York's Corpus Christi plays and the making of the city.

摘要

My dissertation investigates the social and political implications of the Corpus Christi plays that were performed in the city of York during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Drawing on an in-depth investigation of the civic archives, my study places the writing of the plays in dialogue with the writing of the city. Through careful scrutiny of the difficulties involved in these twin projects, dramatic and documentary, I describe how the work of representing the body of Christ engaged with the problem of articulating the social body of the city.;Performing scripture in the city streets, the plays provided an arena for highly charged yet subtly coded debates over the constitution and representation of the civic community. In particular, my research indicates that York's Corpus Christi drama played a key part in the often vexed negotiations between the city's municipal government and royal and ecclesiastical authorities. At the same time, it reveals how the plays engaged with conflicts within the civic community itself, such as the recurring disputes between York's mayor and aldermen, who claimed the authority to direct the city as the head directs the body, and confederacies of citizens who held that the governance of the city should be shared by all members of the civic "body corporate.".;Reconstructing the interaction between sacred drama and civic history, I consider how the portrayal of Lucifer as the "master and mirror" of God's might interrogated structures of power and privilege in the city; how the depiction of Joseph's doubts about Mary critiqued anxieties about "mysgoverned women" while playing upon links between womanly virtue, domestic tranquility, and civic harmony; and how the performance of the Passion entered into dialogue with the theatricality of public executions while exploring the spatial poetics of factional conflict. My work suggests the broader importance of festive play as a matrix of literary and cultural activity and in particular as a scene of complex interactions between ecclesiastical tradition and developing forms of vernacular authorship. One of its broadest aims is to provoke new evaluations of urban experience during the transition from medieval to early modern culture.