A Cultural History of Theatre:

The Middle Ages

Edited by Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara

CONTENTS

Series Preface by Tracy C. Davis and Christopher Balme

Illustrations
Editor’s Acknowledgements

Introduction: Medieval Theatre Makes History

Jody Enders

1. Institutional frameworks
Seeta Chaganti, Noah Guynn, and Erith Jaffe-Berg

2. Social functions
Kathleen Ashley

3. Sexuality and gender

Sharon Aronson-Lehavi

4. The environment of theatre

Laura Weigert

5. Circulation: A Peripatetic Theatre

Claire Sponsler

6. Interpretations
Glending Olson

7. Communities of production
Bruce R. Burningham

8. Repertoire and genres

Donnalee Dox

9. Technologies of performance
Katie Normington

10. Knowledge transmission: media and memory

Carol Symes

Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
 Introduction
Medieval Theatre Makes History

JODY ENDERS

Imagine that the year is 1350. Slowly but surely, feudal lordships have given
way to burgeoning urbanization; the Crusades are over but their legacy lives
on; a shift in Japanese political power moves the shoguns to Kyoto; Ottoman
Turks have been expanding their territory; the plague ravages Europe as France
and England fight the Hundred Years’ War; romance is more popular than epic
even as troubled times inspire miracle plays praising the Virgin Mary; there are
signs of humanism in the Italian city states; Ibn Battuta has been travelling
throughout Asia and Africa since leaving his birthplace of Tangier in 1325; and,
somewhere in the medieval world, a person pretends to be someone else for the
pleasure and edification of an audience. Who is the performer? What does he
or she say or do (or fail to say or do)? What kind of cultural knowledge and
experience precedes what is said and done? What does this performance look
like? Where does it take place and for whom? What does it sound like (if it
sounds like anything at all)? Is it a gesture? A chant? A song? A prayer? An act?
An event? And is it theatre? If so, have any of its words or actions been preserved
in a written account that can be trusted? And how on earth might we recover
something so ephemeral today?
From the fall of the Roman Empire to the advent of Christianity to the
Protestant Reformation; from Byzantium to the Middle East to Western Europe;
from feudal life to a bourgeoisie to emerging nationalism, piecing together
the puzzle of medieval theatre requires an act of imagination that is also an act
of history.

32907.indb 1 13/12/2016 08:49

 2 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Depending on how historians construct the often arbitrary chronologies of

periodization, the Middle Ages normally spans, as it will here, the ten centuries
between 500 and 1500, a millennium’s occupation of the literal ‘middle age’ or
medium aevum, the long denigrated space ‘in between’ the so-called apogees
of Greco-Roman Antiquity and a liberated Renaissance. Not surprisingly, that
‘middle age’ has suffered the anxieties of countless influences as medieval
people came to grips contemporaneously with their classical heritage and as
future scholars read their own past upon them. On the one hand, Petrarch
invoked the ‘dark ages’ as early as the quattrocento; in his seventeenth-century
Art poétique, Nicolas Boileau dismissed the medieval poets of ‘those vulgar
centuries’ (ces siècles grossiers); in the nineteenth century, frustrated socialists
and nostalgic Romantics on both sides of the Channel rediscovered medieval
life as they looked back longingly but anachronistically at what seemed the
communal spirit of their forebears; and twentieth-century patriots fighting the
Nazis helped to give birth to the field of medieval studies.1 On the other hand,
early ‘millennials’ had already struggled with anachronism in their own day. In
one of the premier pedagogical texts of the European Middle Ages, the seventh-
century Etymologies, Isidore of Seville famously misunderstood the events of
the classical amphitheatre; and the authors of fifteenth-century Passion plays
regularly projected Christian doctrine onto Old Testament narratives whose
Jewish protagonists could not have known of the coming of Christ.2 On the
whole, medieval intellectuals waged numerous battles – theological, political
and pedagogical – as they grappled with the theory and practice of translatio
studii, which denoted the transfer, transmittal or translation of knowledge
from one culture to another.3 And those intellectual battle scars remain visible
in a modern medievalist politics that has given rise to the Old vs the New
Medievalism and the Old vs the New Philology of the 1980s, to the founding
of the first scholarly journals explicitly devoted to medieval cultural studies –
Exemplaria in 1989 and New Medieval Literatures in 1997 – and to the
revolutionarily inclined blog ‘In the Middle’ (hosted by the Babel working
group), or to the journal The Medieval Globe.4 That dynamic, cross-cultural
conversation between past and present constitutes the mission of this book.
Following the historian Jacques Le Goff ’s seminal insight that medieval
culture as a whole displayed a widespread tendency to theatricalize itself,5 it is
fair to say that theatre was everywhere. Those undertaking to write its history
must look to the myriad spaces where medieval people came together to revel
in spectacles that had the potential to be repeated, formalized and committed
to writing as the textual entity that we now dub ‘drama’.6 We must look not
only to scripted plays but to the multiple spectacular practices of multiple
performers: to the poetry and songs of scops, bards and jongleurs (among the
earliest ‘solo-performers’), to the tour-de-force oratorical displays of lawyers,
priests, professors and politicians, and to such community festivities as folk

32907.indb 2 13/12/2016 08:49

 INTRODUCTION 3

dancing, processions and religious rituals. In public squares and in increasingly

private spaces, singers of epic shared fictional and nonfictional tales of heroes;
poets waged lyrical battles, competing against one another for the best song and
engaging in the ‘jongleuresque performances’ discussed by Bruce Burningham
in this book’s Chapter 7; and the antiphonal singing of the medieval liturgy
materialized as an embodied dialogue for the faithful. Meanwhile, declaimers
of romance plotted course upon course of love obstructed, thwarted or fulfilled;
acrobats tumbled, dancers danced and mimes communicated nonverbally, their
now static choreography extant in paintings and sculptures. Members of
professional guilds vaunted their wares in grand civic processions and, as
Kathleen Ashley emphasizes in Chapter 2, penitents participated in expiatory
ones as they celebrated – or were made to celebrate – holidays religious and
secular.7 Royal coronations were elaborate staged affairs; town councilmen and
costumed lawyers – the French Basochiens and the Dutch Rederijkers – played
at mock trials and real trials; politicians did likewise at the English Inns of
Court as Spanish rhetoricians perfected the art of the political harangue (ars
arengandi); and, especially in Italy, the moveable rhetorical feast known as the
rhetorical art of letter-writing (ars dictaminis) involved ceremonial delegations
parading through the streets to deliver their communications.8 Scholastic
disputations and university examinations unfolded as educational rites of
passage;9 royal decrees and papal bulls were proclaimed before citizens; the
death penalty comprised a public spectacle; and the very dissemination of
knowledge through teaching, preaching (the ars praedicandi) and courtesy
manuals repeatedly modelled social conduct.
Therefore, the challenge and the delight, as much of this Introduction as of
this entire volume, is to make a scholarly virtue of what was indisputably an
aesthetic virtue (albeit an ever-changing one). It is to isolate for analysis and
interpretation a ubiquitous, ever renewable theatricality that signals both a
literary genre and, as for Michel de Certeau, Alan Read and many others, a
practice of everyday life.10 We scan the evidence of texts, architecture and the
beaux arts in the hope of picturing and, perhaps, performing anew the theatrical
past. And, as we recuperate data from sparse, biased, incomplete or corrupt
accounts that often guard their secrets, our sources can be made substantially
more trustworthy when we ask the right questions of medieval performance
culture.
Lest we create tautologically the very subject that we seek, I initiate our
threefold approach below with Lost in Translation: Textual Politics and the
Nature of the Evidence. This section takes up the deceptive simplicity of the
canonical journalistic questions of Who? What? Where? and When? as we ask:
What documents preserve the cultural history of theatre? Who created the
theatre of the Middle Ages? Where and when did they perform? Next, in,
Bodies of Knowledge and Knowledge of Bodies: A Living Archive, I turn to the

32907.indb 3 13/12/2016 08:49

 4 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

predicaments of assessing the static, written record of an oral, bodily theatrical

experience. Recuperating the medieval theatre of individuals and collectives
requires, I suggest, that we literally get the body into the act. That re-navigation
of the record then facilitates a consideration of Taxonomic Troubles and
Performance Studies: How to Do Things with Theatre. There, I argue that the
interdiscipline of performance studies presents a particularly propitious access
point to a holistic art that does, will and should resist some of the archaeologies
of knowledge that we now hold dear (including the taxonomies that organize
the chapter divisions of this very series). That is why so many of the authors
here assembled dare to disrupt, contradict and unsettle what past historiographies
have identified as a theatre.
Ultimately, if those taxonomical difficulties highlight the historiographical
how, we conclude with a meditation on the medieval theatrical why. Why
did medieval people take to representational practice in the first place? What
contributions has theatre itself made to cultural history and cultural history to
theatre? We shall see that, in its millennium-long encounter with philosophy,
theology, politics, science, pedagogy, music and the arts, the medieval theatre
worked tirelessly toward a deep cultural understanding of the ways in which
the imitative creatures known as humankind play out their relationships with
history, ‘mythistory’ and ‘metahistory’.11 Through theatre, medieval or modern,
they ponder the interplay between truth and lies, authenticity and inauthenticity,
fact and fiction, truth and verisimilitude. They learn about their past from a
medium that has always helped to make history.12 In the ten chapters that
follow, we too stand to learn as much about the medieval past as about our own
as we ponder the future of that history.

LOST IN TRANSLATION: TEXTUAL POLITICS AND

THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE
In demarcated spaces throughout the medieval world, all manner of social
actors regularly made theatre happen. But their manifold performances might
never have been recorded at all or, when they were, they have survived in texts
that we no longer recognize as plays.13 Floods, fires, wars and the ravages of
time have taken their toll on books, manuscripts, contracts and correspondence
as well as on sets, props, costumes and playing spaces, such that beloved plays
are lost forever to the very history they shaped. For example, we learn of the
existence of a given play because an author mentions its title, come to find
that all other traces of it have vanished. Elsewhere, a medieval play is elevated
by modern readers to an importance that it likely never enjoyed in its own
day. Yet elsewhere, as with so much of history, another play comes to our
attention solely because of misdeeds committed by bad actors: a thief is arrested
while playing a devil in a Passion Play; a sotto voce by a comic actor launches

32907.indb 4 13/12/2016 08:49

 INTRODUCTION 5

accusations of heresy or lèse-majesté.14 Additionally, due to the conditions

under which texts were written, transcribed and reproduced, what history
there is tends to be that of the victorious. Most of the plays that have come
down to us were authored by Western European men – much less frequently by
women – who were of sufficient social power and privilege to have been
instructed to read and write or to have been to university to study law, politics
or theology.15 Ecclesiastical practices of preservation and transmission also
shaped and determined any theatrical message deemed worthy of preservation
and propagation (a point articulated with luminous clarity in Glending Olson’s
Chapter 6 and Carol Symes’s Chapter 10). Consequently, to study the medieval
past is to be ever cognizant of the historian’s limitation, to admit that any
cultural history of the medieval theatre is likely to be informed as much by the
empowerment of presence as by the disempowerment of absence.
Beyond the perils of selective preservation, the record is as rich and varied as
it is daunting. It also expands daily as medievalists review works of literature,
music, history, theology, philosophy, science, law, folklore and politics along
with university records, contracts, courtesy books, memoirs, trial summaries,
legal depositions, and so on.16 Teams of researchers involved in the REED
project (Records in Early English Drama) continue to scour the archives that
dot the British countryside; a long-lost manuscript might be rediscovered with
the restoration of Nazi plunder; a mysterious box at the Herzog August
Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, might turn out to house seventy-two
hitherto unseen plays.17 Nor are the ‘texts’ that safeguard the history of the
medieval stage necessarily texts in the conventional sense. Non-linguistic
testimony abounds: a painting, a sculpture of a body no longer in motion, a
costume, a doll, a prop, a piece of jewellery, a shard of pottery, a chalice, a
crumbling architectural ruin, a piece of textile (as for Laura Weigert in
Chapter 4).18 From that kaleidoscopic range of extant artefacts, we may yet
recover the theatrical artistry of aural, oral, visual, gestural and linguistic
communications that have been lost to history. We may yet recreate a whole
that is infinitely more than the sum of its parts.
Comparable in many respects to their classicist colleagues, medievalists
locate relatively few ironclad facts regarding the author, provenance or date of
a given playtext. To counter that paucity of information, they ordinarily
commence by deliberating about the material state of the evidence, all with the
specialist’s attention to detail. While such precision need not preoccupy us
extensively in a series such as this, it is paramount to acknowledge that we are
in possession of a reliable historical record precisely because others trained in
Latin, the medieval vernaculars, palaeography, codicology, diplomatics and
other disciplines have asked their questions and answered them responsibly.
Does the text survive in a manuscript? How old is that manuscript? Is
it illustrated? Does it have capacious or empty margins (which might

32907.indb 5 13/12/2016 08:49

 6 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

signify – vellum and parchment being expensive – the wealth of the person or
persons who commissioned it)? Is the play part of a book, a manuscript book
(codex) or of what the French call a recueil factice (a loosely bound compilation)?
If so, who bound the pages together in accordance with what organizational
principle? Who copied it and when? What does the handwriting look like? Is
the copyist known? Is the text in good condition? Does it appear to have been
read frequently? Infrequently? Not at all? Do we possess multiple copies of a
play (which indicates that it struck a chord with a particular community at a
particular time)? Mostly, though, we endeavour to answer those journalistic
questions of Who? Where? and When?
When? In a culture of manuscripts and performance, establishing a date is
vexing. As a rule, an extant medieval play is older – sometimes decades, even
centuries or more older – than the manuscript, codex or early printed book that
conserves it. Furthermore, fifteenth-century plays were performed well into the
sixteenth century, cohabiting with both Shakespeare and the commedia
dell’arte.19 Nor did medieval theatrical activity cease in the wake of such
widespread efforts to censor it as the ban on Passion plays in France in 1548 or
the reams of anti-theatrical polemic by John Foxe in England.20 Far from it. In
a nascent print culture, plays were among the first literary works to attract early
publishers; and, as far east as the Ukraine in a Harrowing of Hell, medieval
theatre pieces were still being imitated, published and circulated well into
the seventeenth century.21 Indeed, they continue to be performed in the present
day with re-enactments of the Passion in Oberammergau, the Philippines and
the United States or with such re-conceptions and revivals as Sarah Ruhl’s
Passion Play or, off Broadway, the reimagined medieval cycle of The Mysteries
(2014).22 If, typically, the Middle Ages per se are limited chronologically,
medievalism is not. Needless to say, this complicates the matter of who
and where.
Who? Inasmuch as most medieval plays are anonymous, authorship implies
another central question: in what language? Medieval theatricality is attested in
Latin, Hebrew and Arabic – witness the treasure trove of comic puppet plays by
Ibn Dāniyāl (1248–1311)23 – as well as in all the European vernaculars: Old
and Middle English, Old and Middle French, Old Provencal, Old High German,
Old Norse, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etc. Moreover, as is readily
apparent from Isidore’s encyclopaedic Etymologies, to access etymology was to
access an entire culture and its history (even when, like us, he occasionally gets
it wrong). Language is more than an artistic choice: it is a political choice often
cast in political terms. When a medieval vernacular supplanted Latin or when
François Villon wrote a ballad in Old French only to reveal that, by the fifteenth
century, he no longer knew its grammar: those were inflected acts.24 Similarly,
when contemporary medievalists from either side of the Channel refer to one
and the same language as Old French or Anglo-Norman, or when English

32907.indb 6 13/12/2016 08:49

 INTRODUCTION 7

becomes the lingua franca of the Internet: those are inflected acts today, even
though their political ramifications easily elude us in postmedieval editions and
translations. That is to say that early editors did considerably more than re-
select from an already pre-selected canon: through language, they intervened
politically upon those works. Faced with evolving grammars and unstable
orthography, they followed largely nineteenth-century editorial conventions,
customarily homogenizing, normalizing and sanitizing the language of the
written record.25 They effaced dialectal markings, corrected errors and
perceived errors of spelling, grammar and syntax (to say nothing of obscenities);
and they made necessary decisions about authorial intent as they opted for the
so-called best reading (normally the lectio difficilior or ‘the most difficult
reading’). In so doing, they also effaced key information about playwrights,
audiences and readers, creating a collateral damage of misinformation that
endures even in modern scholarly editions.
Particularly nefarious has been the loss of the signature bilingualism and
macaronic language of the medieval theatre. Consistent with a companion
tradition in medieval preaching, a Middle English translation might be inserted
into a Passion play after a citation from Scripture, hinting at possible spectatorial
trouble with the Latin.26 In France, a character from fifteenth-century farce
speaks with a heavy foreign accent or creates a linguistic muddle of French,
Latin and Italian (which I have termed flatin and fritalian).27 In other comedic
offerings, a stage direction in Latin – plorando (‘weeping’) – demonstrates a
wife’s sexual frustration.28 And, as early as the twelfth century, a lengthy
didascalic commentary in Latin painstakingly sets the scene for the Garden of
Eden in the Play of Adam that unfolds in the vernacular.29 When more than one
language is written or spoken in a given play, it means something. Be that as it
may, we find nary an editorial disclosure – not even in William Tydeman’s
otherwise brilliant compilation of archival evidence – that two languages have
been translated.30 Hundreds of extant medieval playtexts challenge us, therefore,
to consult the original sources, the better to recover what has literally been lost
in translation.
Where? However compromised by editorial politics, texts still contain
invaluable clues to their identities. Naturally, the choice of language also tells us
something not only about who authored a play but where it was (or was to be)
performed. In what I can only think to call a kind of ‘preglobal’ studies,
medieval theatre appeared in every future European nation, from Greece to
Portugal, the Ukraine to Switzerland, Scandinavia to the Middle East, and in
the East too (notwithstanding the preference of many scholars of China, Japan,
and India to reject the nomenclature ‘medieval’).31 The Middle East also served
as a critical conduit for the transmission of knowledge from the Greco-Roman
world, even though the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Quintilian are generally
held to be virtually without major literary influence in Europe until the fifteenth

32907.indb 7 13/12/2016 08:49

 8 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

century. Cultural cross-pollination was as important as the country of origin,

which never tells the whole story. Among the more dazzling instances of the
phenomenon: a philological mystery in Hispano-Arabic lyric poetry (a key
medieval performance genre intimately connected to theatre32). After decades
of mystification surrounding a variety of seemingly incomprehensible phrases
in Arabic, enter Samuel Stern. He figured out that the phrases were not in
Arabic at all; rather, they were transliterated lyric insertions from Old Provençal
troubadour song.33 Eureka. To borrow Claire Sponsler’s elegant phrase from
Chapter 5, the medieval theatre was ‘a medium on the move’: so much so that
Robert Potter spoke of its ‘illegal immigration’ to California.34 Likewise on the
move were those who wrote, performed and consumed it. People were born in
one town or country, eventually to study in another; they travelled throughout
Europe, returning to practise their arts in their homelands. In this volume, we
follow their paths, recharting the chronological, geographical and ideological
reach (and overreach) of the Middle Ages, remapping the intellectual geography
of the era’s historiographies. Even when the historical record is silent on the
success, failure, miscommunication or indifference related to theatrical culture,
it is the business of theatre to make silences speak.

BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE OF

BODIES: A LIVING ARCHIVE
Despite much progress in recent years with digitized collections, when
medievalists debate the archive, they are usually sitting in an actual archive of
the dusty – not the digital – variety. But a medieval manuscript is teeming with
life. Worm-eaten piles of parchment or vellum still clamour for reanimation.
On the one hand, they host the vivid remnants of intense dialogues conducted
by early readers who marked their codices with elaborately sketched index
fingers, flagging key passages much as we do nowadays with highlighter pens.
On the other hand, manuscript illuminations and historiated initials in cobalt
blue and glorious gilt establish another sort of artistic dialogue while, at the
margins, a space of contestation and subversion opens up in which pious
moralizing is answered by farting apes at the bottom of the page.35 The
manuscript page was – and is – a pale shadow of the dynamic events that it
records, a space of limitless potentiality. It consigned past words, deeds and
performances to the collective memory as much as it anticipated future
performances. Thus, the cultural historian need scarcely have waited for
Wolfgang Iser to take the 1970s literary critical world by storm to posit a literal
‘act of reading’.36 Early reading meant reading aloud, an act that generated not
only imaginary sights and sounds (virtual and actual) for the spirit but also
action for the body.37 Consider the fascinating if little studied Farce Nouvelle de
Digeste Vielle et Digeste Neufve,38 where two embodied law books actually take

32907.indb 8 13/12/2016 08:49

 INTRODUCTION 9

to the stage to debate one another as characters in a play. Centuries before

Michel de Certeau ever opined that ‘books are only metaphors of the body’ –
an individual and collective body branded by the Law with a ‘red-hot iron’ –
the principle had already made its mark by exemplifying a bookish controversy
as red-hot comedy.39
Whether it be a romance, a poem, a Book of Hours or a play, reading entailed
the aural and visual imagining of a dramatic scene, a learned practice that
had been nurtured by centuries of mnemotechnical theory.40 Reading also
presupposed the presence of an audience even if, as for St Augustine in
his fourth-century Confessions, that audience appeared only in a personal,
cognitive space of meditative prayer: ‘though my tongue be quiet, and my
throat silent, yet can I sing as much as I will’ (et quiescente lingua ac silente
gutture canto quantum volo).41 Jessica Brantley even goes so far as to speculate
that ‘the individual’s quiet encounter with the static book itself [is] a species of
sacred performance’.42 Elsewhere, Brian Stock urges that we ‘listen for the
text’; Emma Dillon makes sense of sound; and Graham Runnalls wonders
whether medieval theatre audiences were ‘listening or watching’.43 Given that
medieval speech and action formed, for Stock, a ‘cohesive whole’, theatre has
always called for both and more, inspiring the likes of Carol Symes to ‘treat all
premodern texts as potential participants in a culture of performance’.44
Although infinite performances have been lost in translation, theatre itself is
always a translation, a vision of and for action. It morphs into something else,
finds itself again, makes sense and nonsense, makes meaning and makes
and remakes history. So we listen and we look, re-tracing the many channels
between oral and written, sight and sound, stasis and motion, word and deed,
idea and gesture, picture and prayer, reading and song, script and print, voice
and mime, thought and action and, for our present purposes, page and stage.
We do so because, as any practitioner of theatre knows full well, performance
changes everything.
Be it virtual or actual, performance is ever mutable and of the moment. It
regularly transforms the religious into the sacrilegious, the sublime into the
grotesque, the tragic into the comic. It is both ephemeral and repeatable – and
repeatable in many different modes and media (such as those discussed by
Symes in our Chapter 10).45 Fortunately, numerous verbal and visual prompts
survive in the rare acting manual46 as well as in the predominant medieval
traditions of rhetoric and musicology, both of which permit responsible
reimagination of the move from the page to the stage and back again. Among
those who help us to listen is Geoffrey of Vinsauf, author of the twelfth-century
Poetria nova. Geoffrey clarified that ‘the voice is as it were the image (imago) of
the thing. . . . As the subject exhibits itself (recitator), so the speaker exhibits his
voice’.47 The exhibition is long gone but its virtuality remains, analogous in
many respects to the processes of linguistic, grammatical and musical notational

32907.indb 9 13/12/2016 08:49

 10 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

systems. For another twelfth-century theorist, for instance, John of Salisbury,

letters constituted ‘shapes indicating voices . . . [which] speak voicelessly the
utterances of the absent’ (et frequenter absentium dicta sine voce loquuntur).48
But if the letter spoke ‘voicelessly’, then in what fashion did the eventual voicing
occur? Was the verbal enactment of the imagistic script to be spoken? Chanted?
Sung? As Guido d’Arezzo had remarked in his Micrologus (c. 1025): ‘just as
everything which is spoken can be written, so everything that is written can
be made into song. Thus everything that is spoken can be sung.’49 In light of
such observations, the maverick musicologist Leo Treitler asserted that the
Middle Ages made no terminological distinction between speaking, singing
and chanting (cantare and dicere).50 And yet, by the thirteenth century, the
anonymous romance (and the only extant chantefable) Aucassin and Nicolette
clearly distinguishes between verse to be recited and songs to be performed,
while the Play of Robin and Marion stands as a genuine musical comedy complete
with notation for the melodies.51 Dramaturgically and historiographically
speaking, indeterminacy is welcome, not unwelcome inasmuch as the same
speaker might choose chant for one performance, speech for another, song for
a third, a combination of any or all of those and so on. At stake is a tremendous
‘textual’ instability – mouvance for Paul Zumthor, variance for Bernard
Cerquiglini52 – that is appropriately reflective of heterogeneous performance
practices, a living hypertext. But if, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the
performance medium was the message, then how do we read such multisensory
events at so many years remove?53
Take the medieval literary predilection for list-making. Whereas oral-
formulaic epics had enumerated the names of fallen warriors, fifteenth-century
farces do the same for the panoply of parodic saints of Holy Deadlock or the
veritable thesaurus for ‘head’ and ‘ass’ of Shit for Brains;54 and, in the published
book of Gargantua (1534), the great François Rabelais gleefully provides a
laundry list of the impressive implements with which the young protagonist
‘cleaned his ass’ (torche-cul).55 I contend that such lists make sense only when
we make room for the possibility that they functioned as call-outs for
performance, texts to be enlivened by mime, texts fully integrative of reading,
speaking and acting and which could revive what Rabelais dubbed ‘frozen
words’.56 So it was that medieval performance culture insists, again quite literally,
that we get the body into the act. When it comes to an art form that is historically,
socially, theologically, philologically, rhetorically and musicologically contingent,
the archive is alive, demanding the immediate revision, as for Donnalee Dox in
Chapter 8, of such postmedieval terminology as ‘closet drama’ or ‘nondramatic’
or ‘paradramatic’ in favour of what I once called ‘protodramatic’.57 So, as we
listen, we also look for signs of ‘liveness’, bearing in mind Aristotle’s principle
from the De Anima that ‘the soul never thinks without a mental picture’58 and
that that picture is a matter of embodiment.

32907.indb 10 13/12/2016 08:49

 INTRODUCTION 11

With or without the accompanying sights and sounds of verbal language, the
medieval body itself was a medium that signified, a body that also comprises a
body of evidence. Indeed, for Keith Thomas, the body is ‘as much a historical
document as a charter or a diary or a parish register’.59 Corporeal communication
had long been codified by thousands of years of paintings, sculptures,
illustrations and artefacts as well as by the fifth rhetorical canon of delivery
(actio, pronuntiatio or hypokrisis), which elucidated the interplay among
gesture, voice, intonation, tone, facial expression, movement, modulation,
impersonation, histrionics, costume and staging.60 Hand in hand with a raft of
exciting ‘new technologies’ addressed by Katie Normington in Chapter 9, they
demonstrated the validity of Le Goff ’s statement that that ‘the body provided
medieval society with one of its principal means of expression. . . . Medieval
civilization was one of gestures’.61 Thomas agrees that ‘there is no attribute of
the human body, whether size, shape, height, or colour, which does not convey
some social meaning to the observer’.62 In that sense, a body of theatrical
knowledge means a knowledge of theatrical bodies: the body politic, the body
of law, the body in pain, Christ’s body, the King’s two bodies,63 the overblown
farcical body that explodes as a huge head on one end and a giant derrière on
the other, shitting, farting and erupting all over late-medieval public squares
and marketplaces.64
Knowledge – theatrical or other – was a pictorial script, a dictionary of
symbols that was deeply embedded in and reflective of cultural literacy. For
Kenneth Burke, ‘the body is an actor . . . [that] participates in the movements
of the mind, posturing correspondingly’; for Judith Butler, it is ‘a materiality
that bears meaning, if nothing else, and the manner of this bearing is
fundamentally dramatic’.65 But long before Butler ever spoke of ‘corporeal
style’, Quintilian, for instance, one of the most understudied theorists of acting,
had invoked ‘physical eloquence’ and ‘styled action’ in the first-century
Institutio oratoria. There existed, he maintained, a universal body language:
‘though the peoples and nations of the earth speak a multitude of tongues, they
share in common the universal language of the hands.’66 Whether it be the
moving pictures of manuscript illuminations and marginalia, the verbal pictures
of the gesticulating and gendered body of the rhetorical tradition (and from
Sharon Aronson-Lehavi’s Chapter 3), or a medieval troupe’s extraordinary
ability to master pantomime so exquisitely that, in 1424, they performed proto-
cinematically ‘without speaking or movement, as if they were images raised
against a wall’: at issue is one and the same preoccupation with the theatrical
performance of visual signs.67 Cultural sign language thus enables a more
nuanced understanding of the media and multi-media that informed what
Pamela Sheingorn christened the ‘visual syntax’ of medieval drama.68 What
emerges, when we listen and watch, is a bona fide theory and practice of social
role-play that is consistent with performance studies.

32907.indb 11 13/12/2016 08:49

 12 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

TAXONOMIC TROUBLES AND PERFORMANCE

STUDIES: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH THEATRE
Typically, medieval plays do not introduce themselves sporting the handy
generic monikers by which we recognize drama today. Nor do these frequently
untitled works subdivide conveniently into dramatic and non-dramatic or
comedy and tragedy (the tragic ethos almost unheard of even for such a genre
as the Passion Play).69 True, they occasionally tell us what they are by means
of such designations as ludus, mystery, interlude, moral or morality play,
procession, miracle, farce, fool’s play, dialogue, debate, discourse or allegory.70
But, if anything, the category of ‘dramatic literature’ has tended to obscure the
rich sociocultural settings in which medieval theatre happened. Following Le
Goff ’s insistence on an omnipresent medieval theatricality or Paul Zumthor’s
on theatre as the most ‘social of all the media and the most receptive to changes
in the social structure’, it proves far more profitable to approach a fungible
medium with the more fungible language of ‘theatre’, ‘performance’, ‘media’ or
‘theatricality’. The mysteries of the culture that gave us the mystery play may
thereby come to light, newly exemplary of the interdiscipline that we now dub
‘performance studies’.71
Even in the Middle Ages, an epoch wont to taxonomize, medieval drama is
so tricky to identify that its very name is interspersed liberally with spectacle,
sport, tournament, ritual, battle play, trial, pageant, parade, procession,
preaching, politics, proclamation, scholastic disputation, oratory, music, dance,
song, pantomime and protest. Belying a hermeneutic instability akin to T.S.
Eliot’s later confusion des genres,72 it is a shape-shifter, an embodiment of
mouvance at the level of genre. Already in the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville
had grouped together sixty-nine cultural events under the heading ‘Of War and
Play [ludus]’. In a veritable primer for performance studies, he included warfare,
forensic rhetoric, gladiatorial combat, horse racing, dice games, religion, the
circus, the amphitheatre, comedy and tragedy based on their shared affinity for
displaying in privileged spaces what Johan Huizinga would go on to term
‘glorious exhibitionism and agonistic aspiration’.73 It is no coincidence that, in
his stellar review article for New Medieval Literatures, ‘Medieval Literature and
Cultures of Performance’, Bruce Holsinger turns to anthropology and
ethnomusicology, broaching Richard Schechner’s foundational question: ‘Is
there anything outside the purview of performance studies?’74 Much as I once
argued for a performance continuum, Holsinger advocates that we ‘conceive of
oral-formulaic studies and performance studies as two ends of a methodological
continuum’.75 It is along such a continuum that our ten chapters now take
shape, each one tending to broaden and blur rather than to narrow and sharpen
the standard taxonomical distinctions. Like the art form that they study – and
starting with the fittingly collaborative Chapter 1 by Seeta Chaganti, Noah
Guynn and Erith Jaffe-Berg – they routinely cross borders and push real and

32907.indb 12 13/12/2016 08:49

 INTRODUCTION 13

imagined boundaries that seem especially coterminous for the Middle Ages. To
summarize the situation another way: there can be no historically informed
study of, say, the social functions of theatre (Chapter 2) independent of a
concomitant inquiry into medieval institutions (Chapter 1), gender (Chapter 3),
the material environment of performance (Chapter 4), circulation and touring
(Chapter 5), interpretation (Chapter 6), theatre-making communities
(Chapter 7), repertoires (Chapter 8), available technologies (Chapter 9) and of
performance media (Chapter 10). Our chapters are intertwined and inseparable,
the better to encourage a much-needed re-examination of some of the teleologies
that have dominated medieval theatre studies.
In 1965, O.B. Hardison laid bare the Darwinian evolutionary model for
medieval drama that undergirded the formative work of E.K. Chambers in The
Mediaeval Stage (1903) and of Karl Young in The Drama of the Medieval Church
(1933), the former primarily concerned with popular folk traditions and the
latter, with literate liturgical ones.76 Hardison exposed the false binary of
Christian vs secular with a simple but compelling analogy: if a student of
zoology were to classify a whale as a fish, the origins and development of the
species would be forever flawed, the fruit of a poisonous family tree. Ever the
literary zoologist, Hardison rebaptized medieval drama a ‘many-headed beast’
whose origins were to be sought in the unexpected places that we now identify
as the province of performance studies.77 Issuing a clarion call that the twain
between Christian and secular meet, he objected to the bizarre teleology
according to which medieval drama had lain dormant throughout the so-called
Dark Ages until arising ex nihilo as troping, the interpolation of music and
gesture into the liturgy. At Easter, the Visitatio sepulchri, better known as the
Quem quaeritis trope, had functioned historiographically as a kind of
Christianized Thespis legend and as ground zero for medieval theatre studies.
Quem quaeritis in sepulchri Iesu? (‘Whom [or what] do you seek in the tomb of
Jesus?’) That is the question asked of three women before an empty tomb as
they search for the disappeared body of a resurrected Christ. But, now that we
understand troping not as the sole origin of medieval drama but as one of many
possible protodramatic activities within a performance culture writ large, we
might respond with a question of our own: Quem quaeritis in theatro?78 Given
the marked medieval preference for the theory and practice of embodiment,
the quintessential story of a sacred body lost and found facilitates a new
apprehension not only of what theatre is but what it does.
As we have seen, as the medieval theatre negotiates the pathways between
thought, image, writing and site-specific action, it also demonstrates forcefully
that speech is action – and in ways that the ordinary-language philosopher J.L.
Austin would much later characterize as ‘performative’.79 In a world where
medieval vassals swore oaths to their overlords in highly public ceremonies,
where popes issued bulls before spectators, where legal edicts were read aloud

32907.indb 13 13/12/2016 08:49

 14 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

to alert the public of current policies, where the cure for a strep throat likely
involved saying a number of Hail Marys, where a convicted criminal was
allegedly executed during the performance of a biblical play in 1549, theatre
did things.80 As for Austin it ‘did things with words’ but, of equal significance,
it did things with action. Simply put, theatre is as theatre does. And it does a lot
as it moves transhistorically and cross-culturally throughout the world at a
moment when everything is in flux, when tradition and continuity are matched
by evolution and revolution.
Many readers will be familiar with the expression that ‘we are what we do’.
They might even have heard it invoked to explain away an alleged defect of
medieval characters who sometimes strike readers as flat or lacking in
psychological complexity. Not so. In the dramatic events that shaped the
medieval world, there was a great deal to do as theatre-makers grappled with
the key trends that held sway over pan-European thinking. As they thought
through theatrically such pillars of civilization as the most effective form of
government, the maintenance of a just and orderly society or the transmission
of knowledge from one generation to the next, they returned time and time
again to questions of authenticity, appearance and representation, perhaps
nowhere more so than when they engaged Church doctrine. Although
Hardison’s paradigm-shifting argument relied on the insight that religion was
not antagonistic to the creative instinct, if anything has cast a giant shadow, if
not always a pall, over the cultural history of the medieval theatre, it has been
the unprecedented influence of religion in general and of Catholicism in
particular.81
In the massive cultural debate that would define the transitional moment
between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, theologians contemplated the
issue that would likewise dominate the turbulent years of the Reformation: the
symbolic vs. the literal interpretation of Transubstantiation. As such astute theatre
scholars as Huston Diehl, Michal Kobialka and John Parker have shown so
convincingly, the debate about Transubstantiation was, in many ways, a high-
stakes debate about theatre.82 Medieval Catholics believed that, when a priest
celebrating Mass took the Host and cup of wine in his hands and said ‘this is my
body, this is my blood,’ a bona fide re-enactment of the Last Supper occurred
performatively (in the strict Austinian sense). Reformers countered that this was
a symbolic act – albeit a powerful one – of what had happened to Christ’s body
during Transubstantiation. Both sides ruminated about the primordial theatrical
question of what was real, what was pretend and what was pretence. Both sides
pondered whether religious congregants were spectators witnessing realism or
participants bearing witness to reality. Was the ritual imbued with truth? Lies?
Probability? Verisimilitude? Some combination thereof? In a word, theatre
captured perfectly a moment of phenomenology that was also a moment of
theology, generating pan-European political pieties that were also ‘theatrical

32907.indb 14 13/12/2016 08:49

 INTRODUCTION 15

pieties’. Those theatrical pieties spoke then and must speak now to historiographical
pieties inasmuch as both are devoted to acts real and represented.
While not all medieval persons took part in that debate, and while Jews and
Muslims were often explicitly excluded from it, it is no exaggeration to state
that everyone would have been affected by controversies about the Eucharist. A
responsible history requires, moreover, that we cease essentializing ‘The
Church’ as a monolithic entity to which one cleaved or against which one
rebelled. As Jo Ann McNamara has reasoned, regardless of how centralized
doctrinal teachings might have been at any given historical moment, there was
no such thing as ‘the medieval Church’. Instead, there were highly diverse
ecclesiastical communities headed by diverse figures exercising diverse types
of power at diverse times.83 At all times, though, the ideological, artistic,
pedagogical and philosophical ramifications of religious habits of thought
proved an irresistible ideological foil against which to fathom what theatre was
and was not. Not surprisingly, this made for an eminently self-conscious
medieval theatricality and a dramatic repertoire that was ensconced in
metacommentary about the very nature of artistic representation.
Medieval plays of every ilk gravitate obsessively toward matters of costuming,
role-playing, impersonating and physical or psychological mirroring and doubling.
Passion plays like Arnoul Gréban’s hold up a mirror to humankind; silly farcical
characters are described in Jekyll-and-Hyde terms; morality plays splinter the
psyche; and mystery plays are informed by the dualities of body and soul, life and
afterlife.84 They think through the very nature of verisimilitude as they make
visible the normally invisible mysteries of a sacred spirit indivisible from the
corporeal secrets of the carnal body. The miracles of religious drama, for instance,
call for the classic theatrical suspension of disbelief. After all, it is not reasonable,
not verisimilar, not in keeping with the logical operations of the universe that a
Saviour could multiply loaves and fishes, walk on water, or be resurrected from
the dead.85 By the same token, farce upon farce displays a different yet compatible
vision of verisimilitude. A stolen sheep passes for the Christ child in the Second
Shepherds’ Play; men pretend to be pregnant – convincingly, no less, in the Galant
qui a fait le coup – and others are beaten to a pulp, only to pick themselves up,
dust themselves off and start all over again. In one of the more sacrilegious
offerings of the medieval French stage, a certain Long John Silver recounts the
hullabaloo that he has allegedly witnessed in Paradise; he purports to have risen
Christ-like from the dead, returning resurrected to his family with a cry of ‘Here
I am!’86 Ecce homo. Ecce theatrum. This is a profoundly philosophical theatre
intent on fashioning a dialogue about the rationality and irrationality of life as
experienced by believers and nonbelievers alike.
In the final analysis, the medieval theatre does an incredible job – and a
credible one – of emphasizing and incarnating what theology is meant to
emphasize and incarnate: the need to look beyond any apparent truth of

32907.indb 15 13/12/2016 08:49

 16 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

appearances. Whether those appearances are magnified beyond all measure

in comedy or re-enacted as history in religious drama, theatre creates a new
vision – a re-vision of the real: a re-creation that is recreation. We can never
recover what has not endured; but medieval theatre endures. Pitfalls of
historiography notwithstanding, the future of the theatrical past demands the
restoration of that living, breathing archive of extant evidence that is so often
lost in translation. In that way, the rich culture of the medieval stage, one of the
most social media of its day, may itself rise anew from the dead.

32907.indb 16 13/12/2016 08:49

 NOTES

Introduction: Medieval Theatre Makes History

1. Boileau n. d., v. 117; Dakyns 1973; Chandler 1970; Nichols 1996. Increasingly,
historians question such terms as ‘feudalism’ and ‘bourgeoise’.
2. Paxson 1995.
3. Exemplary are Copeland 1991; Copeland 2001.
4. See, e.g., ‘The New Philology’ issue of Speculum (1990); Brownlee, Brownlee and
Nichols 1991; Exemplaria was founded by R.A. Shoaf and New Medieval Literatures
by Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton. See also ‘In the Middle’, www.
inthemedievalmiddle.com; and ‘The Medieval Globe’ at http://arc-humanities.org/
series/arc/tmg/.
5. Le Goff 1995, 360–361.
6. For space, helpful places to begin include Hanawalt and Kobialka 1999; Konigson
1975; Southern 1975; and Crohn-Schmitt 1969.
7. Sponsler 2004, e.g., Chap. 6; Ashley and Hüsken 2001; Knight 1983, 117–140;
Kipling 1998.
8. Within the scope of a study such as this, it is impossible to do justice to the voluminous
scholarship but helpful initiations to civic performance culture include Ashley and
Hüsken 2001; Kramer 1996; Arnade 1996; Brown 2011; Knight 1997; Donavin
and Stodola 2015.
9. Ong 1971, Chap. 4; Enders 1993.
10. de Certeau 1984; Read 1993.
11. Wagner 1986; Mali 2003; White 1973.
12. Enders 2004.
13. Enders 1992b, Chap. 1; Symes 2007, Chap. 1.
14. For more on these incidents, see Enders 2002, Chap. 7.
15. Significant exceptions include, e.g., the tenth-century writings of Hrotsvitha of
Gandersheim and Hildegard of Bingen or the fascinating convent dramas of Antonia

32907.indb 213 13/12/2016 08:50

 214 NOTES

Pulci (even if the latter are considered ‘Renaissance’). See Hrotsvit of Gandersheim
1989; Hildegard of Bingen 1994; Holsinger, 2001, Chap. 3; Pulci 1996.
16. Space does not permit an extensive enumeration of all the lists of extant plays and
performances compiled; but for a huge array of primary sources translated into
English, see Meredith and Tailby 1983; Tydeman 2001; and Stern 2009.
17. Medieval manuscripts are frequently lost and found, e.g., in attics; and I speculate
elsewhere that their rediscovery might owe to the restoration of items looted by the
Nazis (Enders 2011, 39–41); the Lille Plays discovered in Wolftenbüttel were
published as Knight 2001–11.
18. Weigert 2016; Gertsman 2010.
19. See, e.g., Schreyer 2014.
20. See esp. Barish 1981; Epp 1997.
21. Makaryk 1989. The latest seventeenth-century ‘revival’ I’ve encountered is Marriage
with a Grain of Salt (Enders 2017, Chap. 12).
22. For postmedieval reenactments, see esp. Sponsler 2004; Trexler 2003; Harris 2000;
Enders 1998, 197–198.
23. Georg Jacob (1862–1937) discovered these plays detailing street life in medieval
Egypt; the first English translation appeared as Ibn Dāniyāl 2013.
24. In the ‘Ballade en Vieil Langage François’ (Villon 1965, 61–63), the poet-singer no
longer masters the case system of the inflected language, Old French.
25. Hanawalt 1998; or Viollet le Duc refuses to transcribe the Middle French word for
testicles in a farce (1854–57, vol. 1, 375): see Margot’s Confession, my translation
of which is in progress for a third volume of farces.
26. Wenzel 1994.
27. Among the better known examples: the delirium scene of the Farce of Master Pierre
Pathelin, trans. Mandel 1982. For flatin, see Birdbrain, Enders 2011, Chap. 12; and
for fritalian, see The Jackass Conjecture in Enders 2017, Chap. 5; for similar
macaronics in Italy, see Dal Molin 2015.
28. See Wife Swap, Chap. 9 of Enders 2017.
29. Bevington 1975, 80–81; Enders 1990.
30. Tydeman 2001, 150; and Symes remedies the issue in Symes 2012b. For two reviews
to that effect, see Kobialka 2003; and Enders 2002b.
31. For these relatively understudied vernacular traditions, see, e.g., for Germany,
Ehrstine 2002; for Spain, Stern 1996 and Burningham 2007; for the Low Countries,
Prins 1999; and [Hüsken and Ashley] 2001; and for Portugal, Massip 1992.
32. Herington 1985.
33. On Stern 1996 and his tour de force on the kharjas of the medieval Hispano-Arabic
muwashshahat, see Menocal 1987, 83–85.
34. Potter 1989; Dal Molin 2015 on similar Franco-Italian migrations.
35. The key work is Camille 1992, expanding considerably on Baxandall 1985.
36. Iser 1978; Enders 1992b, 35–44; compare, e.g., with Jewish traditions of davening.
37. See, e.g., the groundbreaking work of Saenger 1982; as well as Stock 1990; Clanchy
1979; Coleman 1996.
38. This farce appears in Cohen 1949, 333–40; my translation is projected for a future
volume tentatively entitled That’ll Teach You: A Fifth Dozen Medieval French Farces
in Modern English.

32907.indb 214 13/12/2016 08:50

 NOTES 215

39. de Certeau 1984, 140.

40. See, e.g., Sylvia Huot 1997; Bestul 1996; Sheingorn 2008; Pizarro 1989; and
Carruthers 1990; Enders 1992b, 44–54; Enders 1999, Chap. 2.
41. Augustine 1912: bk. 10, Chap. 8.
42. Brantley 2007.
43. Stock 1990; Dillon 2012; Runnalls 1994.
44. Stock 1983, 15, 1; Symes 2007, 2; for a later period, see also Peters 2000.
45. Schechner, 1985; Symes, 2018.
46. See esp. a fourteenth-century Old Provençal acting treatise edited by Vitale-
Brovarone 1984; Elliott 1989a; Plesch 1994–95; Plesch 1999.
47. Geoffrey of Vinsauf 1971, vv. 2044–45.
48. Cited by Clanchy 1979, 202; Treitler 1981, 490.
49. Cited in Stevens 1986, 384; Enders 1992a, 459–602; Holsinger 2003, 272–282.
50. Treitler 1981; Enders 1992a.
51. See, e.g., Aucassin et Nicolette, as translated by Kline 2001.
52. Zumthor 1972, 65–72; Cerquiglini 1989.
53. McLuhan and Fiore 1967.
54. Jeay 2006; Burningham 2007 on jongleuresque performance; Enders 2011, Chap.
8; Enders 2017, Chap. 7.
55. Frame 1991, 34–37.
56. Rabelais, Fourth Book, Chaps. 55–56; Frame 1991, 556–559.
57. Enders 1992b, intro., Chap. 1.
58. Auslander 1999; Aristotle 1935, 432a.
59. Thomas 1991, 11.
60. On the translation of memory imagery into theatrical practice, see Enders 1992b,
44–68. Compare the phenomenon with the exquisite novelistic rendering of
Unsworth 1995.
61. Le Goff 1995, 357; 360–361.
62. Thomas 1991, 1.
63. Enders 1999, 170–192; Scarry 1987; Beckwith 1994; Kantorowicz 1957.
64. See e.g. Shit for Brains and The Farce of the Fart in Enders 2011, Chaps 1 and 8
respectively; and Bitches and Pussycats in Enders 2017, Chap. 8.
65. Burke 1973, 130; Butler 1990a, 272.
66. Butler 1990a, 273; Quintilian 1920, XI, 3.1–2; Enders, 1992, 56–66.
67. Sans parler ne sans signer, comme se ce feussent images eslevees contre ung mur; cited
by Petit de Julleville 1880, 2: 190.
68. Sheingorn 1989.
69. See Kelly 1993; and Kerr 1967. As we await the work of the new editorial team that
was to have been Sponsler 2018, her vision now preserved by Coletti, Enders,
Sebastian and Symes, enlightening here is Steiner’s view that the compensating
heaven of Christianity forestalled the medieval tragic (Steiner 1961).
70. From a vast bibliography on the instability of genre, especially useful places to start
include Hardison 1965; Clopper 2001; Crane 2002.
71. Le Goff 1995, 360–361; Zumthor 1972, 447; Enders 2009a, 318–323.
72. Fittingly, Eliot was alluding to the congegrant who was more interested in the
drama of the Mass than in its religious import (Eliot 1932, 35–36; Enders 1992b,

32907.indb 215 13/12/2016 08:50

 216 NOTES

110–113). E. Catherine Dunn was also a performance theorist avant la lettre in her
brilliant work on liturgical dance (1989, Chap. 5).
73. Isidore 2006, 359–371; Enders 1992b, 77–89; Huizinga 1950, 146; compare with
Ong 1971, Chap. 4.
74. Schechner 1998, 360–361; cited by Holsinger 2003, 274, who draws on the work,
e.g., of Lord 1960; Ong 1982; and Foley 1989.
75. Zumthor 1990; Stock 1983; Enders 1992b; Holsinger 2003, 276–277.
76. In addition to Chambers 1903 and Young 1933, see Hardison 1965; Warning 2001;
Gurevich 1988; Propp 1984; Bakhtin 1984.
77. Hardison 1965, ‘Darwin, Mutations, and the Origin of Medieval Drama’, 1–34.
78. From a vast literature on troping, see, e.g., some of the primary texts in Bevington
1975, 9–29; the seminal discussion by Hardison 1965, Chaps 2, 5, 6; Dunn 1989;
and the rhetorical reconciliation of Enders 1992b, 54–57.
79. Austin 1962. I prefer to reserve the term ‘performative’ for the strict Austinian use,
but most of the contributors to this volume employ it in the more expansive sense of
‘performed’.
80. Enders 2002, Chap. 14.
81. Hardison 1965; also Prosser 1961.
82. Diehl 1997, Chap. 4; Kobialka 1999, Chap. 1; Parker, 2007; Beckwith 1994, 2001;
Sofer 2003; and, for the early Middle Ages, Dox 2004.
83. This idea recurs throughout McNamara 1998.
84. I discuss these phenomena and the related scholarship in Enders 1992b, 170–182;
Enders 2017, Chap. 11; and Enders 2015.
85. Enders 1993.
86. My translation of that play is projected for a third volume tentatively entitled
Immaculate Deception: A Third Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English:
see The Resurrection of Long John Silver [Farce nouvelle très bonne et fort joyeuse de
la résurrection de Jenin Landore]. See also in that projected volume The Resurrection
of Jonny Palmer [Farce nouvelle et fort joyeuse de la Resurrection Jenin à Paulme].

Chapter One: Institutional Frameworks

1. De Certeau 1984, 118.

2. Enders 2002a, 70.
3. Phythian-Adams 1980, 69; Konigson 1979, 26; cited and discussed in Sponsler
1992, 17–19.
4. Massip 2007, 10; Hayes 2010, 13.
5. Macherey 1978, 195.
6. See Enders 2002a, 105–117.
7. Sponsler 1997a, xvi.
8. Symes 2007, 278, 279.
9. Beam 2007, 7, 31.
10. See Koopmans 2002; Beam 2007; Guynn 2012.
11. Foucault 1998, 371.
12. Parker 2007, 12.
13. Parker 2007, 11.

32907.indb 216 13/12/2016 08:50