Abstract
This chapter examines how the Passion–Crucifixion drama demonstrates the fully performative condition of power and truth. The plays’ body of argument centres on the ruthless performance of kyriarchy on the other/body through abuse and torture. Yet, the traditional Christian encoding of Jesus’s flagellation and cross fastening as music-making dangerously aestheticises violence. The advent of the Christian dispensation with its new truth regime is demonstrably grounded in violence both against the innocent victim and, through hate speeches embedded in memorable descriptions of Jesus’s mangled body, against his Jewish executioners. Never treated typologically as akin to Mrs. Noah’s battery, Jesus’s contributes, through its graphically rendered effects, to a new understanding of violence as redemptive, en-gendered as masculine dogmatic knowledge, if yoked to a feminised piety.
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Ciobanu, E. (2018). The Body in Pieces: Judicial Torture and/as Musical Dismemberment in the Passion Plays. In: Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90918-9_4
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