The Medieval Theater of Cruelty

Why did medieval dramatists include so many scenes of torture in 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. According to Enders, theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal 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 in order to fabricate truth.

Jody Enders is Professor of French and Co-chair of the Medieval Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, and winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies