Tout, dans l'inscription littéraire médiévale, paraît échapper à la conception moderne du texte, à la pensée textuaire.—Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante (42)Everything about medieval literary inscription seems to elude the modern conception of the text, of textual thought.The history of the book is everywhere. Intersecting with the thoroughgoing historicism that has dominated scholarly conversation in the last several decades, the study of material texts has flourished in all fields of literary study. An already vast bibliography is growing exponentially as graduate courses in the history of the book proliferate, universities establish centers for those who study material texts, presses publish series dedicated to book history, and more and more scholars recognize the fascination of studying anything “… and the book.” This field of inquiry has been newly codified, not only within numerous institutional structures but also in the most etymological sense, for codify ultimately derives, through code, from codex. Scholars of book history are eager to excavate the codes that are embedded within the codex—that is, more generally, the systems of thought that are both revealed and created by the physical structures through which ideas are expressed. Their true subject is neither the disembodied poem floating free of its material support nor the nuts and bolts of quiring and print runs but “the sociology of texts,” in D. F. McKenzie's memorable phrase (Bibliography). The history of the book thus offers scholars their own kind of system, for it draws methodologies together with theories in a particularly compelling way.
The study of Middle English drama has long been dominated by discussion of the cycle plays, the sweeping multi‐part pageants of biblical history that were performed yearly in cities such as York. But those cycle plays form only part of a complicated and rich culture of performance in late‐medieval England. This essay seeks to provide a sense of the variety of that culture, attesting to the breadth of medieval English drama in play texts such as Mankind, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and the Digby Mary Magdalene, and also in other kinds of performance record, such as dramatic fragments and prose meditations. For the broadening of medieval theater history beyond the cycle plays includes not only other significant genres of dramatic activity, but also performative practices and literary texts that lie relatively far from the stage. A theater history beyond the cycle plays also necessarily becomes a theater history beyond the theater, as scholars write a new history of medieval performance.
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