Disjointed Unison: Bodily Porousness and Subversion in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

Summary

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament has been one of the most widely studied texts in relation to depictions of the body, including Christ's body, the body of the ‘other’ (in this case, the Jewish body), and the medical body. In the majority of such studies, bodies seem to be conceived within and through a dichotomy that privileges bodily ‘wholeness’ over bodily damage or disintegration. It is fairly easy to find justification for this privileging: one sense of the Middle English word hole (whole in modern spelling) signified the healthy, undamaged state of the body, and an undamaged body tends to have a more pleasant sensory experience than a damaged one. However, ‘wholeness’ of the body is not privileged over disintegration in all late medieval contexts: in some examples, the un-whole body is an important signifier. This prompts a reconsideration of how to refer to the quality of being un-whole without invoking the dichotomy and denigrating the un-whole state of bodies to a state of being damaged. My term of choice is porousness, defined as the capacity of the body to have its superficial integrity violated without descending into dysfunction or damage; this then enables it to enter relationships and transactions with other bodies through that very state of porousness. Accordingly, to avoid resorting to ‘disintegration’, I will also refer to the process of achieving such a state as ‘becoming-porous’. By suspending the dichotomy between whole bodies and damaged bodies, we can enrich our understanding of the pivotal scene during the Passion sequence of the Croxton Play, in which the Host (or the body of Christ) and the hand of the character of Jonathas are joined. The adjusted perspective and the reading that it offers augment existing scholarship on the role of bodies and subversion in the play, as well as affecting how we view un-whole bodies (including the body of Christ), highlighting porousness not as the negation or absence of wholeness, but as a self-sufficient property of bodies.

I argue that from such a perspective, the simultaneity of the performance of becoming-porous in the bodies of both Christ and Jonathas (the oppressed and the oppressor) unites Christian and Jewish bodies through the very state of porousness, blurring the purported natural differences between them. Consequently, it offers an opportunity for the subversion of the hierarchy of status between them.