Saints at Play: The Performance Features of French Hagiographic Mystery Plays by Vicki L Hamblin (review)

Vicki Hamblin’s book argues that the mystery plays of the late medieval period constitute a cultural phenomenon more than a literary genre. Saints at Play aims to shed new light on a set of mystery plays, some of which have remained untouched for over a hundred years, simply because they have not been published as modern editions. Since a detailed analysis of the entire corpus of French saints’ plays could risk becoming a simple catalogue, Hamblin has developed a reduced study set of texts that share identifiable features. In the analysis and discussion of these plays, this book illumines the relationship between the text and its community—those who produced, performed and watched this play. This study aims to extract evidence about a community from a text set, and argues that the surviving manuscripts and printed editions of medieval saints’ plays are but two-dimensional artifacts that remain from a rich and lively theater culture. Through her study of textual clues and historical records related to the staging and reception of these plays, Hamblin is able to challenge received ideas on both medieval theater and hagiography.

This analysis presents a little-studied corpus of saints’ plays and offers an introduction to religious theater in the late medieval period. Hamblin suggests there has been a gap in research on saints’ plays, which until now has been based either on large definitions that go unchallenged or on the physical logistics of play production, while very little cross-referencing occurs between play types, play sponsors, play content and play staging. This study aims to begin filling this gap by analyzing understudied texts with a cross-disciplinary method. From the large corpus of saints’ plays from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, Hamblin has created a manageable study set by imposing three constraints. All of the plays included in the study set: 1) were produced during the fifteenth or sixteenth century when this type of play was at its height of popularity, 2) were written in French, 3) and tell the story of a historical rather than a biblical saint, freeing the narrative from the restrictions of a biblically sourced story. Borrowing a computational model from the social sciences made it possible to isolate the commonalities and differences among the texts in the study set. A heterogeneous study set of thirty-eight plays emerged from this process, and Hamblin identifies fifteen episodic types that occur commonly, such as a saint’s conversion or a devil’s harangue. Several plays that contained neither devilish interference nor divine intervention were removed from the study set. The resulting corpus comprises twenty-eight late medieval French mystery plays. Hamblin borrows tenets of cultural theory and reception theory to encourage a criticism that takes into account the performance-centered nature of mystery plays, and to emphasize that their surviving manuscripts and published editions constitute only a partial artifact of an event.

The first three chapters concentrate on the cultural context of the plays, and how their content spoke to and for their communities, while the fourth and fifth chapters deal with the performance features of these mystery plays. Hamblin’s ample explanations of her method and sources contribute to a convincing analysis of the community’s engagement with the theater, the heterogeneity and homogeneity of the mystery play as a category, and the place the texts occupied in late medieval culture. Municipal archives and financial records, as well as the prologues and character roles make it possible to sketch out the community involvement in the production of mystery plays. While many plays cannot be identified with a specific community, and many archival records refer to plays whose texts have not survived, the hierarchically arranged speaking parts and the distribution of speaking roles reconstruct social structures and identities within those structures in medieval society. Different communities treat the distinctive roles of the three estates differently in...