealth and prestige of the Mercers’ guild. 84. Chaganti, Strange Footing, 168. 85. The phrase is Chaganti’s in Strange Footing, 172. 86. For an alternate reading of the mirror in this passage as referring to scripture, see McDermott, Tropologies, 291–370. 87. Mirk’s Festial, ed. Powell, vol. 2, 294. 88. It is possible that “day” of Judgment might have a legalistic connotation in this passage, referring to “lawyer’s time,” in which a day could mean up to seven ordinary days. 89. Item communis intentio est de iure scriber ut rudus efficiantur subtlies, subtiles subtiliores, et homines mali effciantur boni et boni meliores, tum metu poenarum tum exhortation praemiorum, iuxta illud, Oderunt peccare boni virtutis amore, Oderunt peccare mail formidine poenae. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Thorne, vol. 2, 20. 90. My formulation here provides an alternative to the well-­known paradigm of medieval drama as a way to educate the unlettered. 91. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 7. 92. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 7 and 8. 93. Rayner, Ghosts, xii–xiii. 94. Rayner, Ghosts, xv. Herbert Blau writes of “the uncanny position of spectators. [Performance] is uncanny because . . . we are seeing what we saw before.” The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 173. Also see Joseph Roach, “History, Memory, Necrophilia,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 23–30, which argues that performance is characterized by “the desire to communicate physically with the past, a desire that roots itself in the ambivalent love of the dead” (23). 95. Rayner, Ghosts, xvi. In the Eye of Prey, Blau writes, “There is no performance without consciousness,” 179. 96. In this vein, depicting a correlation between two linear expressions of time, Keith D. Lilley argues that the “physical movement of pageants in processional performances of plays symbolized the passage of time, as well as the plays’ contents, which narrated the story of the world from Creation to ‘Doomsday.’” City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 179. 97. In How Soon Is Now? Dinshaw also uses the term “ghosts” to characterize asynchrony: “Asynchrony, in the form of restless ghosts haunting the present, can be the means of calling for justice for past exclusions and injustices; such a now is not only full and various, but it is also more just” (34). 98. By contrast, in their essay “Alle this was Taken Domysday to Drede,” in Homo, Memento Finis, Pamela Sheingorn and David Bevington see God’s speech in a more totalizing and less recursive way that sets the “action at hand in the context of the totality of sacred history, and thus underscores the essential structure of the Corpus Christi cycle as a single play” (135). 99. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), esp. chapter 2.



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100. In Ghosts, Rayner explains: “Multiple time frames tend to intersect as the present of performance meets time past, as when a narrator tells a story or time future, as when the prologue announces what is about to happen” (2). 101. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255. 102. Benjamin, “Theses,” 254. 103. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 84. 104. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 7. 105. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 4 and 7. 106. Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Olick, Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Levy, 188. 107. Megill, “History, Memory and Identity,” 194, and Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 41–62. 108. See de Certeau’s critique of Foucault for the ways that his focus on procedures does not account for variations in practice. The Practice of Everyday Life, 45–48. 109. Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 17. See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 75, 92. 110. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, 18. 111. On the York Plays as “essentially sacramental” rather than “primarily Biblical,” see King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City, 31. 112. Although Henri Lefebvre famously said that the town did not emerge “as a unified entity—and as a subject” until the sixteenth century (The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith [Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1984], 271), medievalists have used his work and that of cultural geographers to understand the meaning of the city as both material and imagined in the Middle Ages. See, for example, the essays in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006). A similar approach could be taken to the construction of time in relation to the city and to medieval drama, which would not rely on the typological paradigm exemplified by Augustine’s City of God. For an example of this kind of reading, which explores the “analogy between urban and cosmological” cities, and the “connections between the body politic and the cosmic body,” and sees the Corpus Christi drama in this context, see Lilley, City and Cosmos, 139, 183, and 194. 113. For Felman, as for medieval court practice, trials are “not only memorable discursive scenes but dramatically physical theaters of justice” in which the body of the witness plays a crucial role as “the ultimate site of memory.” Juridical Unconscious, 9. 114. The full phrase includes a hypothetical: justice proceeds from God, assuming that justice lies in the Creator. Item auctor iustitiae est deus, secundum quod iustitia est in creatore. It is clear from the context, however, that the author of the treatise believes it is a given that justice lies in the Creator. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, 22. 115. For the view that the increase in the popularity of depictions of the Last Judgment in the later Middle Ages was the result of the outlawing of ordeals in Lateran IV, see Pamela Sheingorn, “For God Is Such a Doomsman,” in Homo, Memento Finis, ed. Bevington, 37. 116. Arguably the one brief mention of kingship, “I come as crouned kynge” (line 232), calls attention to the absence of this paradigm elsewhere in the play. 117. This is especially notable in light of the growth of a concept of the professional lawyer in the period. See Profession, Vocation, and Culture in Later Medieval England: Essays Dedicated to the Memory of A. R. Myers, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982).

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Notes to Pages 133–136

118. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix. 119. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 38. 120. A History of Yorkshire: The City of York, ed. P. M. Tillott (London: Published for the Institute of Historical Research by Oxford University Press, 1961), 1. On the inclusion of both religious and civic liberties within the city walls, see Sheila K. Christie, “Bridging the Jurisdictional Divide: The Masons and the York Corpus Christi Play,” in The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City, ed. Margaret Rogerson (York: York Medieval Press, 2011). 121. Charles Donahue Jr., “Proof by Witness in the Church Courts of Medieval England: An Imperfect Reception of the Learned Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. Morris S. Arnold et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 130. 122. Sarah Rees Jones, “York’s Civic Administration, 1354–1464,” in The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, Borthwick Studies in History 3 (York: University of York, 1977), 130. 123. York City Archives, D1, fol. 1r. Cited in Christian D. Liddy, Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27. 124. The National Archives, SC 8/103/5147. Cited in Liddy, Contesting the City, 31. 125. York Memorandum Book Lettered A/Y in the Guildhall Muniment Room, ed. Maud Sellars, Surtees Society, vol. 120 (Durham: Andrews, 1912), Part 1, 115–19. 126. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, 4. 127. Liddy, Contesting the City, esp. 2. 128. Liddy, Contesting the City, 21. 129. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Johnston and Rogerson, vol. 2, 713. Translation. For original, see York Memorandum Book, ed. Sellars, Part 1, 63. 130. Lawyers in Your Living Room: Law on Television, ed. Michael Asimow (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2009).

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Index

“ABC of Aristotle,” 65 Abrams, M. H., 97 Acts of the Mercer’s Court of London, 69 Admiralty court, 2, 143 n41 Advent, 37, 107, 110–111, 120, 172 n32 Agamben, Giorgio, 78, 175 n73 Ahmed, Sara, 20, 76, 80, 82, 93, 97 Alderman, 16, 26, 39, 69, 70, 134 Allen, Judson Boyce, 95 Annas, 5, 19, 21, 56–59, 65, 68, 86, 88–90, 94, 133 Assize, 11, 26, 113, 173 n44; Assize of Clarendon, 14, 28; Grand Assize, 10 Attreed, Lorraine, 37 Auerbach, Erich, 107, 170 n11 Augustine, St., 51, 126; City of God, 177 n112; Confessions, 111, 121 Austin, J. L., 51, 63, 74, 157 n13 Avarice, 3 The Babees Book, 65 Bailiffs, 26 Barabbas, 5, 83 Baret, John cadaver tomb, 109, 120, 124, 126, 130 Beadle, 19, 20, 49, 55, 67–70, 86, 88, 90–92, 103 Beadle, Richard, 103 Benjamin, Walter, 130 Berlant, Lauren, 94 Blasey Ford, Christine, 1 Blau, Herbert, 101–102, 126, 176 n94 The Book of Curtesye, 68 The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 52 The Book of Vices and Virtues, 3, 83, 84, 88 Boyarin, Jonathan, 111–112, 120 Bourdieu, Pierre, 51 Bracton, 10–13, 15, 50, 52, 53, 55, 77, 81–85, 90, 97, 101, 103, 111, 125, 132

Brand, Paul, 116, 174 n55 Brantley, Jessica, 100 Brown, Carleton, 100 Brown, Peter, 12 Brunton, Bishop of Rochester, 5, 77 Burke, Peter, 130 Burton, Roger, 7, 26, 71, 150 n17 Bury St. Edmunds, 109 Butler, Judith, 56, 159 n45 Butterfield, Ardis, 100, 102 Caiaphas, 5, 21, 47, 56, 57, 58, 65–68, 71, 74–75, 86, 88–91, 94, 133, 139 n4, 157 n5 Carlson, Marvin, 106, 126 Cavell, Stanley, 120 Caxton, William, 68 Cecus, 40 Chaganti, Seeta, 94, 124, 148 n117 Chancery, 25 Charter, 2, 6–8, 11, 16, 18, 24–29, 32, 35, 44, 62, 63, 68, 70, 92, 133–134, 141 n25, 142 n28, 149 n8 Chatman, Seymour, 129 Chaucer; Miller’s Tale, 72; Parson’s Tale, 14, 84 Coady, C. A. J., 57 Coleman, Rebecca, 12 Commonplace book, 95, 102. See also John Grimestone’s commonplace book Compurgators, 11 Conduct books, 3, 4, 19, 23, 47, 55, 60–61, 65–68, 70, 72, 74 Confession, 3 Confessional, 4, 5, 20, 23, 46–50, 83, 84–86, 88, 90, 105; confessional handbooks, 4, 77, 83, 92; confessional manuals, 3–5, 19, 23, 48, 50, 53, 77, 83–84, 86 Corfield, Penelope J., 108 Cormack, Bradin, 35

196 Index Corpus Christi, 2, 20, 22, 24, 31, 37, 71, 127, 157 n4; Corpus Christi drama, 72, 101, 105, 130, 135–36; Corpus Christi pageants, 135; Corpus Christi Day, 73, 101, 106, 107, 126 Council of Oxford, 50 County, 6, 26, 27 Coventry Play, 72 Covetousness, 84–85, 111 Crassons, Kate, 115 Creation, 41, 121, 128–129 “Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” 41 Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwit or the Remorse of Conscience, 3 Daniel, 13 David, 36 Davidson, Clifford, 76, 102, 115 De Certeau, Michel, 94, 133, 152 n37, 166 n76 Decretum, 9, 13, 29, 52, 79–80, 143 n46 Defamation, 19, 20, 46, 50, 53, 54, 57, 66 Deixis, 42, 108, 121–23 Deleuze, Gilles, 29, 152 n38 Demons, 107, 170 n14 Derrida, Jacques, 78–80, 158 n23 & n31 Devil, 49, 87–88, 170 n14 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 22, 106, 110, 122, 176 n97 Dives and Pauper, 92 Dobson, Barrie, 26 Donahue, Charles Jr., 13, 30, 79, 81, 143 n45 & n47, 144 n49 & n58, 163–64 n22 Doomsday. See Last Judgment Dox, Donalee, 39 Duffy, Eamon, 109 Eco, Umberto, 73 Eichmann trial, 130 Eighth commandment, 3, 48, 83, 141 n21, 153 n47 Elam, Keir, 42, 123 Envy, 21, 49, 77, 83–86, 88–89, 111 Eucharistic, 3, 131, 132, 170 n13 Exemplum, 49–52 Eyre, 15, 16, 69, 146 n93 Fasciculus Morum, 49, 51, 83, 84, 86, 88, 96–99, 101, 122, 168 n99 Felman, Shoshana, 22, 106, 130, 177 n113 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 73 Fitzgerald, Christina, 61, 159 n50 Fourth Lateran Council. See Lateran Council IV Frisch, Andrea, 78, 152 n45

Garner, Stanton B., 19, 42, 70, 73, 148 n111 Glanvill, Ranulf de, 10–12, 14, 29, 30, 81 Goldberg, P. J. P., 11S Gordon, Avery F., 109 Gospel of Nicodemus, 21, 86, 161 n76 Gough map, 7 Gratian’s Decretum. See Decretum Green, Richard Firth, 79 Green, Thomas Andrew, 14, 15, 28, 146 n85, 151 n27 Guattari, Félix, 29, 152 n38 Guildhall, 2, 6, 16, 19, 22, 36, 44, 55, 68, 135 Halbwachs, Maurice, 112 Handlyng Synne, 48–52, 83, 88, 141, 165, 180 Hanna, Ralph, 6, 16, 135 Harrowing of Hell, 71, 128 Harvey, David, 28, 153 n48 Hate, hatred, 13, 20, 21, 50, 77, 80–84, 86, 89–91, 111, 125, 145 n71, 152 n42 Helmholz, R. H., 9, 79, 164 n32 Henry II, 14, 28, 29 Henry III, 6, 25 Henry IV, 8, 18 Henry VII, 36, 37 Herod, 5, 19, 20, 41, 47, 55, 59, 64–68, 70, 72, 74, 75, 89, 94, 133 Higden, Ranulph, 7 Hoccleve, Thomas, 68, 87 Holocaust, 22, 106, 130 Horn, Andrew, 15–16, 19, 68 House Book, 72 “How the Wise Man Tau3t His Son,” 60 Huizinga, Johan, 109 Humphrey, Chris, 118 Hutson, Lorna, 107, 140 n11 Hyams, Paul R., 14, 15, 28, 80, 143 n45 Inquest, 60, 159 n48 Jacob’s Well, 5, 77, 84 Jerusalem, 18, 31, 32, 36–38, 40, 41, 43, 69, 90 Jesse, 36 John Grimestone’s Commonplace Book, 95, 123 Johnson, Eleanor, 97 Jones, Sarah Rees, 7, 25, 35 Judas, 5, 47, 55, 58 Judgment Day. See Last Judgment Juror, jury, 1, 5, 9–10, 12–15, 19–20, 24, 30–31, 46–49, 50, 53–55, 58, 59, 77, 79, 80–83, 89–90, 97, 101, 111, 114, 146 n85, 143 n47, 166 n68

Index 197 Kavanaugh, Brett, 1 King, Pamela M., 31, 41, 43, 170 n13 Kolve, V. A., 22, 105–106, 170 n11 Langton, Rae, 55 Last Judgment, 3, 21, 38, 49, 53, 106–115, 118–119, 121–123, 125, 128–132, 171 n25, 177 n115 Lateran Council IV, 3, 9, 11–13, 17, 46, 54, 58, 112, 132, 136, 164 n32, 177 n115 Latini, Bruno, 68 Law of Moses, 36 Lefebvre, Henri, 28, 150 n18, 177 n112 Legenda Aurea, 21, 86, 107–108 Leges Henrici Primi, 16 Lerud, Theodore K., 41, 155 n84 Liber Albus, 68 Liber Custumarum, 15, 16, 68 Liber Horn, 15 liberties, 6, 8, 16, 25–27, 37, 39, 70, 178 n120 Libri de iudiciorum ordine, 30, 79 Liddy, Christian D., 135 Li Livre du Tresor, 68 “Little Report of How Young People Should Behave,” 65 Liturgy, liturgical, 31, 37, 101, 102, 107, 110, 121, 127, 148 n108, 155 n84, 157 n4, 169 n115, 172 n32 London, 6, 7, 15, 16, 19, 37, 68, 69, 70, 154 n65 & n71, 146 n94 Love, 4, 14, 20, 77, 84–86, 96, 97, 125, 145 n71, 152 n42, 153 n47, 170 n13, 176 n94 Love, Nicholas, 76, 93, 103, 162 n4 Lyric, 4, 21, 78, 94–103, 119, 121–124, 126, 128, 166 n76, 167 n78, n79, n80 & n86, 168 n106, 169 n108, 169 n115, 175 n73 Maitland, Frederic William, 14, 28, 31, 34 Mala fama, 11, 50, 79 Malchus, 88, 90–91, 103 Mass, 31 Mayor, 16, 26, 28, 32, 37, 39, 68–69, 134, 142 n41 McIntosh, Marjorie, 3, 66 McNamer, Sarah, 76, 93 McSheffrey, Shannon, 3, 66 Meditations on the Life of Christ, 76 Megill, Allan, 130, 172 n41 Memory, 1, 6, 44, 106, 107, 111–114, 116, 119, 120, 124, 130–132, 135, 155 n84, 172 n25 & n41, 177 n113

Ménagier de Paris, 66, 67 Mercer’s guild, 115 Mercer’s indenture, 123–124 Mirk’s Festial, 83, 110, 125; Mirk’s “Advent Sermon,” 111, 120 Mirrors for princes, 20, 23, 47, 55, 63, 67–68, 70, 87 Moran, Richard, 19, 48, 51, 53–54, 56, 120 Moreau, J. M., 110, 172 n27 N-Town “Trial of Mary and Joseph,” 115, 155 n82 Nation, national, 2, 7, 8, 28, 44, 45, 130, 135 Nationalism, 14, 15 Nationhood, 69 Neighbors, 1, 2, 4, 11, 14, 19, 24, 29–31, 34, 35, 43, 44, 80, 81, 84, 92, 99, 103, 132, 134, 135 Nelson, Alan H., 43, 156 n92 Nelson, Ingrid, 96, 100, 101, 121 Ngai, Sianne, 76, 85 Nisse, Ruth, 32, 88 Northern Passion, 21, 86 Oath, 4, 11–14, 21, 29, 46, 49–53, 75, 80, 84, 89, 134, 144 n58, 151 n33, 158 n23 Ordeal, 3, 9, 11, 12, 46, 50, 51, 78, 79, 132, 136, 143 n45, 145 n65, 177 n115 Ordines judiciarii, 9, 53, 79, 158 n34 Ordo paginarum, 39, 71, 72, 74, 103, 106 Ormrod, W. M., 7 Osiel, Mark, 132, 135 Owst, G. R., 5 Palm Sunday, 31, 148 n108 Pappano, Margaret Aziza, 115 Parker, Andrew, 74 Passion, 5, 20, 21, 45, 21, 76–78, 82, 83, 93–98, 100–102, 106, 110, 114, 119, 122–124, 126, 128, 132, 148 n112, 155 n79, 162 n9 Pederson, Sarah, 115 Perjury, 12, 19, 49, 69, 70 Peter, 32, 43, 47, 88, 90 Philip, 32, 33 Pilate, 5, 20, 21, 47, 55, 58, 62–68, 70, 72, 74, 75, 86–91, 94, 133, 160 n53 Plasterers, 135 Pollock, Fredrick, 28, 31, 34 Pricke of Conscience, 113 Pride, 86, 87, 94, 142 n28 Procula, 47, 66, 67, 86–88, 160 n65 Pseudo-Bonaventura, 76

198 Index Publica fama, 11, 112 Public rumor, 50, 54, 55, 164 n32 Publica vox, 112 Rayner, Alice, 126 Records of Early English Drama, 2 Register, 41, 103, 118, 168 n106 Resurrection, 41, 113, 126, 166 n68 Rice, Nicole R., 115 Richard I, 6, 25 Richard II, 6, 7, 26, 134 Richard III, 37 Rokem, Freddie, 125, 126 Rolle, Richard, 76 Rosenfeld, Jessica, 85 Rumor, 9, 11, 50, 54, 55, 112, 164 n32 Salisbury, John, 87 Scrope, Richard, 8, 63, 142 n39 Second Coming, 110, 128 Secretum Secretorum, 63, 67 Sedgwick, Eve, 74 Sermon, 3–5, 20, 46, 77, 83, 86, 92, 95, 96, 99–102, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 119, 120, 125 Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 72, 125 Sheriff, 2, 6, 26, 27 Shoemaker, Karl, 12, 14 Simpson, O. J., 130 Soja, Edward, 31 Solomon, 36, 37 Spearing, A. C., 96 States, Bert O., 101–102 Statute of Gavelet, 10, 30, 79 Steiner, Emily, 101 Stevens, Martin, 24, 31, 41 Susanna, 14, 52, 158 n30

Tancred, 9, 30, 53, 79–80 Towneley “Judgment,” 41, 88, 107, 170 n14 Treason, 63, 157 n6, 160 n53 Treatise of Miraclis Pleying, 21 Trevisa, John, 7 Twycross, Meg, 39, 40, 43 Turner, Victor, 131 Tutivillus, 107 Wenzel, Siegfried, 95 Wimbledon, Thomas, 110 Woolf, Rosemary, 95, 100, 119, 173 n45 Worthen, W. B., 74 Wright, Clare, 72 York Memorandum Books, 2, 6–8, 17, 19–20, 22, 24–26, 39, 43, 44, 68–69, 71, 103, 106, 115, 118, 128, 134–136, 141 n26, 142–143 n41, 149 n8 York Minster, 7, 118 York plays: “The Building of the Ark,” 127; “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas,” 19, 47, 55, 56, 59, 62, 64, 71, 74, 88–91; “Christ Before Pilate I: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife,” 19, 47, 55, 66, 68, 86–90, 94; “Christ Before Pilate II: The Judgement,” 19, 47, 55,58, 59, 61, 63, 89, 127; “Christ Before Herod,” 19, 55, 59, 64, 72, 89; “The Creation,” 41; “Crucifixio Christi,” 21, 78, 92–96, 99–103, 119–123, 124, 127, 128; “Doomsday,” 2, 4, 22, 105–107, 112–114, 116–124, 126–133, 170 n11; “Entry into Jerusalem,” 2, 18, 24–25, 27, 31–45, 127, 133; “Fall of the Angels,” 127; “The Resurrection,” 41, 149 n2 Yorkshire, 26, 95 “The Young Children’s Book,” 4 Zieman, Nicolette, 101

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from an extraordinary range of medievalists whose work inspired me and from the many friends, colleagues, and family members who offered advice and support over the course of its long development. Special thanks are due to a number of people who read and offered astute comments on portions of the manuscript as it developed. A long-­distance writing group provided crucial feedback, encouragement, and perspective in the final stretches of writing: Elizabeth Allen, Emily Steiner, Lisa Lampert-­Weissig, and Myra Seaman. Kathy Lavezzo offered helpful comments on an early version of a chapter; Jessica Rosenfeld offered invaluable insights and ideas at various stages. I am grateful to Glenn Burger for his mentorship and for helping me to find “affect” as a useful term for the project. Ideas for the book were tested at presentations at the University of Michigan, Loyola University, New Orleans, and Connecticut State University, and at various conferences, including the New Chaucer Society, MLA, Kalamazoo, ACMRS, a seminar at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Chester Symposium at the University of Toronto. I have benefited from the support and engagement of a variety of friends and colleagues over the years, including Kathy Ashley, Seeta Chaganti, Lisa Cooper, Holly Crocker, Ruth Evans, Eleanor Johnson, Ingrid Nelson, Maura Nolan, Cathy Sanok, and John Sebastian. Candace Barrington shared her love of law and literature, and offered her distinctive blend of common sense, incisive insight, and support at crucial moments as only a medievalist friend can do. The research for this book was supported by a grant from the Research Council at the University of Missouri. At MU, I benefited from a supportive department and excellent colleagues. Special thanks to Johanna Kramer for reading pieces of the manuscript at all stages, and for always offering wisdom and sage council. Megan Moore was a thoughtful interlocuter (both on and off the bike). I am grateful for the supportive community of medievalists in the department and across campus, including Rabia Gregory, Lee Manion, Lois Huneycutt, and Anne Stanton. Special thanks to the graduate students in my “Medieval Affect,”

200 Acknowledgments

“Medieval Performances,” and “Medieval Drama” seminars who engaged with various strands of my thinking for the book and to Rebecca Mouser for her work at the beginning of the project as my research assistant. I am grateful to Dennis Trout and Elise Broaddus for consulting on my Latin translations, although any errors are my own. My three daughters brought much joy and welcome distraction throughout the time I was writing the book: my twins, Sarah and Louise, who have spent their whole lives cohabitating with this project, and Margaret, who was quite young when I began it. I would not have been able to write the book without the love and support of my husband, John Evelev, whose intellectual engagement is deeply meaningful to me. This book is dedicated to him. Thanks to my editor, Jerry Singerman, at the University of Pennsylvania Press, for his early support of the project, for his patience, and for his guidance of the project through the review process. The perceptive comments from the press’s readers provided helpful guidance with final revisions. An earlier version of part of Chapter 1 appeared as “Space and the Culture of Witnessing in the York Entry into Jerusalem,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49, no. 2 (2019): 295–318. An earlier version of a portion of Chapter 3 was published as “Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Passion Plays,” in Affect, Feeling and Emotion: The Medieval Turn, edited by Glenn Burger and Holly Crocker (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 158–80.