Veröffentlicht von Medieval Institute Publications

Early Drama, Art, and Music

Herausgegeben von: Katie Brokaw, Erith Jaffe-Berg, Jenna Soleo-Shanks, Christopher Swift und Andrew Walker White

Übersicht
Bände

For nearly forty years, Early Drama, Art, and Music has established a reputation for publishing specialized, high-quality scholarship through Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University. The series board welcomes 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 board is especially interested in expanding the scope of the series to include explorations of performance traditions beyond the Anglophone and Latin world to the Eastern Roman Empire and the medieval Mediterranean at large.

The series’ Editorial Board comprises:

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

Proposals or completed manuscripts to be considered for publication in this series should be sent to Tyler Cloherty (tylercloherty44@gmail.com), the acquisitions editor for the series.

Fachgebiete

Buch 2024

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the World Theatre in Early Modern Europe

The Theatrum Mundi of Celebration

Rasmus Vangshardt

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Rasmus Vangshardt offers an original interpretation of one of the most famous images of literary history, the theatrum mundi. By applying methods of comparative literature, hispanic studies, and theology, he reconsiders the world theatre’s historical peak in early modern Europe in general and the Spanish Golden Age in particular.

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.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501517006
ISBN:: 9781501517006
ISBN:: 9781501517020
ISBN:: 9781501527173
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Mittelalter
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Romanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: Lateinamerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2023

The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo)

A Dramaturgical Analysis, Historical Commentary, and Latin Edition with a New English Verse Translation

Kyle A. Thomas, Carol Symes

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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. This new translation and commentary reveals this drama to be strikingly representative of the role that theatrical performance played in shaping contemporary politics, diplomacy, and public opinion. It also shows how drama functioned as an integral component of the educational curricula of elite monastic institutions like Tegernsee, where political administrators and diplomats were trained, and how performance served as a common, connective lingua franca among monasteries in twelfth-century Bavaria.

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 fully-staged production tested the theatricality of this translation, provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play’s rich interpretive and performative possibilities.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513572
ISBN:: 9781501513572
ISBN:: 9781501517983
Fachgebiet:: Altertumswissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Klassische Altertumswissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Lateinische Philologie
Fachgebiet:: Lateinische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Fachgebiet:: Ausgewählte Themen der Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Performativität
Fachgebiet:: Theologie und Religion
Fachgebiet:: Allgemeines und Rezeptionsgeschichte der Bibel
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2023

Collectors, Commissioners, Curators

Studies in Medieval Art for Stephen N. Fliegel

Elina Gertsman

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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 important 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.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514845
ISBN:: 9781501514845
ISBN:: 9781501521102
ISBN:: 9781501514852
Fachgebiet:: Kunst
Fachgebiet:: Epochen
Fachgebiet:: 8.-15. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Museen und Sammlungen
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2020

The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University

The Works of Thomas Chaundler

Thomas Meacham

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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. David Bevington calls it "an impressively learned discussion" and commends the sophistication of its use of performativity theory.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513121
ISBN:: 9781501513121
ISBN:: 9781580443555
ISBN:: 9781501512926
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Mittelalter
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 8.-15. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch Noch nicht erschienen 2024

Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater

Michael Norton

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The expression liturgical drama was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, 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. If this distinction between liturgical rites and non-liturgical representations holds, should we not examine the works called "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them? Given the ways that the words liturgy and drama have been understood, moreover, combining them makes little sense. Given the distinctions that exist within the repertory, the expression also has no definable referent. Ultimately, the expression has little utility if we wish to appreciate how these rites and representations were understood at the time they were copied, celebrated, or performed.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9781580442633
ISBN:: 9781580442633
ISBN:: 9781501512735
Fachgebiet:: Theologie und Religion
Fachgebiet:: Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch Noch nicht erschienen 2024

Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England

Performance, Authority, Devotion

Charlotte Steenbrugge

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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.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9781580442787
ISBN:: 9781580442787
ISBN:: 9781501512797
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch Noch nicht erschienen 2024

Mary of Nemmegen

The ca. 1518 Translation and the Middle Dutch Analogue, Mariken van Nieumeghen

Clifford Davidson, Ton J. Broos, Martin W. Walsh

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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.

It also may be compared to Everyman, described as a treatise in the manner of a moral play. Mary of Nemmegen is an analogue of the Faustus story, in which a person makes an agreement with the devil; hence the work deserves to be made available as background to Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus as well as to later redactions of the Faust story. As such, it is also a window on the obsession in its own time with the occult, including its relation to the issues of damnation and salvation. Further, because Mary is ultimately saved from damnation and becomes saintly, the story is related to the saint play tradition as exemplified by the Digby Mary Magdalene.

The original Dutch drama itself has had a long history in various languages, appearing even in Arabic in the nineteenth century, and is regarded as the most important play of its type from the Dutch Renaissance. It remains a staple reading matter in Dutch education. Mary of Nemmegen: The ca. 1518 Translation and the Middle Dutch Analogue, Mariken van Nieumeghen presents in an old-spelling critical edition, with introduction and notes, along with the text and literal translation of the Dutch play.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9781580442305
ISBN:: 9781580442305
ISBN:: 9781501512506
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 8.-15. Jahrhundert
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch Noch nicht erschienen 2024

From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage

Lisa Hopkins

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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. This was a period that saw both Arthur and Alfred, as well as Hengist, Horsa, and Canute. The country was converted to Christianity and saw successive waves of invasions by Angles, Jutes, and Danes, which left both a mark on the language and a record in the physical landscape. By its end, the British Isles had been transformed beyond recognition, and yet a number of early modern plays suggest an underlying continuity, an essential English identity linked to the land and impervious to vicissitudes and change. This book 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.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9781580442800
ISBN:: 9781580442800
ISBN:: 9781501512773
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch Noch nicht erschienen 2024

The Jeu d'Adam

MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play

Christophe Chaguinian

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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.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9781580442671
ISBN:: 9781580442671
ISBN:: 9781501512810
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2019

The Corporeality of Clothing in Medieval Literature

Sarah Brazil

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Every known society wears some form of clothing. It is central to how we experience our bodies and how we understand the sociocultural dimensions of our embodiment. It is also central to how we understand works of literature. In this innovative study, Brazil demonstrates how medieval writers use clothing to direct readers’ and spectators’ awareness to forms of embodiment. Offering insights into how poetic works, plays, and devotional treatises target readers’ kinesic intelligence—their ability to understand movements and gestures—Brazil demonstrates the theological implications of clothing, often evinced by how garments limit or facilitate the movements and postures of bodies in narratives. 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.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781580443586
ISBN:: 9781580443586
ISBN:: 9783110626643
ISBN:: 9781580443579
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Mittelalter
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications