Who Speaks through the Mouths of Babes? Children and Religious Violence in France. Review of: Crouzet, D. (2020). Les enfants bourreaux au temps des guerres de Religion. Paris: Albin Michel. 336 p. Izvestiya Uralskogo federalnogo universiteta. Seriya 2: Gumanitarnye nauki, 23(1), 293–306.

This essay contains reflections on a new book by renowned historian Denis Crouzet on children’s violence, and, more broadly, on the image of children during the French Wars of Religion. In the book under review, the novelty lies in the fact that the images of ‘innocent infants’ make part of a separate plot. Just as novel are Denis Crouzet’s reflections on the ‘sources of inspiration’ of the young French persecutors of heretics. The author indicates the anthropological correspondences inherent in the culture of both Italian and French cities, such as the carnivalesque inversion of the ‘world inside out’ and the social function of youth associations taking part in the ‘charivari’ rites. Denis Crouzet pays attention to sources that are novel to him, like children’s Christmas chants, mystery plays, and ‘miracles’. While impersonating the Innocents persecuted by Herod but also angels carrying retaliation to this villain, urban children learnt what and how to do in the face of a carnival challenge. The ways to leave the eschatological activism are of particular interest. After 1572, the gangs of executioners-children left the scene. Only the murder of the Guises on Christmas Day, 1588, threw crowds of children into the streets of Paris. Now they were described differently, however, — as a disciplined mass, occupied not with outrages but with prayers. The author speaks of ‘Catholic consciousness’, but that was already a different reformed Catholicism, departing further and further from the old ‘corporate Catholicism’. The religious political activity of children would become a thing of the past, however. The image of an innocent child would once more be in demand only after the Revolution, when, this time in a desacralised context, children became the embodiment of the French nation.

Carols and Music to 1900

From the beginning, music has played an important role in the celebration of Christmas as both a holy day and a holiday, its various expressions reflecting different religious, cultural, and political contexts. To the standard Latin hymns and chants of the medieval Church were added tropes, rhymed songs, and liturgical dramas. Vernacular songs and carols, including those in mystery plays and Nativity representations, expressed both sacred and secular sentiments, and rose and fell in popularity according to such factors as religious allegiance and nationalism. Protestant denominations varied in their approach to the music of Advent and Christmas, with Lutherans promoting elaborate chorale settings like cantatas and oratorios, and Anglicans and Dissenting and Reformed Protestants at first limiting, or even banning, Christmas music-making. The collection of songs and carols, general acceptance of the hymn, and rise of cheap printing in the 1800s encouraged mass participation in Christmas services and concerts that included songs both ‘old and new’, masterpieces such as Handel’s Messiah, and songs about Santa Claus.

Binocular Vision

This essay deploys Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence and Bert States’s Great Reckonings in Little Rooms to analyze the pyrotechnics used in mystery plays to symbolize supernatural truths. On the one hand, these effects cultivated aesthetic immersion, allowing audiences to perceive stage illusions as real. On the other hand, they drew attention to their own artfulness, inviting spectators to marvel at human achievement and contemplate the possibility of misfire. This paradox encapsulates the theological ambiguities of medieval religious theater, which asked spectators to suspend disbelief in the name of conversion even as they maintained skepticism about sacred simulacra. Latour’s metaphysics allows us to see how mystery plays deployed multiple modes of existence, each of which mediated the others but could not reduce or explain them. States’s theater phenomenology shows us how mystery plays used self-given realities like flame to shuttle between human and nonhuman standpoints. If Latour rejects phenomenology for its refusal to consider the agency of the nonhuman, States’s focus on reality as resistance offers an implicit retort. I propose a rapprochement by showing that theater phenomenologists and medieval effects masters are both willing to embrace the ontological work of nonhuman actants.

Petroglyphs of Kangjiashimenzi (Xinjiang, PRC): Once Again about the Chronology and Semantics of the Site

The article discusses a unique monument of rock-art on the territory of Xinjiang – namely the petroglyphs of Kangjiashimenzi (Hutubi County). The person who began scientific investigation of this site in 1987 was Professor Wang Binghua. From that time, the issues of Hutubi petroglyphs became among the most popular topics in Chinese archaeological literature but only in a few publications in other countries and only one – in Russia. This article aims to fill this gap. The Kangjiashimenzi rock-art panel comprises 292 images of different size composed as a whole ensemble depicted using a counter-relief technique, with some grinding after. The images were given in quite stylized (dancing) poses. The male figures are often presented with an erect phallus. The picture also includes several coitus scenes. We supposed this ensemble in general served as a pictorial reflection of ancient mystery-plays connected with genus or tribal worships and with sacred wedding rituals. The main part of the petroglyphs dates to the Middle Bronze Age (circa first half of II millennium BC). On the territory of Xinjiang this period was presented by Xiaohe Culture. Within these rock-art engravings, two groups of petroglyphs, most likely, with later dates can be distinguished though they were very precisely incorporated into the ensemble. Images of ‘tigers’ one could connect with activity of nomad tribes of Saka (circa first half of I millennium BC), and antithetical figures of two horses – with some other nomad tribe of Yuezhi (circa II century BC). In any case, the monument with rock engravings has been created and used over quite a long time. It is very probable that Kangjiashimenzi was a functioning sanctuary, at least for the whole region.

THE STRUCTURE OF “FATHER” IN THE NOVEL “GOOD NIGHT” BY A. TERTS (A. D. SINYAVSKY)

The article demonstrates how the chapter of the “Father” of the novel by A. Terts (A. D. Sinyavsky) “Good Night” is structured, shows how the image of the protagonist's father is built. The storylines of the son and father in the chapter are made in such a way that they rely on typologically similar elements, which largely determine the behavior, characters. In the fate of both, a bicycle and a gun play an important role; at the same time, they acquire new acquaintances of children; their fates were influenced by books; both are prone to invention; revolutionary, arrested. The father seems to help his son to penetrate the secrets of literary skill. The chapter “Father” is presented in such a way as to reflect judgments about literary work that Sinyavsky had a conversation with his father. The author refuses a linear, consistent narrative (for example, within several lines, events that fall on several decades may collide). The concept of mystery plays an important role in the narrative. At the same time, such a secret is important in the chapter, which will be exposed by its carriers. The original narrative in “Good Night” allows you to control both the narrator's awareness of the father and the degree of awareness of the reader. Avoiding a linear, consistent, “rational” narrative, A. D. Sinyavsky postulates the failure of such a story about human fate, where it is thought of as organically whole.

Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England

In the early nineteenth century, the biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the novel, the oratorio, and poetry, but spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban on religious theatrical representation was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about impersonation, performance, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation. But by mid-century, the turn towards medievalism in visual culture, antiquarianism in literary history, and the ‘popular’ in constitutional reform placed England’s pre-Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national theatrical literature. In this changing climate, how was England’s rich heritage of vernacular sacred drama to be understood? This book probes the tensions inherent in the idea of ‘incarnational art’—whether, after the Reformation, ‘presence’ was only to be conjured up in the mind’s eye by the act of reading, or whether drama could rightfully reclaim all the implications of ‘incarnation’ understood in the Christian tradition as ‘the word made flesh’. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the recovery of the medieval mystery plays and their subsequent impact on the national imagination. The second half of the book looks at the gradual relaxation of the ban on the performance of sacred drama and asks whether Christian theatre can ever be truly tragic, whether art perpetually reanimates or appropriates sacred ideas, and whether there is any place for sacramental thought in a post-Darwinian, industrial age.

The Art of the People

This chapter traces the rediscovery of the medieval mystery plays which had been suppressed at the Reformation. The texts were painstakingly recovered, edited, and published in the first half of the nineteenth century, by medieval scholars but also by radicals like William Hone who were keen to emphasize the political value of expanding the literary canon. At the start of the nineteenth century, then, vernacular devotional drama was largely unknown; by the 1850s, the genre had been accorded a place in an evolutionary design that privileged the achievements of Shakespeare, and by the early twentieth century, performance was finally countenanced, albeit under the watchful eye of the Lord Chamberlain. This is a narrative of recuperation but also of misunderstanding, as the mystery plays were also positioned as comic burlesque and farce in constructions of the literary canon which stressed the aesthetic and religious superiority of the Protestant present.