The urgent debate about torture in public discourse of the twenty-first century thrusts pain into the foreground while research in neuroscience is transforming our understanding of this fundamental human experience. In late-medieval France, a country devastated by the Black Deat…
This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering and torture in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.
Passion Play is Sarah Ruhl's "biggest, most ambitious effort yet" (The New York Times), a three-and-a-half hour intimate epic, plunging the depths of the timely intersection of politics and religion. Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the E…