Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays by Emma Lipton (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays by Emma Lipton
• Elisabeth Dutton (bio)

Emma Lipton. Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 248. $65.

Records of the York plays are preserved in the York Memorandum Books, manuscripts that also contain administrative records and charters defining and demonstrating York's politically powerful civic culture. These books offer some rationale for the approach that Emma Lipton follows in Cultures of Witnessing: the now firmly established interdisciplinary method that places the study of law alongside topics more generally explored in departments of language and literature. The York Plays are perhaps the most researched examples of medieval drama, but Lipton's approach does enable her to offer some new insights into their familiar material, particularly the Trial, Crucifixion and Last Judgment plays on which her discussion focuses.

The book first describes the particular legal privileges granted to the city of York by successive English kings: the negotiation of these privileges provides "crucial context for the depiction of legal witnessing in the York plays" (6). Also outlined in the Introduction is the rise in the legal significance of witnesses as a result of the ban, imposed by the Fourth Lateran Council, on trial by ordeal: witnessing and jury trials, however, relied "as much on rumor or shared knowledge as they did on direct perception" (9), and many individuals were disqualified as witnesses on the basis of condition, gender, age, reputation, and fortune. Nonetheless, witnessing was an important civic duty, contributing to local, legal identity within the city. Witness records are also here described as similar to records of performance, with their accounts of places, times and persons resembling "the unities of action, place and time long associated with the drama" (17). Of course, these unities were no concern of medieval drama itself, but they may suggest associations in the mind of the modern scholar of drama.

Subsequent chapters use medieval witnessing to theorize dramatic space, speech acts, affect, and temporality. Dramatic space is discussed in chapter 1 in relation to the York play of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem: unsurprisingly, comparison is drawn with the royal entry of King Henry IV into the city, but new light is cast on the comparison by Lipton's discussion of those present at the entry as if they were legal witnesses, "neighbors close enough to have seen and heard relevant events, or to have local knowledge of reputation accorded by spatial proximity" (24-5). The idea of the witness as neighbor then contributes to observations about the different stations around York at which each play was performed in turn: very localized spaces of individual performance were defined temporally by what small groups of witnesses could individually and collectively see and hear, "just as in legal witnessing the neighborhood came into being in the actions of seeing, hearing, and sharing knowledge" (44). [End Page 278]

The trial plays are the focus of chapter 2, which analyzes the speeches of Christ and the Beadle as models of witness testimony and good citizenship. Christ's reluctance to speak also reflects the ideal behavior prescribed in contemporary conduct books, this chapter argues. By contrast, the excessive speeches of Pilate and Herod identify them as tyrants according to the portraits of tyranny found in mirrors for princes. This is not new, but Lipton argues that her focus on witnessing offers fresh insight into the role of the body in speech, by contrast with scholars' concentration on Christ's body as symbol of the Christian community; furthermore, she argues that attention to a witness's intention and emotion, as emphasized by medieval legal theory, offers an understanding of affect in the plays as a public practice, different from the imaginative affective piety the plays are often thought to engage. Chapter 3 also discusses the trial plays, this time exploring witnessing as an activity poised between individual and social. The motives of Annas and Caiaphas are not presented as envious, as they are in the source texts, but rather are articulated in legal terms.

Chapter 4 discusses the York Doomsday pageant in the light of the asynchronous model of temporality implied by witness. Although...