Early Drama, Art, and Music

Medieval Institute Publications

Early Drama, Art, and Music

A fragment of a stained glass window in tones of blue and gold depicting an angel robed in white playing a portatif organ. — Image credit: Border Fragment with Musical Angel, ca. 1140-1144. From the ambulatory and crypt of the church of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis, Saint Benedict Window. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1980. Public domain.

For nearly forty years, Early Drama, Art, and Music (EDAM) has established a reputation for publishing specialized, high-quality scholarship through Medieval Institute Publications. The EDAM Board seeks submissions from new and established scholars conducting studies of the medieval performing and visual arts broadly conceived, on topics including—but not limited to—music; civic and liturgical festivals; plays and dramatic literature; performance objects, architecture and technology; and ritual and homiletics. We also invite theoretical and interdisciplinary work that engages historical subjects in relation to art and material culture, orality and speech-act theory, gender and sexuality, affect and reception, and philosophy.

The editors are especially interested in expanding the scope of EDAM to include explorations of performance traditions beyond the Anglophone and Latin world to the Eastern Roman Empire and the medieval Mediterranean at large.

Keywords: Medieval music; liturgical festivals; plays and dramatic literature; architecture; visual art

Geographical Scope: Global

Chronological Scope: Medieval

Editorial Board

Katie Brokaw, University of California, Merced
Erith Jaffe-Berg, University of California, Riverside
Jenna Soleo-Shanks, University of Minnesota Duluth
Christopher Swift, New York City College of Technology
Andrew Walker White, George Mason University

Submissions

To submit a proposal or completed manuscript to be considered for publication by Medieval Institute Publications or to learn more about the series, please contact Tyler Cloherty, acquisitions editor for the series.

All Books in this Series

Art and Drama on a Late Medieval Rood Screen: Unveiling a Mystical Passion

Cover of Art and Drama on a Late Medieval Rood Screen; title imposed over art of Christ hanging on the cross surrounded by various figures.

Art and Drama on a Late Medieval Rood Screen: Unveiling a Mystical Passion

By Michael Calder

With little scholarly attention having been given to the late medieval iconography that features on rood screens in the southwest of England, the significance of the figures painted at Berry Pomeroy has long been underappreciated. The unlocking of their meaning by the author has led to the discovery of a unique iconographic program. The gestures adopted by many of these figures belong to a common visual culture in the art and drama of the medieval church. The iconography, which reflects a Gothic Mannerist style of the early sixteenth century, displays a marked theatricality giving expression to the mysteries of the faith in the form of a drama. The narrative recorded has notable similarities to that found in a dramatic trilogy which was once performed in Cornwall called the Ordinalia. This book makes an important contribution to scholarship in the genre of mysticism in art and to our understanding of popular devotional practices on the eve of the Reformation.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the World Theatre in Early Modern Europe: The Theatrum Mundi of Celebration

PEDRO CALERON DE LA BARCA AND THE WORLD THEATRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE BOOK IMAGE

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the World Theatre in Early Modern Europe: The Theatrum Mundi of Celebration

By Rasmus Vangshardt

The author presents a new close reading of Pedro Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1633–36) and outlines the historical and systematic framework for a theatrum mundi of celebration. This concept entails using art to justify human existence in the face of changing conceptions of the cosmos: an early modern aesthetic theodicy and a justification of the world in that liminal space between drama and ritual. By discussing historiographical theories of early modern Europe, especially those of Hans Blumenberg and Bruno Latour, and through conversations with Shakespearean drama and Spanish Golden Age classics, Vangshardt also argues that the theatrum mundi of celebration questions traditional assumptions of great divides between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity and challenges theories of a European-wide early modern sense of crisis.

The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo): A Dramaturgical Analysis, Historical Commentary, and Latin Edition with a New English Verse Translation

THE PLAY ABOUT THE ANTICHRIST Book image

The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo): A Dramaturgical Analysis, Historical Commentary, and Latin Edition with a New English Verse Translation

Edited by Kyle A. Thomas and Carol Symes

The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play’s dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose dedicated research provides the foundation for an analysis of the play’s broader contexts, also brings perspectives from the first fully staged modern production that tested the theatricality of the translation and provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play’s rich interpretive and performative possibilities.

Collectors, Commissioners, Curators: Studies in Medieval Art for Stephen Fliegel

Collectors, Commissioners, Curators book image

Collectors, Commissioners, Curators: Studies in Medieval Art for Stephen Fliegel

Edited by Elina Gertsman

This volume celebrates the storied career of Stephen N. Fliegel, the former Robert Bergman Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Authors of these essays, all leading curators in their fields, offer insights into curatorial practices by highlighting key objects in some of the most famous medieval collections in North America and Europe: Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Louvre, the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Getty, the Groeningemuseum, The Morgan Library, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum and, of course, the CMA, offering perspectives on the histories of collecting and display, artistic identity and patronage, with special foci on Burgundian art, acquisition histories and objects in the CMA.

The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University: The Works of Thomas Chaundler

THE PERFORMANCE TRADITION OF THE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH UNIVERSITY book image

The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University: The Works of Thomas Chaundler

By Thomas Meacham

This is a truly paradigm-shifting study that reads a key text in Latin Humanist studies as the culmination, rather than an early example, of a tradition in university drama. It persuasively argues against the common assumption that there was no "drama" in the medieval universities until the syllabus was influenced by Humanist ideas, and posits a new way of reading the performative dimensions of fourteenth and fifteenth- century university education in, for example, Ciceronian tuition on epistolary delivery.

The Corporeality of Clothing in Medieval Literature: Cognition, Kinesis, and the Sacred

By Sarah Brazil

In this innovative study, Brazil demonstrates how medieval writers use clothing to direct readers’ and spectators’ awareness to forms of embodiment. By bringing recent studies in the field of embodied cognition to bear on narrated and dramatized interactions between dress and body, this book offers new methodological tools to the study of clothing.

The Jeu d'Adam: MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play

Edited by Christophe Chaguinian

The Jeu d'Adam is an Anglo-Norman mid-twelfth-century representation of several biblical stories, including the temptation of Adam and Eve and the subsequent fall, Cain and Abel, and the prophets Isaiah and Daniel. Its framework builds on the Latin responses of the mass during the liturgical season of Septuagesima, from before Lent to Easter. This collection of essays explores whether this early play was monastic or secular, its Anglo-Norman character, and the text's musical provenance.

From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage

By Lisa Hopkins

This book examines the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century engagement with a crucial part of Britain's past, the period between the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the Norman Conquest, and considers the extent to which ideas about early modern English and British national, religious, and political identities were rooted in cultural constructions of the pre-Conquest past.

Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England: Performance, Authority, Devotion

Cover of Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England; yellow background, with artwork of a figure in a red robe speaking to assorted figures in the foreground.

Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England: Performance, Authority, Devotion

By Charlotte Steenbrugge

This is the first full-length study of the interrelation between sermons and vernacular religious drama in late medieval England. It investigates how these genres worked as media for public learning, how they combined this didactic aim with literary exigencies, and how the plays in particular acquired and reflected a position of authority. The interrelation between sermons and vernacular drama, formerly assumed relatively uncritically to be a close one, is addressed from a variety of angles, including historical connections, performative aspects, and the portrayal of the sacrament of penance. The analysis challenges the common assumption that Middle English religious drama is strongly influenced by contemporary sermons. Instead, the work demonstrates the subtly different purpose and content of these two genres and outlines the unique ways in which they operate within late medieval English devotional life.

Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater

By Michael Norton

Prior to the invention of the expression "liturgical drama" in 1834 as a metaphor that only later hardened into a formal category, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. This ground-breaking work examines "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them.

Mary of Nemmegen: The ca. 1518 Translation and Middle Dutch Analogue, "Mariken van Nieumeghen"

Edited and translated by Clifford Davidson, Ton Broos, and Martin Walsh

Mary of Nemmegen, a prose condensation in English of the Middle Dutch play "Mariken van Nieumeghen," is an important example of the literature that was imported from Holland in the early part of the sixteenth century - literature that helped to establish an English taste for narrative prose fiction.

Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages

Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Edited by Timothy J. McGee

A careful reading of the essays brings with it the awareness that to ignore improvisation is to distort the art in a major way. In light of the present volume, the very concept of "faithful historical re-creation" takes on a much broader and more complex character.

Paying the Piper: Music in Pre-1642 Cheshire

Elizabeth Baldwin, with a contribution on music in the city by David Mills

In this book, Elizabeth Baldwin studies the early music situation in a single county, Cheshire, from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the Civil War, focusing on music outside the regular control of the Church and looking not only at the trained professional but at music-makers from the performers at guild feasts to the gentleman who takes music lessons and the alehouse-keeper who plays the pipes.

Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art

Edited by Clifford Davidson

Gesture and movement on stage in early drama have previously received very little attention in scholarship. The present collection of essays is the first book to present sensible, penetrating, and wide-ranging discussions of the gestural effects that were integral to the early stage.

The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays

Edited by Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson

One of the greatest medieval drama cycles in England was mounted annually at Coventry at Corpus Christi until suppressed in 1579 and is of particular importance because it was almost certainly seen by William Shakespeare when he was a boy in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Worlde and the Chylde

Edited by Clifford Davidson and Peter Happé, with an appendix on the dialect by Paul A. Johnston, Jr.

"The Worlde and the Chylde," issued by the press of Wynkyn de Worde in 1521, is one of the very earliest plays published in England. It also has very considerable interest for its adaptation of the ages of man iconography, which is extensively treated in the introduction, notes and illustrations.

Material Culture and Medieval Drama

Edited by Clifford Davidson

Like the editor's "Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama," the contributions by distinguished American and British scholars to this volume recognize that early drama depended on specific developments in material culture in order to achieve its effects, which included both visual and auditory means of appealing to audiences.

The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays

Edited by Dunbar H. Ogden, with a transcription of the music by A. Marcel J. Zijlstra

This book, for the first time, provides a critical introduction to the staging and production, music and setting of the play in its architectural and historical context.

Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama

Clifford Davidson

This book is designed to open up a broader scope of study which calls attention to both social organization and material culture as integrally related to the civic drama of England in cities such as Coventry, York and Chester.
Copyright 1997, pp. x + 128

Fools and Folly

Edited by Clifford Davidson

Attitudes toward the fool varied, but his place was to become assured on stage, where his role is best known to us through the plays of Shakespeare. The articles in the present volume provide indispensable analyses of the fool from a number of different perspectives.

A Selection of Early Music from the Repertoire of the Society for Old Music

Transcribed by Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, edited by Matthew Steel and Nicholas Batch

Audrey Ekdahl Davidson was a professor of music for many years at �鶹��ý. In honor of her retirement and her history with the Society for Old Music, an organization that she founded in 1966, this collection of music has been selected and prepared. The transcriptions were all designed for performances by the Society for Old Music, and were used in concerts for the local community, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and other audiences in Michigan. The Society's concerts ranged from medieval chant and monophonic song to polyphonic choral works, and each concert focused on a particular topic, perhaps most successfully when music-drama was joined to liturgical display. The collection is a fitting tribute to tireless scholar, and an asset to any �鶹��ý of early music performance.

Early Drama, Art and Music Documents: A Paleography Handbook

John M. Wasson

A practical guide to late medieval and Renaissance paleography complete with facsimiles of documents, transcriptions and translations. The present volume will be of the greatest value to �鶹��ýs and scholars who wish to consult original documents.

A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, Revised Edition

Edited by Clifford Davidson

"A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge," usually believed to have been written between 1380 and 1425, is the longest and most significant piece of dramatic criticism in Middle English. It reflects the hostility of Wycliffite (or Lollard) authors toward dramatic representation and related activity, especially religious drama.

The "Ordo Virtutum" of Hildegard of Bingen: Critical Studies

Edited by Audrey Ekdahl Davidson

The first collection of essays on Hildegard's wonderfully unique "Ordo Virtutum," along with a reduced facsimile of the pages in Wiesbaden manuscript that contain the drama.

Illustrations of the Stage and Acting in England to 1580

Clifford Davidson

This richly illustrated book surveys representations of the stage and acting from manuscript illuminations, stained glass, sculpture, woodcarving, wall paintings and the woodcuts that appear in playbooks produced by the first English printers.

Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities

Edited by Konrad Eisenbichler

Despite the paramount importance of confraternities (especially to males) in medieval European society, scholars have tended to neglect not only the social role they played but also the influence they had on the art, drama, music, and thinking of the society in which they not only existed but thrived. This collection of essays serves to illuminate this oft-ignored facet of medieval society, and each essay carefully examines some element of the influence of confraternities on society and its products.

Studies in Fifteenth-Century Stagecraft

J. W. Robinson

Before he suddenly passed away, John W. Robinson was working on a manuscript that he saw as effecting a marriage between the dramatic and the theatrical, as he felt there was too large a divide between literary scholars and practitioners of the theater. That manuscript is presented here, a close study of eight plays and the elements Robinson considers essential to performance: playwright, sponsors, location, plot, script, players, and audience.

Holy Week and Easter Ceremonies and Dramas from Medieval Sweden

Edited by Audrey Ekdahl Davidson

Texts, translations, musical transcriptions and facsimiles of the Swedish music-dramas for Holy Week and Easter: "Depositio," "Elevatio," and "Visitatio Sepulchri."
Copyright 1990, pp. viii + 176

Shakespeare's Play within Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form in "Hamlet," "Othello," and "King Lear"

Cherrell Guilfoyle

In his foreword to the volume, Clifford Davidson praises Guilfoyle’s application of the concept of scenic form in her study of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, and her exposition of Shakespeare’s historical consciousness, noting her “sensitive examination of the shape of the playwright’s scenes when placed against traditional visual configurations and related textual resonances.” Any �鶹��ý of Shakespeare will benefit from the nuanced study of his imagery and how it helps to color his characters and the action in his plays.

Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama

Edited by Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols

The radical Protestantism that led to the suppression of the religious drama also had destroyed perhaps the majority of ecclesiastical art in England by the early years of Queen Elizabeth I.

The Monophonic Lauda and the Lay Religious Confraternities of Tuscany and Umbria in the Late Middle Ages

Cyrilla Barr

The study of popular hymnody is remote not only from contemporary experience but also from very many contemporary scholars. A great deal of this remove stems from the complicated origins and history of this important genre. The Monophonic Lauda aims to present for the first time an English study of the form, as such a text has not been available before. This also necessitates an exploration of previous scholarship on the lauda, though the book is not devoted to this particular exercise. The volume is well illustrated, including musical notation and black-and-white plates.

The Idea of Music: An Introduction to Musical Aesthetics in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Herbert M. Schueller

Music has long been neglected by aestheticians, who tend to privilege discussions of visual arts and literature. In this volume, Herbert M. Schueller brings the aesthetics of music into the fold, tracing the development of the idea from classical antiquity through the medieval period. He writes in a manner accessible to scholars whose specialties lie outside of technical music theory, keeping in mind especially the aesthetician but also general medieval scholars, and even the general reader.

The Saint Play in Medieval Europe

Edited by Clifford Davidson

This illustrated volume intelligently provides a much-needed introduction to what may have been the most popular variety of drama in the Middle Ages: the saint play. A comprehensive and collaborative survey is provided with an emphasis on interdisciplinary study rather than only literary analysis. While the saint play in England is the connecting theme of the volume, the papers explore other topics necessary to fully understand the culture of the saint play, such as the genre as manifest on the continent, including plays in French, Italian and German.

The Fleury "Playbook": Essays and Studies

Edited by Thomas P. Campbell and Clifford Davidson

Growing out of a symposium on the Fleury Playbook at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, this book includes essays from the symposium, as well as additional papers written by scholars whose specialties were not represented at the conference. Each essay covers a unique topic in the study of the Playbook, utilizing a diverse set of methodological tools and interdisciplinary approaches for subjects which have not heretofore received adequate scholarly attention. The topics at hand are each of significant interest to the field at large.

Homo, Memento Finis: The Iconography of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama

Papers by David Bevington, Huston Diehl, Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Ronald Herzman and Pamela Sheingorn

David Bevington and the other contributors to this book look at this final event of history as depicted in pre-modern times, and the result is a work of scholarly precision that, according to Professor Bevington's introduction, "attempts to see medieval drama in the context of other medieval art forms."

Word, Picture, and Spectacle

Edited by Clifford Davidson

The topics covered include the symbolism of scatological illustration in Gothic manuscripts, connections between word and picture in religious art, and the relationship perceived between divine and human creativity.

The Early Art of Norfolk: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art including Items Relevant to Early Drama

Ann Eljenholm Nichols

The book (double columns, 357 pages, plus plates) serves as a standard reference source for �鶹��ýs of the ecclesiastical arts and also will provide an essential dimension for drama scholars.

The Early Art of the West Riding of Yorkshire: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art including Items Relevant to Early Drama

Barbara D. Palmer

Professor Palmer has systematically surveyed the art of the former West Riding of Yorkshire and has provided an iconographic index of this large region where medieval drama also flourished.

The Easter Sepulchre in England

Pamela Sheingorn

In addition to a catalog of Easter sepulchres in England, Professor Sheingorn has produced in her introduction a superb study of the ceremonies, rites and dramas associated with this structure.

The Early Art of Coventry, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwick, and Lesser Sites in Warwickshire: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art including Items Relevant to Early Drama

Clifford Davidson and Jennifer Alexander

The study of the early art of England can be frustrating for scholars, as the destruction by iconoclasm and neglect was very thorough in certain regions. This volume seeks to aid those studying the early art, including relics and musical iconography, of Coventry, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick and other Warwickshire locations. Accompanied by 71 illustrations and 2 maps, the subject lists found within provide information from records and antiquarian accounts that should prove invaluable in visualizing the dimensions of the iconography of both lost and extant early art from the region.

Chester Art: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art including Items Relevant to Early Drama

Sally-Beth MacLean

This book will serve as an invaluable research tool for �鶹��ýs and scholars with an interest in art relating to early drama, as well as those whose interests lie more in local art history, specifically that of Chester. Though it may not contain the bumper-crop of surviving subject-art as a city such as York possesses, Chester nevertheless holds much of value and interest, as the list in this book aptly demonstrates. Richly illustrated and carefully arranged, this book is a tremendous catalog of surviving subject-art and will reward any scholar who pulls it from the bookshelf.

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