Enculturated, Embodied, Social: Medieval Drama and Cognitive Integration

Highlighting the embodied, collaborative, and spatially and temporally divers nature of medieval English plays, this essay argues that the cognitive work of medieval drama is best understood through the theory of cognitive integration, and in particular niche construction. Using the famous fifteenth-century York Play of the Crucifixion as a case study, the essay illustrates how this pageant constructed its particular niche, and its reliance on social as well as spatial and material affordances. The Play of the Crucifixion, it is argued, created opportunities for highly personal, individual devotional responses in the midst of what was fundamentally, and necessarily, a social and collaborative act. What is more, as a niche created for the purpose of devotion, it was focused on stimulating emotion and feeling, rather than supporting rational problem solving. It also overlapped with, and perhaps influenced, other devotional niches active beyond the frame of performance, contributing to extensive feedback cycles to which it was also subject.