Newest research into drama and performance of the Middle Ages and Tudor period. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays , and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. The papers in this volume explore richly interlocking topics. Themes of royalty and play continue from Volume 43. We have the first in-depth examination of the employment of the now-famous Black Tudor trumpeter, John Blanke, at the royal courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. An entertaining survey of the popular European game of blanket-tossing accompanies the translation of a raucous, sophisticated, but surprisingly humane Dutch rederijkers farce. The Towneley plays remain fertile ground for further research, and this blanket-tossing farce illuminates a key scene of the well-known Second Shepherd's Play. New exploration of a colloquial reference to 'Stafford Blue' in another Towneley pageant, Noah, not only enlivens the play's social context but contributes to important current re-thinking of the manuscript's date. Two papers bring home the theatrical potential of food and eating. We learn how the Tudor interlude Jacob and Esau dramatises the preparation and provision of food from the Genesis story. Serving and eating meals becomes a means of social, theological, and theatrical manipulation. Contrastingly, in the N. Town Last Supper play and a French convent drama, we see how the bread of Passover, the Last Supper, and the Mass could be evoked, layered and shared in performance. In both these plays the audiences' experiences of theatre and of communion overlap and inform each other.

An exploration of the contours imposed on physical punishment by education, establishing how pedagogues accommodated violence into a system of rules, rituals and objectives. What meanys shall I use to lurne withoute betynge?, asks a pupil in a translation exercise compiled at Oxford in 1460s. One of the most conspicuous features of medieval education is its reliance on flogging. Throughout the period, the rod looms large in literary and artistic depictions of the schoolroom: it appears in teaching manuals, classroom exercises, and even in the iconography of instruction, which invariably personifies Grammatica as a woman brandishing a birch or ferule. However, as this book seeks to demonstrate, the association between teaching and beating was more than simply conventional. Medieval pedagogues and theorists did not merely accept the utility of punishment without question, but engaged with the issue in depth and detail. Almost every conceivable aspect of discipline was subject to intense scrutiny: the benefits it might transmit to learners, the relationship between mental development and physical correction, and the optimal ways in which chastisement should be performed, were all carefully examined. This book unpicks the various levels of this debate. It surveys material from multiple languages and discourses, in order to build up the fullest possible picture of medieval thought and practice. Each chapter addresses a specific aspect of punishment in school: topics include the classical inheritance of medieval teaching, therituals and structures of discipline, theoretical accounts of its effects, and the responses of students themselves to grammar's regimen. As a whole, the study not only exposes the impressive rigour with which beating was defined, but also some of the doubts, paradoxes, and even anxieties that surrounded its usage. At the same time, it also raises larger questions about the presence of violence across medieval culture, and how we might confront it withoutplaying into the reductive stereotype of "a barbaric age". BEN PARSONS is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Leicester.

Text and translation of comic plays sheds light on a fascinating era of theatrical production. `[Opens] up an entirely new corpus of texts for scholars and readers familar with and interested in European dramatic texts from this period, but who have heretofore not had access to them due to the language barrier.' Professor David F. Johnson, Florida State University, Tallahassee During the Middle Ages and early modern period, a dramatic culture of astonishing vitality developed in the Low Countries. Owing to the activities of organisationsknown as rederijkerskamers, or "chambers of rhetoric", drama became a central aspect of public life in the cities of the Netherlands. The comedies produced by these groups are particularly interesting. Drawing their forms and narratives from folklore and popular ritual, and entertaining in their own right, they also bring together a range of important concerns; they respond directly to some of the key developments in the period, reflecting the political and religious turmoil of the Reformation and Dutch Revolt, the emergence of humanism, and the appearance of an early capitalist economy. This collection brings together the original Middle Dutch text of ten of these comic plays, with facing translation into modern English. The selection is divided evenly between formal stage-plays and monologues, and provides a representation of the full range of rederijker drama, from the sophisticatedFarce of the Fisherman, with its sly undermining of audience expectation, to the hearty scatology of A Mock-Sermon on Saint Nobody, and the grim gallows humour of The Farce of the Beggar. An introduction and notes place the plays in their context and elucidate difficulties of interpretation. Ben Parsons is Teaching Fellow at the University of Leicester; Bas Jongenelen is teacher of Dutch Literature at Fontys Lerarenopleidingin Tilburg.