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4 books match the query 'Christian drama, English (Middle)'
From Page to Performance
Essays in Early English DramaJohn A. Alford
Michigan State University Press, 1995
This book is a collection of 22 essays by scholars in the field of Medieval Drama, mostly relating to performance both past and present. Alford wrote one essay in the book.
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Sacred Players
The Politics of Response in the Middle English Religious DramaHeather Hill-Vásquez
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Offering a unique historical perspective to the study of medieval English drama, Heather Hill-Vásquez in Sacred Players argues that different treatments of audience and performance in the early drama indicate that the performance life of the drama may have continued well beyond its traditional placement in medieval history and into the Reformation and Renaissance eras.
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Signifying God
Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi PlaysSarah Beckwith
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In Signifying God, Sarah Beckwith explores the most lavish, long-lasting, and complex form of collective theatrical enterprise in English history: the York Corpus Christi plays. First staged as early as 1376, the plays were performed annually until the late 1500s and involved as much as a tenth of the city in multiple performances at a dozen or more locations.
Introducing a radical new understanding of these plays as "sacramental theater," Beckwith shows how organizing the plays served as a political mechanism for regulating labor, and how theater and sacrament combined in them to do important theological work. She argues, for instance, that the theology of Corpus Christi in the resurrection plays can only be understood as a theatrical exploration of eucharistic absence and presence. Beckwith frames her study with discussions of twentieth-century manifestations of sacramental theater in Barry Unsworth's novel Morality Play and Denys Arcand's film Jesus of Montreal, and the connections between contemporary revivals of the York Corpus Christi plays and England's heritage culture.
Introducing a radical new understanding of these plays as "sacramental theater," Beckwith shows how organizing the plays served as a political mechanism for regulating labor, and how theater and sacrament combined in them to do important theological work. She argues, for instance, that the theology of Corpus Christi in the resurrection plays can only be understood as a theatrical exploration of eucharistic absence and presence. Beckwith frames her study with discussions of twentieth-century manifestations of sacramental theater in Barry Unsworth's novel Morality Play and Denys Arcand's film Jesus of Montreal, and the connections between contemporary revivals of the York Corpus Christi plays and England's heritage culture.
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The Theater of Devotion
East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle AgesGail McMurray Gibson
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In this interdisciplinary study of drama, arts, and spirituality, Gail Gibson provides a provocative reappraisal of fifteenth-century English theater through a detailed portrait of the flourishing cultures of Suffolk and Norfolk. By emphasizing the importance of the Incarnation of Christ as a model and justification for late medieval drama and art, Gibson challenges currently held views of the secularization of late medieval culture.
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