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Defining Acts considers how the surviving English theatrical works of the fifteenth century represent competing practices of interpretation. The plays take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of textsmen or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jewsand transform these questions for audiences far beyond their original medieval academic contexts. Ruth Nisse focuses in particular on how theater translates the temporal ideas of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama, therefore, both in its vernacular literary setting, as a genre composed against the same cultural background as The Canterbury Tales , Piers Plowman, and The Book of Margery Kempe , and in its performances, which negotiate a range of contemporary social and political issues. Defining Acts begins with an introductory chapter that reveals the dangers and pleasures of theater in a reading of Chaucer's antic Miller's Tale and the violently anti-theatrical Wycliffite Treatise of Miracle Playing . These two radically different works provide a dialectic entry into late-medieval controversies over biblical interpretation and vernacul

Author

Nisse Ruth Nisse

Publisher

Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press

Published

2004

Language

EN

ISBN

9780268036010

Subjects

Literary Fiction, History, Humanities