This volume brings together a wide selection of primary source materials from the theatrical history of the Middle Ages. The focus is on Western Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of markedly Renaissance forms in Italy. Early sections of the volume are devoted to the survival of Classical tradition and the development of the liturgical drama of the Roman Catholic Church, but the main concentration is on the genesis and growth of popular religious drama in the vernacular. Each of the major medieval regions is featured, while a final section covers the pastimes and customs of the people, a record of whose traditional activities often only survives in the margins of official recognition. The documents are compiled by a team of leading scholars in the field and the over 700 documents are all presented in modern English translation.
The study of early drama has undergone a quiet revolution in the last four decades, radically altering critical approaches to form, genre, and canon. Drawing on disciplines from art history to musicology and reception studies, The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance reconsiders early "drama" as a mixed mode entertainment best studied not only alongside non-dramatic texts, but also other modes of performance. From performance before the playhouse to the afterlife of medieval drama in the contemporary avant-garde, this stunning collection of essays is divided into four sections: Northern European Playing before the Playhouse; Modes of Production and Reception; Reviewing the Anglophone Tradition; The Long Middle Ages Offering a much needed reassessment of what is generally understood as "English medieval drama", The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance provides an invaluable resource for both students and scholars of medieval studies.
This book explores the commedia dell'arte: the Italian professional theatre in Shakespeare's time. The actors of this theatre usually did not perform from scripted drama but instead improvised their performances from a shared plot and thorough knowledge of individual character roles. Robert Henke closely analyzes hitherto unexamined commedia dell'arte texts in order to demonstrate how the spoken word and written literature were fruitfully combined in performance. Henke examines a number of primary sources including performance accounts, actors' contracts, and letters, among other documents.
Tropologies is the first book-length study to elaborate the medieval and early modern theory of the tropological, or moral, sense of scripture. Ryan McDermott argues that tropology is not only a way to interpret the Bible but also a theory of literary and ethical invention. The “tropological imperative” demands that words be turned into works—books as well as deeds. Beginning with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, then treating monuments of exegesis such as the Glossa ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra, as well as theorists including Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and others, Tropologies reveals the unwritten history of a major hermeneutical theory and inventive practice. Late medieval and early Reformation writers adapted tropological theory to invent new biblical poetry and drama that would invite readers to participate in salvation history by inventing their own new works. Tropologies reinterprets a wide range of medieval and early modern texts and performances—including the Patience-Poet, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, the York and Coventry cycle plays, and the literary circles of the reformist King Edward VI—to argue that “tropological invention” provided a robust alternative to rhetorical theories of literary production. In this groundbreaking revision of literary history, the Bible and biblical hermeneutics, commonly understood as sources of tumultuous discord, turn out to provide principles of continuity and mutuality across the Reformation’s temporal and confessional rifts. Each chapter pursues an argument about poetic and dramatic form, linking questions of style and aesthetics to exegetical theory and theology. Because Tropologies attends to the flux of exegetical theory and practice across a watershed period of intellectual history, it is able to register subtle shifts in literary production, fine-tuning our sense of how literature and religion mutually and dynamically informed and reformed each other.
Crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable half-a-millennium later, Jody Enders's translations of twelve medieval French farces take on the hilariously depressing—and depressingly hilarious—state of holy wedlock.
Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable - even forbidden - for students of literature to talk about an author's intentions for a given work. In Murder by Accident, Jody Enders boldly resurrects the long-disgraced concept of intentionality, especially as it relates to the theater. Drawing on four fascinating medieval events in which a theat...
Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds’ Play, or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise there. The lion’s share of mostly anonymous farces was written by barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche, which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still going strong on the eve of Molière, resilient against those who sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender, and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations to raise their voices and act.
This volume brings together important records of medieval theatre practice between 1400 and 1580. The records are drawn from a wide range of spheres including civic, ecclesiastical, trade and guild records and consist of payments for materials, techniques and services; also included are some eye witness accounts. Alongside these records is a selection of the best contemporary research conducted into medieval performance practice, which features ground-breaking analysis and challenges current understanding, knowledge and authority in this field. These contributions of rigorous scholarship complement and support the work of the well-known Records of Early English Drama project and help to further illuminate contemporary fifteenth and early sixteenth-century theatre performance practice.
Annually published since 1930, the International bibliography of Historical Sciences (IBOHS) is an international bibliography of the most important historical monographs and periodical articles published throughout the world, which deal with history from the earliest to the most recent times. The works are arranged systematically according to period, region or historical discipline, and within this classification alphabetically. The bibliography contains a geographical index and indexes of persons and authors.
Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to address the representation of the humors from non-traditional, abstract, and materialist perspectives, considering the humorality of everyday objects, activities, and performance within the early modern period. To uncover how humoralism shapes textual, material, and aesthetic encounters for contemporary subjects in a broader sense than previous studies have pursued, the project brings together three principal areas of investigation: how the humoral body was evoked and embodied within the space of the early modern stage; how the materiality of an object can be understood as constructed within humoral discourse; and how individuals’ activities and pursuits can connote specific practices informed by humoralism. Across the book, contributors explore how diverse media and cultural practices are informed by humoralism. As a whole, the collection investigates alternative humoralities in order to illuminate both early modern works of art as well as the cultural moments of their production.
