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  • Parisian Confraternity Drama of the Fourteenth Century: The ‘Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages’
  • Carol Symes
Parisian Confraternity Drama of the Fourteenth Century: The ‘Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages’. Edited by Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox. (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 22). Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. x + 256 pp, ill. Hb €60.00.

Forty plays performed over a span of forty-four years, preserved in a de luxe manuscript completed in 1389: the ‘first formal collection of vernacular drama from the French Middle Ages’, as the editors of this welcome volume put it (p. 1). Given their extraordinary importance, the Miracles de Nostre Dame — sponsored by the goldsmiths’ guild of Paris and played at their annual puy between 1339 and 1382 — have been surprisingly neglected, apart from the pioneering efforts of Rudolf Glutz (in 1954) and Graham A. Runnalls (in a handful of studies published after 1969). Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the scripting or transcription of medieval drama was rare, even if drama itself was ubiquitous. Most obvious examples date from the mid-fifteenth century or later, and in Francophone Europe there are only a few earlier instances. Moreover, the designated plays associated with thirteenth-century Arras were not preserved as part of a single, coherent effort to create a dramatic canon. So among the many questions raised by the codex in question (now Paris, BnF fr. 819–20) is that of the relationship between its carefully illuminated texts and the contexts in which they were devised, enacted, and copied.

In their important analysis of the manuscript’s miniatures, Robert L. A. Clarke and Pamela Sheingorn here lay the groundwork for future study, showing that these illuminations cannot be used as evidence for staging yet do indicate how the codex was assembled and how its artist(s) drew on a fund of Marian imagery loosely adapted to the plots of individual plays. In a separate essay Clarke also traces the history of the manuscript and its reception. Samuel N. Rosenberg’s examination of the serventois accompanying each play points towards the development of a lyric tradition within the goldsmiths’ guild, which fostered group identity and artistic emulation. Careful attention should also be paid to the plays’ other multimedia components: the embedded rondeaux, transmitted without notation but certainly featuring song, dance, and instrumental music; and the prose sermons opening most performances, whose relationship to the dramatic action is often mysterious and thus ripe for consideration within the context of late medieval preaching and Marian piety. Essays by Olivier Collet, Kathy M. Krause, Alan E. Knight, Carol J. Harvey, Pierre Kunstmann, and Donald Maddox consider different aspects of this Marian tradition and its creative use within the plays, suggesting numerous links to larger trends.

Together, these essays signal the urgent need for detailed analyses of the contemporary circumstances to which individual plays responded, and an overall consideration of what the collection as a whole can tell us about the development of theatrical conventions within a single milieu. The register of York’s Corpus Christi cycle enables this sort of investigation, but not for another century and a half. Thanks to this recent book, a new generation of scholars may recognize this gathering of plays as a truly golden opportunity to study the interaction between theatricality and community, and therefore to track political, religious, and socio-economic changes in Paris over the course of the fourteenth century.

Carol Symes
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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