Cultures of Miracle. Processional Theater and the Cult of Images as Global Network Phenomena in the Early Modern Era

The early modern celebration and spectacle culture connected distant cultural areas. Sacralizing urban spaces, it included theater and processions with vivid images. With the expansion of the Spanish empire from the 15th century onwards, the Christological idea of incarnation and the corporeal veneration of images that came with it reached as far as Latin America and Asia: They become evident in the Mexican allegory plays of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as well as in the Philippine re-enactments of the crucifixion motif, the theatricalized miracles of Peruvian relics and the performance of mystery plays in Japan. Starting from Hispanic liturgical drama, the project examines these ritualized forms of play for their global implementations of the Christian miracle complex. The project asks specifically how the religious theatrical genres performatively observe and negotiate the practices of gazing and the aesthetic techniques of what remains to be defined as cultures of miracle.

The wide range of material, iconic, kinetic, and linguistic forms of representation that are applied in processional theater and the cult of images reveal a notorious desire for the vivification and realistic reproduction of the transcendent. What can be found in the groups of colored wooden sculptures on their processional carts, in the imágenes de vestir (clothed figures of saints), the tableaux vivants of silent and motionless performers, in the mute dancers and mimics of the interludes, or in the moving, spoken, and sung sacramental play with its flying personae and transforming objects, is an extraordinary variety of perceptual dispositives for the embodiment of the unseen. For the Spanish Siglo de Oro (1550–1700), the emergence of presence in visionary painting and liturgical drama can be “reduced to the common ground of the miracle” (Belting/Stoichita). Miracles as religious forms designate a “narrative genre” and “social fact” and can thus be described in their respective historical context and contemporary functions as well as in their diversity of perception (Auffahrt).

By reappraising the cross-spatial genre history of the Spanish Corpus Christi play (auto sacramental), the project brings into view the global circulation of Hispanic patterns of miracle. In the process, the strategies of representation inherent in miracle cultures, always teetering on the animistic, become an important component of the cultural delimitation of Europe from its colonial heterotopias. The project will examine the reflection of these mechanisms of suppression in the early modern liturgical drama of the Hispanicized world, in particular through the synchronous network of practices of performance in Latin American, Southeast Asian, and Spanish sacramental plays.

Fig. above:
Title page sacrament play, Source: Lope de Vega: La Margarita Preciosa. Auto Sacramental, manuscript of the National Library of Spain about 1601, 1 [left]
Corpus Christi Procession Lima, Peru (anonymous, 1674–1680, Parroquia del Hospital de los Naturales), Source: Luis Peirano Falconi/Lucila Castro de Trelles (eds.): Teatro y Fe: Los autos sacramentales en el Peru, Lima: Pontífica Universidad Católica del Perú 2008, 147 [right]