Abstract
What goes on in the mind of the fifteenth-century spectator as he or she watches an actor standing in for Christ being beaten, scourged, humiliated and crucified? This article explores questions of audience response through recent research into mirror mechanisms, arguing that these mechanisms offer glimpses of the inner life of others and provide a biological explanation for the communicative efficacy of embodiment.
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Notes
Text references to individual plays and pageants are given by play and line numbers in the relevant edition.
I kindly thank Antony Passaro, Claire Boyle and Josip Vučković for comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Pfeiffer, K. Feeling the Passion: Neuropsychological perspectives on audience response. Postmedieval 3, 328–340 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.21