Teaching to Hate through Theater: Hate, Violence, and the Invention of Piety in French Passion Plays

Abstract

AbstractIn the pre‐modern Christian imaginary, the tortured body of Christ represents a theological, visual, and performative conglomerate meant to edify Christian piety while fueling feelings of hate against the Jews. The fifteenth century French Passion Plays – large‐scale dramatic representations about the public life of Christ –are no exception in this sense either. Indeed, as theater historians argue, the plays encompass the minutiae of Christ's ordeal in order to coerce theater audience into cultivating such feelings of both piety and hate. While the persecuted body of Christ is for sure a powerful emotional vector, one should not forget that hate is also articulated through a particular vocabulary stemming out from certain intellectual practices and sources that do not necessarily have racial connotations. This paper will analyze the displacement and adaptation of such vocabularies of hate from its original background to the emotional economy in the plays.