Author: Theresa Coletti
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
A sinner-saint who embraced then renounced sexual and worldly pleasures; a woman who, through her attachment to Jesus, embodied both erotic and sacred power; a symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in later medieval England was cultural preoccupation with the Magdalene stronger than in fifteenth-century East Anglia. Looking to East Anglian texts including the N-Town Plays, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, and Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women, Theresa Coletti explores how the gendered symbol of Mary Magdalene mediates tensions between masculine and feminine spiritual power, institutional and individual modes of religious expression, and authorized and unauthorized forms of revelation and sacred speech. Using the Digby play Mary Magdalene as her touchstone, Coletti engages a wide variety of textual and visual resources to make evident the discursive and material ties of East Anglian dramatic texts and feminine religion to broader traditions of cultural commentary and representation. In bringing the disciplinary perspectives of literary history and criticism, gender studies, and social and religious history to bear on specific local instances of dramatic practice, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints highlights the relevance of Middle English dramatic discourse to the dynamic religious climate of late medieval England. In doing so, the book decisively challenges the marginalization of drama within medieval English studies, elucidates vernacular theater's kinship with influential late medieval religious texts and institutions, and articulates the changing possibilities for sacred representation in the decades before the Reformation.
Author: Fr. Sean Davidson
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1621640922
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Adoration is love, and eucharistic adoration is love of Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament. In the Gospels there are few people who understand love for Jesus as well as Mary Magdalene, which is the reason she is a prophetess of eucharistic love. This work is an extended meditation on the life of Saint Mary Magdalene, known as the "Apostle to the Apostles" because the Risen Christ appeared to her first and then sent her to announce the Resurrection to the apostles. Based on the biblical texts traditionally associated with Mary Magdalene, this book helps readers to learn from her inspiring example and to enter more deeply into adoration of Jesus Christ truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. In telling the story of Mary Magdalene's profound conversion after a life so steeped in sin that the Lord had to expel seven demons from her soul, this book shows how she is a shining witness to the transforming power of an encounter with Jesus Christ. Mary Magdalene is the perfect model for those who have experienced the redeeming love of Christ and who seek to deepen their devotion to him and to the Eucharist.
Author: Theresa Coletti
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580442862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene is a rare, surviving example of the Middle English saint play. It provides a window on the deep embedding of biblical drama and performance in late medieval devotional practices, social aspiration and critique, and religious discourses. Fully annotated and extensively glossed, this edition adds to the METS Drama series an essential resource for the study of late medieval English religious drama.
Author: Chester Norman Scoville
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802089441
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
Saints and heroes were often central characters in Middle English biblical plays, although scholarship has tended to focus more on the villainous than the virtuous. In this study, Chester Scoville examines how medieval playwrights portrayed saints and how they used them to convey feelings of social virtue, devotion, compassion and community in the audience. Although looking also at performance practices, costume, gesture and scenert, the main emphasis is on language and rhetoric in biblical drama and the position of saints lying between the earthly and ultimate community. Four `role models' are jeld up for close examination: Thomas the Doubter, Mary Magdalene, Jospeh and Paul.
Author: Nadia Thérèse van Pelt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042951414X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’ drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.
Author: Raymond Van Dam
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812236811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 752
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Book Description
Kingdom of Snow investigates the impact of Roman rule in Cappadocia and the fate of classical Greek culture in an increasingly Christian society.
Author: Katherine Steele Brokaw
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501705911
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England’s long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for. The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.
Author: Margaret Schaus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415969441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 986
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Book Description
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Author: Thomas Betteridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019956647X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 709
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of Tudor drama that sees the long 16th century from the accession of Henry Tudor to the death of Elizabeth as a whole, taking in the numinous drama of the 'Mystery Plays' and the early work of Shakespeare. It is an invaluable account of current scholarship and an introduction to the complexity of Tudor drama.
Author: Gina M. Di Salvo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192689967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
The age of miracles was not yet past on the Shakespearean stage. In the first book-length study of the English saint play across the Reformation divide, The Renaissance of the Saints after Reform recovers the surprisingly long theatrical life of the saints from a tenth-century monastery to the Restoration stage. Through a reassessment of archival records of performance and religious change, this book challenges the established history of the saint play as a product of medieval devotional culture that ended with the national conversion to Protestantism during the Reformation. Not only did saints in performance frequently diverge from the narratives of devotional literature during the Middle Ages but also saints made a spectacular reappearance in the theatre of the early modern era. In the rupture between those two eras, the English church separated itself from the Cult of the Saints, and saints disappeared from public view until sainthood transformed from a matter of theology into a matter of theatricality. Early modern saint plays document a post-Reformation culture committed to saints—but not all saints. Certain ancient martyrs and British saints returned to the liturgical calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. This limited inventory performed an initial de-Catholicization of these saints, but it did not recover their lives. Instead, the theatre produced new lives of the saints for the English public. A period of experimentation with saints and devils in the 1590s was followed by unprecedented innovation throughout the Stuart era. This book traces the transformation of sainthood in early modern drama from ambiguous supernatural association and negotiated patronage to a renaissance of miraculous theatricality and sacred place-making. By excavating saints in plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, and Rowley, as well as plays authored by relatively unknown dramatists, this book reconfigures how we think about the legacy of late medieval religious culture, the impact of Reformation change on literary texts and social practices, and the development of English theatre and drama.
