Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Medieval Europe showing locations of principal play-texts and records cited in this study
- Map 2 Enlargement of central area showing locations of liturgical and feast-day plays as defined in chapter 1
- Map 3 Enlargement of central area showing locations of civic and community plays as defined in chapter 2
- Introduction: Christian Europe and the Play of God
- PART ONE THE THEATRICAL COMMUNITY
- PART TWO THE THEATRICAL TEXT
- Conclusion: survival and revival
- Appendix: the liturgical context of the plays
- Notes
- Bibliographical index of plays
- Performance records and references
- General bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Medieval Europe showing locations of principal play-texts and records cited in this study
- Map 2 Enlargement of central area showing locations of liturgical and feast-day plays as defined in chapter 1
- Map 3 Enlargement of central area showing locations of civic and community plays as defined in chapter 2
- Introduction: Christian Europe and the Play of God
- PART ONE THE THEATRICAL COMMUNITY
- PART TWO THE THEATRICAL TEXT
- Conclusion: survival and revival
- Appendix: the liturgical context of the plays
- Notes
- Bibliographical index of plays
- Performance records and references
- General bibliography
- Index
Summary
The aim of the present study is to make available to the increasing number of scholars working in the field of medieval drama, and to the even larger number of people who attend performances of such plays, a detailed survey and analysis of the surviving corpus of biblical drama from all parts of medieval Christian Europe. The number of plays is very considerable, their variety and quality remarkable and the history of their development and evolution fascinating.
Inevitably in a work conceived on a European scale, the need for translation discourages discussion of the stylistic and linguistic qualities of the plays. Nor, though the book is essentially comparatist in its approach, can it avoid some national divisions, for they are an essential part of the evolution of the genre. Very little secondary literature has been cited since the overall purpose is to encourage and facilitate detailed and comparative critical investigation of the plays, not to provide it.
The origin of the book goes back to the early 1970s when interested members of the Leeds Centre for Medieval Studies met on Wednesdays for a working lunch and hammered out the principles of a catalogue and episode-guide to the medieval religious plays. The catalogue was eventually abandoned (partly because of the work being done by Lancashire, in England, and Lippman, Bergmann and Neumann in Germany) but some of the material gathered was published in The staging of religious drama in Europe in the later Middle Ages, edited by Peter Meredith and John Tailby, in 1983.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe , pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995