The Current State of Research on Late-Medieval Drama: 2005–2007. Survey, Bibliography, and Reviews

Summary

This article is a regular feature of “Fifteenth-Century Studies.” Our intent is 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 2007 again in the next listing. Our readers are encouraged to bring new items to our attention, including their own work. Monographs and collections selected for detailed review will appear in the third section of this article and will be marked by an asterisk in the pages below.

On late-medieval theater in general we report that the periodical European Medieval Drama,* in its seventh, eighth, and ninth volumes, highlights the thespian activities of many countries. Also, on a more theoretic note, an article in Comparative Drama and a monograph are devoted to the origins of theater. Steven F. Walker probes India and Greece before Christ and muses whether staging was a global phenomenon then, where actors performed scenic events in ritual or entertainment, watched by (passive) spectators. The monograph of Eli Rozik rethinks similar origins, where fictional human beings were “imprinted upon” real persons, a process beginning in rituals. Spontaneous image-making exploited the actors' mimetic faculties — in Rozik's book Roots of Theater. While Donnalee Dox studies the theater in Latin Christian times, beginning with Augustine's, Isidore of Seville's, and Rabanus Maurus's objections against the stage, she also considers attempts at reworking pagan into Christian drama. William Egginton tells us “how the world became a stage.”