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Since the appearance of the first volume in 1979, the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series has made available an accurate and useable transcription of all surviving documentary evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain up to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Although they are immensely valuable to scholars, the REED volumes sometimes prove difficult for students to use without considerable assistance. With this book, Elza Tiner aims to make the records accessible for classroom use. The contributors to the volume describe the various ways in which students can learn from working with these documents. Divided into five sections, the volume illustrates how specific disciplines can use the Records to provide resources for students including ways to teach the historical documents of early English drama, training students in acting and producing, historical contexts for the interpretation of literature, as well as the study of local history, women's studies, and historical linguistics. As a practical and much needed companion to the REED volumes, Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama will prove invaluable to both students and teachers of Medieval English Drama.
Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.
Originally published in 1990, Medieval English Drama is an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on medieval English drama. Each item has been annotated in the bibliography with considerable care; these annotations are descriptive rather than critical and give a clear synopsis of the content of each reference, the texts with which it deals, and a brief indication of its critical position. The bibliography is divided into two sections; editions and collections of plays, and critical works. The bibliography is exhaustive rather than selective and provides English annotations for foreign language works, as well as a list of reviews for most books. The book covers liturgical and folk drama, other forms of entertainment, and related material useful to researchers in the field. The book provides an update of sources not listed in Carl J. Stratman's comprehensive Bibliography of Medieval Drama published in 1972.
In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay’s accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath’s priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.
The Records of Early English Drama volumes make available historical transcripts that provide evidence of early English drama, music, ceremonial dance, and other forms of communal public entertainment in Britain from the Middle Ages to 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres.
Somerset is a large, diverse county in southwest England, bordered by Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and the Bristol Channel. Before the onset of the Reformation in 1532 Somerset became prosperous as its agriculture, industries, and coastal trade all flourished in the relative cultural stability and coherence that characterized that earlier period. By the start of the Civil War in 1642, the unified culture present in the 1530s had given way to a fragmented society. Those conflicts and changes are abundantly illustrated in the many records of Somerset entertainments surviving from that tumultuous period. Somerset's diverse dramatic records span a period of time from 1258 to 1642. In the introduction James Stokes surveys the social and economic history of towns for which dramatic records survive and provides a commentary on the major kinds of entertainments represented in the collection. These include traditional drama, custom, and game, among which are Robin Hood play, skimmingtons, baitings, pageants, and shows; and performance by travelling professional entertainers, including players, minstrels, waits, puppeteers, and others. Topics discussed include, `women and performance,' `entertainments in schools,' `playing places and staging conventions,' and `patterns of travel by performers.' The Records of Early English Drama volumes make available historical transcripts that provide evidence of early English drama, music, ceremonial, dance, and other forms of communal public entertainment in Britain from the Middle Ages to 1642, together with the necessary interpretative introductions and notes to explicate the materials for the reader. Somerset, in two volumes, is the twelfth publication in the series. These records are an invaluable addition to the scholarship of early drama, establishing as they do part of the total context of the great drama of Shakespeare, his predecessors, and his contemporaries.
In the sixteenth century, the people of England witnessed the physical transformation of their most valued buildings: their parish churches. This is the first ever full-scale investigation of the dramatic changes experienced by the English parish church during the English Reformation. By drawing on a wealth of documentary evidence, including court records, wills and church wardens' accounts, and by examining the material remains themselves - such as screens, fonts, paintings, monuments, windows and other artefacts - found in churches today, Robert Whiting reveals how, why and by whom these ancient buildings were transformed. He explores the reasons why Catholics revered the artefacts found in churches as well as why these objects became the subject of Protestant suspicion and hatred in subsequent years. This richly illustrated account sheds new light on the acts of destruction as well as the acts of creation that accompanied religious change over the course of the 'long' Reformation.
