Law, Farce, and Counter-Kingship in the Semur Fall of Lucifer

Abstract

Introduction: Lucifer and World of Basoche In this essay I offer a new reading of fall of Lucifer, opening episode of Passion de Semur, a fifteenth-century Burgundian mystere extant in a single copy dated 1488. This two-day religious play, which dramatizes Lucifer's fall through Christ's resurrection, is a composite work, augmented in several stages, perhaps over more than a century. Graham Runnalls has meticulously reconstructed work's textual evolution, from a simple Passion Play to a more extensive drama featuring Old Testament episodes and a host of new comic and grotesque characters. (1) The entire first section of play (lines 1-3419), from angelic fall to John Baptist's appearance, was probably added during a second stage of revision. (2) This added section features allegorical characters and episodes such as traditional debate between Ecclesia and Synagoga and trial of heaven preceding Christ's incarnation, as well as a greatly expanded cast of devils. (3) Such an extensive expansion may have involved several different revisers, yet, Runnalls notes, all modifications in Stage II reflect a tendency towards learned, literate and scholarly: use of Latin lines, introduction of allegorical characters, dramatization of a wide range of apocryphal sources, long speeches including didactic sermons, complex versification--all of these features are of a piece, stylistically. (4) Building on these observations as well as suggestive remarks made by play's editor, Lynette Muir, I analyze Semur's distinctive Lucifer episode in relation to a learned, literate, and performative milieu: world of culture and festive performance in late fifteenth-century Burgundy. The Lucifer episode, in which this slippery figure makes elaborately specious arguments, dallies with dubious allegorical characters, and is crowned king of world, creates a parodie spectacle that recalls traditions of local festive societies and associations of law clerks (basoche societies), which shared many performative practices, including mounting comic plays and yearly electing their kings in public ceremonies. While auspices for Semur play are unknown, and we cannot link drama to any one such fraternity, prominence of mock discourse combined with particular parodie action shows influence of basoche culture on play's reviser. I contend that Passion de Semur, and Lucifer sequence in particular, not only feature mixture of grotesque and sublime that is typical of mysteres, but more specifically foreground a set of vocational identifications and performative practices prominent in Burgundian civic life. (5) The Lucifer sequence highlights cultural importance of basoche societies while obliquely referencing threats of censorship and repression under which they operated during fifteenth century. While recent criticism of Passion de Semur has highlighted its ties to contemporary piety, I look closely at Lucifer episode in relation to secular performance traditions to show how religious drama might have promoted interests of particular urban groups and performed political commentary. (6) While identities of play's reviser(s) are unknown, author of fall of Lucifer segment was clearly learned in rhetoric and terminology. Jody Enders argues, Medieval students' extensive training in disputation would have impressed upon them dramatic potential of rhetoric of judgment in a wide variety of contexts. (7) It is in tradition of clerks of royal courts, or basochiens, of Paris and other grandes villes, including Dijon in Burgundy, that we find most vividly what Marie Bouhaik-Girones calls the intimate link between judicial practice and theatrical practice during this period. (8) Originating in Paris, societies of law clerks, essentially legal apprentices, formed during Middle Ages for purposes of vocational improvement and common amusement. …