The Current State of Research on Late-Medieval Drama: 1998–2000. Survey, Bibliography, and Reviews

Summary

This article is a regular feature of ‘Fifteenth-Century Studies.’ Our intent was to catalogue, survey, and assess scholarship on the staging and textual configuration of dramatic presentations in the late Middle Ages. Like all such dated material this assessment remains incomplete. We shall therefore include 2000 again in the next listing [vol. 29]. Our readers are encouraged to bring new items to our attention, including their own work. Monographs and collections selected for detailed review will appear either in the third section of this article or in the years indicated here by digits in parentheses.

After discussing general work on medieval theater we shall turn to England, as usual. Perhaps the most outstanding general work is the yearly collection of articles, which have so far appeared, in European Medieval Drama, edited by Sydney Higgins (here marked EMD), which will be reviewed in 00–02. We think that this project is long overdue, since contributions on England have now been accompanied by those on other countries, in a reasonable proportion. Meg Twycross edited Festive Drama, a collection focused mainly on England (reviewed in this article), Jelle Koopmans wrote on the theater of the excluded (heretics, sorcerers, and social outcasts, also reviewed here), Alan Knight on civic theater, and Konrad Schoell on the historical stage of the fifteenth century, where exemplary situations became models for human conduct.