ABSTRACT
Positioned at the center and climax of the great medieval dramatic cycles at York and Chester were the plays of Christ’s torture, crucifixion, and death. Literal examples of what Miri Rubin has described as a figurative “theater of blood in fifteenth-century devotional literature” (25), the York and Chester plays offered to their audiences scenes of violence to encourage affective piety but also to educate and to entertain, even to captivate viewers with their spectacular, terrible, and yet (to medieval thinking) beautiful imagery.
