The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence

by Jody Enders

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

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

Jody Enders, Distinguished Professor of French, is a prize-winning theater historian and the author of 4 books of literary criticism: Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Cornell, 1992), which garnered the inaugural Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association; The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Cornell, 1999); Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago, 2002), recipient of the Barnard Hewitt Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research; and Murder by Accident (Chicago, 2009). A past Guggenheim fellow and editor of Theatre Survey, she has published numerous essays on the interplay of rhetoric, theater, medieval literature, performance theory, and the law, plus two edited volumes for Bloomsbury: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages (2017); and A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages (2019). As the founder of the University of California’s Public Speaking Initiative, she is committed to the globalization of rhetoric, as in the reformed medieval rhetorical canon she sets forth in the Norton Anthology of Rhetoric of Rhetoric and Writing (forthcoming in 2025). Currently, she has turned joyously to translating scores of Middle-French farces into stage-friendly English. Four volumes have appeared thus far (with more to come): The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries (Penn, 2011), Holy Deadlock (Penn, 2017), Immaculate Deception (Penn, 2021), and Trial by Farce (Michigan 2023). According to the late great Terry Jones of Monty Python, she is “a great champion of comedy at its most vulgar and hilarious!”