French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater by Weigert Laura

Author:Weigert, Laura [Weigert, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

“C’était qu’un jeu industrieux”

Artifice and Authenticity in the Devil’s Play

“It was just an engineered play.” So reformers in the city of Laon belittled an exorcism that took place in 1566 in the cathedral. For its organizers and promoters, however, the devil’s departure from the girl’s body when confronted by the host confirmed the miracle of God’s real presence. The audience of the explicitly anti-Jewish story of the host’s resistance to multiple attacks, Le Mistere de la sainte Hostie (The Mystery of the Sacred Host), was told that it had “seen a beautiful miracle before its eyes, not a play.”1 Clearly the charge of being a “play” was one that those who endorsed such performances in which the Eucharistic wafer played a central role were eager to dispel. One of the ways to contest this accusation against the so-called Miracle of Laon was to produce and distribute a print showing the event.

Unlike the Reims painted cloths, whose association with a performance is the product of the historiography of medieval theater, this picture asserts its own connection to an actual performance: the successful exorcism of the devil from Nicole Obry (Figure 128). Whereas the Valenciennes frontispiece claims to depict the stage on which a Passion play took place, this print makes a greater claim. According to its inscription, the print represents the exorcism au vif, meaning in this context both “from life” and “lifelike.” Its coordination of text and image thereby suggests that a picture can offer us a representation of a performance that is just as accurate as if we had witnessed the event ourselves.

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