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Author: Max R. Harris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
For centuries, the Feast of Fools has been condemned and occasionally celebrated as a disorderly, even transgressive Christian festival, in which reveling clergy elected a burlesque Lord of Misrule, presided over the divine office wearing animal masks or women's clothes, sang obscene songs, swung censers that gave off foul-smelling smoke, played dice at the altar, and otherwise parodied the liturgy of the church. Afterward, they would take to the streets, howling, issuing mock indulgences, hurling manure at bystanders, and staging scurrilous plays. The problem with this popular account—intriguing as it may be— is that it is wrong.In Sacred Folly, Max Harris rewrites the history of the Feast of Fools, showing that it developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as an elaborate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision (1 January)—serving as a dignified alternative to rowdy secular New Year festivities. The intent of the feast was not mockery but thanksgiving for the incarnation of Christ. Prescribed role reversals, in which the lower clergy presided over divine office, recalled Mary's joyous affirmation that God "has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble." The "fools" represented those chosen by God for their lowly status.The feast, never widespread, was largely confined to cathedrals and collegiate churches in northern France. In the fifteenth century, high-ranking clergy who relied on rumor rather than firsthand knowledge attacked and eventually suppressed the feast. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians repeatedly misread records of the feast; their erroneous accounts formed a shaky foundation for subsequent understanding of the medieval ritual. By returning to the primary documents, Harris reconstructs a Feast of Fools that is all the more remarkable for being sanctified rather than sacrilegious.
Author: Max R. Harris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
For centuries, the Feast of Fools has been condemned and occasionally celebrated as a disorderly, even transgressive Christian festival, in which reveling clergy elected a burlesque Lord of Misrule, presided over the divine office wearing animal masks or women's clothes, sang obscene songs, swung censers that gave off foul-smelling smoke, played dice at the altar, and otherwise parodied the liturgy of the church. Afterward, they would take to the streets, howling, issuing mock indulgences, hurling manure at bystanders, and staging scurrilous plays. The problem with this popular account—intriguing as it may be— is that it is wrong.In Sacred Folly, Max Harris rewrites the history of the Feast of Fools, showing that it developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as an elaborate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision (1 January)—serving as a dignified alternative to rowdy secular New Year festivities. The intent of the feast was not mockery but thanksgiving for the incarnation of Christ. Prescribed role reversals, in which the lower clergy presided over divine office, recalled Mary's joyous affirmation that God "has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble." The "fools" represented those chosen by God for their lowly status.The feast, never widespread, was largely confined to cathedrals and collegiate churches in northern France. In the fifteenth century, high-ranking clergy who relied on rumor rather than firsthand knowledge attacked and eventually suppressed the feast. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians repeatedly misread records of the feast; their erroneous accounts formed a shaky foundation for subsequent understanding of the medieval ritual. By returning to the primary documents, Harris reconstructs a Feast of Fools that is all the more remarkable for being sanctified rather than sacrilegious.
Author: Robert C. Lagueux
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837650594
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
A newly identified medieval play for the Feast of Fools, with a new English translation and musical edition ready for performance.Scholars and non-scholars alike have long been fascinated by the medieval "Feast of Fools", the annual celebration on or around the New Year that came to be known for its inversion of established hierarchies, its boisterousness, and its scurrilous, even sacrilegious, clerical behaviour. However, we now know that many of the most obscene and subversive practices associated with the feast were, in fact, the misunderstandings, exaggerations, or even fabrications of overzealous ecclesiastical reformers.Our most reliable information about the Feast comes from the scant extant liturgical items that clerical communities actually used during their celebrations. This book shows that the twelfth-century Ordo Joseph from Laon, in France - a play long-known to scholars, telling the story of Joseph the patriarch and his brothers -- is in fact a drama for the Feast of Fools, long hidden in plain sight, intended for performance at Epiphany. It situates the play within the context of the cathedral community's history of biblical exegesis under its school-master Anselm of Laon, proposing "performative gloss" as an important new tool for understanding how medieval liturgical dramas generated meaning. It Includes a new Latin edition of the text, accompanied by an English translation, as well as a musical reconstruction that harnesses the music of Laon's liturgy and finally makes possible a performance of this spectacular, newly identified Feast of Fools drama.n sight, intended for performance at Epiphany. It situates the play within the context of the cathedral community's history of biblical exegesis under its school-master Anselm of Laon, proposing "performative gloss" as an important new tool for understanding how medieval liturgical dramas generated meaning. It Includes a new Latin edition of the text, accompanied by an English translation, as well as a musical reconstruction that harnesses the music of Laon's liturgy and finally makes possible a performance of this spectacular, newly identified Feast of Fools drama.n sight, intended for performance at Epiphany. It situates the play within the context of the cathedral community's history of biblical exegesis under its school-master Anselm of Laon, proposing "performative gloss" as an important new tool for understanding how medieval liturgical dramas generated meaning. It Includes a new Latin edition of the text, accompanied by an English translation, as well as a musical reconstruction that harnesses the music of Laon's liturgy and finally makes possible a performance of this spectacular, newly identified Feast of Fools drama.n sight, intended for performance at Epiphany. It situates the play within the context of the cathedral community's history of biblical exegesis under its school-master Anselm of Laon, proposing "performative gloss" as an important new tool for understanding how medieval liturgical dramas generated meaning. It Includes a new Latin edition of the text, accompanied by an English translation, as well as a musical reconstruction that harnesses the music of Laon's liturgy and finally makes possible a performance of this spectacular, newly identified Feast of Fools drama.c of Laon's liturgy and finally makes possible a performance of this spectacular, newly identified Feast of Fools drama.
Author: Richard B. Donovan
Publisher: PIMS
ISBN: 9780888440044
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Author: Thomas Heffernan
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580445039
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 734
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Book Description
This volume seeks to address the needs of teachers and advanced students who are preparing classes on the Middle Ages or who find themselves confounded in their studies by reference to the various liturgies that were fundamental to the lives of medieval peoples. In a series of essays, scholars of the liturgy examine The Shape of the Liturgical Year, Particular Liturgies, The Physical Setting of the Liturgy, The Liturgy and Books, and Liturgy and the Arts. A concluding essay, which originated in notes left behind by the late C. Clifford Flanigan, seeks to open the field, to examine liturgy within the larger and more inclusive category of ritual. The essays are intended to be introductory but to provide the basic facts and the essential bibliography for further study. They approach particular problems assuming a knowledge of medieval Europe but little expertise in liturgical studies per se.
Author: Luis Oscar Arata
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813194334
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
Along with Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal is a major exponent of the Theater of the Absurd. In this study Arrabal's plays are seen as a contemporary expression of a festive form of theater that flourished during the Middle Ages and that had its roots in the drama of Aeschylus and Aristophanes. With this view of Arrabal's work, Luis Arata explores the nature of play in art in the light of Jean Piaget's psychology. He thus offers a new way to approach festive and playful art.
Author: Peter Dronke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521727650
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Nine outstanding plays composed during the period of the finest flowering of medieval Latin drama.
Author: Thomas Forrest Kelly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521401609
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
It is the variation in plainsong, its living quality, that these essays address.
Author: Francesco Stella
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027247293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 726
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Book Description
The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.
Author: John Dickinson Haines
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521765749
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Ranging from 500 to 1200, this book considers the neglected vernacular music of this period, performed mainly by women.
Author: Ronald W. Vince
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 421
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Book Description
Vince has provided a useful and, for the most part, usable reference work. His introduction should be required reading for anyone approaching medieval theater. Choice Scholars increasingly see medieval theatre as a complex and vital performance medium related more closely to political, religious, and social life than to literature as we know it. Reflecting the current interest in performance, A Companion to the Medieval Theatre presents 250 alphabetically arranged entries offering a panoramic view of European and British theatrical productions between the years 900 and 1550. The volume features 30 essays contributed by an international group of specialists and includes many shorter entries as well as systematic cross-referencing, a chronology, a bibliography, and a full complement of indexes. Major entries focus on the theatres of the principal linguistic areas (the British Isles, France, Germany, Iberia, Italy, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and Eastern Europe), and on dramatic forms and genres such as liturgical drama, Passion and saint plays, morality plays, folk drama, and Humanist drama. Other articles examine costume, acting, pageantry, and music, and explore the theatrical dimension of courtly entertainment, the dance, and the tournament. Short entries supply information on over one hundred playwrights, directors, actors and antiquarians whose contributions to the theatre have been documented. This informative guide brings new depth to our appreciation of the richness and color of medieval public entertainments and the symbolism and pageantry that were a part of daily life in the Middle Ages. Designed to appeal to general reader, this volume is also an attractive choice for libraries serving students and scholars of theatre history, English and European literatures, medieval history, cultural history, drama, and performance.
