The Medieval Archive and the History of Theatre: Assessing the Written and Unwritten Evidence for Premodern Performance

Symes, Carol

doi:10.1017/s0040557411000056

Cited by 17 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…10 In 1567, a village near the northern outlet of the Mont Cenis Pass, Lanslevillard, orchestrated the performance of a traditional mystery play, the Mystère de Saint Sébastian, in honor of the saint frequently invoked in times of plague. This two-day dramatic event was probably based on a much older template (Symes 2011) scripted in the early fifteenth century, before the painting of the murals in Lanslevillard's chapel of Saint-Sébastien (1446-1518, which also document this village's long experience of recurrent plague outbreaks (see Plate 2 on page 230). Other performances of plays dedicated to that saint were mounted elsewhere in the Maurienne in the mid-1560s, as they had been a generation earlier, when the plague last circulated there.…”

Section: Endemic Plague In Alpine Europe During the 1560smentioning

confidence: 99%

Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis

Carmichael¹

2015

TMG

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Historical sources documenting recurrent plagues of the “Second Pandemic” usually focus on urban epidemic mortality. Instead, plague persists in remote, rural hinterlands: areas less visible in the written sources of late medieval Europe. Plague spreads as fleas move from relatively resistant rodents, which serve as “maintenance hosts,” to an array of more susceptible rural mammals, now called “amplifying hosts.” Using sources relevant to plague in thinly populated Central and Western Alpine regions, this paper postulates that Alpine Europe could have been a region of plague persistence via its population of wild rodents, particularly the Alpine marmot.

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Section: Endemic Plague In Alpine Europe During the 1560smentioning

confidence: 99%

Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis

Carmichael¹

2015

TMG

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“…10 In 1567, a village near the northern outlet of the Mont Cenis Pass, Lanslevillard, orches trated the performance of a traditional mystery play, the Mystère de Saint Sébastian, in honor of the saint frequently invoked in times of plague. This twoday dramatic event was probably based on a much older template (Symes 2011) scripted in the early fifteenth century, before the painting of the murals in Lanslevillard's chapel of Saint-Sébastien (1446-1518, which also document this village's long experience of recurrent plague outbreaks (see Plate 2 on page 230). Other performances of plays dedi cated to that saint were mounted elsewhere in the Maurienne in the mid 1560s, as they had been a generation earlier, when the plague last circu lated there.…”

Section: Endemic Plague In Alpine Europe During the 1560smentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World

Symes¹,

Green²

2015

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I will refer to this as the 2014 outbreak, even though evidence suggests it began in late 2013 and, at the time of writing, gives every sign of continuing well into 2015. GLObE 1 (2014) pp. ix-xx 6 Van der Waals et al. (1986) and Knobloch et al. (1982), neither of which were cited by Schoepp et al. (2014), which found nearly comparable levels of seroprevalence of Ebola antibodies. Cf. Becquart et al. (2010) for a similar study of Gabon based on samples taken in 2006-08. Importantly, scientists have noted for more than a decade that major dieoffs were occurring from Ebola in primate populations in West Central Africa; see Muyembe-Tamfum et al. 2012. Saéz et al. (2014/2015, however, found no evidence of such dieoffs in primate or other nonbat populations in the area of Guinea where the 2014 outbreak is thought to have begun. ThE MEdIEvALxvi PREFACE There is an important trend now in historical studies: not only to move analysis beyond the limits of the nationstate and even the human organ ism, but also to move it into deeper time scales. Although some diseases (like malaria and various kinds of parasites) have likely been with humans for many millennia (e.g., Webb forthcoming), increasing congregations of human populations into urban settlements have amplified the impact of infectious diseases in a shorter timescale, perhaps some 4,000 to 6,000 years, in both the Old World and the New. No definitive shift separates us from that history of increasing urbanization and the networking of human communities through longdistance trade. Granted, the revolution in sci entific understanding of infectious diseases brought about by the great late nineteenthcentury revelations of germ theory did put us on a whole new footing with respect to understanding infectious disease. But only one infectious disease has since been thoroughly eradicated (smallpox). Malaria and tuberculosis are still high on the list of the world's killers; plague, as we have noted, is embedded in the landscapes of four conti nents, still regularly producing outbreaks in Madagascar, Peru, Vietnam, Central Africa, and China; cholera still rears its head in any number of places, most recently in Haiti and Ghana. And for all of these diseases, antibiotic resistance is weakening the arsenal of defenses we have. Ebola's "small" numbers or (currently) limited geography should not, therefore, in any way be dismissed. Rather, we should think of this as a realtime les son in how local diseases become global.Recent comparisons of Ebola and plague have often been accompa nied by an implicit shudder of horror: "How medieval." Yes, the practice of quarantine-so discredited when it was invoked by the Liberian gov ernment in August 2014 in its own capital of Monrovia, and implicitly by many other nations as they closed their borders to travellers from West Africa and cut off air transport-is medieval in its origins, even if prac tices of segregation and exclusion of suspected infectious persons are much older (Grmek 1980). Yes, the sight of bodies being piled in stre...

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“…Thinking more broadly about where to look for evidence of theatricality and how to understand what constitutes performance has revealed new sources for understanding medieval theater generally (e.g., Sponsler). Carol Symes has demonstrated that plays do not always advertise themselves as such in the medieval records; read carefully and imaginatively, the archive reveals much more than might be at first supposed (“Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays”; A Common Stage , “Medieval Archive”). Her focus is the theatrical records of thirteenth‐century Arras, but late‐medieval England, too, offers dramatic material in unforeseen places.…”

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confidence: 99%

Middle English Drama Beyond the Cycle Plays

Brantley

2013

Literature Compass

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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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The Medieval Archive and the History of Theatre: Assessing the Written and Unwritten Evidence for Premodern Performance

Cited by 17 publications

References 42 publications

Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis

Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis

Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World

Middle English Drama Beyond the Cycle Plays

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