Miracle cultures. Processional theatre and the cult of images as global network phenomena in the early modern era

• Applicant: Dr. Johanna Abel
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450191644

The proposed research project investigates the reception and adaption of the Christian miracle complex in ritualized forms of theatre from the early modern period on the Iberian Pensinsula, in Latin America and Southeast Asia. At the end of the Middle Ages, early modern liturgical drama emerges throughout Europe from morality and mystery plays to reenact the birth and passion of Christ. With the Reformation, the dogma of transubstantiation - consolidated at the Council of Trient - and the religious wars of the 17th century, the Spanish Corpus Christi play 'auto sacramental' became a precedent of sacramental representation under the auspices of the Counter-Reformation. Religious theatre genres, including the sacramental play, reflect the visual practices and cultural techniques of miracle cultures on the performative level.By examining the transareal genre history of the Spanish Corpus Christi play, the project makes the global circulation of the Hispanic model of the miracle visible. By analyzing their entanglement as manifestations of Christian miracle cultures, processional theatre and the cult of images shall be exposed in their cross-cultural synchronicity for the first time. In order to investigate the literary incorporation of miracle practices in non-European religious cultures, the project develops three working hypotheses. First, Hispanic sacramental plays, with their visualization and apotheosis of the Eucharist, display a poetics of transubstantiation that is anchored on all levels of representation. Secondly, the difficult task of depicting the dogma of transubstantiation with dramatic and theatrical means is solved by implementing figures of presence such as ‘living images’ or embodied allegories. Thirdly, 'autos sacramentales' as a genre must be situated within the history of animation formats, meaning forms of cultural performance that create scenes of vividness and motion. Specific Eucharistic animation strategies and immersion techniques can be extracted from the text, body and image layers in theatre and ritual. What they reveal is the desire for imagery and the production of presence, contributing to our understanding of a literary anthropology of Western Christianity.The project thus meets a threefold desideratum: The combination of text-based drama analyses with the study of religious performance provides a necessary extension to the parameters of materiality and performativity still lacking in literary research. In this way, the sacramental play, which has so far been explored only locally, becomes visible as a global phenomenon of Christianity’s expanding cultural network. By convergently considering 'autos sacramentales' as global literatures, Romance philology is extended to the transareal level. What is initiated in this project is, thus, a pan-Hispanic genre history of the sacramental play that, for the first time, takes the interconnections with Asia into account.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants