The Essay: Cooking and Eating God in Medieval Drama
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Daisy Black looks at religious imagery, food, anti-semitism and product placement in medieval mystery plays. Eaten by characters, dotted around the stage as saliva-prompting props, or nibbled by audiences - a medieval religious drama is glutted with food but Christianity’s vision of God as spiritual nutrition could provoke horror and fear as well as hunger. We'll hear about some of the gristly, crunchy medieval episodes of culinary performance as the Essay investigates the relationship between faith and food. In one play, sacramental bread is attacked in a kitchen, drawing disturbing parallels between the eucharist and cannibalism. Daisy Black lectures in English at the University of Wolverhampton and performs as a storyteller and freelance theatre director. Her essay was recorded at this year's Free Thinking Festival with an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
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| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:37.9 | Hello, I'm Shahed Abari, and I'm delighted to be introducing this short talk recorded at BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival as a BBC Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:48.0 | Daisy Black is a lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton. |
| 0:51.8 | She works on gender, time and food in medieval drama. |
| 0:55.9 | She also works as a storyteller, telling, amongst other things, tales of unruly medieval women, |
| 1:02.0 | which involves miming having sex in a tree, acting out the entire Battle of Hastings on her own. |
| 1:08.7 | She's crucified three different Christs in the name of research, |
| 1:12.6 | including two female ones. |
| 1:14.5 | She's a new generation thinker on the scheme |
| 1:16.8 | the BBC runs with the Arts and Humanities |
| 1:18.8 | Research Council to make radio |
| 1:20.7 | programs from academic research. |
| 1:22.8 | And her short talk today is |
| 1:24.7 | called cooking and eating God |
| 1:26.8 | in medieval drama watching a modern adaptation of the york |
| 1:39.4 | mystery plays i had a dilemma the interval fell between judas's betrayal and Jesus's trials, so I and much of the |
| 1:48.6 | rest of the audience went to grab an ice cream. Waiting in the queue, I was struck by a theological |
| 1:54.8 | question. Is it in bad taste to buy an ice cream knowing you're going to be eating it during the crucifixion. |
| 2:03.7 | Those attending plays in the late Middle Ages had fewer qualms about munching during sensitive |
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