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

The early modern culture of celebration and spectacle connected otherwise distant cultural regions through a common cultural repertoire. This included theater and processions with vivid images that sacralized urban spaces. With the expansion of the Spanish Empire from the 15th century onward, the Christological concept of incarnation and its associated practice of the corporeal veneration of images spread to Latin America and Asia. This is visible for instance in the Mexican allegorical plays of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, in Philippine re-enactments of the crucifixion motif, in theatricalized miraculous activities of Peruvian relics, or in performances of mystery plays in Japan. Taking Hispanic liturgical drama as its starting point, the project examines these ritualized forms of performance as global realizations of the paradigm of the Christian miracle. The project asks specifically how various religious genres performatively observe and negotiate the visual practices and aesthetic techniques of ‘cultures of miracle’—a term this project sets out to define.

The wide range of material, iconic, kinetic, and linguistic forms of representation deployed in processional theater and the cult of images points to the perennial desire for the vivification and realistic reproduction of the transcendent. There are the ensembles of colored wooden sculptures on processional carts; the imágenes de vestir (clothed figures of saints); the tableaux vivants composed of silent and motionless performers; the mute dancers and mimics of the interludes; the dynamic spoken and sung sacramental play with its flying personae and transforming objects. All of them bear witness to an extraordinary variety of devices that serve to embody the invisible. If the representational ability of visionary painting and liturgical drama in the Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro, 1550–1700) can be “reduced to the common denominator of the miracle” (Belting/Stoichita), then ‘miracle’ as religious form denotes a ‘narrative genre’ and ‘social fact’ and can be considered from the point of view of its respective historical context and contemporary functions as well as the diversity of perception it enables (Auffahrt).

By reappraising the cross-spatial history of the genre of the Spanish Corpus Christi play (auto sacramental), the project brings into relief the global circulation of Hispanic patterns of miracle. In this analysis, the representational strategies inherent to miracle cultures, always teetering on the animistic, emerge as an important component of the cultural delimitation of Europe from its colonial heterotopias. The project examines whether the mechanisms of suppression are already reflected in the early modern liturgical drama of the Hispanicized world, focusing in particular on the synchronous networks 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]