2 - Medieval Latin music-drama

Summary

Major difficulties confront anyone who wishes to survey the scholarship on medieval drama, especially on the so-called liturgical drama. One can, of course, go to the library, use the standard bibliographies to generate a listing of everything published on the subject, read and digest these pieces of research and then simply report on the present state of the question. But if someone really were naively to undertake such a simple procedure, he or she would immediately recognise how imprecise the designation ‘medieval Latin drama’ is. In a survey of scholarship on the liturgical drama published over a decade ago (1975–6), I discussed more than 100 items, only twelve of which were listed in the annual ‘definitive’ bibliographies published by the Modern Language Association. The primary reason for this seeming lack of attention to the medieval music-drama is that the MLA bibliography is devoted to literary studies, but much of the work undertaken on this subject has been carried out within the framework of other disciplines, especially musical history and liturgiology. The standard bibliographies in these areas must therefore be consulted. When one attempts to undertake this task and bring together the work of scholars in disparate academic disciplines on what might appear to be the same subject, new difficulties arise, however. There is, first of all, the extremely unfortunate fact that literary scholars usually fail to consult the work of their musicological counterparts; similarly, few historians of music are known for their enthusiasm for literary scholarship.