0.10 Discussion of patel, sheingorn, and smail papers

Audience : In the Middle Ages, it took remarkably little to put someone into a state in which they talked to the Virgin Mary, for example. Within a liturgical context, such things could often happen without elaborate ritual preparation or even music.

Smail : The Middle Ages had an abundance of practices that were described as compulsive. We wonder if descriptions of how easily tears flowed, for example, are a trope or a reality. I suspect that whatever the psychotropic assemblage is, it’s at least in part a learned phenomenon. If I went to a medieval service, I doubt I’d have the same reaction as what medieval observers have described, because my body has not been tuned to that psychotropic assemblage. This notion of tuning your body provides a way out of the epistemological difficulty of explaining why each culture reacts differently. I’ve introduced psychoactive stimulants as a way to explain the difference between cultures, but drugs are not the only way to bring about changes in psychotropic assemblages.

Audience: Was there a psychoactive or political consequence of the dominance of the four-part harmony and trance-like nature of Gregorian chant in medieval Europe?

Smail : Some studies suggest that practices such as confession can be addictive, and I suspect that a lot of practices in the medieval monastic world would be. Other practices, such as the prohibition against speaking in the Cluniac monastic system after the eleventh century, would be stress-inducing, at least in modern bodies. In light of the “pit of despair” experiments at McGill University, we know that wide-spread monastic practices such as fasting and remaining in isolation induce stress. Those stress-inducing practices were likely balanced by stress-alleviating practices, such as Gregorian chant or prayer.

Audience: There have been studies on nuns and anorexia in the medieval ascetic tradition.

Smail : If you deprive yourself of calories, you change neurological states (see Richard Wrangham’s book on this). Caroline Bynum and others have written about women’s fasting in the ascetic tradition and the other practices of food deprivation that women adopted as a form of control. The question of changing neurological states also comes up with Marjorie Kempe’s tears.

Patel : The book Deep Listeners by the musicologist Judith Becker discusses music and trancing, particularly the interface of music, ritual, and biology. Becker takes a cross-cultural approach and looks at commonalities in the ways that music and trance regulate physiological states among Sufi mystics, Pentecostal Christians in the U.S., and Balinese trancers.

Sheingorn : We now know that people have a group response, a kind of entrainment, and move with a performer’s body in the recitation of lines. If it can happen in an audience at a play, I would think that the groups of performers in medieval theater, which was frequently in verse, would experience it even more strongly.

Audience : It appears that in pre-Reformation England, there were many more processions than after the Reformation. Religious life was central and people held processions on all the saints’ days. Perhaps procession was another form of stress relief for that society.