Staged Resistance: Rethinking the Context of the Tragaedia de Sancta Agnetis

Abstract

Recent scholarship has proposed that the Tragaedia de Santa Agnetis, a medieval musical drama written in Provençal and in Latin, was part of the efforts of the papal inquisition to fight heresy in Occitania. In addition, the few studies that focused on the drama over the last century dated it to the fourteenth-century. This article proposes a reconsid­ eration of the context of the Tragaedia de Sancta Agnetis by calling attention to moments in the text where aspects of meter and content bring heresy, witchcraft, conversion, and persecution of religious minorities to the fore. I argue that communities of religious dissenters used the media of theater and song to resist persecution. Considering the evidence in support of this context, as well as aspects of metric shift, codicology, and paleography, I also propose a redating of the play to the second half of the thirteenth century.