Newest research into drama and performance of the middle ages. 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 mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. This volume features essays on stagecraft, performance, and reception across a wide range of theatrical genres. Overlapping themes include a return to the York Corpus Christi Play, the practicalities of pageant waggon construction and maintenance, mechanical stage effects, international influences, East Anglian theatre and "folk" happenings, academic Latin drama, and private gentry festivities. Contributors include Jamie Beckett, Phil Butterworth, Peter Happe, James McBain, Tom Pettitt, James Stokes, and Diana Wyatt.

This collection situates the North-East within a developing nationwide account of British musical culture. Music in North-East England provides a wide-ranging exploration of musical life in the North-East of England during the early modern period. It contributes to a growing number of studies concerned with developing a nationwide account of British musical culture. By defining the North-East in its widest sense, the collection illuminates localised differences, distinct musical cultures in urban centres and rural locations, as well as region-wide networks, and situates regional musical life in broader national and international contexts. Music in North-East England affords new insights into aspects of musical life that have been the focus of previous studies of British musical life - such as public concerts - but also draws attention to aspects that have attracted less scholarly attention in histories of early modern British musical culture: the musical activities and tastes of non-elite consumers; interactions between art music and cheap print and popular song; music education beyond London and its satellite environs; the recovery of northern urban soundscapes; and the careers of professional musicians who have not previously been the focus of major published musicological studies.

The Yearbook of English Studies 2013 is devoted to early English drama, ranging from what is generally understood as 'medieval' to plays of the early Tudor period, while also including chapters on modern theatrical responses to the surviving corpus of texts. The volume is edited by Pamela King (Professor of English at the University of Glasgow), Sue Niebrzydowski (Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Bangor University, Wales) and Diana Wyatt (Research Associate at the University of Durham). This rich and varied collection is deliberately loosely ordered in order to encourage the reader to think again about the old canonical categories, particularly 'mysteries' and 'moralities'. The authors lead the reader to engage with recent scholarship in the field which has, for example, drawn on archival research into lost plays to question old certainties about genre, about chronology, and about evolution, and which has taken another look at surviving texts in ways that resist categorization, and found them to be more problematic than hitherto assumed. This volume does not aim to offer coverage of new work in a known field, so there is, for example, no essay dedicated to the York Cycle, although references to it are shot through the whole. Rather, individual chapters reflect not only their authors' specialist sub-fields but also a variety of approaches, from the study of sources and the materiality of surviving witnesses to the texts, to various critical readings and approaches, to studies in the history of staging. In addition, essays on modern productions stake the claim for a new and distinct area in the study of medievalism, as modern authors and producers draw inspiration from the original early scripts. The reader will encounter old favourites in this volume - the Towneley Plays, the Chester Cycle, The Castle of Perseverance, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, to name a few - as well as Bewnans Ke, the Cornish saint's play discovered only in 1999, and an intriguing mixture of hagiography and Arthuriana. Equally, the reader will be led to reconsider some lesser-read texts and to encounter traces of wonderful plays which have been lost forever. Overall, the volume seeks to engage with a dramatic tradition which was at once richer and more varied than has been conventionally imagined.