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

“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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Hubert, Ann Marie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Barrett, Jr., Robert W.
• Wright, Charles D.
• Camargo, Martin
• Perry, Curtis
• Symes, Carol

• 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

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2015 Ann Marie Hubert

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/89212