The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence.(Review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-MAR-00

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Jody Enders. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii + 268. $45.00.

Jody Enders wisely begins her argument that the histories of torture, law, rhetoric, theater, and aesthetics are interconnected by acknowledging and answering potential criticisms of her unconventional (at least within medieval theater circles) approach to and reading of her subject. In her Introduction, she gently chastises medievalists for their tendency to emphasize the alterity of the Middle Ages and post-modern theorists for their tendency to believe that our twentieth-century aesthetic of violence is somehow new or revolutionary. Enders unapologetically declares her intention to discuss modern psychoanalytic and phenomenological readings of torture and of theater alongside medieval rhetorical representations of the same. She does so in order to establish the "historical continuity of the conflation of torture, rhetoric, and drama" (20), a task she regards as no mere intellectual exercise. Enders believes that by distancing ourselves from the violence underpinning medieval rhetorics, forensics, and aesthetics, we as twentieth-century artists, audiences, and critics betray our own "complicity in the history of that violence" (24). Only by recognizing continuities between medieval and modern theaters of cruelty can we effect social change.

Enders presents her argument in such a careful manner that even the most conservative reader will find it persuasive. Beginning in Chapter 1 with a discussion of inventio or literary invention, she...

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