Medieval English Theatre Meeting 2015 Change of publication details

The 2015 METh meeting was held at the University of Southampton, hosted by John McGavin. His carefully timetabled proceedings were interrupted by the unscheduled (by him) presentation of a Festschrift in his honour. He holds the unique composite volume, but the articles it contains will be divided between this volume of METh (Part One), and Volume 38 (Part Two).

The rest of the day lived up to its festive beginning. A range of papers on the topic of ‘Paradigms Lost’ highlighted those once entrenched scholarly positions about which we have changed our minds. Pamela M. King, in ‘Medieval Drama Criticism before METh’, introduced the late nineteenth-century work of Adolphus William Ward; Garrett Epp, on ‘Things we can no longer say about the Towneley Plays’, gave an impressive PowerPoint show of deletions of accepted ‘facts’; while Meg Twycross summarised new evidence on the provenance of the manuscript (see this volume). Other speakers introduced new material which extends or changes our approach to well-worn topics: Lindsey Cox showed us the visual evidence for the portrait miniature in Wit and Science, and how the different parts of the audience might have perceived it, and Jason Burg sketched the changing patterns of performance in Lincoln Cathedral between 1309 and 1642. Nadia van Pelt reminded us of the necessity of looking at original manuscript sources rather than their calendared summaries by discussing the enigmatic detail of a letter from Chapuys which reports Henry VIII's visit to a St John's Day pageant showing him ‘cutting off the heads of the clergy’; while Greg Walker rounded off the day with a masterly summation of recent critical approaches to spectatorship, and where they fell short.

Elisabeth Dutton gave us our own spectatorly experience. Before lunch, James McBain and Stephanie Allen of the EDOX (Early Drama at Oxford University) project spoke about ‘Rehabilitating Academic Drama’, and just after lunch this was put to the test by an enthusiastic reading of the play of Narcissus originally mounted by the undergraduates of St John's College, Oxford, as a Christmas entertainment in 1602.