English, 2015, vol. 64 no. 244, pp.

69 –74

BOOK REVIEWS
The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City. By Margaret Rogerson. York:
York Medieval Press; Boydell & Brewer, 2011. ISBN 9781903153352.
Hb. £60.

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ON 29 August 1483, the feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, the
recently crowned Richard III made a triumphal entry into the city of York,
following the same processional route as the pageants of the Corpus Christi
play. While York’s Entry into Jerusalem pageant echoed the language of a con-
temporary royal entry, with burgesses welcoming the Saviour to ‘owre ceté’,
so here, in the same streets, a Christomimetic Richard presented himself as
God’s anointed, politics, performance, and religion combining to great ritual
effect. This Feast Day of the Beheading of the Baptist contained a further link
to the Corpus Christi play. ‘The eucharistic symbolism of St John’s . . .
decollated head was . . . well known in York’, writes Richard Beadle. It was spe-
cifically alluded to in the York Breviary: ‘The head . . . on a dish signifies the
body of Christ, by which we are nourished at the holy altar.’ Richard himself
was the pre-eminent member of the Corpus Christi Guild and would have
seized upon this eucharistically resonant date.
Beadle notes how the 1476 ordinance, which asserted a considerable degree
of council control over the play’s production, coincided with the beginning of
Richard’s significant association with York. Could the play be becoming an
enterprise with a Ricardian aspect? Yet, only a few years later, York’s pageant
wagons were used to welcome Henry VII. Like Fortune’s wheel, the wheels
on the wagons went round and round. Beadle’s fascinating article opens a
volume which provides rich insights into the mystery plays in York and their
modern revival. It draws upon academic scholarship and the practical experi-
ence of those who now mount the cycle: the city’s modern guilds, faith groups,
and a network of committed supporters. The work is characterized by both
rigorous theatre-historical research and a chronicling of dramatic vitality in
which much learning stems from practice.
At the heart of this vitality is an ongoing sense of community. Just as York’s
medieval forebears were active participants in Corpus Christi ritual – part of
the Body of Christ, themselves, no less – so practitioners and public today,
whether believers or not, form a meaningful ‘community with the past’,
according to Alexandra Johnston. She discusses the York Plays’ various vivify-
ing communities, wherever they might be staged, and is one of several
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70 BOOK REVIEWS
contributors to connect the ongoing emotional impact of the pageants to the
felt immediacy of fourteenth-century ‘affective piety’. Margaret Rogerson, the
volume’s fine editor, links what she calls ‘devotional acting’ in the Mysteries to
affective piety’s aim to comprehend more fully the dramatic implications of
Christ’s suffering humanity through imaginative meditation. She discusses a
complementary focus on Christ’s suffering mother in order to more fully
empathize with the Passion of the Man of Sorrows. This leads to an insightful
consideration of Margery Kempe’s demonstrative and histrionic piety through
what she claims to have seen and experienced ‘in her sowle’. Neither imitatio

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Christi nor imitatio Mariae provoked embarrassment or post-Reformation fears
of blasphemy.
While Rogerson’s historical exegesis provides an insightful comparative
analysis into a contemporary celebration of the Stations of the Cross, Jill
Stevenson turns to cognitive theory to explore affective piety’s ongoing rele-
vance in terms of ‘lived bodiliness’, empathic neural activity, visceral connec-
tion, and imaginative engagement. She argues for a ‘conceptual blending’ of
first-century Palestine, say, with medieval York, with spectators living partici-
pants in the unfolding events, and cites, as an imaginative example of inter-
active fascination and ‘embodied medievalism’, the Descent of the Holy Spirit
at Pentecost signified by bubble-blowing apostles and bubble-machines.
Having established Corpus Christi’s links to communal devotion and per-
formance, Mike Tyler discusses family, group dynamics, and the role of women
in the Fishers guild in his study of The Flood. He documents the trope of the
unruly woman, but his focus is on mutuality, reconciliation, and connecting
with the spectating community. Sheila Christie argues persuasively that the
masons were not guild members and their sponsorship and production of
pageants demonstrates an inclusive bridging of the jurisdictional divide in York.
I take issue with Sharon Aronson-Lehavi’s equating the elevation of the
crucifix with the medieval equivalent of a deus ex machina in her account of
a recent production of The Crucifixion. While of course there is an iconic
element in the elevation, there is rather – given Christ’s direct exhortation to
‘fully feele’ – a focus on Christ’s suffering humanity here, and no miraculous
apparition from beyond the confines of the stage. (Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux
Arts’ is excellent in its grasp of what’s afoot.)
I was surprised Christie did not mention York’s shameful history of
anti-Semitism when discussing the virulently anti-Semitic Funeral of the Virgin
and disappointed that she should assert that Herod is most memorable in
popular culture as an example of bad acting. There is an art to his badness, surely.
But, this volume, a communal collaboration, is a considerable achievement.

doi:10.1093/english/efu029 PHILIP CRISPIN

University of Hull