Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain

What was playing on stage at a medieval or early modern festival was not always a matching accessory. Its content may not reflect the appropriate feast day, for example, or its manner of presentation may include unexpected or untraditional elements, such as local history. Further, documentation of such plays as presented is hard to come by and sometimes ambiguous. However, Davidson (English and medieval studies emeritus, Western Michigan U.) produces fascinating insights from lean material, explaining why such anomalies and ambiguities, resulting from tenets of faith and sheer practicality, became essential to communication of secular power and belief. In doing so he reviews the "landscape" of playing at such festivals and then focuses on two examples of medieval drama, the symbolic engagement with the suffering of the Christ in the York Corpus Christi plays and the mystical and meditative traditions invoked by the Bodley Christ's Burial and Christ's Resurrection. Annotation 穢2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)