Diabolical Affects: The Anxieties and Pleasures of Playing Demons in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract This essay argues that the performance of demonic, idolatrous, and other illicit acts and identities in fifteenth-century religious drama provoked risky and conflicting feelings in its participants in order to engage them in a competition between licit and illicit spiritual affiliations. By examining a protestatio made by an anxious player in fifteenth-century Avignon, various written saints’ lives, and the two saints’ plays found in MS Digby 133, The Conversion of St Paul and Mary Magdalene, I emphasize the dynamic between ‘sincerity’ and ‘play’ through which participants in these texts—writers, readers, dramatists, performers, audience members—engage in fraught negotiations of how the emotional responses stirred by performance define their ethical and spiritual identities. I argue therefore that the tensions in these texts between pious, spiritual edification and idolatrous, demonic subversion are affective tensions between the competing identities that are formed from the licit or illicit feelings provoked by the performance. By regarding this ‘risky play’ as affective, therefore, I challenge readings of medieval ‘play’ as a straightforward defence against the risk of sacrilege in sacred drama, drawing out the ways in which such a sophisticated dramatic theory still struggles to definitively manage or expel the illicit affects of diabolical play.