Performing piety: preachers and players in East Anglia, 1400-1520

Abstract

“Performing Piety” examines the interdependent relationship between medieval sermons and plays in late-medieval East Anglia, arguing that the mutual use of thematic divisions and exempla (moral tales) evinces the reciprocal interaction of preacher and playwright. By focusing on these common rhetorical strategies, I stress the medieval play’s confluence with preaching’s form, rejecting the critical assumption that drama depends on the sermon to instead demonstrate the two genres’ interactive creation of a regionally-inflected performance continuum. In East Anglia, preachers and players used the same spaces in the area’s numerous churches and churchyards, a circumstance that reinforced these rhetorical and generic continuities. My dissertation therefore reevaluates the regional specificity of East Anglian preaching and drama and, by emphasizing the mutual employment of exempla, reconfigures East Anglian devotional culture. An examination of the fluidity that embodied rhetoric affords to pious material in writing and performance reveals that drama’s employment of sermon rhetoric enables these plays to embody what they enact, transforming themselves into exempla that animate a path to salvation.