Reviewed by:

• Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays by Emma Lipton
• Elisabeth Dutton (bio)

Records of the York plays are preserved in the York Memorandum Books, manuscripts that also contain administrative records and charters defining and demonstrating York's politically powerful civic culture. These books offer some rationale for the approach that Emma Lipton follows in Cultures of Witnessing: the now firmly established interdisciplinary method that places the study of law alongside topics more generally explored in departments of language and literature. The York Plays are perhaps the most researched examples of medieval drama, but Lipton's approach does enable her to offer some new insights into their familiar material, particularly the Trial, Crucifixion and Last Judgment plays on which her discussion focuses.

The book first describes the particular legal privileges granted to the city of York by successive English kings: the negotiation of these privileges provides "crucial context for the depiction of legal witnessing in the York plays" (6). Also outlined in the Introduction is the rise in the legal significance of witnesses as a result of the ban, imposed by the Fourth Lateran Council, on trial by ordeal: witnessing and jury trials, however, relied "as much on rumor or shared knowledge as they did on direct perception" (9), and many individuals were disqualified as witnesses on the basis of condition, gender, age, reputation, and fortune. Nonetheless, witnessing was an important civic duty, contributing to local, legal identity within the city. Witness records are also here described as similar to records of performance, with their accounts of places, times and persons resembling "the unities of action, place and time long associated with the drama" (17). Of course, these unities were no concern of medieval drama itself, but they may suggest associations in the mind of the modern scholar of drama.

Subsequent chapters use medieval witnessing to theorize dramatic space, speech acts, affect, and temporality. Dramatic space is discussed in chapter 1 in relation to the York play of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem: unsurprisingly, comparison is drawn with the royal entry of King Henry IV into the city, but new light is cast on the comparison by Lipton's discussion of those present at the entry as if they were legal witnesses, "neighbors close enough to have seen and heard relevant events, or to have local knowledge of reputation accorded by spatial proximity" (24-5). The idea of the witness as neighbor then contributes to observations about the different stations around York at which each play was performed in turn: very localized spaces of individual performance were defined temporally by what small groups of witnesses could individually and collectively see and hear, "just as in legal witnessing the neighborhood came into being in the actions of seeing, hearing, and sharing knowledge" (44). [End Page 278]

The trial plays are the focus of chapter 2, which analyzes the speeches of Christ and the Beadle as models of witness testimony and good citizenship. Christ's reluctance to speak also reflects the ideal behavior prescribed in contemporary conduct books, this chapter argues. By contrast, the excessive speeches of Pilate and Herod identify them as tyrants according to the portraits of tyranny found in mirrors for princes. This is not new, but Lipton argues that her focus on witnessing offers fresh insight into the role of the body in speech, by contrast with scholars' concentration on Christ's body as symbol of the Christian community; furthermore, she argues that attention to a witness's intention and emotion, as emphasized by medieval legal theory, offers an understanding of affect in the plays as a public practice, different from the imaginative affective piety the plays are often thought to engage. Chapter 3 also discusses the trial plays, this time exploring witnessing as an activity poised between individual and social. The motives of Annas and Caiaphas are not presented as envious, as they are in the source texts, but rather are articulated in legal terms.

Chapter 4 discusses the York Doomsday pageant in the light of the asynchronous model of temporality implied by witness. Although...

审阅者：

• 见证文化：艾玛·利普顿的《法律与约克戏剧》
• 伊丽莎白·达顿（简介）

约克戏剧的记录保存在《约克备忘录》中，手稿中还包含定义和展示约克强大的政治公民文化的行政记录和章程。这些书为艾玛·利普顿在《见证文化》中遵循的方法提供了一些基本原理：现已牢固确立的跨学科方法，将法律研究与语言和文学系更普遍探讨的主题放在一起。约克戏剧也许是中世纪戏剧研究最多的例子，但利普顿的方法确实使她能够对他们熟悉的材料提供一些新的见解，特别是她讨论的重点是《审判》、《受难》和《最后的审判》戏剧。

该书首先描述了历任英国国王授予约克市的特殊法律特权：这些特权的谈判提供了“约克戏剧中描述法律见证的关键背景”(6)。引言中还概述了由于第四拉特兰议会对严酷审判实行的禁令，证人的法律意义有所提高：然而，证人审判和陪审团审判“同样依赖于谣言或共同知识”他们是根据直接感知来做到的”(9)，许多人因身体状况、性别、年龄、声誉和财富而被取消证人资格。尽管如此，作见证是一项重要的公民义务，有助于增强城市内的当地合法身份。这里的目击记录也被描述为类似于表演记录，它们对地点、时间和人物的描述类似于“与戏剧长期相关的动作、地点和时间的统一”(17)。当然，这些统一性与中世纪戏剧本身无关，但它们可能暗示了现代戏剧学者心中的联想。

随后的章节使用中世纪的见证来理论化戏剧空间、言语行为、情感和时间性。第一章讨论了与约克戏剧《基督进入耶路撒冷》相关的戏剧性空间：毫不奇怪，与国王亨利四世进入这座城市的皇家进入进行了比较，但利普顿对在场者的讨论为这种比较带来了新的线索在入口处，就好像他们是合法证人一样，“邻居足够近，可以看到和听到相关事件，或者了解当地因空间接近而产生的声誉”（24-5）。目击者作为邻居的想法有助于观察约克周围的不同车站，每场戏剧都在这些车站轮流上演：个人表演的非常局部的空间是由一小群目击者可以单独和集体看到和听到的时间来定义的，“正如在法律见证中，邻居是在看到、听到和分享知识的行为中形成的”（44）。[完第278页]

审判剧是第二章的重点，该章分析了基督和执事的演讲，将其作为证人证言和良好公民的典范。本章认为，基督不愿说话也反映了当代行为书籍中规定的理想行为。相比之下，彼拉多和希律的过度言论根据王子镜子中的暴政肖像将他们视为暴君。这并不新鲜，但利普顿认为，她对见证的关注为身体在言语中的作用提供了新的见解，这与学者们对基督身体作为基督教团体象征的关注形成鲜明对比；此外，她认为，正如中世纪法律理论所强调的那样，对证人意图和情感的关注提供了对戏剧情感作为一种公共实践的理解，这与戏剧通常被认为涉及的富有想象力的情感虔诚不同。第三章还讨论了审判剧，这次探讨了见证作为一种介于个人和社会之间的活动。亚那和该亚法的动机并不像源文本中那样表现得嫉妒，而是用法律术语阐明的。

第四章根据目击者隐含的异步时间性模型讨论了约克世界末日盛会。虽然...