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

Hubert, Ann Marie

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89212 Copy

Description

Title

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

Author(s)

Hubert, Ann Marie

Issue Date

2015-12-03

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Barrett, Jr., Robert W.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Barrett, Jr., Robert W.

Committee Member(s)

• Wright, Charles D.
• Camargo, Martin
• Perry, Curtis
• Symes, Carol

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• East Anglia
• drama
• medieval
• sermon
• preaching
• artes praedicandi
• Macro Manuscript
• Digby Manuscript
• N-Town Manuscript
• exemplum
• inventio
• play
• Dominican Order
• Franciscan Order
• Cambridge
• Mankind
• Wisdom
• Castle of Perseverance
• The Conversion of St. Paul
• Mary Magdalene

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.

Graduation Semester

2015-12

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89212

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2015 Ann Marie Hubert

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