The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture

Coletti, Theresa

doi:10.1215/10829636-2007-012

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In trying to assess readers’ tastes, literary scholars have focused on the early modern reception of medieval authors, texts, and genres – for example, in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England , Gordon McMullan and David Matthews note that the early modern period defined itself in many ways through its response to, dependence on, and interpretation of medieval texts such as Chaucer’s (6) 7 . Similarly, Theresa Coletti has recently demonstrated in her study of the Chester plays that medieval drama was especially adaptable to post‐Reformation audiences who appreciated its grounding in Biblical text and forms 8 . In Reform and Cultural Revolution , James Simpson attributes the differences between medieval and early modern cultural practices to the “newly centralized power” in both English politics and religion, noting that while some traditions died out by the mid‐sixteenth century, social changes led to aesthetic preferences that allowed modified forms of elegy, romance, hagiography, and the work of certain authors (such as Chaucer) to survive (559) 9 .…”

Section: Boke As a Medieval Book In An Early Modern Worldmentioning

confidence: 95%

A Medieval French Book in an Early Modern English World: Christine de Pisan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames and Women Readers in the Age of Print

Long

2012

Literature Compass

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The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes is Bryan Anslay’s 1521 translation of Christine de Pisan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. Its form as an English printed book had implications for its readership and reception: Christine’s emphases on rhetoric, reading, and scholarship dovetailed with the spread in England of more accessible books and education. Given the cultural context of the early sixteenth century – a time during which print was beginning to compete with manuscript, women were becoming an important segment of the market for books, and Protestant values were negotiating coexistence with Catholic culture – we can deduce that Anslay’s version of Christine’s text resonated more strongly with sixteenth‐century English readers than the original did with its fifteenth‐century French audience, gaining more sympathy for Christine’s goal of elevating the status of women.

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Section: Boke As a Medieval Book In An Early Modern Worldmentioning

confidence: 95%

A Medieval French Book in an Early Modern English World: Christine de Pisan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames and Women Readers in the Age of Print

Long

2012

Literature Compass

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“…Crucial early modern encounters with medieval dramatic texts, however, tell a more complex story, illustrating how the borders between medieval and early modern cultural performances were fluidly traversed. Indeed, these encounters point to the very artificiality of the border itself as a salient critical category for the history of early English theater (see Clopper 2001;Coletti 2007;Dillon 2006;Emmerson 1999 andParker 2007;Watkins 2003;2008).…”

Section: Theresa Coletti and Gail Mcmurray Gibsonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Medievalism in English Renaissance Literature

Williams

2010

A Companion to Tudor Literature

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The term "medieval" is the creation of the nineteenth-century Swiss historian, Jakob Butckhardt, whose argu ment for the Renaissance required a conception of the Middle Ages to define what came before it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the terms "medieval" and "medievalism" appear first in the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, and A. W. N. Pugin, tying them to the nostalgia and aesthetic ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Gothic Revival, and the Arts and Crafts movement. The alternative term for the period is the "Middle Ages," first used by John Foxe, according to the OED, in his work of Protestant martyrology, Actes and Monuments of the English Martyrs (1570). Foxe refers to the pre-Reformation period as "the middle age," which he describes as "the primitive tyme of the church." Foxe is translating a Latin term, medium aevum, devised by Petrarch and other humanists ro denote the period between the ancients and the moderns ro describe England's Catholic past.Medievalism and the idea of the Middle Ages are retrospective inventions, having less to do with the qualities of the period itself than with the agendas of those who seek to describe it. According ro Brian Stock's oft-quoted formulation:The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications "the Middle Ages" thus consti tute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world. (Stock 1990: 69) Whether we regard the period through the nostalgic eyes of a Ruskin or Rossetti or, following Foxe, as a primitive time, our views of the Middle Ages are conditioned by certain value judgments. In Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350-1547, James Simpson argues that prevailing definitions of the Middle Ages are the result of Reformist institutions and policies of Henry VIII that erlacted a contraction and Simplification of the medieval literary culture that preceded it, producing a specific notion of the period and establishing strict boundaries between it and the Renaissance.

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“…The play then would have exhibited an 'openness to alignment with conflicting religious and doctrinal positions' similar to that noticed in the Chester cycle of plays by Theresa Coletti, who credits this openness with the cycle's continued performance through the mid-to-late sixteenth century. 119 As accommodating as this staging choice would have been, the Bakers' representation of the bread as a loaf or loaves would in some respects have affected its potentially diverse audience members similarly, calling to mind contexts other than the ecclesiastical and liturgical. Lee Palmer Wandel, analyzing a pair of woodcuts depicting the Last Supper printed on the title pages of two of Zwingli's works on the mass, 120 notes the absence in these images of components commonly seen in traditional depictions of the event: 'Gone is the carefully molded eucharist wafer, whose size, shape, and composition were carefully regulated.…”

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confidence: 99%

York Bakers and Their Play of the Last Supper

Groeneveld¹

2019

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This article reconsiders the York Bakers’ pageant ‘The Last Supper’: both the play’s representation of the biblical narrative and possible reasons for removal of a leaf from the text as recorded in the York register. Noting the play’s uninterrupted production throughout the protracted Reformation, I argue that the pageant likely represented the bread shared by Christ and his disciples as a common loaf rather than as eucharistic wafers. This style of representation makes sense of the pageant’s guild ascription but challenges current assumptions about why dialogue and action were eventually excised from the written text of the play.

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The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

A Medieval French Book in an Early Modern English World: Christine de Pisan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames and Women Readers in the Age of Print

A Medieval French Book in an Early Modern English World: Christine de Pisan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames and Women Readers in the Age of Print

Medievalism in English Renaissance Literature

York Bakers and Their Play of the Last Supper

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