Saints at Play: The Performance Features of French Hagiographic Mystery Plays

In the introduction to Saints at Play, Hamblin notes that "this approach is intended to strengthen a comparative analysis of relatively similar texts created within a particular cultural setting. [The plays'] somewhat parallel narratives and performative structures facilitate their comparison as performance remnants. . . . To that end, the first three chapters will investigate the cultural contexts in which these plays were produced and performed, as well as the cultural content that spoke to and for the communities that created them. In two subsequent chapters, the performance features of these remnants, verbal and nonverbal, textual and supratextual, will be compared in search of evidence of a collective performance history. Anomalies and questions regarding these texts as reminiscent of a performative past will be posited and conclusions drawn as to how these texts expressed contemporary social perspectives at both localized and generic levels.