medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: Revd Gordon Plumb <[log in to unmask]>
> Emmanuel Pierre' suggestion
it was mine.
>regarding the wheels is open to the objection that the mystery plays on
waggons
we're not dealing with a "play on waggons" here
http://www.art-roman.net/autun/autun46x.jpg
http://www.art-roman.net/saulieu/saulieu22.jpg
we're dealing (apparently) with the depiction of a statue of a donkey with V&C
*on wheels*.
no "waggons" visible.
> were a development that took place later than the Romanesque period.
to which i would object that this statement needs to be qualified by the
insertion of "as far as we know from the *surviving* evidence".
this is a methodological problem which i am comming, more and more, to believe
is absolutely essential when trying to reconstruct many aspects of the
middlevil past: in any given subject area we are only dealing with a small
percentage --sometimes a miniscule percentage-- of the monuments or exemplars
which originally existed.
in this case we have the *fact* that we've got what look for all the world
like wheels beneath the feet of the donkey in the Flight scene.
my understanding is that the possibility of "mystery plays" [and i only use
that term because i know nothing whatever about the subject and it shouldn't
be taken in any technically precise sense] playing a role in why those wheels
are there has been put forward by some iconographers, somewhere.
sounds like a reasonable possibility, to me.
if you have another, morebetter solution to the problem, i'd be glad to
entertain it.
but the lack of evidence of "mystery plays" in the early decades of the 12th
c. is *not* sufficient to destroy the suggestion that that is what is behind
the Flight iconography as we *sometimes* see it.
we've just lost *too much* of the evidence to say that definitively, seems to
me.
conversely, the Flight scenes with the wheels *themselves* constitute the
evidence for the existance of such practices --or something very much like
them-- at least until some other hypothesis is put forward to explain their
presence which does a better job of it.
>At that time surely the drama was still largely performed within the church
building itself and only gradually - and later than this - did it move out of
doors and we get the development of the cycle of mystery
plays.
small wheels like this imply pavement, and about the only space in a middlevil
city which was paved was to be found inside a church.
i have no problem with having liturgical dramas --inside churches-- involving
movable props in the 12th c.
the silence of the surviving documents is not dispositive in disproving their
existence.
>Not an area about which I would claim expertise,
we certainly share this Blissful State of Ignorance.
>but I believe what I have put above is broadly correct from a swift check of
the books I have to hand - but I stand ready to be put in my place! (as
always on this site with wit and grace I trust!)
Wit, i can sometimes supply.
Grace, you have to prey for, unceasingly.
that's *way* beyond my paygrade.
c
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