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  • Medieval Drama Studies:A Performance Review
  • Christina M. Fitzgerald
The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City. Edited by Margaret Rogerson. Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press and Boydell & Brewer, 2011. Pp. xiv + 248; 26 illustrations. $90.
Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. By Jill Stevenson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. xii + 264; 7 illustrations. $84.

Medieval drama studies is undergoing a period of welcome growth, bringing with it new voices, new approaches, and fresh perspectives, qualities shared by the books reviewed here. Much is happening in drama studies that would interest a wide range of medieval, Early Modern, and theater scholars interested in devotional culture, material culture, the mercantile and artisan classes, the history and theory of theater, performance theories, the history of literacy and consumption of literature and art, and more. Yet, too often it seems that medieval drama scholars are speaking only to and being read only by other medieval drama scholars. The two books I review here offer the potential to reach a broader array of scholars and practitioners. Each is focused on performance in one way or another—practical or theoretical; historical or modern—and it may be performance, in theory and in practice, that finally opens up the field of medieval drama studies to a larger audience of scholars, students, and interested general audiences.

Attention to the performance of medieval drama, not only in the past but also in the present, has the potential to open up the field to new research opportunities that we might not see from the vantage point of the various historicist-oriented approaches that currently dominate the field. The approaches taken by the two books reviewed here show the compatibility of a focus on performance with a range of historically minded methods, but they also move out of the archive and even out of the Middle Ages to capture the vitality and energy of medieval drama in performance. This is a welcome broadening of the field, for at times the [End Page 93] historicist, archival, and textual scholarship practiced in drama studies seems to focus on minutiae and to move incrementally—a focus and a slow progress that can appear off-puttingly narrow and specialized for someone trying to break into the field, for it makes the “state of the field” hard to grasp as a whole.

Of course, while arguably too singularly dominant in medieval drama studies, such historicist modes have nevertheless been extremely important to the field. That focus and slow, careful study can have tremendous dividends; what at first appears to be a discovery of only local importance may produce rippling effects, overturning whole categories of assumptions about our object of study. But the impact of such work is itself slow moving, even among medieval drama specialists, but especially among nonspecialists. For example, Barbara Palmer’s careful rereading and reconsideration of the texts of the Towneley plays and their long-assumed association with the Yorkshire town of Wakefield, published in a series of articles in Comparative Drama and Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (now Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama) over the course of fourteen years, raised considerable doubts about the existence of such a thing as a “Wakefield Cycle.”1 As Richard K. Emmerson notes, in the wake of Palmer’s work, “most students of these plays are agnostic regarding the connection [of the Towneley plays to Wakefield] and some fervently deny it.”2 But Emmerson notes this in a review essay responding to James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution, the second volume of the new Oxford English Literary History, in which he criticizes Simpson for being unaware of such developments in the field. Emmerson praises the “daring” volume and “welcome[s] enthusiastically” Simpson’s questioning of periodic boundaries, a questioning that drama scholars have long called for;3 however, he also gently takes Simpson to task for a number of misapprehensions of the nature, character, and variety of medieval and Tudor drama, and for his reliance on older scholarship and ideas that have long since been questioned or even overturned. Although Emmerson fairly allows that “it simply isn’t possible for any one literary...

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