| The Middle English moral comedies, usually misperceived as instruments of conservative social control, more likely represented the voices of the discontented and marginalized majority of Christians who positioned themselves between the extremes of orthodox belief and Wycliffite rebellion. Against the Bakhtinian assumption that carnival language remains outside the political realm of "officialdom," I argue that these plays, especially Mankind, Wisdom, and Occupacion and Ydelnes, utilize parodic carnival language to highlight political strife in fifteenth-century England.;In Mankind carnival laughter is used to highlight material differences between orthodoxy and Lollardy. Throughout the play, the Sacraments, Christ's Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection, and ecclesiastical court proceedings are parodied through irreverent images of the body (especially scatological), food, and clothing. Combining language drawn from Wycliffite and Patristic writings, these instances of sacred parody, which are both sites of contention between the opposing ideologies and ways of ridiculing both, serve to accentuate the Church's neglect of its members and to call for Church reform.;In Wisdom, physical beauty and ease are contrasted with bodily disfigurement and pain. The suffering of the main figure in the play, Anima, represents the suffering inflicted on the fifteenth-century social body by prelates and ecclesiastical lawyers. But, as in Mankind, the play's task, representing and speaking for the body in pain, carries with it the political burden of simultaneously condemning Church practices and affirming Church beliefs.;In Occupacion and Ydelnes, the first university play in English, the conversion of the prodigal Ydelnes comes only by means of violence. Because the only alternative to this violence is chaos, the play simultaneously calls into question and affirms the catechetical project of the Church. As the play parodies the imagery of Judgement Day and the Feast of All Saints and juxtaposes these to the poverty, neglect, and abuse of the lower class, it attempts to reconcile, however problematically, the material and spiritual works of the Church.;Finally, I present the first critical edition of Occupacion and Ydelnes and its companion piece in Winchester College MS 33, Lucidus and Dubius, complete with introduction, notes, and glossary. |
