Cultures of Witnessing: Law and The York Plays by Emma Lipton (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Cultures of Witnessing: Law and The York Plays by Emma Lipton
• Gillian Redfern

CULTURES OF WITNESSING: LAW AND THE YORK PLAYS. By Emma Lipton. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; pp. 200.

Written in lively, engaging prose that is equally authoritative and accessible, the central argument of Emma Lipton’s most recent monograph, Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays, is that the York plays use legal concepts of witnessing to promote ideals of citizenship in medieval York. Seeking to move scholarship on law and medieval drama beyond the accepted notion that the depiction of law in religious dramas generally reflects the corruption of earthly courts, Lipton persuasively theorizes that the plays also depict “virtuous witnesses, using them and other legalisms to promote local civic values and authority” (5). Thus, concepts of witnessing, and what or who makes a “good” witness, are uniquely interwoven with the York plays’ religious themes to bolster York’s sense of importance and promote local jurisdictional and legal powers, rather than monarchical, central ones. Lipton argues that this helped to articulate model citizenship in particularly local ways. Situating readings of selected dramas alongside legal treatises, sermons, confessional manuals, mirrors for princes, lyrics, conduct books, and all manner of textual forms of witness, Lipton explores how such texts and civic dramas informed and affected each other in site-specific ways in medieval York.

For example, in the first chapter, “Space and the Cultures of Witnessing in the York ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’” Lipton claims that the legal charters in the York Memorandum Books, kept in the guildhall, demonstrate York’s concerted effort to preserve local jurisdiction over central power. Lipton sees this echoed in the Entry into Jerusalem, as Christ’s presence in the city, alluded to by deictic references, sets the audience as “His” witnesses and puts “the neighbor and citizen—rather than king, cleric, or lawyer—at the center of legal practice” (44). However, as Lipton rightly remarks at the very end of this chapter, there were many groups of citizens (such as women, the poor, et al.) who were excluded by law from giving legal witness. Thus, where Lipton concedes that, in practice, such legal witnessing would only have been available to a “subset” of York’s citizens, perhaps that subset would be more recognizably described as the wealthy male elite of medieval York (45).

Given Lipton’s focus on the law and witnessing, it is perhaps unsurprising to see two chapters devoted to scrutiny of York’s sequence of trial plays (The Conspiracy, The Trial Before Caiaphas and Annas, Christ before Pilate 1, The Trial Before Herod, [End Page 254] and Christ before Pilate 2: The Judgment). Chapter 2, “Witnessing as Speech,” builds on extant scholarship that discusses the many legal terms and procedures entailed in these plays, considering them as “a record of embodied speech acts” (71), where the act of speaking (or accusing, or the reluctance to speak) essentially constitutes the plays’ action. These speech-actions, witnessed by the whole gamut of individuals constituting the audience in medieval York (incidental passersby, those within earshot, those actually watching the plays), are, according to Lipton, performative in multiple senses. They act as ethical guides by which York’s citizens, or populace during the plays’ performances, can learn how to control their own speech. By combining legal authority, religious authority, and theatrical conventions, the audience is further implicated in witnessing and adjudicating between paradigmatic characters such as Christ and tyrants such as Pilate or Herod. Lipton underscores the affective experience of late-medieval witnessing here with recourse to conduct literature and the governing, wisdom, and advice principles found in the mirrors for princes genre. Lipton gives an excellent close reading to argue for witnessing in these plays as both an experience and practice that promotes ethical self-governance over one’s own speech and that of others.

Chapter 3, “Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Trial Plays,” builds on the work in the previous chapter, although it is distinct in that it explores the notion of false witnessing, which might lead to false justice, or a miscarriage of justice. Lipton’s points are supported by a...