Digital Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]

Medieval Guilds, Passions and Abuse

Norman Simms
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 1, Summer 1998

In an earlier paper,1 I discussed the way in which medieval guilds at the close of the Middle Ages in England were not only in charge of the production of the Corpus Christi or Mystery Cycle plays, as critics have long been aware, but were also using the direction and performance of this drama for their own deep psychological reasons, whether or not they were conscious of this process at all. In that paper I brought forward a lot of contemporary (i.e., medieval) documentation to show that the functioning of the guilds was not a simple matter of controlling the mercantile and industrial life of cities in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, and that the spiritual duties of the guilds could not be explained merely by listing their role as a burial society, a manager of charity for widows and orphans, or a chantry fraternity dedicated to a particular saint or sacrament. Examination of the charters and related documents shows that the guilds were vitally concerned with a collective drinking-bout, called a potacio or compotacio, during which the members became drunk, unruly and performed some sort of never clearly stated "shameful thing." Guild regulations not only require all members to attend this "banquet" or "feast," as the potacio is often coyly translated, but also expend many words enumerating ways to police and manage the rowdy and noisy behaviors - the rixus - that attend their celebration, or at least at the time of the guild's foundation, usually some two or three hundred years prior to extant documentation.

With this combination of drunkenness, riotous behavior and shame, I argued that the development of the Mystery Cycle of plays was not merely fortuitous as an accompaniment of other guild duties, both civil and religious. That an elaborate, extended drama based on carefully chosen episodes from the Bible should develop in England under the name of corpus christi needs to be carefully examined. The plays stress the relationship between siblings, parents and children, husbands and wives, and masters and servants and do so in a way that uses the sermo humilis, or gospel-like "low style," to emphasize tensions and anxieties in these intimate and domestic situations that are not normally exposed in the Middle Ages. It therefore looks as if the guild members are using the plays to work out some of their own psychological problems and to project onto the stage of the city both the pains of their own childhood experiences and the various possibilities for amendment and resolution.

In the first paper I also began to look at recent studies of family life and politics in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, and especially in England, the management of sexuality and the treatment of children from conception through birth to various stages of infancy and education. Psychohistorical evidence indicates that there were major shifts in childrearing practices during this period with consequent changes in the dominant personality types among the so-called psychoclasses involved. This kind of investigation not only helps make the functions of the guilds clearer in this period of radical realignment of sensibility in Western Europe, but also begins to refocus the way in which we understand the plays produced by the guilds for the great festival celebrating the Real Presence in the eucharistic bread and wine.

In this second article I want to go over some of the same grounds as earlier, but with more evidence and with new insight. I will also explore much more deeply the dynamics of trance-production and hypnotic effect during the compotacio and show more clearly the changes within the guilds as they moved from earlier psychohistorical functions to newer ones at the end of the Middle Ages and at the start of the Renaissance.

Recent studies make clear that many instances of possession and multiple personality disorders recognized since the nineteenth century as arising from childhood sexual abuse and related traumas are also part of the configuration of medieval mental illnesses. Nuns who dream of devils raping them or of giving themselves to monstrous lovers often reveal in their confessions, when read in extenso, symptoms of repeated violation by fathers, uncles, priests or other authority figures, whose sexual advances the frightened girl dissociates from by projecting into a black stranger or beast, and re-experiences in a variety of culturally-determined forms. But rather than dwell on cases where the trauma and its subsequent symptomatic illness belonged to individuals, I want to discuss a situation in which the abuse is carried out by traumatized groups against many individuals, and the symptomatic responses and their therapeutic healing are also experienced as ritualized social actions. In particular, I want to discuss the role of guilds in England in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries and their relationship to the production of large-scale civic dramas, the Corpus Christi or Mystery Cycle of plays.

I will outline briefly the nature of late medieval guilds in England and then the specific motivation, shape, and function of the mystery plays which were brought into being during the fourteenth century and flourished for about the next two hundred and fifty years. I shall then discuss the kind of evidence that is used by psychohistorians and historians of mentality to describe the traumas of sexual abuse in this period of West European history, and then indicate why the usual approach through individual experience is inappropriate.

Evidence of Sexual Abuse in the Past

In this section of the paper, I will examine some recent studies on sexual abuse in the Middle Ages, and evaluate the evidence in terms of the main subject of my study, the guilds and their production of mystery plays. At the same time I shall pick up more general critical notions and give them a more specific focus by dealing with particular individuals and documents from the period at the heart of this study. This process will consequently require extrapolating insights from these articles and recasting them to fit a situation which is not specifically that of individual victims traumatized into dissociative states and thereafter subject to forms of exorcism or persecution by the Inquisition, but rather a situation in which the guilds as a group "play out" their own therapeutic regimens. There are indications of hypnotic and trance-states throughout the ancient world, yet it is only with the development of Christianity that there tends to be a moral regimen attached to the phenomena and also an institutionalization of techniques to exorcise and punish those diagnosed as susceptible to and victimized by demonic possession.2 While early scholars in the field confused medieval possession states and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of hysteria, the key factor for our study is the close approximation of sexual trauma with both symptoms.

Anita M. Walker and Edmund H. Dickerman3 have carefully reviewed the evidence in the case of Magdeleine des Aymards, a thirteen-year-old servant girl who confessed demon possession to the legal authorities in Riom, in central France, early in the seventeenth century; and have shown that this may be one of the first documented cases of child abuse on record. This case confirms Freud's earliest views that instances of witchcraft and demonic possession have an etiology of child sexual abuse. The authors further disclose the relationship between such abuse and the political and economic structures of the early modern family. Once the trappings of demonological and ecclesiastical discourses are removed, Magdeleine's case sounds painfully modern, both in terms of her trauma and the conditions in which she was raped by her uncle at a very early age. These three facets of the case bear indirectly on the relationship of guilds and the passion plays in England during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.

Magdeleine's delusions of being raped by a black monster, devil, or beast bears a powerful resemblance to modern cases of sexual abuse, and realization of this factor prepares for the shocking details of sexual abuse within the structures of the guild and then their therapeutic projection into the plays of Christ's sufferings on the Cross.

The social and economic factors, the radical changes in the organization of communities and families,4 on the Continent that lie behind Magdeleine's case are related to the situation in England which drives the guild members obsessively to recall with horror the acts which first defined and brought the guilds into existence in their medieval form and then later led them to project those highly charged and ambivalent feelings into the elaborate structures of the Mystery Cycle plays which only appear in the final years of the Middle Ages in England. Walker and Dickerman write, "The dominant male culture viewed post-pubertal females as sexually voracious and insatiable, and thus treated their rape primarily in economic or status terms, ignoring or denying any nonphysical injury" (247). But they do not say why such a society found it convenient to put the blame on the children and to avoid punishments of malefactors except in cases of physical injury or death, and even then to measure out different punishments according to the class relations of the individuals involved. Moreover, they also - perhaps correctly in their specific study - limit their concern to the abuse of female children by adult males. In the situation of the guilds, however, the model of the family is presumed, but with an increasing taboo of sexual intimacy between parents and children and among siblings, despite the frequency of abuse of male apprentices and other male minors by masters, older boys, and associated young men who occupied the workshop-home and thus formed part of the master's "family." Voracious sexuality in children is presumed because the desire of the incompletely developed egos in the tense and straightened circumstances of most medieval social groups, where older males sought the empowerment of enforced sex with a weaker partner, at the same time as it seems to have resulted from a compulsion of the perpetrator to punish the bad feelings he had as aspects of the person he buggered or raped. Judicial punishments were infrequent and inadequate in large measure because the legal authorities were parents of or even themselves the leading offenders, and because - then as now - they viewed the abuse of children - male and female - who were not their own as a way of avoiding sinfulness and criminality in their own families.

That being so, then we have to look more closely at the effect on the victims of these crimes. As Walker and Dickerman put it,

There is no indication that the passage of 400 years has produced any significant modification in brain physiology (indeed, the evidence of physical anthropology suggests it has remained the same since the Upper Paleolithic). One would expect therefore, that if the female experience of rape in the early modern period were as negative and traumatic as it is today, then long-term reactions to rape would also be similar, although their behavioral expression be culturally constrained. (248)

Again, we cannot take these statements simply and uncritically. The real details of the situation which our evidence begins to bring forth about the guilds suggest strongly that many of the male victims not only suffered post-traumatic syndrome and most likely were part of the next generation of obsessively repeating abusers, but they were also contributing members of the effort to break the cycle of abuse. This interactive cycle of abuse and victimization occurred partly by deflecting the bad-feelings into the evil or sinful characters of the drama of salvation and partly by turning the guilt into more socially-constructive activities. In other words, the good works of the guild as a social, civic and charitable organization are driven by the need to repress and deny the abuse that is recollected and inflicted by the guild. Such a group-fantasy mechanism includes the public performance of plays which first recognize and so formalize complaints against the shameful actions, and then on this projective stage of urban activity enact tentative models of reform. Since, however, the consciousness of the crimes is subject to constant personal and cultural censorship, the forms in which the complaints and reforms are articulated in the cycle plays are oblique and ironic. Myth, symbolism, allegory and homiletic rhetoric are all involved in the necessary distortions. Nevertheless, I hope to show that in some small measure the performance of these corpus christi plays served to aid and shape the development of a more modern ("liberal") attitude towards family, domestic politics, and sexual relationships.

The following study will touch on a number of interrelated themes, such as the role of hypnotism, the restructuring of the family, and the development of the festival of corpus christi, and so gradually show their connections. The psychological function of the guilds will be adduced and the principles integrated into a social and aesthetic picture of the emergent late medieval mystery cycle of plays in England. There is no way, of course, to psychoanalyze the performers in these actions, whether the secret rites of the guild or its public enactment of the corpus chirsti plays, so we have to work by analogy, inference, and educated guess. In doing that, we are also required to modify the procedures and extrapolations of the scientific and historical experts.

It is significant, however, that writers on hypnotism tend to shy away from any historical consideration of the individuals involved, whether hypnotizers or subjects, and to assess only contemporary ("modern") adult social behaviors and superficial personality traits. William C. Coe and Theodore R. Sarbin, however, do move towards what they term "a dramaturgical and narrational" perspective.5 Nevertheless, their notions of dramaturgy and narratology are remarkably innocent of contemporary discourse analysis and ritual theory; and so they treat these relationships in a fairly one-dimensional, non-dynamic way. Eva I. B‡nyai comes a bit closer to seeing the social complexities of the encounter between hypnotist and subject, adding as well the "audience" or other scientific ("objective") observers. She considers that there are some predispositional factors in the physiology, the personal history, and personality of the actors, and hence that hypnosis is neither a fluid that flows from or between the various parties or a particular state of consciousness or dissociation per se but rather a social experience shared by two or more persons.6

Walker and Dickermann's study shows, however, that insight into hypnosis can come from other, more historical and social situations. Therefore our approach, built up out of extrapolations of these kinds of investigations by psychohistorians, has different premises than these researchers use: (1) that hypnosis or trance, possession, influence, rapport or group-fantasy - the terms are varied and show how extensive the phenomena subsumed under this title can be - has played a vital role in the way individuals and groups relate to one another in real-life situations, not in artificially constructed laboratory or theatrical conditions; (2) that these phenomena conveniently collected under the category of "hypnosis" are essentially social, group, interactive encounters and function within the ebb and flow of historical situations - economic, political, religious and so on; and (3) that the persons who take part are not isolated from normal experiences, and that "normal" experiences are for the most part abnormal, dysfunctional, painful and violent, with molestation, abuse, neglect, humiliation and abandonment usually at the root of the susceptibility in the group qua group that generates the hypnotic event. As with B‡nyai's casual reference to "archaic levels" of consciousness which are cathected during hypnosis, so too her almost off-hand allusion to "adaptive" features hints at but never explores the nature of the bio-psychological functions of the group-fantasy. By following through with our critical review of recent studies of medieval cases of possession and exorcism, we will be able to move into an investigation of the large-scale fantasy associated with guilds, shameful things and Passion Plays.

Thus, another psychohistorical study carries this kind of historical analysis further into the realm of mental disorders. Onno Van der Hart, Ruth Lierens and Jean Goodwin examine "a sixteenth-century case of possession and exorcism as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)."7 The case involves a Dominican nun, Jeanne Fery, who wrote an account of her own exorcism that took place in Mons, France, in 1584 and 1585. Again, while the case of a cloistered nun does not bear directly on the matter of usually male, or at least male-dominated, guilds in England during the late Middle Ages and their activities focused on the production of civic drama, the techniques of analysis and the issues displayed in the study point towards conditions in the minds of individuals and groups at this period of history which are normally ignored, flattened out into sensationalism, or dismissed as beyond modern analysis. By translating Jeanne's symptoms into modern terminology the researchers risk losing touch with the specific cultural determinants of her case, but at the same time the risk is worth taking, as the technique provides a way of recognizing the specific nature of her mental illness. Thus the nun is described:

Jeanne's alters were at times visualized, at times heard arguing inside, and at times took over her body in violent pseudoseizures, rage attacks requiring restraints (from which she escaped), compulsive suicide attempts, regression to a childlike state, and episodes of prolonged sobbing and intense physical pain (especially headache). Sleep disturbance, abysmal sadness, conversion blindness, shivering, disordered eating, mutism, contorted faces, inexplicably lost and found objects, and episodic loss of knowledge and skills completed a clinical picture quite familiar to contemporary clinicians working with dissociative disorders. (19)

That she was first abused at age two years, and then at four, with episodes becoming more frequent from four to twelve not only gives a cause to the trauma she has suffered and the symptoms of personality dissociation she displays, but tells us something about the nature of the society in which the nun lived as a child. That she imagines the abusers as devils and monsters is normal in the Counter-Reformation atmosphere she lives in, just as are the identities of the various alters she generates in her mind to avoid the pain, humiliation, and desire to take revenge on her abusers. These alters include Mary Magdelaine and other characters specific to Catholic European mythology of the time.

But what is not explained in this study is why she was abused by her father and various other men in her family whom she then must disguise for her own protection as devils and monsters. Nor do the researchers ask how or why the religious orders within the Church provide both a haven from such abuse and a mechanism of shielding the families of the abused victim from confronting the sickness they perpetrated. If exorcism was institutionalized by the Church, and that institutionalization was made more regular and systematic in the centuries before and after the Counter-Reformation, then the incidence of abuse either became more virulent or was at least less tolerable within the day-to-day lives of victims and victimizers themselves. The Reformation and the wars of religion - civil and international - which accompanied the collapse of the old Christian-Latin hegemony over Western Europe, along with the breakdown of feudalism, destabilized life for most people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and created conditions which were both positive, in opening up new economic and social opportunities for advancement, and negative, in making unclear lines of moral authority both in public and private life. Moreover, these large-scale disruptions to society were accompanied by changes in the childrearing practices of increasing numbers of West Europeans, especially those in the cities, and therefore those likely to be members of the guilds and participate in their religious and civic duties. From a dominance of neglectful childrearing, in which infants were handed over to wet-nurses, maidservants, and non-household members, the move was towards an increasingly intrusive and shaping regime of parenting.8 The change also involved a shift out of a deep "social trance," in Lloyd deMause's term, to one in which the projection of anxieties and guilt into the production of the plays allows for some apprehension and growing awareness of what the impact of the older treatment of children meant and thus some gradual improvement in the conditions of the family and the workplace. Children were more and more subject to new forms of corrective punishments, strict monitoring of their physical and psychological development, and public scrutiny of their achievements as incipient members of the family and the community. This did not, of course, involve any recognition or respect for their specific needs as individuals, or even as developing organisms, but it did move away from infanticide, abandonment, callousness and neglect.

The Guilds and their Relation
to Family Structures

Having looked at the way several individuals manifest symptoms that we can today recognize as more than post-traumatic stress syndrome, as it involves deeper unconscious transformations to the psyche and its projections into personal, domestic and civic life, it becomes clear that not all families in the late Middle Ages were safe, nurturant or protective places to grow up. The extent to which this dysfunctional quality can be considered to be widespread may be judged by the institutionalization of techniques for exorcism and punishment of possessed persons during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It may also be indicative of deep-seated traumatization of a large proportion of the population, not only that the older Christian-Latin synthesis of the Middle Ages, based on feudalism and Catholic hegemony, began to break apart in the late fourteenth century, but also that this break-up was attended by civil wars, religious persecutions, witch-hunting epidemics, and other signs of terror and uncontrollable rages in vast numbers of individuals and groups. To understand some of this anxiety, hatred and violence we need to go further than normative historical accounts of the social, political and economic structures of medieval society to examine the nature of the family itself as a psychological group concerned with child-rearing, sexual relationships, and the management of the economy for food, clothing, and shelter. It will also be important to take into account a kind of duplication of the family in the construction of the workplace, where master and apprentices relate to one another.

From this psychohistorical perspective, families structure themselves around children and the processes of breeding and educating them in particular, and the distribution of power between men and women, as well as between children and adults, is a consequence of how the primary object, that is, the emergent newborn, is treated. Whereas Philippe Aries9 and his followers work with a model that denigrates the place of the child by claiming that prior generations could not imagine (e.g., by painting pictures) or institutionalize the concept of children except as incomplete adults, psychohistorians operate with very different paradigms. The difficulty in the past, however, was not the inability to focus on the child as an organism that changed in size and proportions, intellectual capacity, and physical skills, but the inability or unwillingness to relate to that organism with love and understanding. B. R. Hanno, for instance, has recently done a quantitative analysis of Dutch paintings of children from the late sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth century to test Aries's propositions and concludes

Aries' thinking that "medieval society did not recognize childhood and that by the mid-18th century the child has taken a central place in the family" is not reflected in the data of our empirical research.10

Earlier studies by Lloyd deMause11 and other psychohistorians12 have shown that it is more significant to generalize a series of "psychoclasses" to indicate generational changes for the central cohorts of children according to child-rearing practices, ranging from infanticide through abandonment to intrusive and on to caring modes. Psychoclasses are groups of children brought up in roughly similar ways and consequently sharing similar marks of parental neglect, care, or love which they then pass on to their own children. The history of families, which are not stable entities at the best of times, is a history of the cultural and socio-economic terms in which these childrearing practices are articulated at various periods and places. When times are not at their best - for children, that is, when parents feel guilty about their success and wealth - families are not merely unstable; they are filled with tensions and uncontrollable passions.

Thus when we find that studies of guilds,13 whether in ancient or medieval times, indicate that "[t]he nucleus of the guild was the working family," and indicative of this longstanding identification we can point to the fact that one of the names for a guild in ancient Hebrew is "mishpucha" (family),14 there is a habit - a trick of non-dynamic historians - to slide over this designation, as though all families were the same sentimentally idealized nineteenth-century extended group we find in children's stories or the more modern and urban model of the nuclear family.15 No matter how often reports indicate that the family is the site of the worst violence against women and children, these historians assume that in the past this was not so.16 If the positivist historians are forced to take some note of regulations against or accusations of misbehavior in the guild-family, it tends to be glossed over and normalized to a mere argument over payments or days off or some professional quarrel. Moses Kremer, for example, speaking of Jewish and Christian guilds in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Poland, explains:

Some statutes of the city guilds granted the journeymen the right to quit their masters if the latter committed a shameful deed, such as theft, or even if he killed a dog. At times, the journeymen exploited this right to blackmail their masters, demanding milczkowe (hush money).17

The fact that journeymen would blackmail their masters and that the masters were susceptible to this pressure should indicate immediately that the home-like family atmosphere of the guilds was anything but harmonious, warm, and loving. More than that, however, the balancing of "theft" and the "killing of a dog" as shameful deeds should tell us something, either about the sources Kremer is working with, insofar as they repress the unthinkable deeds that were cause of controversy, or Kremer himself, who is too concerned about the economic nature of the guilds to see - or to be able to see - its more human, family-like qualities. If the Polish guilds were anything like Polish families, then the shameful deeds would be indeed the killing of a dog - and we recall here the famous essay by Robert Darnton on the great cat massacres by journeymen in Paris in the late eighteenth century.18 But more than that, insensitivity to the torture and killing of domestic animals is now shown to be an accompaniment of abuse and violence of children.19 The likely behavior in the workshop that rouses the journeymen's ire is thus likely to be sexual, and some sort of homosexual harassment or attack, by the master on his workers or among the older apprentices on the younger. Blackmail could also arise from the journeymen having evidence of the master's abuse of his wife and family.

The Potacio and Trance

Like the family, the guild is a group of individuals who relate to one another in a highly intense and ambiguous way, and moreover one in which certain individuals have much greater power over others on the basis of age, sex, and knowledge; they are also both institutions in which interpersonal stress levels rise in response to external circumstances. While Miri Rubin has begun to examine and problematize the symbolic relations between the individual units of late medieval urbanism and the central cult of those persons and institutions,20 the current section of the study looks at a deeper, more dynamic aspect of the situation: the psychological dimension and the dream-like unfolding of the mystery plays in the late fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Jerrold Atlas has pointed out two features of such groups which are pertinent to my presentation. The first is that groups under stress regress as a "coping mechanism." "Since this regression is usually to pre-verbal/pre-oedipal fantasies, we display our willingness - even more strongly, our desire - to be punished."21 A result of this regression to the desire to be punished, then, is a rise in hypnotizability, not merely the susceptibility to the will of dominant figures, but more significantly "as a defense using Ôhypnotic evasion.'"22 In the situation of the guild, moreover, we can say that the apprentices and later the journeymen as well are subject to the absolute rule of their masters. This includes abuse - punishments and acts of wanton cruelty - through long hours of enforced labour, as well as deprivation of free play time and of contact with parents, siblings and playmates, often in harsh, dark, cold and hungry conditions.23 It also includes liability to violent and even sadistic punishments, sexual exploitation, and, in the extreme, death. Trauma is therefore not unusual, and a desire to identify with the abusive elders - older or bigger apprentices or the master and his family - leads to regressive behavior, with the susceptibility to hypnotism which creates what deMause calls "group craziness."

In discussing the guilds, however, we are not talking about isolated instances of abuse and regressive behaviors, but rather with an institutionalization of a larger civic group constituted by the various fraternities, confraternities, parish associations and mercantile and craft guilds,24 who together in the city council formed a group which at once sought to regulate25 the behavior which created traumatic difficulties for the city's population manifest in violence, rape, drunkenness, rioting, and other shameful deeds and, at the same time, hides or at least disguises its incorporation of those shameful things as its founding purpose; and then, through a range of civic and religious duties, most especially by its control over the production and performance of the corpus christi play cycle.26 The drama projects those feelings of punishment and guilt into a form that allows for economic and political developments towards bourgeois morality. In this way, two events come together, the individual's regression into a dream of escape and hysterical repetition of the traumatic acts and the group's incorporation as a public dreaming. As Jerrold Atlas puts it, basing his views on Margaret Brenman-Gibson's revision of Freud, "people go into groups as they would go into dreams."27 If in this sense "the group is a dream," then it is amenable to analysis as dreams are, both for the manifest and the latent content, and within all the modes that dream-work produces. But since the group is also not simply a dream in the sense that an individual has while asleep but more like a collective trance, then we need to consider some of the means by which trances are induced and manipulated, or in other words the interplay of the mesmerist and the magnetized in these "regressive shifts in interpersonal processes," to cite Brenman-Gibson.28 As "Hypnosis induction disrupts the ego's control of its various apparatus thereby diminishing input," according to Atlas, "What follows is both an altered state and a transference relationship in which the normal defensive and controlling functions are dissolved."29

The hypnotic states or trances we are talking about are not those meant by Atlas, since there is no leader manipulating small groups to their own consciously or unconsciously constructed ideological ends. Rubins' "New Historical" approach, with its concern for the distribution of power relationships,30 might benefit from this examination of hypnotizability and influential leaders, but this is not where we are moving in our discussion. We are talking about situations in which the group hypnotizes itself and dreams its way in and out of conscious awareness of its political and psychological goals. This situation of shifting consciousness and unconsciousness, where the psychological motives distort the political principles and the social goals are shaped by the psychological anxieties of the participants, is a group-fantasy. In deMause's terms, "When people construct a group-fantasy, they give up their idiosyncratic defensive fantasies and become entrained in a social trance."31 Late medieval society in England was only partly able to contain and articulate idiosyncratic individualities, so that much already of social consciousness was constituted by a variety of overlapping group-identities.32

In terms of the fraternities or guilds, as opposed to the individual workshops where apprentices and journeymen are punished and regress into childish states of dependence and fantasy, the members collectively hypnotize one another into the belief that their group-identity is coextensive with society as a whole, while they clearly are an exclusive, self-choosing association of citizens. That is, they assume their identity as social alters, which deMause considers to be their social trance forms. He also speaks of the way people "in earlier societies spent much of their time in their persecutory social alters - a world of spirits and gods and magic - because they had so little private selves due to their abusive and neglectful upbringing."33 Yet in the period we are concerned with, there was a stirring of change, and there are the beginnings of institutionalized control over the social alters, just as there are beginnings of non-abusive and non-neglectful childhood experiences. As Rubins indicates, the corpus christi drama "progressed processionally with the climax at the scene of the Crucifixion," and what was put on display there was "Christ's suffering body...: its wounds, its interstices, fascinated large numbers in the dramatic, public presentation."34 Then Rubins concludes rather lamely, but indicating the way in which we can pass beyond current anthropological cliche' to a more insightful psychohistorical perspective: "Thus, the processional mode can induce tension and rivalry rather than resolve difference into communitas through ritual." The processions became the site of tensions since these displays of relationship and projections of inner anxiety displayed for all to see the points of stress and the contradictory tugs on society. Nonetheless, the thesis of this study is that in England, during a crucial period of close to two centuries, much of the inner turmoil caused by modernization of child-rearing practice was played out in public dramatic performances and hence the ordeal of modernization was less fraught in England with the massive blood-lettings that marked the process on the Continent, where religious persecution, witchcraft mania, and civil strife went on in an almost unstoppable orgy of mimetic violence.35

The medieval guild, though hierarchical in nature, was not conceived as a group subordinate to a charismatic leader. Rather than being set into a docile congregation or audience which looks up at and on a leader who reshapes them as a potent religious or political mob, the medieval guild trance leads the members into a collective mythological dream as the body of Christ. The body of Christ is at once a persecuting and a persecuted image. It is a terrifying image of persecution, torture, and humiliation but leads to some form of momentary resolution of intrapsychic tensions. The resolution is only at a secondary (individual or group) or even tertiary (aesthetic or performative and textual) level of consciousness felt in civic and ecclesiastical behaviors. Though humiliated by Romans and Jews and tortured on the Cross, the corpus christi provides a means to salvation through the Eucharist celebrated in the performance of the Mystery Cycle of biblical plays.

Just as they look after each other's welfare professionally and economically and provide mutual assistance in times of sickness and death, as well as intervening in civic affairs to their collective benefit as citizens and householders in matters of government, justice, and taxation, so too the guilds provide mechanisms in the plays for deflecting the pains they feel individually and as smaller groups into salvific actions and into working paradigms in which emotional hurts can be aired and social frustrations articulated - and possible ameliorative paradigms of interpersonal relationships tried out. The history of humankind is enacted by the plays, running from Creation through the Fall to the prefigurative experiences of Christ through his Passion and Resurrection out to the foundations of the Church, the life of the saints and finally the Second Coming and Apocalyptic close of history. While this version of sacred history in its large scale is drawn from the encyclopedic works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the specifics of presentation in England is almost unique. This dramatic sweep of history in the corpus christi cycles tends to focus on the relationships of parents to children, siblings and spouses, masters and servants, and rarely subjects and rulers. The more city councils in England focused in on themselves through the production of these plays, it seems, the less the plays served the kind of doctrinal functions primary to the biblical dramas of France, Italy, Spain and Germanic lands amongst competing clerical factions or reformist groups. The English play cycles themselves, though hardly a logically-worked-out genre, were known as corpus christi plays because they were seen, experienced, and thought of in terms of a suffering body, the broken yet sanctified body of Christ, which in its diverse ways served as the synechdoche for the body politic of the city corporation itself.

Therefore, unlike Passion plays on the Continent, whose interests were more doctrinal and concerned with sacramental miracles, inscribed and produced by ecclesiastical and royal agents, the four extant English Mystery Plays tend to view history as a series of domestic clashes culminating in the Passion of Jesus and above all in his personal tribulations and tortuous and humiliating execution.36 Thus too, as in the Wakefield Cycle especially, the farcical and comic emphasis on complaining wives, rebellious children, jealous brothers, treacherous servants and victimizing magistrates draws on conventional Scriptural legends but develops them in specifically new affective ways, not so much within homiletic discourse, where they instruct in obedience to canon law, or in the language of complaint and satire, where blame is declared and sinful behavior scorned, but rather as descriptive embodiments of recognized and unrecognized faults in the personalized categories of family, workshop and town.

It is not merely an abused individual child dissociating under stress who "enters an altered state as a psychic defense,"37 but the guild as a whole, metonymically representing the city as a body politic, becoming both the surrogate for the correcting parent and the victimized child seeking salvation in a dreamed idealization of the family, where father and mother are lovingly close and helpful, which "plays" its way towards a more modern conception of social ("mutual") individuality and childrearing responsibilities at the care-giving stage. The God who is worshiped and honored in the plays is at once the Father who cares and punishes for correction, the Son who suffers with the abused ego inside each hurt individual of the guild or city and who also transforms the humiliation and pain into salvation, and the Holy Spirit and/or Blessed Virgin Mother who intercedes and protects.

The community from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries in England was in a state of rapid restructuring and redefinition: plagues, famines, civil wars, and then the rise of a new capitalist economy saw another revolutionary change. This is the shift from what is known as autistic group personalities caused by the abandoning mode of childrearing practices, which had dominated through the first thousand years of the Middle Ages from the fall of the Roman Empire and the development of feudal relationships, through the ambivalent stage with its depressive personalities from the fourteenth to late sixteenth century, to the intrusive phase of childrearing and its compulsive personality types from the mid-seventeenth century to the great social and political revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century.38 While the dominant psychoclass at any period shows the personality types appropriate to the normative childrearing practices, there are always small numbers of families which have shifted already into a more advanced stage of development, and a large proportion of the population, particularly in rural and isolated places - geographic, as well as economic - which hang on to much earlier and cruder treatment of children and mothers and hence tend to produce even more regressive - violent, sadistic and masochistic - styles of interpersonal relationship. The evidence to back up this progressive series of developmental stages derives from frequency of resort to wet-nurses, use of swaddling and intensity of neglect, ages of weaning, periodization of toilet-training, and similar indicator facts which are relatively available in historical records.

The Urban Crises: Demographic
and Psychohistorical

It is also important to keep in context the nature of the urban crisis which the individual members of the guilds and the constituent family structures were undergoing during this key period from the fourteenth through to the mid-seventeenth century. Harold G. Gardiner's claim that the disappearance of the Mystery Plays was not a matter of puritanical mistrust in drama or an unwillingness to shoulder the high economic costs, but strictly "from an external force, the hostility of the Reformation,"39 needs to be looked at again, both in terms of internal forces of modernization at work in the English guilds of the late Middle Ages but also in terms of mutations and developments in the mentality of the dominant members of these associations. Arthur Brown cites ample evidence from York, for example, to show that financial strains were placed on the guilds by the continued performances of the plays, and the activities did begin increasingly to interfere with what was being re-perceived as the "serious" business of the guilds, the corporation, and the town itself.40

It was not a simple matter of economic stress impinging on the resources of the city's elite merchant and artisan citizens, but a much deeper based anxiety at the level of biological and psychological survival. Three quarters of all families in this demographic group during this period failed to produce sufficient male heirs to sustain the family over three generations. Among the twenty-five per cent of families that could accumulate wealth over a sustained biological period, most tended to opt out of civic affairs and retire to the countryside, purchasing estates and titles wherever possible.41 This left the late medieval city and thereby the all-important guilds in the hands of a precarious body of men, deeply concerned with widows and orphans, to be sure, but also more deeply concerned with their own sense of individual and family integrity. "High infant and child mortality," claims Gottfried, "made survival of heirs a haphazard affair";42 but what he neglects to say is that the anxiety was not merely direct and related to a sense of loss of children and the family name. As families disappeared, either totally with no male issue, or by withdrawal from urban life and governance, the individuals and groups which stepped into their place were often unexpected newcomers - distant relations who inherited radically as intervening male lines collapsed and ambitious new clans that bought up the businesses and houses of the defunct or retiring elite class. The sense of guilt was probably very strong, with parents shocked at the way in which they superseded their own fathers' wealth and station in life and ashamed at the easy life which their own sons seemed to have after their difficult childhoods. Thus at the same time as this new, more open society started to crystallize around a more liberal, democratic and bourgeois sense of domestic and social responsibility, there was also a self-hatred that needed to be suppressed, a resentment that could not be openly expressed, and at best a vague awareness of the new social, political and economic structures growing up in England at this juncture between medieval feudalism and Renaissance centralized monarchy.

By the close of the fifteenth century the new society and the new sensibility were beginning to undercut the very basis of the religious and institutional life of the English city, so that increasingly successful merchants and industrialists chose not to participate in the governing of the city through the guild hierarchy, and, more importantly for our thesis, to neglect participation in town pageantry, such as the corpus christi plays. While in some places, such as Bury St. Edmunds, the opposite seemed to happen, as Gottfried indicates,43 the national tendency was to follow the course of incipient Protestant individualism away from medieval Catholic corporationalism. Again we need to stress that all this involved more than just a socio-political revolution ("reformation"), with a concomitant change in personal "behavior"; we must also examine the vital components of a psychohistorical vision, such as child-rearing practices; domestic relations between parents, siblings, and servants; and individual- and group-fantasy dynamics.

In short, it is not enough to know that swaddling virtually came to a halt in England in the course of the sixteenth century or that doctors and midwives increasingly recommended that mothers breastfeed their own children during this same period to become aware of a radical shift from previous centuries of childrearing practice. It is also important to follow the changes to legislation and the judgments in courts, as well as the development of institutions like orphanages, refuges and hospitals, in which it can be seen that increasingly the rights of children and apprentices were respected and protected by authorities. Each time the official bodies take into account the criminality of acts which hitherto were overlooked or winked at, the more we can see a further shift into the dominance of a more advanced psychoclass. Thus Fox surveys the treatment of apprentices and notes that

The history of apprenticeship indicates that a number of methods developed for insuring that the terms of these agreements [with masters] were carried out. In the [M]iddle [A]ges, for example, larger guilds sent beadles around to inspect the conditions under which the master and his apprentices worked. By the 17th century additional monitoring machinery was introduced with the use of professional informers.... By the 16th century apprentices had acquired the right to take their cases to the court of assistance or the chamberlain's court in the city of London. In other major cities such as Norwich a similar right appeared in the mayoralty courts.44

It is when there is attention paid to abuses that actions begin to occur that ameliorate the problem, but recognition is not a simple matter, and efforts to inspect individual working places may not yield any structural change in the law for generations. Nevertheless more and more individuals grow up with a reformed sense of their own worth and consequently treat their children in ways that are less harsh than their own parents or govern their apprentices less strictly and cruelly than their own masters.

Platt's conclusion, based on a survey of contracts for workers' cottages which show an emerging concern for comfort, health and safety over the course of the fifteenth century, is that "in many material respects the condition of the average tradesman and artisan had decidedly improved, to the erosion of antique social distinctions."45 But an improvement is only relative, and the life of young apprentices, like children in the home, was never consistently happy and salubrious. Nevertheless, the improvement was enough to move society towards a greater recognition and acceptance of the legitimacy of the newly articulated complaints.

An excellent example of such a complaint appears in what is today one of the best-known of the corpus christi plays, the so-called Second Shepherds' Play of the Wakefield Cycle. After two of his masters come on stage to make their own complaints, Coll speaks about the pressures put upon north country farmers by the absentee landlords from the south and their insensitive overseers and Gib about the domestic difficulties of having too many children and an overbearing wife, the young shepherd Daw (or David), who works for them, appears to voice his own complaints about their unjust treatment of him:

Such servants as I
That sweats and swinks,
Eats our bread full dry,
And that me forthinks,
We are oft wet and weary
When master-men winks,
Yet comes full lately
Both dinners and drinks.
But nately
Both our dame and our sire,
When we have run in the mire,
They can nip at our hire,
And pay us full lately.
(lines 222-234)46

Threatening to go on strike, Daw continues his complaint about late payment and lack of proper nourishment. From his perspective, he is not just economically exploited: as a child he is neglected and cruelly treated. The older men, who when he first appeared talked of whipping him for negligence of their sheep, now hear him out, and while they do not respond directly to his complaints, join him in a song of reconciliation. This reconciliation serves a prefigurative function in looking forward to the song that the angel will sing to announce the birth of the Christ Child and then the harmonious choral they intone at the end of the play to signal the advent of the new covenant of salvation. Before there is a real address to the problems raised of inequality, injustice and insensitivity to the plight of poor folk, an address mythically articulated in the presentation of the idealized scene of Mary and the Infant Jesus, however, the three shepherds encounter another character, Mak the Sheepstealer. How this trickster dupes the shepherds, steals one of their young rams, disguises it as his own son, and then is caught out and punished, I shall leave to a more appropriate moment. It is time to turn back to the dynamics of the trance state and its production of the group-dream.

This condition of the collective dream arises in the heated atmosphere of the compotacio but is driven by real-life conditions at home and in the work-space where the punishments and abuse occurred. Since it is now clear that hypnotizability is conditioned by early trauma of this sort, the events that transpired in the annual guild drinking bouts can be inferred from the circumstantial evidence, and by interpretation of the oblique enactments on the stage of the mystery plays.

The trance-like state which we are discussing here in relation to the compotacio is not, of course, a full hypnotic or somnambulistic sleep. In this group-phenomenon, the members of the guild bond their relationship and group-identity through drinking together. On a rather superficial level, Gottfried says of the fraternal organizations which overlap with merchant and craft guilds, that they "probably served as drinking clubs in that day before public houses were common, and this may have been part of their basic attraction..."47 This avoids the crucial issue of what constituted the bonding mechanism ("that members might Ôjoin together,'" as Gottfried puts it48) in the medieval organization as much as it does the social and psychological functions of contemporary all-male drinking clubs. To say that men gather to drink together and to be separate from women is only the beginning of the argument.

It is not drinking alone which enables the trance-like formation of the group-dream to come about, although the consumption of large amounts of alcohol helps to lower certain individual ego-boundaries between the participants.49 Other factors include the crowding together of many persons into a relatively small space, the pressure and warmth of their bodies and its consequent reduction in oxygen levels. Activity is therefore slowed, attention begins to focus on the expected transformation of the occasion, and the leaders of the guild make their speeches in a mesmerizing manner; that is, they repeat key words in rhythmically slowed-down sentences. According to deMause, "Neurobiologically, all trance states increase theta-wave rhythm in the hippocampus, indicating increased attentional activity to early amygdalan-centered memories, allowing access to dissociated traumatic experiences."50

What actually happened during the compotacio has to be constructed imaginatively both from sparse and scattered verbal details dropped in the guild charters and from the effects of the event seen in the corpus christi plays of biblical events that depict farced and comic versions of relationships between parents and children, siblings, mothers and fathers, and masters and servants. This account therefore is a guess, but I trust an intelligent and informed guess.

While the manifest level of the orations deals with the civic and religious duties of the guild, its professional status and functions, and its important affirmation of solidarity, there is also an unconscious, latent level to the discourses. Key words and phrases here will evoke repressed memories of fetal experience, birth traumas, and unresolved tensions of early childhood, and will probably repeat formulae of liturgical offices addressed to the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus.

As the guild officials intone the regulations of the charter, the programme of activities of the year, the review of past accomplishments, and other apparently soporific details of ordinary business, these repeated words and phrases - divorced from the syntax of rational approval or disapproval and freed from the matrix of narrative sequential tenses - generate highly suggestive patterns of emotional response and group behavior. DeMause and others have found that the normal speaking rates of about 120 beats per minute are slowed down during trance-inducing political and cultic experiences to around 70 per minute "because this is the rate of the mother's heart beat one first heard in the womb."51 Even the punctuated prayers, hymns and toasts of the formal speeches in the guild's "banquet" reinforce the magnetic rapport in which the subliminal womb-messages are delivered and received. It is here at the fantasy level of the speech-making, rather than in the drinking bout itself, that the myth of the guild is established and reaffirmed. In this myth, the guild, as a dream, performs shameful acts - those which are unspeakable, unimaginable, and unthinkable; and at the same time, as the individual members regress into their trauma-ridden infant memories, they collectively identify as victims of horrible, painful and unacceptable abuse - neglect, punishment, humiliation, abandonment, and threats of death. The guild is thus at once parent and child, abuser and abused. It is also not only the all-powerful, irrationally angry and vindictive father whose actions are painful and overwhelming to the small child but couched in words which mingle, collapse and deny the promises of love and reward with threats of punishment and abandonment to the devil, monsters, the "otherness" of the dark. But the guild is also the other parent, the mother, whose warmth and nurturance are craved, yet whose breasts are mysteriously withheld, whose comforting arms are sought to protect the child from the abusive father but whose face turns awful and whose words blame the infant and threaten further punishment.

The guild is also the child, fearful, confused, and desperately seeking meaning, the infant who blames itself for the awful things done to it, who identifies with the father's power and the mother's love; the child whose fragile, weak, and contemptible body is continuously invaded and hurt in ways that make no sense, and which distort the face and body of the father and mother, which turn their words into strange groans and threats. The child denies that the invasion has occurred, sees it done to another, and joins the abuser in performing the acts; and at the same time, in its collective identity the guild-dreamers punish the abuser, bring love and nurturance to the victims of abuse, and establish the grounds for order and meaning in the community.

The guild plans out the production of mystery plays which show the course of evil in the world and the opening up of a scheme of salvation: they will enact and display the wicked deeds of Satan and the salvific life of Jesus; and they will celebrate the way in which, in the very lowest and grossest of human activities and using the language of filth and violence, the mysterious corpus christi comes into the world, like a thief in the night, like an abandoning and murderous parent, like a jealous or rebellious spouse, like the bloody body of a broken child tortured on the cross. This makes the appearance of Mak the Sheepstealer more than a farcical diversion in the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play. His devilish role and hints at kabbalistic mystery are both pretentiousness to mask his role as a parasite in society and another level of allegorical preparations for the fulfillment of divine promise in Christ's Incarnation; yet as a father with an ever-pregnant wife, Mak's home is the only one we see, other than the virtually see-through manger with Mary and her Child, but not the male parent, Joseph. That invisibility of the walls and the ever-present image of Mary and Jesus signal an unworldly status to the Holy Family, an ideal to be gazed at in wonder and awe but hardly to be replicated in ordinary life. There is no father, not even a Heavenly Father, only a distant angel who sings outside and above to the three good shepherds who leave the Yorkshire Dales to travel in spiritual exaltation to the hills of Judea. Mak's house, on the other hand, is partly open to the world, and while filled with carping and trickery, nevertheless is a haven of realizable domesticity. Mak and Gil ("Jill") never hit one another and seem genuinely cooperative in their work, and much of their complaining is not so much against one another as about the hostile world without. When the stolen sheep is brought to Gil, his wife, Mak agrees to disguise it as another son, and his and Gil's crooning lullaby presents a parodic yet highly potent image of parental love and concern. Yet Mak is given no part in the salutations and adoration of the Holy Family, and Gil does not seem worthy of punishment by the shepherds. After his crime is discovered Mak is tossed in a blanket and left with Gil and a hungry family to feed.

In the Noah plays we find another example of the mystery play using a biblical event to encode a domestic crisis, this time of a dysfunctional family. Mrs. Noah is reluctant to go on the ark and her disobedience to her husband - and through him to God the Father - is signaled by her womanly activities, sometimes spinning and sometimes wine-drinking. Yet the craft plays defy conventional misogyny and ecclesiastical wisdom by making female obtuseness to the divine plan an occasion for human feelings for those who are to be drowned in the Flood and, more significantly, a covert image of divine mercy and desire for justice. In these performances, the farce pushes Mrs. Noah, not her husband, into the center of the action and her resistance becomes also of ideological interest, despite the conventional words put in his mouth in his formal speeches to God and his family. That the plays go up to and sometimes cross over the line that separates creed acceptability may be taken as a signal for the unconscious dream-ideology of the Mystery Cycles. Disobedience and rebellion against patriarchal authority, including at times stubborn refusal to accede to God's wishes, tend to generate emotions in the play that are quite other than those expressed in liturgical hymn and homily and in other doctrinal discourses of the period and earlier. These emotions, both consciously expressed by the actors and unconsciously performed in their actions, are the sub-textual stuff of the guild's compotacio as a shared dream.

Returning to our account of what probably occurred during the guild's annual drinking bout, the speakers at the compotacio read out the regulations which at once require attendance and participation in the drinking and feasting and at the same time stipulate the punishments for those who disobey, who violate the good order of the work-place, the integrity of the family, and the sanctity of the family. Now while it is likely that in the earlier times, before the fourteenth century, these events were noisy and rowdy, by the later period visitors from abroad were remarking on the silence and orderliness of these English occasions. It is likely that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the guilds we are concerned with were founded, the compotacio included the procurement of young children, boys and girls, brought in to serve as "cup-bearers," that is, to mingle among the drunken revelers, to be verbally and physically abused, to be threatened, and at times to be taken away for sadistic sexual acts and even murder, as occurs in modern societies among "leading citizens" and "pillars of the community." These children were usually, we suggest, orphans and foundlings left to the care of the guilds in the days before proper refuges and orphanages were established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As they experienced these frightening and painful things said and done to them, the children would begin to dissociate from the experience and enter a trance-like state in which they were no longer psychologically there or were self-cast observers from afar or in fantasy identified with the behavior of the adults.

At the same time, the adult guild members themselves would begin to separate themselves from the activity at hand and would regress into identification with the frightened children. However, the guildsmen not only would continue to perform the humiliating and abusive actions, but would simultaneously intensify the level of cruelty, attempting thereby to punish the child-like parts of themselves split-off and projected into their victims, and seek in the pain and humiliations they were vicariously feeling to expiate themselves for the shameful actions the collective trance was inducing in them. When the drinking-bout was over and the group returned to a more normal state of acceptable consciousness, the torture of the children would be forgotten and denied, but the residual guilt would drive the guild to perform even more efficiently and enthusiastically as a professional, religious, and charitable organization in order to prove to themselves and assert before others their status as honorable, Christian gentlemen. As Gardiner explains, "The common guild funds...were in part amassed with a view precisely to undertake the pageants,"52 and this was experienced by "the guilds as corporate bodies and not by the individual guild craftsmen..."53

In the early modern period, the actions of abuse and humiliation need not be actually performed for the mythic dream to work. A new psychoclass of children would grow up with a new sense of ego-identity and the integrity of the body, and would see in their own day-to-day activities at home and in the workplace disgraceful and humiliating relationships to their children and apprentices which they would attempt to deny by transforming into corrective, intrusive child-rearing practice. Thus rather than being unaware of their activities and needing the stimulus of the compotacio to generate a secondary dream-trance in order to perform the professional and civic duties of the guild, in the new age a more conscious and pragmatic sense of shame and guilt was operative precisely because the sensitivity of the collectivity was consciously disturbed by the increasingly speakable remnants of former cruelties.

Plays of Passion and Passionate Play

One of the ways in which childhood traumatization could be raised to partial and sporadic consciousness was through the production of the corpus christi plays, and this advance in self-management by individuals and group is indicated by the reported orderliness and silence at the drinking bout. For example, Platt reports that a Venetian visitor to a civic feast in London in the fifteenth century

remarked the 'sumptuous entertainment, the display of plate, the long duration of the meals, and the infinite profusion of victuals.' Certainly, there were longer pauses between the courses than he had been accustomed to at similar functions at home. But what struck him chiefly as remarkable was the 'extraordinary silence of everyone,' so different from the style of his compatriots.54

Second, having taken on board the responsibilities for performance of the corpus christi plays, the guild leaders would speak of the organization needed to put them on, from having scripts prepared (written or rewritten regularly) to storing and making new props, through finding actors and rehearsing them, all the way to policing the performance on the day of its production. Since the guild was not a casual, passive spectator at the plays, each of the members would be increasingly self-conscious of the role he or she had to play in its production, and hence increasingly aware of the enactment it made of dysfunctionality in family and workshop, as well as the new scope it gave to traditional themes and images of Christian salvation.

But before taking on the responsibilities of production and performance of the corpus christi plays, English bishops decided to implement the papal decrees instituting the new feast in honor of the Eucharist and the dogma that had been proclaimed at the end of the thirteenth century by which belief in the Real Presence became a necessary condition for communication within the Catholic Church. This was a task that became available early in the fourteenth century. This feast was to display the Eucharist itself and the various historical, legendary, moral and mysterious modes by which the bread and wine of the Mass were transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Separated in liturgical time from Easter, the corpus christi processions organized by civic authorities also attempted to show that the cities were in themselves paradigms of that sacred body, as much as the Church herself. In England especially, the processions became the occasion for a vast cyclic dramatic display of human history, from Creation through to the Second Coming, centered on Christ's Passion and Resurrection, but actually expending most of the time, effort, and literary creativity on the prefigurative events of the Old Testament, and simultaneously, through a system of tropological interpretations, an enactment of civic life itself and its institutions as sites of eucharistic transformation - correction, punishment, and recognition. Each of the city guilds - whether merchant, artisan, or parish based - had long been used to staging short dramatic events in honor of their patron saints or one of the sacraments, such as the corpus christi itself. In most instances, rather than adapt one of the existing miracle processions or skits, the guilds, directed by the corporate body of the city, undertook to prepare one of the requisite plays in the cycle history of salvation. Professional playwrights, stage designers, directors, actors, along with musicians and dancers were drawn from the ranks of the guilds themselves or co-opted as members or hired on an annual basis, with the funding coming from through special tithes, and the whole operation taking up a great part of the guild's time, energy and wealth. Yet performance cannot be understood by attebnbtion to the social functions alone; one must also examine the specific changes to the doctrinal elements, the "content" of the plays.

For in these plays performed in England by the medieval guilds, as opposed to the processional celebrations of corpus christi in Europe and the Passion Plays acted in various countries, there was a manifest convergence between the Old Testament prefigurative vision of life and morals prior to Christ's Incarnation into the world and the tropological acting out of ordinary experience in the here and now. This contemporaneity of enacted life, while it was conducted in a matrix of traditional homiletic and satiric materials, seeking to instruct and transform behavior and belief, was nevertheless distinct from the kind of abstract and moralistic patterns of enactment characteristic of the morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth century; in those plays, good and bad parts were clearly delineated, and devilish prompts to wickedness were set against angelic appeals to virtuous action. Nominally set in a time before the scheme of salvation had become manifest and effective, the plays of the corpus christi pageants could, however, take a less intrusive hold on domestic and work-a-day actions and allow characters to display more ambiguous and confused motivations and understandings of their deeds. This very lack of dichotomization between the world of sin and the world of salvation permits the guild members, who construct and enact the mystery plays, to explore the nature of their own ambiguous, confused, and guilt-ridden experiences in such a way as to allow for recognition, assessment and eventual correction. Whereas the homiletic filter enforces a limiting ecclesiastical set of regulations on the body, its desires and pleasures, as well as the warnings of punishment, pain, and abandonment to come, and whereas the satiric mode distorts the depictions of sin, foolishness, and human weakness into categories of rational control and correction, the screen of the mystery plays upon which the dreams of the childhood traumata are projected provides a less "judgmental" matrix and allows the collective effort in psychic adjustment to occur.

In the first instance, Old Testament plays are chosen on traditional grounds of foreshadowing key moments and sacramental revelations in the life of Jesus Christ. The choice made is relatively small and constant among the extant English cycles, with the focus on prefigurative moments of childhood stress, parental anxiety, and master-servant strife. What is promised in the earlier plays is fulfilled in the New Testament drama, what is imperfectly revealed and rendered by Jewish patriarchs and characters is perfected and completed by Jesus and his disciples, and what is presented as a matter of law and national history becomes in the final part of the biblical cycle the Passion Plays - a superseded old order replaced by thhe rule of love and spirit. But at the same time, the English mystery plays articulate these prefigurative topoi in a peculiarly "popular" discursive system that muffles much of the homiletic criticism and displaces the sacramental foreshadowing to marginal moments in the production; center stage go the low characters whose roles in the prefigurative drama are tenuous and ambivalent, at least to a superficial observer, and so, while seeming to offer the audience a free display of farcical entertainments, the plays actually destabilize conventional themes and images of the ecclesiastical tradition, replacing them by other ideas and pictures couched in the sermo humilis, the humble or even trivial or more radically filthy way of speaking.

Thus, to take an example from the Wakefield Cycle again, while it is conventional to have the story of Cain and Abel represent at once the first murder in the post-lapsarian world and prefigure the ultimate violence of deicide in Christ's crucifixion, the English mystery plays re-run the events of the two sons of Adam in such a way as to emphasize the struggle of siblings, rival kinds of farmers, and two modes of economic mentality. Cain also is given a servant to abuse, but this youth, sometimes called Pikharnys, is at the same time an impish instigator of the agriculturist's sense of cynical distrust of those who speak of an ever-providing God, since he knows by experience the instability of the climate and the enormous labour required to bring his crops to harvest. Cain's cruelty to his servant does more than foreshadow his own hot-headed anger at Abel for successfully sacrificing his first-born lamb, since the audience can share with Cain his exasperation at his brother's endless goody-goody preaching and supercilious carping at Cain's meticulous counting of the sheaves for burning on the alter. Given no manifest evidence of divine support, Cain's commonsense behavior intersects with his generically farcical character. This intersection creates a skit in which fratricide has a context of mitigating circumstances. For while the constant sniping of Cain and Pikharnys at one another suggests that the servant is also a devil, and thus the abuse he receives from Cain is deserved, and consequently the contradictions in his role as victim and victimizer are displayed, all this serves to confirm the ambiguous, manifest and latent, feelings in the dream of the guild.

Even in a less manifestly farcical play, such as the Chester Noah Pageant, the figure of Mrs. Noah cannot be seen merely as a type of the drunken wife or the rebellious spouse: her refusal to get into the ark when Noah commands reveals deeper contradictions in both the relationship of husband to wife and creature to Creator.55 Her obstinacy stems, she says, from an unwillingness to leave her gossips behind, and this concern for drinking friends must strike a deep note in the mentality of the guildsmen watching the play: her sense of loyalty and duty through the medium of drink, even without tying in with a prefigurative image of the not yet established sacrament of the eucharistic wine as blood of Christ, suggests a strong responsibility of human beings to resist unproven demands of selfishness. For in her initial resistance to Noah's command to come on board the boat, Mrs Noah actually confirms God's own anger at the patriarch for moving too swiftly, for seeking to escape his responsibilities as a human being even before the period in which humankind can heed God's warning has run out. The apparently trivial, farcical and marginal episode of Mrs. Noah's refusal to leave her gossips turns out to be a moment of deep dramatic irony in which basic relations between men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children, and individuals and groups are explored, tested, and found at best to be highly problematic according to traditional formulaic readings of the Deluge incident. These formulaic liturgical and homiletic truths which uphold the conventional order of society are shown to be rationalizations and ways of avoiding awareness of the abuse which obtains between family members and the exploitation of servants by masters. In the very act of "abusing" the traditional text of Scriptures, therefore, the playwrights - sometimes monks from nearby monasteries or friars from local houses, or secular clerics in the city churches - writing under the direction of guild committees provide scripts in which the guild actors can speak and show both their roles as victims and victimizers and suggest that, while the mysterious Christian resolution in the present and eternal sacramental structures of the Church is an ideal to be worked for, at the very least there are more practical steps to be taken, steps that go not through the little wicket gate and along the straight and narrow path, but significantly out one of several side roads and then on through a more twisting and labyrinthine path of existential trial and error.

What we are more aware of now than historians of the theatre could see just thirty years ago is that the plays are not "traditional," in the sense of being repeated automatically each year and subject to some kind of popular folk revisions. Each time there was to be a production, the corporation had to make a decision, the guilds were contacted, and careful overseeing of revisions of the text were undertaken.56 New plays were added and old plays dropped, not just because this guild or that came on to "evil days" and could not afford to keep up payment, but because new concepts of the "sacred" had to be worked out and developed forms of psychological tension projected into the drama. We should see these changes in the scripts as more than thoughtless byproducts of simpleminded mechanicals fallen out of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As the plays moved further away from the near mid-summer date of Corpus Christi day itself and any residual ecclesiastical control, the cycles functioned within the city's own self-concepts, conscious and unconscious. As Richard Beadle puts it, the medieval audience, crowded into the narrow streets of York, where the overhanging houses almost blocked out the sky, "seem to have been very susceptible to the contagious emotions of the dramatic moment"57 and hence, with ears finely tuned to the subtleties of homiletic and oratorical poetry, could respond to "allusion, wordplay and the verbal embodiment of psychological nuance";58 this is also what Beadle calls "the authentic sense of psychological movement captured in the texture of the verse."59

It is in this psychological perspective, added to the historical and aesthetic scholarship already in place, that we can really start to understand the shape, power, and meaning of the plays. J.W. Robinson, for example, points out how the founding sermon of the York Corpus Christi Guild proclaimed that "the Passion was and is both caused by human sin - then and now - and was and is the answer to it... the wines are answered by the vinegar, the beds by the cross, the doors by the openness."60

Conclusion

In conventional histories of the guilds, most time is expended in discussions of their economic, professional, civic and religious functions, as these are certainly what the guilds claimed to be in their formal charters, especially in England at the time of the Reformation when they had to rewrite these documents to gain governmental approval to continue under the new Protestant regime. In addition, when the transitional movement from late medieval to early modern society was accomplished, signaled as well by the shift from the abandoning through the ambivalent to the intrusive modes of child rearing, the guilds themselves stressed their secular functions within the middle class city governments they played a major part in running. However, as Colin Platt indicates at the end of his long catalogue of the various duties of the guild, all these facets of their identity were "symbolically secured by convivial sessions in the hall."61 Then after some other remarks on the legal origins of the guild, Platt returns to this feature of guild life, saying "It provided its members with an excuse for the customary drinking-bout (potacio)."62 But while this modern historian does not totally ignore the (com)potacio, he does not explore the implications of what it means. Using Emile Coornaert's massive survey of Continental guild charters, Platt nevertheless does not see the drinking bouts as essential to the foundation and survival of the medieval guilds.63 Attendance and participation in these drinkings, and not merely at the semi-annual banquets and business meetings, were required of all members, and as the name implies there was a requirement that all the members become inebriated. Guild regulations at the same time sought to police the behavior of members, fearing excessive violence (the rixus of the charters) and an even greater fear of the honte, the shameful thing that is barely alluded to.

Platt does cite one instance of an occasion in which something shameful is hinted at. Though it occurred at a somewhat earlier date than we are dealing with and involves a female visitor, it nevertheless suggests avenues of approach to this problematical honte. In the twelfth century, Christina of Markyate, later to be canonized as a saint, "was summoned as a cup-bearer" to one of the Huntingdon guild merchant day-long compotacio. According to Platt,64 the compotacio proved for young Christina to be an ordeal to be endured by constant recourse to the thought of the Mother of God. For the merchants of Huntingdon, their gild in session was an entirely necessary demonstration, both to themselves and to others outside their community, of the strength and solidarity of their fellowship.65

Ambiguous as this passage is, which means it is difficult to assign motivation or censorship to Platt's sources or to himself, what emerges is a very provocative juxtaposition. On the one side, to begin with, Christina's ordeal at the potacio is such that she is forced to dissociate and enter a near-trance relationship with the Virgin Mary, suggesting that being a cup-bearer at one of these drinking bouts was far more than waitressing down at the local pub: her presence may have involved a lot more of tactile activity that drove her into this state of fantasy-withdrawal. On the other, in a striking example of non sequitur that signals the psychohistorical gap in Platt's grasp of the historical event, this drinking-bout is the guild in its full "session" and whatever they are doing there - drinking and interacting with Christina of Markyate or someone like her of either sex - gives them a sense of strength and collective identity.

Before we can judge the role of the guilds in the corpus christi plays, this central source of identity needs to be addressed. To do this we need to make a jump from medieval organizations in particular to remarks about civic life in general, and here is where Robbins becomes useful in providing tools of inquiry and models of possible structured argument. He suggests that "civic life...replicates the dynamics of a sexually abusive family."66 Robbins then continues:

In civic life as in family life, there is a father and a mother. And there are children. Government, in the form of our civic leaders, plays the role of mother. Government nurtures, protects and takes care of her children....She makes us feel good and safe. We can trust her....She tells us, we the children, what we want to hear....

In civic life there is a father. Satisfying father's needs constitutes the motivation and direction for economics and civic life. Father's power is generative power.... As in the abusive family, generative power in civic life is arbitrary, absolute, whimsical, unyielding and unaccountable. Its needs must be met fully, unquestioningly and continually.67

It is perhaps no wonder that Christina turned to the Virgin Mother to fantasize protection from what the male guild members were doing during their drinking session. And what about the men themselves, who are in this potacio both the children and the father, the victims and the victimizer, the magnetized and the mesmerizer?

To try to penetrate the secrets of the shameful thing that the guilds are founded both to perform and to prevent happening, we have to turn to Robbins again. Again he must be quoted at some length, for though he talking specifically about contemporary conditions in the United States, he opens up a much more general condition, witness not just the scandals in 1996 on paedophile rings in Belgium which reach right up to the highest echelons of government, but to the constant exposure of such perversity throughout modern society.68 We cannot assume that these episodes are abnormal features of modern life, but rather the "natural" conditions of a still emerging civilization based on improved child-rearing practices in which large sectors of the contemporary American society remain fixated in earlier, more cruel and psychotic stages.

As it is in the abusive family, there are sexual secrets in civic life, secrets which if revealed result in the loss of power. Civic leaders have been found guilty of embezzlement, drug use, lying under oath, misappropriation of public funds, consorting with criminal elements, of collaborating in the dissipation of billions of dollars of public funds through extravagant defense spending and the collapse of the Savings and Loan banks without eliciting much in the way of outcry. However, should a civic leader deviate sexually from the highest standards, he is out of office and out of power, which explains his vulnerability to the blackmail and the extreme precautions he takes in concealing his sexual life.69

What these sexual crimes consist of are least of all the infidelities of husbands against wives or the frequenting of whore houses, which may at best be taken as disguised statements of more perverse and dysfunctional behaviors, such as homosexual rape, child abuse, and ritual murder of infants. I therefore make one last quotation from Robbins to illustrate the point upon which the analogy to late medieval conditions is based in this paper:

The political economy of sexual abuse is based on two triangulated relationships. There is the procurement triangle - sexually abused children, men in power, men who get the benefits of power through procurement - and a blackmail triangle - sexually abused children, men in power, men who get what they want through blackmail.70

A pool of children for use in these kinds of paedophile rings was readily available in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first in the apprentices sent away from home, often of poor children directly under the control of the guild officers, and of infants abandoned to the new institutions for orphans and foundlings. Very few children are technically orphans by virtue of having no living father (or mother), but they are so classified by society by virtue of abandonment, that is, extreme neglect and near-infanticide. I suggest that the invitation to Christina of Markyate to serve as cup-bearer was a typical case of procurement of a young girl for sexual purposes, and that at that early stage in the guild's history (the twelfth century), before it undertook a more positive ameliorative - intrusive - role in correcting society's ills, she was abused and hence her withdrawal into the life of a recluse and her dissociated onset of divine visions. Later, probably, physical abuse was less frequent or at least less public; still, the memory lingered on in the rituals of the guild and continued to drive it towards defensive behaviors, namely, the performance of good works for the city, the church, and the members of the guild. It was also able to enact both the abuse and the salvation from abuse in the elaborate and expensive mystery cycles. This obsession or persistence even in the face of political opposition and the imminence of bankruptcy from the costs involved indicates the power of guilt in the public dreaming which is the guild.

Norman Simms is the Director of the Institute for the History of Mentalities and Co-ordinating Editor of Mentalities/Mentalit's, P.O. Box 1198, Hamilton, New Zealand. He is currently writing a book on the intersection of sexual abuse in the medieval guilds and the development of Corpus Christi plays in England during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.

Refrences for:
Medieval Guilds, Passions and Abuse by: Norman Simms
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 1, Summer 1998

Digital Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]

To report errors in this electronic
transcription please contact:
[email protected]