© 2018 Kyle A. Thomas THE LUDUS DE ANTICHRISTO AND THE MAKING OF A MONASTIC THEATRE: IMPERIAL POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE AT THE ABBEY OF TEGERNSEE 1000-1200 BY KYLE A. THOMAS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Carol Symes, Chair Professor Martin Camargo Associate Professor Lofton Durham, University of Western Michigan Associate Professor Andrea Stevens Associate Professor Katherine Syer ABSTRACT The Ludus de Antichristo (Play about the Antichrist) is one of the most fascinating, yet under-researched and poorly understood examples of medieval drama. A product of the imperial Benedictine monastery at Tegernsee, the Ludus is a twelfth-century play (c. 1159 CE) that was written to perform the monastery’s perspectives on sacred and secular authority in the renewed tensions of the protracted Investiture Controversy that were inflamed by the conflicts between the self-styled “Holy Roman Emperor” Frederick I “Barbarossa” and Pope Alexander III. In addition to its dramatization of contemporary issues surrounding imperial and papal politics, the Ludus was also placed into service in the cloister school at Tegernsee Abbey. Thus, the play stands as a valuable example of a medieval theatre in which performance acts at the center of political and educational institutions, revealing how individuals processed, distributed, and debated the most important topics at the forefront of state-building in medieval Europe. The work of this dissertation will show how drama, as a form of documentation and a form of presentation, was central to a growing network of exchange between the various spiritual and secular authorities in medieval Europe. Building upon the work of Carol Symes and her re-defining aspect of theatre as a "common stage"—as an explicit challenge to the narrow model of the modern public sphere posited by Jürgen Habermas—I employ Symes' paradigm of performance as a site for agency and exchange in all aspects of medieval life to earlier eras and broader boundaries. In the end, I will show how the Ludus de Antichristo participates in longstanding medieval traditions whereby theatricality serves as a vehicle for public discourse and informs the recognition, display, and dissemination of political agency. ii To My Mother, Cindy B. Thomas (1958-2003) iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Carol Symes for her exceptional leadership and guidance through this process. Dr. Symes introduced me to the Ludus de Antichristo several years ago and her supervision of my work has helped me grow as a scholar and medievalist. I must also thank Dr. Scott Holsclaw in modelling for me the image of an artist-scholar and for his lasting friendship. I would also like to thank my family for their continued love and support. Lastly, I could not have landed firmly on this academic path without the initial and continued support of Jessa Thomas; nor could I have completed this journey without the example of strength and patience set by Shayna Ansley. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: DRAMATIC NARRATIVE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POWER.............18 CHAPTER 2: A TWELFTH-CENTURY NETWORK OF DRAMA...............................................70 CHAPTER 3: THE LITURGY AND MONASTIC AUDIENCES..................................................119 CHAPTER 4: PEDAGOGY AND THE AESTHETICS OF PERFORMANCE..........................179 FIGURE AND MAPS...............................................................................................................................198 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................................201 v INTRODUCTION Ecclesia sings: Behold the man who made not God his strength. But I am like an olive tree in the house of God.1 The play commonly known as the Ludus de Antichristo (Play About the Antichrist) is one of the most unique and exciting examples of medieval drama to come down to us today. It features major geo-political conflicts, popular themes of Latin Christian eschatology, localized liturgical traditions, propagandized characters, and pedagogical lessons in medieval monastic instruction: all captured by an author deft in the creation of dramatic literature and medieval theatricality. Written around 1159 CE, at the imperial Benedictine abbey at Tegernsee in the duchy of Bavaria, the extant version of the play is a copy that was written between 1176-1186 and bound within manuscript Clm 19411, now archived at the Bavarian State Library (BSb) in Munich. The Ludus was initially documented by the Benedictine historian, Bernhard Pez, in the second volume of his Thesaurus Anecdotorum Novissimus (1729), where he describes the drama as “Ludus Paschalis de Adventu et interitu Antichristi” (“Play for Easter about the Coming and Downfall of Antichrist”).2 But since Pez’s initial cataloging and description, the Ludus has been couched within scholarly analyses that favor the recognizably modern aspects of the drama: from Karl Hase’s 1. Ludus de Antichristo, ll. 415-6, trans. Carol Symes, “Play about the Antichrist” (unpublished manuscript, 2013), 33. 2. Bernhard Pez, Thesaurus Anecdotorum Novissimus vol. II, part 3 (Fratrum Veithiorum, 1729), 187. For a list of early analyses on the play in German-language scholarship see Chapter Three, note 11 (page 123). 1 consideration of its place in the narrative of scripted European drama, to the nationalistic sentiments explored by Gerhard von Zezschwitz, to Wilhelm Meyer’s literary evaluation of the play as a work of Latin poetry.3 Furthermore, the renowned Shakespearean scholar and literary critic E.K. Chambers considered the play to be a significant development of staging and spectacle in his teleological study of medieval drama from simple liturgical tropes to the vernacular scripted dramas written for purpose-built stages and theatres.4 Yet while the Ludus de Antichristo has consistently captured the attention of scholars of medieval dramatic literature since Pez, it strikingly remains on the margins of most narratives of medieval drama’s development and is often completely neglected in the canon of medieval plays. Thankfully, recent scholarly studies that examine the many ways in which extant texts inscribe and convey evidence of performance, make it possible to demonstrate that the Ludus actually epitomizes early medieval drama. The work of C. Stephen Jaeger, 3. Karl Hase, Das Geistliche Schauspiel (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1858); Gerhard von Zezschwitz, Vom römischen Kaisertum deutscher Nation: Ein mittelalterliches Drama, nebst untersuchungen nebst die byzantinischen quellen der deutschen kaisersage (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche, 1877); and Wilhelm Meyer, “Der Ludus de Antichristo und Bemerkungen über die lateinischen Rhythmen des XII. Jahrhunderts,“ in Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-Philologischen und Historischen Classe der K.B. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München (Munich: Akademische Buchdruckerei von F. Straub, 1882). 4. E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Calrendon Press, 1903); see vol. II, 62-5 and 151-2. 2 Geoffrey Koziol, and Jody Enders collectively argue that political rhetoric and ritual were defining characteristics and influential attributes of the courts and schools of the Middle Ages. Their work identifies the various courts and religious centers as major hubs of information as it was trafficked across Europe.5 Furthermore, historian Courtney M. Booker has argued that dramatic structure was fundamental to ways those intellectuals negotiated the business of the courts, cathedrals, and cloisters of medieval Europe— framing and reporting on historical events in theatrically-informed ways.6 Indeed, as this 5. Specifically, Jaeger examines the structures of medieval education and literary models that informed the network of correspondence between cloister schools and which stretched across Western Europe in The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Koziol looks into the representative practices within the medieval court system in the early and central Middle Ages, particularly how political agency is outlined across those courts in Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Enders into Classical and Late Antique pedagogical techniques that incorporate drama into rhetorical instruction, thereby making stronger links to pre-medieval practices that continue into the early and central Middle Ages in Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) and The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 6. Courtney Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) argues that early 3 study sets out to prove, the Ludus de Antichristo not only reflects the political dynamics of its day—steeped in the lingering tensions between the medieval Roman Empire and the Papacy—it was, for the monastic community at Tegernsee, the theatrical means through which social