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“L’enfer, c’est les autres”: En-gendering Sin in Middle English Religious Drama. The Case of Chester

Paper · 2021 · Ciobanu Estella

Summary

This is a literary-historical study, not an NLP paper. It asks whether the Chester biblical plays distribute sin and punishment unevenly by gender, beyond the expected divisions by estate and trade. Ciobanu reads three retribution plays in reverse narrative order: the Last Judgement, then the Harrowing of Hell, then Noah's Flood. She sets them against Chester's 1540 civic ordinances aimed at women, pastoral writing on the deadly sins, and studies of church and secular court records.

The method is close reading of the plays' confessions and accusations. Male characters are damned for abusing office, mishandling money or wronging the church. Women are condemned through lechery, vanity, dishonest brewing and gossip.

The main claim is that social gendering overrides the theological idea that sin is gender-neutral. The plays also turn gossip, a sin of speech blamed on women, back against women. The study shows how a conservative civic genre can carry secular, gender-specific anxieties under a religious frame.

Key points

  • On 12 May 1540, four days before the plays were staged, Chester passed ordinances aimed at women:
    • women aged 14–40 were barred from keeping alehouses;
    • women's gatherings around lying-in and churching were restricted;
    • a later ordinance curbed women's headgear.
  • Between 1472 and 1521 the plays moved from Corpus Christi to Whitsuntide, and by the 1530s they had grown into a three-day "Whitsun play."
  • In the Last Judgement (C24), Regina Damnata is the only woman among the damned.
    • Regina Salvata and the kings confess similar sins.
    • Yet Primus Demon accuses only the damned queen of lechery-inducing conduct, not Rex Damnatus.
  • Karras's work on defamation cases shows clear gender patterns:
    • women were defamed and punished for adultery far more than men, mostly by other women;
    • men's reputations suffered chiefly from charges of business dishonesty.
  • In the Harrowing of Hell, Mulier, an alewife figure, is the only human Christ leaves in hell. Noah's Flood links Mrs Noah and the Good Gossips with drinking and defiance.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Saved and damned characters confess nearly the same sins, so the author isolates the real variable: who gets formally accused.
  • I2. The paper separates the sin a character confesses from the charge a prosecutor brings, showing that blame can be assigned unevenly across agents who did the same thing.
  • I3. The analysis works backward from the final judgment to earlier plays, because the cause of each trial lies in a prior history of wrongdoing.
  • I4. Plays are read against contemporary records such as civic ordinances and court data, so the background knowledge comes from the text's own time and place.
  • I5. Gossip, condemned as a sin of speech, is shown being used by authorities as a weapon against the very group blamed for it.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Build minimal-pair negative controls in which two characters perform the same act. The evaluation then checks whether the system's judgment follows the act or a spurious attribute.
  • I2 (frames): Represent self-accusation and accusation by others as distinct speech-act frames, each with its own speaker and target. This lets the system detect and explain asymmetric blame in a text.
  • I3 (world): When explaining an outcome such as a punishment or reward, trace the event order back to the earlier states and actions that motivate it. Do not treat the outcome as an isolated fact.
  • I4 (world): Attach period- and place-specific norms to the knowledge graph, so the inferred world of a historical text uses that era's assumptions rather than modern defaults.
  • I5 (frames): Flag cases where a speech act condemns the same act it performs, or reverses its target, as candidates for irony or implicature analysis.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Ovidius University.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Ciobanu Estella. 2021. “L’enfer, c’est les autres”: En-gendering Sin in Middle English Religious Drama. The Case of Chester. American, British and Canadian Studies Journal 36.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.2478/abcsj-2021-0006

@article{estella2021l,
  title = {{“L’enfer, c’est les autres”: En-gendering Sin in Middle English Religious Drama. The Case of Chester}},
  author = {Ciobanu Estella},
  journal = {American, British and Canadian Studies Journal 36},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.2478/abcsj-2021-0006},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2021-0006}
}

References

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