Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the
Fourteenth Century by Donnalee Dox
Review by: Pamela Sheingorn
Source: Speculum, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 979-981
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20466397
Accessed: 25-02-2017 14:46 UTC

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 Reviews 979
large audience, will be impelled to
failings or omissions than because o

THOMAS KUEHN, Clemson

DONNALEE Dox, The Idea of the Th

Fourteenth Century. Ann Arbor, M
$65.
For early Christian and medieval intellectuals, theater was good to think with. Because
performance of all kinds, including theater, had such an entrenched place in cities through
out the Roman Empire, early Christian writers found the metaphor of performance a very
powerful one, and they employed it extensively and repeatedly. But in the absence of theater
practice, medieval readers and writers struggled to understand the earlier references. Don
nalee Dox charts their struggles, focusing on "the function of theater in Christian dis
course" (p. 5). What most scholars of the theater know about medieval conceptions of and
attitudes toward theater comes from collections of excerpted primary sources. Working in
a spirit entirely different from those admittedly useful collections of extracts, Dox deftly
situates her authors, locating their ideas about theater within their larger intellectual proj
ects. She subtly but persistently reminds her readers that our concept of theater is still based
in the Aristotelian model of written texts performed mimetically in order to explore human
behavior and that too many scholars persist in perceiving medieval performance through
that distorting lens.
Beginning with "The Idea of a Theater in Late Antiquity" (chapter 1), Dox first considers
Augustine, a man whose conversion to Christianity entailed a total rejection of his earlier
love of the theater. Characterizing the theater as a site for the seductive visualization of the
Roman gods, as well as of their ridicule, Augustine finds no place for such an "inherently
evil institution" (p. 24) in the City of God. In On Christian Doctrine, where he develops
his theory of signs, he contrasts signs that reveal truth with the theater, which has signifying
potential but functions as a "false mode of representation" since its signs "point not to
God but to the material world of human creation" (p. 29).
Isidore of Seville, whom Dox considers next, attempted to document lost practice. The
image of Greco-Roman theater he creates in the Etymologiae is both "wildly inaccurate"
(p. 30) and extremely influential. Based in conflict, theater is classified with sport and
games, especially combat games, and dissociated from dramatic texts, which are literature.
Theater's associations are "with physical bodies, sex and prostitution, and vulgar public
display" (p. 33).
As Dox shows in chapter 2, "Transmission and Transformation: Liturgical Allegory and
the Idea of Theater," from Isidore on, contemporary performance practices (even if they
may have derived from Roman traditions) were assumed to have nothing in common with
theater, which was firmly understood to be a feature of antiquity. Rabanus Maurus used
theater as a metaphor for the Christian agon; to win the contest against evil, the Christian
needed the discipline of athletes. But he condemned Roman theatrical practices because of
their "systematic violence" (p. 47) and the persecution of Christians within the framework
of performance. Although he borrowed the idea of theater, the values of the society that
produced it had to be rejected.
Amalarius of Metz applied the methods of classical allegory to Christian liturgy, and
scholars have seen his allegorization of the Mass as revealing "a theatrical sensibility in
early liturgy" (p. 50). In order to assess Amalarius's own ideas about theater, Dox inter
rogates this scholarship, specifically 0. B. Hardison, Jr.'s assertion that "Amalarius under
stood the Mass as a drama, with a plot and character roles" (p. 51). Amalarius's critics con

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980 Reviews
demned his focus on the performance
components, because to them he put h
objects and human ingenuity in their
and the truth of Scripture. As a result
body" (p. 55) and "allowed the Mass
convincingly that Amalarius was not cr
theater in mind; rather, with his "ima
the "abstractions of Christian salvati
The distinction between the inner spi
riality of theaters was also important t
had been "sites of false representation
"transience of the material world and
(p. 68). Although his comparisons of t
Greek legends brought them into the
Christian forms of representation . ..
In chapter 3, "Renaissance and Reori
opments. In her discussion of Honorius
we now call liturgical drama from anci
medieval "humanism," toward which
chapter 83, "De tragoediis," Honorius a
the priest is protagonist, but he also t
the ceremony works as an experience
this allegorization "construed the Chr
(p. 77), but Dox looks for medieval ra
work. In her astute and attentive readi
that participants in the liturgy played r
discussed those actions but, rather, that
(p. 84). Neither Honorius nor Hugh of
situated theater entirely in the past, un
John of Salisbury, thinking about th
difficulties of leading an ethically sound
in illusion, to characterize the falsity an
ticus also expresses admiration for anc
specifically their ability to convey mor
spectacles of his own day offered only
ery, and frivolity.
For all of those twelfth-century think
ideas about other subjects central to th
viewed positively, its practices general
contemporary life or the ancient poetr
Chapter 4, "From Poetics to Perform
totle's Poetics to C the Early Fourteenth
on the Scholastics, puzzling given its a
theater. Again, context is crucial, for D
thirteenth-century versions of the Poe
and William of Moerbeke, situated the
tragic poetry as mimetic performance i
to contemporary culture. Bartholomew
of Paris early in the fourteenth centur
within the category of logic, but he a
but distinct modes of reasoning" (p. 1

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 Reviews 981
Poetics to contemporary theatrical prac
emotions into play by suggesting that
the direction of mimesis. Such shifts in
principles that underlay what Dox call
Exploding the narrative of a theater his
as a hiatus, Dox reveals that medieval w
in a current of intellectual history. She

PAMELA SHEINGORN, City Univ

JONATHAN ELUKIN, Living Together, Li

in the Middle Ages. (Jews, Christians,
World.) Princeton, N.J., and Oxford:
$24.95.
This concise, provocative, and frequently speculative volume is yet another salvo against
what Salo Baron famously labeled "the lachrymose conception of Jewish history." A bit
more particularly, it urges us to treat with suspicion the thesis captured neatly in the very
title of R. I. Moore's seminal (and now two decades old) work The Formation of a Per
secuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, 1987).
Moreover, Elukin's focus on northwestern and central Europe affords him the opportunity
to suggest that, while the integration of medieval Jews in those regions may not have led
to such spectacular cultural collaboration as did the fabled Iberian convivencia, their lives
as well were characterized by a fundamentally continuous, though precarious and some
times interrupted, Zusammenleben. Elukin's chronological sweep is broader than Moore's,
beginning with chapter 1, "From Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages," and ending
with chapter 6, "Expulsion and Continuity" -the latter, of course, a bracingly challenging
title.
In Elukin's view, to see in the first centuries of the second millennium a nascent "perse
cuting society" "reads back into medieval history the anachronistic power and efficacy of
the twentieth-century totalitarian state" (p. 4). He links this view to theoretical discourses
on "the 'Other"' in medieval society, which, he complains, lead to a "Manichean vision
of medieval Europe [that] ignores the complexities, paradoxes, and tensions within elite
society" (p. 5).
In my own view, Elukin is being far too hasty here. Rather, most recent scholars who
have been studying Jewish and other differences in medieval Europe understand that dis
courses of Othering are used precisely in the work of debating and creating the collective
Self, not merely as ideological dehumanization built up on the basis of economic or political
domination. Nor do the more specific studies that suggest increasingly harsh rhetorical
efforts to limit the space for tolerance of Jews in European Christian society-I think, for
example, of Jeremy Cohen's landmark book The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of
Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982)-suggest (to me as one reader, at any rate)
that their authors view groups such as the friars as merely the ideological wing of a unified
Christian noble elite. For that matter, the frequent continued defense of Jewish settlement
rights by popes as well as lesser regional clerics is well known and has been explored by
earlier historians as well as by current scholars.
Yet Elukin's book is a welcome contribution to the debate. One of its signal virtues is to
bring together and to expand, to my knowledge for the first time, insights from recent work
by scholars such as Ivan Marcus and Yisrael Yuval about what, to paraphrase one of
Yuval's titles cited by Elukin, were the shared myths and common language of Jews and
Christians in the Middle Ages. Elukin stresses-most dramatically in the last chapter, where

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