Research Guides: Medieval Drama: Finding Books

Subject Headings

Subject headings are words and phrases which constitute a "controlled vocabulary" to categorize books by subject field. Subject headings often indicate the contents of books in terms that their titles do not use, which often may be very general. Subject headings in online databases are often referred to as descriptors, but they serve the same purpose in locating valuable resources.

Use general subject headings for searching a broad topic or more specific subject headings for a specific text, film, or play.

You will find (more) headings specific to the subject category within the left-hand facets in our online catalog. If you want to see the subject headings for a specific title, click on the "details" link in the title record.

Here are some subject headings you may want to try:

English drama - To 1500 - History and criticism
French drama - To 1500 - History and criticism
Mysteries and miracle-plays, English
Theater - England - History - Medieval , 500-1500
Theater and society - England - History and criticism
Theatre audiences - England - History - To 1500

The term "England" is used in many of these subject headings, but you could easily change that to another location.

Books in the Stacks

Medieval Drama by David M. Bevington
The Cambridge companion to medieval English theatre by Richard Beadle
Provides an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays.
Moral play and counterpublic: transformations in moral drama, 1465-1599 by Ineke Murakami
In this study, Murakami overturns the misconception that popular English morality plays were simple medieval vehicles for disseminating conservative religious doctrine. This book demonstrates how the genre’s apparently inert conventions—from allegorical characters to the battle between good and evil for Mankind’s soul—veiled critical explorations of topical issues.
Street scenes: late medieval acting and performance by Sharon Aronson-Lehavi
Street Scenes offers a theory of late medieval acting and performance through a fresh and original reading of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. The performance theory perspective employed here, along with the examination of actor/character dialectics, paves the way to understanding both religious theatre and the complexity of late medieval theatricalities.
The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City by Margaret Rogerson
This volume provides a wealth of new insights into the performance of mystery plays in medieval York and their modern revival. It utilises both academic study, and the practical experience of those who now produce the cycle within York itself on wagons in the street, in an approximation of their original performance.
The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama by Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian
The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.
Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances by Phyllis Brown
Hrotsvit was the first dramatist of Christianity, the first female Saxon poet, the first Germanic author to employ the Faust theme, and one of the first Western writers to compose a Christian epic. The essays in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim examine the historical, cultural, legal, and political contexts of Hrotsvit's works, locating her opus within the tenth-century aristocratic and clerical intellectual milieu.
The York Corpus Christi play: selected pageants
Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Mark Cruse
his volume offers a panoramic mosaic of the world-making role of theater and performance in medieval and early modern European societies. This volume is a contribution to the cross-cultural study of theater and performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The studies gathered here examine material from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Spain from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.

Non-English Medieval Drama

Medieval French plays by Richard Axton
A history of theatre in Spain by Maria M. Delgado
Leading theater historians and practitioners map a theatrical history that moves from the religious tropes of Medieval Iberia to the postmodern practices of twenty-first-century Spain. Considering work across the different languages of Spain, from vernacular Latin to Catalan, Galician and Basque, this history engages with the work of actors and directors, designers and publishers, agents and impresarios, and architects and ensembles, in indicating the ways in which theater has both commented on and intervened in the major debates and issues of the day.
The farce of the fart and other ribaldries : twelve medieval French plays in modern English by Jody Enders
For medievalists, theater practitioners, and classic comedy lovers alike, Enders provides a wealth of information about the plays and their history. Helpful details abound for each play about plot, character development, sets, staging, costumes, and props. This performance-friendly collection offers in-depth guidance to actors, directors, dramaturges, teachers, and their students.
Three Florentine Sacre Rappresentazioni by Michael O'Connell; Feo Belcari; Castellano Castellani
Religious drama and the humanist tradition : Christian theater in Germany and in the Netherlands, 1500-1680 by James A. Parente
La festa et storia di Sancta Caterina : a medieval Italian religious drama by Anne Wilson Tordi
The Festa et storia is singular in that it is one of only two known medieval Italian plays about this saint, and it is structured to be performed over a three-day period. This religious play, or sacra rappresentazione, is analyzed in the context of medieval lay confraternities and of earlier treatments of Catherine's legend in Italy. The linguistic and literary aspects of the text reflect its place in the popular literary tradition of late medieval Siena. Also, the primary Latin source of the Festa et storia and many other Romance vernacular recensions, BHL 1663, is provided in English translation.
Performing bodies in pain: medieval and post-modern martyrs, mystics, and artists by Marla Carlson
The urgent debate about torture in public discourse of the twenty-first century thrusts pain into the foreground while research in neuroscience is transforming our understanding of this fundamental human experience. In late-medieval France, a country devastated by the Black Death, torn by civil strife, and strained by the Hundred Year’s War with England, the notion of pain shifted within the conceptual frameworks provided by theology and medicine. Performing Bodies in Pain analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering during these two periods, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Facsimiles of Medieval Manuscripts at Bobst Library

Bobst Library's holdings of Old English and Middle English manuscripts in facsimile, and also notes the guides and indices which accompany these holdings.

N.B.: Not all series are complete. Where indicated, the order request date has been included.

The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Facsimile of MS Bodley 175. R. M. Lumiansky & David Mills, eds. 1973.
- PR1260.C36 1973 Oversize
The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2124. David Mills, ed. 1984.
- PR1261.C54 1984 Oversize
The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Reduced Facsimile of Huntington Library MS 2. R. M. Lumiansky & David Mills, eds. 1980.
- PR1261.C52 1980 Oversize
The Digby Plays: Facsimiles of the Plays in Bodley MS Digby 133 and e Museo 160. Donald C. Baker & J. L. Murphy, eds. 1976.
- PR1260.D49 1976
The N-Town Plays: A Facsimile of British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.VIII. Peter Meredith & Stanley J. Kahrl, eds. 1977.
- PR1260.C64 1977
Non-Cycle Plays and the Winchester Dialogues: Facsimiles of Plays and Fragments. Norman Davis, ed. 1979.
- PR1260.N66 Oversize
The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM I. A. C. Cawley & Martin Stevens, eds.
- PR1260.T65 1976b Oversize
The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290. . . . Richard Beadle & Peter Meredith, eds. 1983.
- PR1261.Y67 1983 Oversize