Essays on festive drama - plays, pageantry and traditional ceremonies - of the European middle ages, with comparative material. Festive drama, in these studies, includes processions and folk-customs as well as full-blown plays, from Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, and Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). The main focus is the middleages, but style and approach are as relevant as time-scale, reflecting a culture in which there are no firm divisions between drama and pageantry and traditional ceremonies. Common themes emerge: the world turned upside-down of Shrovetide; the emotive power of religious celebration; and the links between commerce and the demonstration of civic pride. Festive customs are viewed as hidden agendas of popular culture, and performances are reconstructed. Thisis the obverse of art and power: the means by which the people, not the princes, rule the world. Professor MEG TWYCROSS teaches at the Department of English at Lancaster University. Contributors: PETER H. GREENFIELD, OLGA HORNER, SHEILA LINDENBAUM, CLAIRE SPONSLER, RONALD E. SURTZ, RAFAEL PORTILLO, MANUEL J. GOMEZ LARA, PAMELA M. KING, ROBERT POTTER, JOHN CARTWRIGHT, DAVID MILLS, JAMES STOKES, ALAN E. KNIGHT, MARJOKE DE ROOS, FEMKE KRAMER, TOM PETTITT, LEIF SNDERGAARD, WIM HUESKEN, JEAN-MARC PASTREE, SALLY-BETH MACLEAN, MALCOLM JONES, CHRISTINE RICHARDSON, JARMILA F. VELTRUSKY, JOHN COLDEWEY.

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.

Essays on the performance of drama from the Middle Ages, ranging from the well-known cycles of York to matter from Iran. 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. Theatrical performance is central to the groups and communities discussed in this volume, and to their particular and local expressions of faith. The articles presented explore the drama of a variety of different communities from religious orders and houses, through local, medieval and post-medieval lay communities, to contemporary worshippers. Contributors examine complex relationships between theatrical performance and faith, understanding religious theatre as a mode of worship and a method of exploring belief, as well as a site for the study of synchronous and asynchronous connections and fractures within communities. Particular topics addressed include the fragments of play-scripts surviving from the monastery at Mont-St-Michel; the Barking Abbey Easter celebrations; and how the sixteenth-century community which owned the surviving copy of the Towneley plays might have understood them in relation to their own faith. The volume is completed with an exploration of traditional Iranian religious theatre from an ethnographic perspective, in a bid to uncover and understand its very particular effects on the contemporary communities who perform and attend it in the twenty-first century. ELISABETH DUTTON and OLIVA ROBINSON run the Medieval Convent Drama project, based at the University of Fribourg and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which provides the impetus for this special issue of Medieval English Theatre. Contributors: Aurelie Blanc, Eleanor Lucy Deacon, George Gandy, Camille Marshall, James Stokes

Had Will Alexander not shunned the limelight, he might already be a national legend, for he was one of the greatest white champions of the Negro cause in the South from 1915 to 1954. A farm boy who worked his way through Vanderbilt University and became a Methodist minister, he was a tireless enemy of the abuses, large and petty, which he saw around him. In 1919 Will Alexander helped establish the Commission on Interracial Co-operation in Atlanta. During the Depression he became assistant administrator of the Resettlement Administration and, later, director of the Farm Security Administration; under his supervision, the tide was finally turned against the spread of sharecropping. In World War II he served as adviser on minority problems to the War Manpower Commission. He was the driving force in founding Dillard and Atlanta universities. These were some of his achievements in public life. In addition, he helped and encouraged individual Negroes such as Marian Anderson, Ralphe Bunche, and Robert Weaver and influenced eminent white southerners, including Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, and Brooks Hays. His real impact must be measured also in the numbers of southerners giving leadership today who owe to him their start in the fight against prejudice.