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MEDIEVAL STAGES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2009

Jody Enders
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Extract

In 1996, R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols edited a remarkable volume of essays called Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, in which seventeen scholars pondered, through detailed philological analysis and imaginative cultural-studies approaches, the legacy of the Middle Ages and its relevance to modern times. “WORD'S OUT,” they began, “There's something exciting going on in medieval studies, and maybe in the Renaissance too. The study of medieval literature and culture has never been more alive or at a more interesting, innovative stage.” Bloch and Nichols understood, as few others, the pertinent critical stages of the interdiscipline of medieval studies. But, critically speaking, where was the stage? With the exception of Seth Lerer's terrific piece on Eric Auerbach's gender-biased editorial establishment of the text of the twelfth-century Play of Adam, theatre was nowhere to be found.

Type
Critical Stages: Edited by Mike Sell
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , November 2009 , pp. 317 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2009

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References

Endnotes

1. Bloch, R. Howard and Nichols, Stephen G., “Introduction,” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. Bloch, and Nichols, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1–22, at 1Google Scholar. This volume made a similar impression on Michal Kobialka, who discusses it at length when opening This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

2. Lerer, Seth, “Making Mimesis: Eric Auerbach and the Institutions of Medieval Studies,” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. Bloch, and Nichols, , 308–33Google Scholar.

3. Case, Sue-Ellen, “Introduction,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Case, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 1–13, at 2Google Scholar.

4. Limiting myself here to book-length studies (and acknowledging that it is difficult not to neglect and/or offend some), I refer to Chambers, E. K., The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903)Google Scholar; Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1950; reprint Boston: Beacon Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Clopper, Lawrence M., Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Gurevich, Aron, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. Bak, János M. and Hollingsworth, Paul A., Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, 14 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Gustave, Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux français du moyen âge, 2d ed. (Paris: Champion, 1951)Google Scholar.

5. Young, Karl, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933)Google Scholar; Hardison, O. B., “Darwin, Mutations, and the Origin of Medieval Drama,” in Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1–34Google Scholar; Warning, Rainer, The Ambivalences of Medieval Religious Drama, trans. Rendall, Steven (1974; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Kubiak, Anthony, “Trope to Tragedy: Rubbing out Theatre's Corpus,” in Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 48–71Google Scholar.

6. Knight, Alan, “The Processional Context of Medieval Drama,” in Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1983), 117–40Google Scholar; Kipling, Gordon, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Konigson, Elie, L'Espace théâtral médiéval (Paris: CNRS, 1975)Google Scholar; and Enders, Jody, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For Clifford Davidson, the latest in scores of books, which include many edited interdisciplinary volumes, is Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot, Hampshire, U.K., and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).

7. Huizinga, 146; Treitler, Leo, “Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music,” Speculum 56.3 (1981): 471–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (1957; reprint Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 109Google Scholar.

8. See, respectively, http://english.boisestate.edu/lzaerr/ and http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ebv1/ (both accessed 10 July 2009).

9. Stock, Brian, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

10. Runnalls, Graham, “Were They Listening or Watching? Text and Spectacle at the 1510 Châteaudun Passion Play,” in Medieval English Theatre 16 (1994): 25–36Google Scholar.

11. Lucian of Samosata, , “Saltatio,” ed. and trans. (as “The Dance”) Harmon, A. M., in vol. 5 of Works, Loeb Classical Library no. 302 (1936; reprint Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 211–89Google Scholar.

12. See esp. “The New Philology,” special issue of Speculum 65.1 (1990), ed. Stephen G. Nichols; and The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

13. Le Goff, Jacques, Medieval Civilization, 400–1500, trans. Barrow, Julia (1988; Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 360–1Google Scholar.

14. One much neglected approach was explored in La Circulation des nouvelles au moyen âge: XXIVe congrès de la S.H.M.E.S., Avignon, juin 1993 ([Rome]: École française de Rome; Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994).

15. See, e.g., Buc, Philippe, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Muir, Edward, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

16. Symes, Carol, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For more on this remarkable study, see my review in H-France Review 9.26 (February 2009): 105–9, online at http://www.h-france.net/vol9reviews/vol9no26enders.pdf.

17. Beam, Sara, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

18. Those studying medieval French theatre can barely keep up with the publications. Consider Alan Knight's edition of the Mystères de la procession de Lille, of which four of five projected volumes have appeared (Geneva: Droz, 2001–7), and André Tissier's thirteen-volume edition of Recueil de farces (1450–1550) (Geneva: Droz, 1986–2000).

19. This is God speaking to Adam in the Service for Representing Adam (i.e., the Play of Adam or Jeu d' Adam), l. 48, as reproduced in both Anglo-Norman, that is Old French, and English translation, in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 78–121, at 82.

20. See, e.g., Pulci, Antonia, Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays, trans. Cook, James Wyatt, ed. Cook, James Wyatt and Cook, Barbara Collier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Schernberg, Dietrich's Play of Lady Jutta appears in Medieval German Drama: Four Plays in Translation, 159–219, trans. Wright, Stephen K. (Fairview, NC: Pegasus, 2002)Google Scholar. See also Wright, , “Joseph as Mother, Jutta as Pope: Gender and Transgression in Medieval German Drama,” Theatre Journal 51 (1999): 149–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Heldris de Cornuälle should be required reading for all theatre scholars; see Silence, a Thirteenth-Century Romance, trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992).

22. Ehrstine, Glenn, Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555 (Leiden: Brill, 2002)Google Scholar.

23. See esp. Medieval Dutch Drama: Four Secular Plays and Four Farces from the Van Hulthem Manuscript, trans. Johanna C. Prins (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 1999); and Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Wim Hüsken and Kathleen Ashley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).

24. Stern, Charlotte, The Medieval Theater in Castile, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies no. 156 (Binghamton, NY: SUNY, 1996)Google Scholar; and, e.g., Massip, Jesús Francesc, El teatro medieval: Voz de la divinidad cuerpo de histrión (Barcelona: Montesinos, 1992)Google Scholar.

25. See Hardison; and also Prosser, Eleanor's sensible Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays: A Re-Evaluation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

26. This is yet another version of a rampant critical narcissism that asks of all things, “How is this about me?” See, e.g., Bérubé, Michael, “Against Subjectivity,” in Bérubé et al., “Four Views on the Place of the Personal in Scholarship,” PMLA 111.5 (1996): 1063–79, at 1063–8Google Scholar.

27. Beckwith, Sarah, Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Action in York's Play of Corpus Christi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar; my emphasis.

28. Dox, Donnalee, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007)Google Scholar, and Parker, John, The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

29. After a brilliant dissertation in 1984, he arrived on the scene primarily with Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

30. Biernoff, Suzannah, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, U.K., and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. See Coletti, Theresa, “Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Patterson, Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 248–84Google Scholar; and de Julleville, Petit, Les Mystères, vols. 1 and 2 of Histoire du théâtre en France (1880; reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1968)Google Scholar. One thinks also of the many distinguished editions produced by Graham Runnalls.

32. The Medieval European Stage, 500–1550, ed. William Tydeman, in the series Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Kobialka and I both had substantive critiques in our reviews of the book, mine for Theatre Journal 54.4 (2002): 658–9; his for Theatre Survey 44.1 (2003): 138–40.

33. Symes did so in a charmingly polemical lecture of 5 May 2006 at the International Congress for Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI): “What Is the Use of Theater History? Why Historians Should Be Scholars of Medieval Theater, and Scholars of Medieval Theater Should Be Historians.”

34. In addition to Symes and Kobialka, cited above, the full citations are Sponsler, Claire, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Brantley, Jessica, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crane, Susan, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Enders, , Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar and Murder by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Important exceptions to the conservative European school include Koopmans, Jelle, Le Théâtre des exclus au Moyen Age: Hérétiques, sorcières et marginaux (Paris: Imago, 1997)Google Scholar; Rey-Flaud, Henri, Pour une dramaturgie du moyen-âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Darwin, Maistre Pierre Pathelin: Le Miroir d'orgueil (Saint-Benoît-du-Sault: Tarabuste, 2002)Google Scholar.

35. Saenger, Paul, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society,” Viator 13 (1982): 367–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bestul, Thomas H., Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Texts and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Huot, Sylvia, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.