"Nayles Large and Lang": Masculine Identity and the Anachronic Object in the York Crucifixion Play

ven for the most enthusiastic DIY aficionado, a performance of the death of Christ might be considered a rather inappropriate venue for commercial product placement. Nevertheless, the late medieval York Crucifixion play appears to come perilously close to doing just that. Although the Crucifixion occupied the theological center of a series of pageants performed during the celebration of Corpus Christi, the body of Christ is out of sight for much of the play. As Greg Walker has noted, during much of the play’s action, Christ’s body lies prone and silent on the stage, obscured by the antics of the soldiers carrying out the crucifixion. 1 These soldiers are chiefly concerned with the mechanics of their task–the engineering challenges the crucifixion poses and the tools employed to carry it out. As a consequence, the soldiers’ mechanical preoccupations displace the audience’s attention from the body undergoing the suffering of the crucifixion to the tools used to perform the work. Yet the tools used during the York Crucifixion—particularly the “nayles large and lange”—also work to project the identity of the guild producing the