The goal of this session will be to propose new avenues of inquiry into the relationship between performance and the miraculous in late medieval and early modern Europe. On the one hand, our panelists are interested in how the theater of this period used practices of illusion and simulation to encourage or compel faith in miraculous occurrences. On the other hand, they emphasize the ways in which theater practitioners and audiences were conscious of the instability of live performance and its capacity to erode, imperil, or transform belief. Thus, even as religious theater proffers signs of the reality of miracles and the efficacy of the saints as miracle-workers, they also highlight the capacity of theatrical phenomena to undermine that sense of reality and efficacy. In part, the panel’s aim will be to demonstrate how these concerns regarding performance and miracles transcend the linguistic and cultural divisions that modern scholars have imposed upon premodern and early modern theater and culture. Our interdisciplinary approach brazenly crosses historical, generic, and political boundaries. We consider plays, narratives, sermons, and treatises in English, Dutch, and French, and trace the multilingual flow of culture between England and the Continent.

Susannah Crowder’s paper will discuss the question of miracles and performance in the microhistorical context of local politics. Early in the fourteenth century, the citizens of francophone Metz became embroiled in an extremely destructive war that pitted their independent city against nearly all other regional powers. Just when the end was in sight, with a formal accord ending external hostilities, fighting broke out once more—this time among the Messine factions. Crowder’s paper will focus on the Serment de Pappegay, a contemporary performance text that gives voice to the conflict among local parties. Narrated by a foul-mouthed parrot, this “sermon” concludes by envisioning an abrupt resolution to the war by a miracle-working phoenix. Situate this performance moment within its highly specific historical context, Crowder will explore how the scatological and the obscene could function in tandem with the miraculous. Viewed alongside the more clearly “pious” genres of the other performances in its group, the Serment de Pappegay reveals the eager intertwining of political and devotional discourse for bellicose purposes.

John Parker’s paper will address the subject of miracles through early modern debates about science and religion. In 1607, Johann Kepler sent King James a personally inscribed treatise on the challenge posed by a recent nova to the ancient faith in supralunar immutability. At around the same time, Shakespeare’s company, on stage at court, made reference to the same nova as part of Edmund’s attack on the ancient faith in astrology: “I should have been that I am,” he says, “had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardy.” It is accordingly routine to interpret Edmund’s “revolutionary skepticism” (Dollimore) as part of the Copernican revolution; both helped create the “new rationality” (Elton) that led to our modern, secular world. And yet Kepler fervently believed that the 1604 nova reinforced the novel message of the New Testament, which had also been heralded by the miraculous appearance of a new star and which Kepler appears to have helped promulgate as a student by acting in a Nativity play. In fact he exhorts his fellow astronomers to imagine that they, too, are playing a role in a familiar, biblical drama: “Let us imitate the Magi,” he says—meaning, in part, that astronomers should prepare to have every preconception shattered, just as the Magi discovered in the heavens that everything they knew about heaven was wrong: “A new star,” writes John Donne (an early reader of Kepler and eventually a liaison between him and James), “is miracle, for there no new things are.” Parker’s paper will explore how the Jacobean court, as a major locus for the latest developments in scientific and dramaturgical thinking, witnessed the strengthening of a common medieval view: namely, that the New Testament was the only new thing to come into history, that its novelty had radically disenchanted the pagan past and finally set humanity on the course to a new rationality, in light of which only Christianity could count as true science—hence the proximity of Edmund’s skeptical diatribe against astrology to the conventional Christian critique of pagan superstition.

Finally, Cathy Sanok’s paper takes the ambivalent relationship between performance and miracles beyond anxieties about ritual and orthodoxy. Miracles might be understood as acts of recognition insofar as they identify a physical state (of the human body, of inanimate matter) with either a prior state to which it is returned (as in miracles of healing), or a truer state that it is revealed to contain or in which it is revealed to participate (as in miraculous visions of the Eucharist). Sanok will explore miracles-as-recognition in a little-known Dutch text, the Histoire van Jan van Beverley, which is very likely based on a performance tradition, in order to think about how the modes of recognition inherent to dramatic representation (including the primary recognition of an actor as a persona) might dissolve, rather than instantiate, the structure of recognition constitutive of miracle. In textual presentation, the Histoire’s miracles instantiate ontological differences between human and nonhuman animals and clear epistemological parameters for guilt and innocence. But in performance the modes of recognition they entail are undone by drama’s own structures (1) of recognizing a persona through its embodiment by an actor and (2) of recognizing a persona’s continuity across the different bodily forms it takes. The Histoire—in which performance as a mode of recognition works at cross-purposes to the miracle as a form of recognition—can help us understand the anxieties that some forms of religious drama provoked beyond the usual explanatory models offered by historicist concerns about sacramental theology or ecclesiastical authority.

As a whole, this panel will showcase fresh, interdisciplinary, intertemporal, and transnational perspectives on the uses of the supernatural in medieval and early modern theater, exploring the question of how performance and miracles, simulation and the supernatural, and theatrical unpredictability and theological necessity work to confirm and contest one another.