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MEDIEVAL STAGES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2009

Jody Enders

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.

Information

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

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.”Footnote 1 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.Footnote 2

That was then. This is now. And “word has been out” for quite awhile. Much as, for Sue-Ellen Case, theatre studies came “‘later’ to the feminist critique than work in other genres,”Footnote 3 so too it seems that it has come later to medievalism. But has it really?

Many medievalists have been rather like Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain, who was speaking in prose and just didn't know it: they have been practicing performance studies for decades and just don't (necessarily) know it. Back in 1903, E. K. Chambers turned to ritual and popular culture in The Mediaeval Stage, as did Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1950), inspiring the later work of Lawrence Clopper and Aron Gurevich; while Gustave Cohen emerged in the 1950s as a premier historian, theorist, and practitioner of French medieval theatre.Footnote 4 In 1933, Karl Young explored the theatrical nature of ecclesiastical ritual in The Drama of the Medieval Church; in 1965, O. B. Hardison synthesized, in Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages, a bona fide theatre of the church in an intellectual tour de force about Darwinism; and, in 1974, Rainer Warning situated medieval drama in the theological culture of performance (although most American scholars had to wait until 2001 for the work to be translated). Anthony Kubiak's 1991 chapter on the quem quaeritis trope remains one of the most brilliant essays ever written on the medieval theatrical body.Footnote 5 Alan Knight and Gordon Kipling were among the first to turn to the theatricality of processional culture; Clifford Davidson has facilitated collaborative work for decades on a variety of pan-European spectacles; Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka went well beyond the efforts of an Elie Konigson when they brought together scholars in art history, literature, theatre, and history to consider the semiotics of medieval space; and I suppose that, back in 1992, when I turned to the “protodramatic” nature of medieval juridical culture, I too was doing performance studies.Footnote 6

Given the preliterate, largely oral/aural and visual/corporeal literary culture(s) of the European Middle Ages, medievalists have long engaged in performance studies, regardless of whether they employ that specific term. Simply put, medieval literary studies is performance studies. Romances were declaimed by jongleurs in public squares; poetry competitions were waged and won with all the “glorious exhibitionism and agonistic aspiration” that Huizinga attributed to the medieval university; musicologists like Leo Treitler have shown that medieval Latin made no terminological distinction between cantare and dicere, singing and speaking; and even Northrop Frye observed in 1957 that ritual is “the content of action and more particularly of dramatic action.”Footnote 7 Happily, a handful of specialists of medieval romance are well aware that, if much was novel in the Middle Ages, not much was novelistic. (Most teachers of medieval literature need to remind their undergraduates repeatedly that roman in Old or Middle French denoted “romance,” not “novel”). In the good old medieval sense of demonstrare—to display and to prove—Linda Marie Zaerr has been performing romance since the 1980s; and, in a series of exciting programs with a website to match, Evelyn Birge Vitz has made New York University a receptive home to medieval performance.Footnote 8 In other words, notwithstanding Brian Stock's considerable wisdom on the subject, “listening for the text” is not enough.Footnote 9 Scholars of medieval theatre and theatricality must watch for it as well. Even though Graham Runnalls wonders whether medieval audiences were listening or watching,Footnote 10 theatre demands both and more—and has done so ever since Lucian of Samosata explored the holistic nature of mimed performance in ancient Greece.Footnote 11

That task is all the more daunting in that medieval theatre studies is home to several divided populations governed by the kind of false binaries that we have grown to love to hate. Readers of Theatre Survey are all too familiar with the great Theatre versus Drama divide, so I will not rerehearse it here beyond pointing out that contemporary debates about the historiography of the theatrical archive have a different twist for medievalists: when medievalists debate the archive, we're usually sitting in an actual archive of the dusty—not the digital—variety. With explanations to follow, the critical landscape, might best be characterized like so:

  1. 1. History (or, for that matter, folklore or anthropology) versus Literature;

  2. 2. Continental versus British (with members of the latter population doubtless citing a marked preference for England over Ireland or Scotland … and, by the way, “Yes, Virginia,” it's the Middle Ages, so there is no American drama); and last, but certainly not least,

  3. 3. Religious versus Secular.

Each one of those divides reflects the medievalist politics of the 1980s and 1990s: the Old vs. the New Medievalism; the Old vs. the New Philology.Footnote 12

Why should readers of Theatre Survey care about those three trends?

Because large-scale theatricality is by no means a modern phenomenon, and medievalists have much to contribute to the larger conversation about drama as genre and theatre as medium. Only together can we understand the theatrical and prototheatrical forms that were ubiquitous in a culture that, as the historian Jacques Le Goff famously noted, displayed a widespread tendency to theatricalize itself.Footnote 13 At a minimum, we need to examine how and why that tendency is similar to and different from our own. Medieval theatre is so tricky to identify that its very name is interspersed liberally in criticism with spectacle, performance, sport, ritual, battle-play, trial, pageant, parade, procession, dance, song, and even allegory or dialogue. The twains must finally meet if we are to understand not only hundreds of critically untouched playtexts but also the arts of preaching and letter writing, the performance setting of letters of remission and royal proclamations, the agonistic public engagement of scholastic disputation, the Inns at Court, the circulation of news, the sites of sport, and so on.Footnote 14

History versus Literature

Medieval historians have been positively immersed in the study of ritual, yet the work of theatre and performance studies is, more often than not, a foreign language to them.Footnote 15 No reasonable historian would hesitate to affirm that every literary scholar has a duty to be knowledgeable about history and historiography. And yet, with few exceptions, that duty does not appear to be reciprocal enough to motivate medieval historians to be similarly knowledgeable about the insights, debates, and methodologies of literary theory and criticism. Fortunately, Carol Symes is in a class all her own. As one of the rare scholars trained in both social history and theatrical practice, she sheds new light on the rich theatrical culture of the thirteenth-century city of Arras in A Common Stage (2007).Footnote 16 Unfortunately, the norm is rather more like Sara Beam's maddening Laughing Matters (2007), a well-written study of the tradition of fifteenth-century French farce in which any potential impact on our field is considerably weakened by the author's not-so-benign neglect of reams of theatre theory and criticism on her very topic.Footnote 17 That is not to say that critical transgressions of the opposite sort are impossible. Equally maddening is the type of piece that often crossed my editor's desk at Theatre Survey in which so-called scholars apparently felt free to theorize about drama to their hearts' content, with little or no knowledge of the history, social contexts, or even the languages of their objects of inquiry.

Continental versus British

On one side of the English Channel, theory-savvy medievalists in English departments often wonder, “Just how many more analyses of the cycle plays can there be?” On the other side, medievalists in French departments, for instance, tend to opt out, leaving by the intellectual wayside literally hundreds of theatre pieces.Footnote 18 The problem? Actually, there are two of them. For one thing, there seems to be no such thing as a “medieval theatre generalist.” For another, to be blunt about it, scholars of medieval Britain have everything to say about almost nothing, whereas most continental medievalists have almost nothing to say about everything. Believe it or not, the latest critical entry is something called “the French of England,” which is part of a long-standing discussion of who claims Anglo-Norman as its own (pre)national language, France or England. Let me dispel forthwith any remaining confusion. Forgive me for using the informal tu form (and, no, I'm not saying that I'm the voice of God) but: Escote, English Studies, et entent ma raison! (“Listen, and hear my judgment!”).Footnote 19 Anglo-Norman is not the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf; it's Old French—and we teach that language in French departments. It is difficult to frame the problem in such a way that it does not sound like scholarly turf protection, but allow me to try: Even if we hope to understand a medieval whole that is more than the sum of its parts, we still have a duty to respect the integrity of those parts. While the “French of England movement” is admirable for its comparativist spirit, it also seems to be yet another way of saying that even French studies needs to be about England!

One of the questions asked by contributors to Critical Stages is, “What are people angry about?” In medieval studies, many of us are angry about the relative tokenism associated with medieval drama on the Continent. Honestly, it is as if the Second Shepherd's Play told the whole theatrical story for the ten centuries or so that separate Saint Augustine from the Chester plays. For France, if nonspecialists have read any theatre at all, it may be the Jeu d'Adam, the Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin, or, oddly enough, the Jeu de la feuillée, which, before Symes, was practically incomprehensible. For Italy, we find, prior to the commedia dell'arte, almost no readily available playtexts that even rise to the status of a canon, despite a wealth of fascinating convent dramas.Footnote 20 For Germany, while the tenth-century writings of Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim have rightly attracted the attention of feminists, most theatre scholars have barely heard of the fifteenth-century pseudohistorical dramatization of the myth of Pope Joan, a masterpiece of theological strife and cross-dressing that rivals the great Roman de Silence; we owe Stephen Wright a debt of gratitude for bringing it to our attention back in 1999.Footnote 21 Meanwhile, in the secondary literatures, I rarely come across Glenn Ehrstine's Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern (2002), even though it is erudite about the medieval habits of thought that informed the theatricality and antitheatricality of the Reformation.Footnote 22 There is a rich tradition of Dutch plays that would offer intriguing insights into both the celebrated Chambers of Rhetoric and the theatricality of civic culture in general—if only others would join Wim Hüsken and Kathleen Ashley and look at them.Footnote 23 And, when it comes to the theatre of medieval Spain, one sometimes has the impression that the only extant theatrical text is the Auto de los reyes magos. Few seem familiar with Charlotte Stern's work on Castile, while a simple search for book-length studies by Jesús Francesc Massip reveals no fewer than ten single-authored, edited, or coedited books—all essentially ignored in the United States.Footnote 24

Religious versus Secular

Finally, the fragmented whole that it is medieval theatre studies is frequently inflected by a religiosity—or an antireligiosity—that one rarely sees in other literary disciplines. Although one of Hardison's singular contributions to the field was his elegant argument that religion was not antagonistic to the creative instinct,Footnote 25 nonspecialists are likely unaware that, at least anecdotally, there are two types of medievalist. One type sees the hand of God everywhere and turns, with unrivaled spiritual commitment (and as part of the exercise of personal faith), to a period that owes its very historiographical existence largely to ecclesiastical practices of preservation and transmission. I have personally witnessed responses by medievalists that range from, “Yes, when I'm at church, I too feel that. . . ,” to denial that there could have been anything remotely theatrical about even the quem quaeritis trope (which has long been acknowledged as one of many possible origins—if no longer the origin—of medieval drama).Footnote 26 Another type of medievalist seeks just as arduously to remove the hand of God from everywhere, the better to free intellectual inquiry from the perceived yoke of the Christian hegemony. Without calling upon Bill Maher's Religulous as evidence of the polarizing influence of things religious, I can offer this stunning example that compounds the “French is not French” problem (as above for the “French of England”) with “theatre is not theatre.” Consider Derek Pearsall's advance praise on the dust jacket of Sarah Beckwith's Signifying God: “She dares to say what many have thought: that the Corpus Christi plays are not ‘theatre’ but sacrament and can be understood only as theology and experienced only as religious experience.”Footnote 27 Dare I say it? On behalf of theatre historians everywhere, thanks a lot! Two recent works, however, while conservative in their critical sensibilities, are commendable for the breadth and depth of their inquiries into the theory and practice (respectively) of theological performativity: Donnalee Dox's The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought and John Parker's The Aesthetics of Antichrist.Footnote 28

• • •

Why is it so hard for medievalists to come together? Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but, when it comes to an art form that is historically, socially, theologically, philologically, paleographically, codicologically, and even musicologically contingent, most people simply don't have the time to establish the necessary competency in the tools of their trade: classical and medieval Latin, medieval vernaculars, paleography, codicology, diplomatics—and that's all before we even begin to try to situate theatrical works in their sociohistorical, theological, and performance contexts. That's also before we begin true intellectual engagement with theatre practitioners, past and present, whose training is very different from our own and from whom we have much to learn as we face the enormous historiographical challenges of reconstructing the medieval theatrical past.

Lest the reader fear, at this critical stage, that the Dark Ages are getting darker and darker by the minute, rest assured: there is intellectual hope in the chiaroscuro of art history, where such groundbreaking scholars as the late Michael Camille have been eyeing medieval performance for decades.Footnote 29 More recently, Suzannah Biernoff has analyzed the medieval gaze with a sophisticated attention to the ideology of perception and to the nascent science of optics in a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in reception theory.Footnote 30 And, whatever our critique of the limits and dangers of collecting and archiving data—both of which are well known to most medievalists thanks to Theresa Coletti's incisive critique of the REED project (Records of Early English Drama)—the most important compilation to date follows a path not seen since Chambers, Young, and the great Louis Petit de Julleville who, once upon a time, reproduced and analyzed every extant account of medieval French religious drama that he could find.Footnote 31 I refer to William Tydeman's collaborative anthology of some six hundred primary sources in English translation, spanning some thousand years of interplay among theatre, mime, music, law, ritual, religion, politics, folklore, and the beaux-arts.Footnote 32

Enter, now, onto the critical stage a handful of scholars who truly understand both theatre and the Middle Ages: the medievalists who employ, not merely metaphorically, such terms as “theatre,” “drama,” “performance,” and “theatricality”; the theatre theorists who are willing to back up their claims about “history” with some serious historiographical training; and, as always, the archive dwellers who might not always know why their finds are so interesting, but who continue no less steadfastly to expand the historical record. Carol Symes even goes so far as to suggest that the best medieval theatre scholars have been trained not in theatre but in something else.Footnote 33 Whatever medievalists' quibbles with the following titles—and we are medievalists, after all: we always have quibbles—here are five breakthrough books from the past decade, all from what one might call the American school, which tends to be more daringly theoretical and more interdisciplinary than its European counterparts: Symes, A Common Stage; Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports; Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness; Susan Crane, The Performance of the Self; and Kobialka, This Is My Body.Footnote 34

At the risk of summing up as one-liners their complex and provocative claims into a past made present: Symes “treats all premodern texts as potential participants in a culture of performance” (2); Sponsler establishes connections between the ritual performances of medieval Europe and early America; Brantley expands—although she could have done so more generously—on the earlier work of such scholars as Paul Saenger, Thomas H. Bestul, and Sylvia HuotFootnote 35 to argue that, especially in late medieval practices of spiritual reading, “the individual's quiet encounter with the static book itself [is] a species of sacred performance” (2); Crane explores the rhetorical and theatrical functions of the textual and visual practices of medieval court culture; and Kobialka retheorizes medieval practices of representation in such a way as to resist the telos of canonical theatre history and criticism, beginning with ecclesiastical views of where, when, and how bodies were to be seen and heard (31–3).

Avant la lettre, in the most literal sense of the term, there was the medieval theatre. Ancestor? Forerunner? Precursor? Outlier? Theatrical apprentice? Prophet of modern and even postmodern performance studies? We won't know until we get our collective act together and take a closer look at all of what passes for medieval—and for theatre—then and now.

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.