The VERY LATEST by Jody Enders
https://www.mla.org/content/download/191362/file/LRA-2023-Lois-Roth-Award-Press-Release.pdf
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OA ACCESS HERE: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/60881/9780472903177.pdf?s... more OA ACCESS HERE: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/60881/9780472903177.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Twelve more farces, all legally themed, dropped in the Spring of 2023 here: https://www.press.umich.edu//12504948. The medieval version of Judge Judy? You'll see soon enough as this project returns me to my first love from the days of Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (1992). Plus, in contrast to my earlier anthologies, the whole critical apparatus of Trial by Farce has been dramatically streamlined, the better to get the plays into the hands of readers, teachers, students, and performers as quickly as possible. Please reach out if you're interested in doing a virtual workshop of any of these farces. (There are some things that have become easier on Zoom, not harder.)
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IN PROGRESS: Volume 5 is devoted to the crazy pedagogy plays: from the dad who shoves his son int... more IN PROGRESS: Volume 5 is devoted to the crazy pedagogy plays: from the dad who shoves his son into a bag to drag him off to school to an entrance exam for fools to what happens in the most surreal of the farces when women become college professors and ultimately decide to replant their husbands head-down in the ground for new growth. Working titles only.
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https://premodernity.net/veryraunchy
Inspired director Matt Sergi did an amazing job with the f... more https://premodernity.net/veryraunchy
Inspired director Matt Sergi did an amazing job with the first staged readings of my NOT GETTIN' ANY (from TRIAL BY FARCE) plus BRO JOB and THE PARDONERS' TALES (from IMMACULATE DECEPTION) at the University of Toronto (April 14-15, 2023).
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Hopscotch Translation, 2023
https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2023/07/11/reading-for-comic-performance-part-1/
When making ... more https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2023/07/11/reading-for-comic-performance-part-1/
When making meaning of a play in general and of a comedy in particular, the translator owes at least a triple duty to the auditory, visual, and linguistic stimuli that bombard the senses simultaneously during performance. Indeed, a theatrical script is a sort of blueprint of and for performance, which is itself a form of translation, interpretation, and adaptation. Each and every time theater goes live, performance changes everything; but its crucial, inflectional modalities are often unseen on the page, especially in medieval and Renaissance farce. The better to bring those inflections into view, I sketch a taxonomy for how to practice what I call “virtual dramaturgy:” a way for the translator to see the potentiality of performance in the mind’s eye and to hear it in the mind’s ear. Once the holistic translator stays faithful not just to the language of a literary genre but to the action of an artistic medium, it is all the more feasible to recapture the sights and sounds that re-enliven the humor of the past—and present.
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Hopscotch Translation, 2023
https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2023/07/21/reading-for-comic-performance-part-2/
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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022
http://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/feminae/MonthTranslation.aspx. Featured as the November Translation ... more http://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/feminae/MonthTranslation.aspx. Featured as the November Translation of the Month (2022) in Feminae on the Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index website. Did you hear the one about the Mother Superior who was so busy casting the first stone that she got caught in flagrante delicto with her lover? What about the drunk with a Savior complex who was fool enough to believe himself to be the Second Coming? And that’s nothing compared to what happens when comedy gets its grubby paws on the confessional in Confessions of a Medieval Drama Queen and Blue Confessions. Welcome to the world of what I’ve typically called “the long Middle Ages.” Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French farce was the “bestseller” of its day and it stands to tell us a lot about the sources of the humor of a Shakespeare or a Molière. It’s the world of Immaculate Deception, the third volume of my series of stage-friendly translations, featuring twelve more obscene, over-the-top, sacrilegious satires, each targeting religious hypocrisy in that in-your-face way that only true slapstick can muster. At long last and after many months of COVID-wrought delays, Volume 3 of the farces seems headed out into the world. If anyone is interested in an actual or virtual workshop, please let me know. I might be able to share a sneak peek of the script.
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In honor of work initially conceived by the late Claire Sponsler, Volume 2 of Bloomsbury's Cultur... more In honor of work initially conceived by the late Claire Sponsler, Volume 2 of Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Tragedy takes a broad and revisionist view of what it means to think through tragedy in the long Middle Ages. Coedited with Theresa Coletti, Carol Symes, and John Sebastian. Forthcoming in 2019.
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From the Humanities Decanted Series at UCSB, recorded here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qa... more From the Humanities Decanted Series at UCSB, recorded here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qa7vQOR8K8
Join us for a dialogue with Jody Enders about her two new edited and translated volumes of medieval French comedies, interviewed by Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese; Theater).
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Books by Jody Enders
A Cultural History of Theatre: The Middle Ages. Edited with an introduction by Jody Enders.. Vol.... more A Cultural History of Theatre: The Middle Ages. Edited with an introduction by Jody Enders.. Vol. 2 of A Cultural History of Theatre (6 vols.). General editors: Tracy C. Davis and Christopher Balme. Forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2017.
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Check out probably my favorite play from this volume in addition to the summary below. The new fa... more Check out probably my favorite play from this volume in addition to the summary below. The new farce m-o, I think, will be making play by play by play available!
Did you hear the one about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer's pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more, and shares it in her second volume of performance-friendly translations of medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than two hundred extant farces, and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable a millennium later, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock.
In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comedy, love and marriage do not exactly go together like a horse and carriage. What with all the arranged matches of child brides to doddering geezers, the frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment, and despair are matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances, and cavorts in the pursuit of deception, trickery, and adultery. Easily recognizable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class, and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce. Whether the antics play out on the fifteenth-century stage or the twenty-first-century screen, Enders notes, comedy revels in shining its brightest spotlight on the social and legal questions of what makes a family. Her volume defines and redefines love and marriage with a message that no passage of time can tear asunder: social change finds its start where comedy itself begins—at home.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Labyrinth Books or Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
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Here's a peek at the Front Matter, Brief Plot Summaries, and Preface. These 12 farces have never... more Here's a peek at the Front Matter, Brief Plot Summaries, and Preface. These 12 farces have never been translated into the English language; each one is performance-friendly, newly adapted for the modern stage. More exciting still: my first foray into artistic work was praised from none other than Terry Jones of Monty Python:
“Scurrilous, sexy, stupid, satirical, scatological, side-splitting and probably something else beginning with ‘s,’ Jody Enders’ translation of twelve Medieval French farces is a real discovery that goes a long way to re-adjusting our perception of the Middle Ages.
Enders is a great champion of comedy at its most vulgar and hilarious. She points out that however silly or banal these farces may appear to us, they nonetheless confront the real controversies of their day over the law, politics, religion, social order or the battle of the sexes. Thoroughly grounded in her academic approach to the subject, Enders nevertheless writes with liveliness and humor and wit. She is unafraid to reference modern comedy in her translations, and insists on the primacy of performance in assessing these comedies from half a millennium ago.”—Terry Jones""
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
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"Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable—even forbidden—for students of literature to talk ... more "Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable—even forbidden—for students of literature to talk about an author’s intentions for a given work. In Murder by Accident, Jody Enders boldly resurrects the long-disgraced concept of intentionality, especially as it relates to the theater.
Drawing on four fascinating medieval events in which a theatrical performance precipitated deadly consequences, Enders contends that the marginalization of intention in critical discourse is a mirror for the marginalization—and misunderstanding—of theater. Murder by Accident revisits the legal, moral, ethical, and aesthetic limits of the living arts of the past, pairing them with examples from the present, whether they be reality television, snuff films, the “accidental” live broadcast of a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway, or an actor who jokingly fired a stage revolver at his temple, causing his eventual death. This book will force scholars and students to rethink their assumptions about theory, intention, and performance, both past and present."
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. But here's a peek at the Prologue or Mise-en-Scène JE
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Part of every legend is true. Or so argues Jody Enders in this fascinating look at early French d... more Part of every legend is true. Or so argues Jody Enders in this fascinating look at early French drama and the way it compels us to consider where the stage ends and where real life begins. This ambitious and bracing study explores fourteen tales of the theater that are at turns dark and dangerous, sexy and scandalous, humorous and frightening—stories that are nurtured by the confusion between truth and fiction, and imitation and enactment, until it becomes impossible to tell whether life is imitating art, or art is imitating life.
Was a convicted criminal executed on stage during a beheading scene? Was an unfortunate actor driven insane while playing a madman? Did a theatrical enactment of a crucifixion result in a real one? Did an androgynous young man seduce a priest when portraying a female saint? Enders answers these and other questions while presenting a treasure trove of tales that have long seemed true but are actually medieval urban legends. On topics ranging through politics, religion, marriage, class, and law, these tales, Enders argues, do the cultural work of all urban legends: they disclose the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their tellers. Each one represents a medieval meditation created or dramatized by the theater with its power to blur the line between fiction and reality, engaging anyone who watches, performs, or is represented by it. Each one also raises pressing questions about the medieval and modern world on the eve of the Reformation, when Europe had never engaged more anxiously and fervently in the great debate about what was real, what was pretend, and what was pretense.
Written with elegance and flair, and meticulously researched, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends will interest scholars of medieval and Renaissance literature, history, theater, performance studies, and anyone curious about urban legends.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
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Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige b... more Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. That said, I think that enough time has elapsed--with enough reviewable work out there--that I'm happy to be able to upload the Introduction! Thanks again, all for your interest. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
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Cornell University Press, 1992
Introduction now posted. The popularity of today's courtroom media spectacles--from televised tri... more Introduction now posted. The popularity of today's courtroom media spectacles--from televised trials to bestselling fiction--reflects a centuries-old Western tradition. In this ground-breaking exploration of the "origins" of medieval drama, Jody Enders redefines the very concept of origins as she deepens our understanding of the relationship between theater and law.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
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Media, Performances by Jody Enders
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
https://youtu.be/fMrySeNEht4
Can the relentless misogyny of medieval French farce still play i... more https://youtu.be/fMrySeNEht4
Can the relentless misogyny of medieval French farce still play in the twenty-first century? Check out this brilliant performance of Cooch E. Whippet, as directed by David Beach, which premiered at Lofton Durham’s inaugural Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival (May 2017). It has already helped me to teach comedy.
https://youtu.be/fMrySeNEht4
Cuckold now and evermore, Cooch the Cobbler likes to lock up his wife inside the house while he is out hawking his wares. Annoyed by those impediments, Wilhelmina devises a ruse with her lover (their Priest) such that, the next time Cooch curses her out with “The devil take you!,” the Priest will appear in a devil-costume and do just that. He does, they do, and Cooch can but accept his lot as a henpecked husband. And that’s the story of being Cooch E. Whippet, which appears as Play #10 in The Farce of the Fart.
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What fun! Blogging the upcoming performance--of the play, that is--right here: https://pennpress.... more What fun! Blogging the upcoming performance--of the play, that is--right here: https://pennpress.typepad.com/pennpresslog/2019/04/to-laugh-or-not-to-laugh.html
**Performance Times have been Updated**
And LOL: this is NOT a double entendre but the name of one of my favorite plays from HOLY DEADLOCK! How about taking medieval farcical misogyny and flipping it on its . . . derrière? David Beach, the same brilliant director who, in 2017, brought Cooch E. Whippet to the International Congress for Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI), returns for an encore with one of my favorites, Husband Swap. Don’t miss opening night of Lofton Durham’s Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival (8 May 2019) or catch the Thursday matinée (9 May) at noon!
Husband Swap (Le Trocheur de Maris)
Translated by Jody Enders
Directed by David Beach
Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival
Kalamazoo, MI
Wednesday, 8 May 2019, 8 PM
Thursday, 9 May 2019, 12 PM
For three housewives—Cindy Lou, Charlotte, and Anna Nicole—the deficiencies of their respective spouses make for an extensive bill of particulars. Enter the Husband Trader, with quite the stock of merchandise. As he presents the ladies with specimen after specimen, they must come to a decision as to whether they prefer a newer model to the devils they know. To swap or not to swap? That is the question.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
The VERY LATEST by Jody Enders
Inspired director Matt Sergi did an amazing job with the first staged readings of my NOT GETTIN' ANY (from TRIAL BY FARCE) plus BRO JOB and THE PARDONERS' TALES (from IMMACULATE DECEPTION) at the University of Toronto (April 14-15, 2023).
When making meaning of a play in general and of a comedy in particular, the translator owes at least a triple duty to the auditory, visual, and linguistic stimuli that bombard the senses simultaneously during performance. Indeed, a theatrical script is a sort of blueprint of and for performance, which is itself a form of translation, interpretation, and adaptation. Each and every time theater goes live, performance changes everything; but its crucial, inflectional modalities are often unseen on the page, especially in medieval and Renaissance farce. The better to bring those inflections into view, I sketch a taxonomy for how to practice what I call “virtual dramaturgy:” a way for the translator to see the potentiality of performance in the mind’s eye and to hear it in the mind’s ear. Once the holistic translator stays faithful not just to the language of a literary genre but to the action of an artistic medium, it is all the more feasible to recapture the sights and sounds that re-enliven the humor of the past—and present.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qa7vQOR8K8
Join us for a dialogue with Jody Enders about her two new edited and translated volumes of medieval French comedies, interviewed by Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese; Theater).
Books by Jody Enders
Did you hear the one about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer's pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more, and shares it in her second volume of performance-friendly translations of medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than two hundred extant farces, and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable a millennium later, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock.
In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comedy, love and marriage do not exactly go together like a horse and carriage. What with all the arranged matches of child brides to doddering geezers, the frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment, and despair are matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances, and cavorts in the pursuit of deception, trickery, and adultery. Easily recognizable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class, and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce. Whether the antics play out on the fifteenth-century stage or the twenty-first-century screen, Enders notes, comedy revels in shining its brightest spotlight on the social and legal questions of what makes a family. Her volume defines and redefines love and marriage with a message that no passage of time can tear asunder: social change finds its start where comedy itself begins—at home.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Labyrinth Books or Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
“Scurrilous, sexy, stupid, satirical, scatological, side-splitting and probably something else beginning with ‘s,’ Jody Enders’ translation of twelve Medieval French farces is a real discovery that goes a long way to re-adjusting our perception of the Middle Ages.
Enders is a great champion of comedy at its most vulgar and hilarious. She points out that however silly or banal these farces may appear to us, they nonetheless confront the real controversies of their day over the law, politics, religion, social order or the battle of the sexes. Thoroughly grounded in her academic approach to the subject, Enders nevertheless writes with liveliness and humor and wit. She is unafraid to reference modern comedy in her translations, and insists on the primacy of performance in assessing these comedies from half a millennium ago.”—Terry Jones""
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
Drawing on four fascinating medieval events in which a theatrical performance precipitated deadly consequences, Enders contends that the marginalization of intention in critical discourse is a mirror for the marginalization—and misunderstanding—of theater. Murder by Accident revisits the legal, moral, ethical, and aesthetic limits of the living arts of the past, pairing them with examples from the present, whether they be reality television, snuff films, the “accidental” live broadcast of a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway, or an actor who jokingly fired a stage revolver at his temple, causing his eventual death. This book will force scholars and students to rethink their assumptions about theory, intention, and performance, both past and present."
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. But here's a peek at the Prologue or Mise-en-Scène JE
Was a convicted criminal executed on stage during a beheading scene? Was an unfortunate actor driven insane while playing a madman? Did a theatrical enactment of a crucifixion result in a real one? Did an androgynous young man seduce a priest when portraying a female saint? Enders answers these and other questions while presenting a treasure trove of tales that have long seemed true but are actually medieval urban legends. On topics ranging through politics, religion, marriage, class, and law, these tales, Enders argues, do the cultural work of all urban legends: they disclose the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their tellers. Each one represents a medieval meditation created or dramatized by the theater with its power to blur the line between fiction and reality, engaging anyone who watches, performs, or is represented by it. Each one also raises pressing questions about the medieval and modern world on the eve of the Reformation, when Europe had never engaged more anxiously and fervently in the great debate about what was real, what was pretend, and what was pretense.
Written with elegance and flair, and meticulously researched, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends will interest scholars of medieval and Renaissance literature, history, theater, performance studies, and anyone curious about urban legends.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
Media, Performances by Jody Enders
Can the relentless misogyny of medieval French farce still play in the twenty-first century? Check out this brilliant performance of Cooch E. Whippet, as directed by David Beach, which premiered at Lofton Durham’s inaugural Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival (May 2017). It has already helped me to teach comedy.
https://youtu.be/fMrySeNEht4
Cuckold now and evermore, Cooch the Cobbler likes to lock up his wife inside the house while he is out hawking his wares. Annoyed by those impediments, Wilhelmina devises a ruse with her lover (their Priest) such that, the next time Cooch curses her out with “The devil take you!,” the Priest will appear in a devil-costume and do just that. He does, they do, and Cooch can but accept his lot as a henpecked husband. And that’s the story of being Cooch E. Whippet, which appears as Play #10 in The Farce of the Fart.
**Performance Times have been Updated**
And LOL: this is NOT a double entendre but the name of one of my favorite plays from HOLY DEADLOCK! How about taking medieval farcical misogyny and flipping it on its . . . derrière? David Beach, the same brilliant director who, in 2017, brought Cooch E. Whippet to the International Congress for Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI), returns for an encore with one of my favorites, Husband Swap. Don’t miss opening night of Lofton Durham’s Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival (8 May 2019) or catch the Thursday matinée (9 May) at noon!
Husband Swap (Le Trocheur de Maris)
Translated by Jody Enders
Directed by David Beach
Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival
Kalamazoo, MI
Wednesday, 8 May 2019, 8 PM
Thursday, 9 May 2019, 12 PM
For three housewives—Cindy Lou, Charlotte, and Anna Nicole—the deficiencies of their respective spouses make for an extensive bill of particulars. Enter the Husband Trader, with quite the stock of merchandise. As he presents the ladies with specimen after specimen, they must come to a decision as to whether they prefer a newer model to the devils they know. To swap or not to swap? That is the question.
Inspired director Matt Sergi did an amazing job with the first staged readings of my NOT GETTIN' ANY (from TRIAL BY FARCE) plus BRO JOB and THE PARDONERS' TALES (from IMMACULATE DECEPTION) at the University of Toronto (April 14-15, 2023).
When making meaning of a play in general and of a comedy in particular, the translator owes at least a triple duty to the auditory, visual, and linguistic stimuli that bombard the senses simultaneously during performance. Indeed, a theatrical script is a sort of blueprint of and for performance, which is itself a form of translation, interpretation, and adaptation. Each and every time theater goes live, performance changes everything; but its crucial, inflectional modalities are often unseen on the page, especially in medieval and Renaissance farce. The better to bring those inflections into view, I sketch a taxonomy for how to practice what I call “virtual dramaturgy:” a way for the translator to see the potentiality of performance in the mind’s eye and to hear it in the mind’s ear. Once the holistic translator stays faithful not just to the language of a literary genre but to the action of an artistic medium, it is all the more feasible to recapture the sights and sounds that re-enliven the humor of the past—and present.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qa7vQOR8K8
Join us for a dialogue with Jody Enders about her two new edited and translated volumes of medieval French comedies, interviewed by Leo Cabranes-Grant (Spanish and Portuguese; Theater).
Did you hear the one about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer's pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more, and shares it in her second volume of performance-friendly translations of medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than two hundred extant farces, and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable a millennium later, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock.
In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comedy, love and marriage do not exactly go together like a horse and carriage. What with all the arranged matches of child brides to doddering geezers, the frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment, and despair are matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances, and cavorts in the pursuit of deception, trickery, and adultery. Easily recognizable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class, and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce. Whether the antics play out on the fifteenth-century stage or the twenty-first-century screen, Enders notes, comedy revels in shining its brightest spotlight on the social and legal questions of what makes a family. Her volume defines and redefines love and marriage with a message that no passage of time can tear asunder: social change finds its start where comedy itself begins—at home.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Labyrinth Books or Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
“Scurrilous, sexy, stupid, satirical, scatological, side-splitting and probably something else beginning with ‘s,’ Jody Enders’ translation of twelve Medieval French farces is a real discovery that goes a long way to re-adjusting our perception of the Middle Ages.
Enders is a great champion of comedy at its most vulgar and hilarious. She points out that however silly or banal these farces may appear to us, they nonetheless confront the real controversies of their day over the law, politics, religion, social order or the battle of the sexes. Thoroughly grounded in her academic approach to the subject, Enders nevertheless writes with liveliness and humor and wit. She is unafraid to reference modern comedy in her translations, and insists on the primacy of performance in assessing these comedies from half a millennium ago.”—Terry Jones""
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
Drawing on four fascinating medieval events in which a theatrical performance precipitated deadly consequences, Enders contends that the marginalization of intention in critical discourse is a mirror for the marginalization—and misunderstanding—of theater. Murder by Accident revisits the legal, moral, ethical, and aesthetic limits of the living arts of the past, pairing them with examples from the present, whether they be reality television, snuff films, the “accidental” live broadcast of a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway, or an actor who jokingly fired a stage revolver at his temple, causing his eventual death. This book will force scholars and students to rethink their assumptions about theory, intention, and performance, both past and present."
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. But here's a peek at the Prologue or Mise-en-Scène JE
Was a convicted criminal executed on stage during a beheading scene? Was an unfortunate actor driven insane while playing a madman? Did a theatrical enactment of a crucifixion result in a real one? Did an androgynous young man seduce a priest when portraying a female saint? Enders answers these and other questions while presenting a treasure trove of tales that have long seemed true but are actually medieval urban legends. On topics ranging through politics, religion, marriage, class, and law, these tales, Enders argues, do the cultural work of all urban legends: they disclose the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their tellers. Each one represents a medieval meditation created or dramatized by the theater with its power to blur the line between fiction and reality, engaging anyone who watches, performs, or is represented by it. Each one also raises pressing questions about the medieval and modern world on the eve of the Reformation, when Europe had never engaged more anxiously and fervently in the great debate about what was real, what was pretend, and what was pretense.
Written with elegance and flair, and meticulously researched, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends will interest scholars of medieval and Renaissance literature, history, theater, performance studies, and anyone curious about urban legends.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
Thanking all those who have requested that I upload a copy, very sorry not to be able to oblige but copyright law forbids it. Amazon.com or abebooks.com often have great deals on used copies. JE
Can the relentless misogyny of medieval French farce still play in the twenty-first century? Check out this brilliant performance of Cooch E. Whippet, as directed by David Beach, which premiered at Lofton Durham’s inaugural Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival (May 2017). It has already helped me to teach comedy.
https://youtu.be/fMrySeNEht4
Cuckold now and evermore, Cooch the Cobbler likes to lock up his wife inside the house while he is out hawking his wares. Annoyed by those impediments, Wilhelmina devises a ruse with her lover (their Priest) such that, the next time Cooch curses her out with “The devil take you!,” the Priest will appear in a devil-costume and do just that. He does, they do, and Cooch can but accept his lot as a henpecked husband. And that’s the story of being Cooch E. Whippet, which appears as Play #10 in The Farce of the Fart.
**Performance Times have been Updated**
And LOL: this is NOT a double entendre but the name of one of my favorite plays from HOLY DEADLOCK! How about taking medieval farcical misogyny and flipping it on its . . . derrière? David Beach, the same brilliant director who, in 2017, brought Cooch E. Whippet to the International Congress for Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI), returns for an encore with one of my favorites, Husband Swap. Don’t miss opening night of Lofton Durham’s Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival (8 May 2019) or catch the Thursday matinée (9 May) at noon!
Husband Swap (Le Trocheur de Maris)
Translated by Jody Enders
Directed by David Beach
Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival
Kalamazoo, MI
Wednesday, 8 May 2019, 8 PM
Thursday, 9 May 2019, 12 PM
For three housewives—Cindy Lou, Charlotte, and Anna Nicole—the deficiencies of their respective spouses make for an extensive bill of particulars. Enter the Husband Trader, with quite the stock of merchandise. As he presents the ladies with specimen after specimen, they must come to a decision as to whether they prefer a newer model to the devils they know. To swap or not to swap? That is the question.
My Abstract for this chapter is included in the PDF. This volume of studies in honor of Stephen G. Nichols by colleagues, friends, and students is called Revealing New Perspectives because that is what his career exemplifies. As both the verb and adjective forms suggest, Steve has undeniably changed the course of medieval studies in ways which have had a global impact that continues to be profound. He has always been committed to not only contextualizing the intellectual and artistic production of the past in which a work was created, but to considering it also according to the current theoretical optics of our time, since each age has its own set of aesthetic and cultural realities and expectations. The contributions to this volume by sixteen distinguished medievalists are divided into the five sections of "Visuals," "Lyric," "Philology," "Alterity," and "Rewritings." While it can, of course, be argued that each essay partakes of more than one of these categories, they have been globally organized into the category that predominates in their articulation.
Résumé: Faisant appel à la rhétorique judiciaire et à la théorie de la performance (« performance studies »), il est possible d’avancer la proposition qu’il y existait un véritable « drame policier » au Moyen Age. Un cas de meurtre de l’année 1474 révèle que l’enquête et la punition du crime sont incitées mais aussi vengées par les principes et les pratiques du spectacle. Tout en élucidant le caractère dramatique des interrogatoires policiers, le cas de 1474 démontre que, grâce à la théâtralité, le verdict juridique relève moins du « vrai-dire » que de la vraisemblance théâtrale. Dans l’imaginaire judiciaire, c’est la littérarité de l’intrigue qui explique les pièces à conviction du crime, la culpabilité se basant ici sur l’absence des preuves et menant, au dénouement troublant de cette histoire, au spectacle quintessentiel de la peine de mort.
n this brief polemic, I draw upon two exemplary rhetorical treatises—the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria—in order to argue that moral allegory no longer plays and it needs to. Allegory plays in both senses of the term: it plays for the stage as good drama, and it plays in the sense that its authors, producers, directors, and actors had some fun with it. Over time, both senses have been lost in translation. Both can be recovered, however, once we reintegrate a bona fide, mnemotechnically inspired rhetoric of performance into the theory and practice of allegory. The rhetorical and mnemonic conception of allegory as prototheatrical or theatrical practice allows us to recuperate the patently ludic dimensions of allegorical theater and theatrical allegory.
A contemporary Flemish festival raises the stakes of ongoing critical conversations about reenactments, theatre historiography, and performativity in the service of social change. The Witch Festival of Nieuwpoort, or Heksenfeest, reenacts (as medieval) the trial and unjust conviction of Jeanne Panne, who was burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1650. In 2012, prior to a theatrical representation of the unlikely heroine's life and death, the town's mayor proclaimed that he was pardoning Jeanne Panne, along with sixteen other executed witches. In addition to rehearsing complex questions about anachronism, linguistic and cultural translation, gallows humor, and the appropriation or rejection of the past, the Heksenfeest places front and center theatre's capacity for true Austinian performativity as it seeks to make history. To theorize such unusual events, the essay proposes two terms, pseudoperformativity and paraperformativity, the better to underscore the common ground among medieval studies, reenactment studies, and the history of rhetoric.
The PSI website at UCSB is currently under construction. More news to come!
https://www.nhalliance.org/magnifying_the_value_of_the_humanities