Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays & The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550.

Sarah Beckwith. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xviii + 296 Pp. index. illus. $35. ISBN: 0-226-04134-4.

William Tydeman, ed. The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550.

(Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. lxii + 720 pp. + index. illus. bibl. $140. ISBN: 0-521-24609-1.

Although these two books differ greatly in size and content, they represent the best trends of current scholarship regarding primary source material and its interpretation. The Medieval European Stage provides a wealth of documentary evidence for medieval theater across Europe; Signifying God posits the York Corpus Christi cycle as a type of sacramental, civic theater. If the former makes available the sorts of documentary evidence lately so much in demand, then the latter exemplifies a model of scholarship that embraces these resources without compromising theoretical and textual sophsstication.

As part of the Cambridge series on documentary theater history, The Medieval European Stage provides an excellent introduction to sources from across western Europe between the sixth and the end of the sixteenth century (despite the title's stated "1550"). Primary sources in English translation for the "major medieval regions" are divided into six sections written by experts in the field: England, including Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; France; the German-speaking areas; Italy; the Low Countries; and the Iberian Peninsula (i). The geographic sections are joined by topical material on "The Inheritance" (sect. A), "Latin Liturgical Drama" (sect. B), "Extra-Liturgical Latin and Early Vernacular Drama" (sect. C), and "Traditions of the People: Customs and Folk Drama" (sect. J). A short introduction and bibliography accompany each section, offering the non-specialist and expert alike an easy window into potentially unfamiliar regions. Other useful apparatus include a timeline of the theater, a glossary of terms, and citations of the source and location of the original documents with modern publication information when available.

As befits a reference work, The Medieval European Stage treats new and controversial questions cautiously. Occasionally, this is a weakness; despite Tydeman's more subtle analysis in his introduction, the division of the subchapters returns to the old model of tension between "secular" and "religious" drama. More often, however, the reader benefits from current approaches and topical discussion, as well as up-to-date bibliographies. The editor has chosen to define drama loosely, citing E M. Salter: "It is the type of drama, rather than the period, that is in question" (16). This flexibility strengthens the book greatly. Thus, although the title of the section on folk custom and games is off-putting, the evidence it contains represents an important part of the current study of drama. In general, the material comprises a number of areas of interest, speaking to questions about costume, architectural space, sets, actors, gesture, financial arrangements, and audience response, to name but a few. Furthermore, sin ce the excerpts are in English translation they will be of special use to a field too often unfamiliar with the variety of sources available outside England; the section on Spain is a particularly welcome addition to previous efforts at "European" theater history. At its best, The Medieval European Stage enables the sort of comparative, contextualized work that should be practiced in the future.

Sarah Beckwiths Signifying God is an entirely different sort of book. It considers the York Corpus Christi plays as a form of sacramental theater, articulating cultural forms by and through the performance of the body of Christ in the Passion and Resurrection sequences. Divided into five sections with subchapters, this study reunites the theatrical and theological aspects of the plays, incorporating textual, archival, spatial, and temporal analyses to do so. In essence, Beckwith effects a massive recontextualization of this material, shaped by her interest in performance practice. She finds that the conjunction of church and theater in eucharistic performances allowed York to examine presence and absence, and thus to function as a site for ambiguity and multiple representations of the social organization. This expands upon an argument from Beckwith's 1993 book, Christ's Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings, which discussed the symbolic Christ as a model for medieval thinking about th e social order. Much like her previous book, Signifying God is concerned with questions of identity, particularly as they coalesce around the communal. Here, though, Beckwith traces the "reworking" of clerical, sacramental symbols of the eucharist and penance.

Part of the project of the book is to recapture the specifically medieval context of the York Corpus Christi cycle, and Beckwith accomplishes this by identifying and then peeling away some post-medieval accretions. She bookends the study with a consideration of modern performance history, but her work on the impact of the Reformation and its legacy for modern scholarship will be of particular importance. By deconstructing the post-Reformation opposition of church and theater and reassessing modern ritual theory, Beckwith challenges the way we have seen these plays. In "Theaters of Signs and Disguises: The Reform of the York Corpus Christi Plays" (chap. 7) she discusses a shift in the relations between theatrical and ritual practice over the course of the second half of the sixteenth century. The eucharistic signification possible in a medieval "theater of signs" gave way to a "theater of disguise" as post-Reformation theater saw "the transfer of authority out of the community of embodiment and into the script ural story and its interpreter" (122, 152). The actor no longer signified, but instead imitated, God. Signifying God suggests that the resulting isolation of theology and history created cultural currents that still hinder our understanding of the meanings of communal drama. Thus her reconrextualization considers ritual as relational and expands functional ritual theory to include cultural, social, and political aspects.

Sections 2 and 3 encompass the most valuable portion of the book as documentary and textual history, examining the cycle festivities as sacramental theater. Beckwith frames the plays through the performance of the body of Christ, finding multiple representations within its ambiguity. "Work, Markets, Civic Structure" (chap. 3) embeds the Passion and Resurrection sequences in a social and economic analysis, finding that the plays' production both created and regulated an artificial division of labor in York between merchants and manufacturing guilds. Christ's broken body expressed and critiqued these divisions in the artisan body at the same time that the financial penalties imposed on guild members for breaking these boundaries helped to finance its very performance. Sacramental theater operated on several levels; hegemonic social relations were rethought through the eucharistic body of Christ, but also through concepts of penance. "Penance, Presence, Punishment" (chap. 6) uses Lollard writings as a mirror for the plays' critique of clerical jurisdiction. Beckwith argues that the York cycle presents Christ as being tried for ecclesiastical crimes and tells the passion story in terms of "the contemporary processes by which the church and state colluded to burn heretics to death" (103). Like Christ's Body, this book identifies opposition to clerical authority as an important factor in late medieval representations of the Passion and Resurrection. Here, however, audience plays its most important part on the local level. Signifying God emphasizes the ways in which York presented a "counterliturgy ... in which performers and participants explore[d] their own community as the body of Christ" (197).

This is just a sampling of the book's striking and original conclusions, made possible by Beckwith's staging of a dialogue between theater and theology. One hopes that scholars will follow her model in utilizing the documentary riches available, and easily accessed, through The Medieval European Stage. Taken together, these two volumes point to a bright interdisciplinary future for dramatic, cultural, and religious history of the Middle Ages.