medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear Laura,
I can't help you with the reference, but I do have a question
about "the only gradually" part of your oversimplification.
The earliest church dramas we have from today's Italy that are of any
substantial length (i.e., longer than the very brief exchanges of the
_Quem quaeritis_ trope) are all of the twelfth century. Two of these
are relatively brief and also poorly dated: a version of the Easter
play _Peregrinus_ and the _Officium stellae_, an Epiphany play of
Herod. The provenance of both of these is Sicilian and, if memory
serves, from cathedral liturgies; they're entirely in Latin.
From the middle of the same century, though, we have, from south
central Italy, the incompletely preserved _Montecassino Passion Play_,
whose surviving text, hitherto entirely in Latin, breaks off in the
initial lines of a _planctus Mariae_ in _volgare_. And from late in
the same century we have the _Greater Carmina Burana Passion Play_, now
thought most likely to have come from a monastery in the vicinity of
Bressanone (Brixen) in the South Tirol; this has many lines in German.
It seems quite possible that, in monastic communities in some parts of
Europe, church plays partly accessible to the non-Latinate laity
developed _rapidly_. But these parts of Europe may have been
latecomers to the overall development of this genre. Was the gradual
shift of which you were speaking already taking place in the late
eleventh and very early twelfth centuries?
Best,
John Dillon
On Friday, October 14, 2005, at 8:36 am, Laura Jacobus wrote:
> In the course of somethng I'm writing at the moment, I blithely
> wrote that 'most early church dramas were originally perfomed by
> and for the clergy in the privacy of their choirs, only gradually
> becoming accessible to the laity in the nave'. Something of an
> oversimplification I know, but now I cannot find any reference to
> this idea, though I'm sure I haven't just made it up! I thought I
> got it from Young's Drama of the M/E Church, where I thought it
> was coupled with the idea was that the dramas could be understood
> as a form of participatory devotion- but can't find it there
> now! Does this idea ring any bells?
>
> Laura
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