Search results for ""Author Claire Sponsler""
University of Minnesota Press Drama And Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England
Explores the intertwined histories of bodily subjectivity, commodity culture and theatricality in late medieval England. In this examination of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, the author argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions to the imposition of disciplinary power. The medieval theatre was a social site where resistance, masked from the full scrutiny of authority by theatricality, was practised, articulated, and enacted. This text examines three key discourses of authoritarian bodily and commodity control - clothing laws, conduct literature and Books of Hours - and pairs them with three kinds of theatrical performances that enact resistance to disciplining codes - Robin Hood performances, morality plays and Corpus Christi pageants. Considering the contradictions and inconsistencies in the repressive official discourses, the author analyzes the ways in which the staging of forbidden acts like cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehaviour, and violence against the body challenged these discourses.
£26.99
University of Pennsylvania Press The Queen's Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater
No medieval writer reveals more about early English drama than John Lydgate, Claire Sponsler contends. Best known for his enormously long narrative poems The Fall of Princes and The Troy Book, Lydgate also wrote numerous verses related to theatrical performances and ceremonies. This rich yet understudied body of material includes mummings for London guildsmen and sheriffs, texts for wall hangings that combined pictures and poetry, a Corpus Christi procession, and entertainments for the young Henry VI and his mother. In The Queen's Dumbshows, Sponsler reclaims these writings to reveal what they have to tell us about performance practices in the late Middle Ages. Placing theatricality at the hub of fifteenth-century British culture, she rethinks what constituted drama in the period and explores the relationship between private forms of entertainment, such as household banquets, and more overtly public forms of political theater, such as royal entries and processions. She delineates the intersection of performance with other forms of representation such as feasts, pictorial displays, and tableaux, and parses the connections between the primarily visual and aural modes of performance and the reading of literary texts written on paper or parchment. In doing so, she has written a book of signal importance to scholars of medieval literature and culture, theater history, and visual studies.
£60.30
Medieval Institute Publications Mummings and Entertainments
John Lydgate is known as the most distinguished poet of fifteenth-century England. This volume presents his brilliant and underappreciated dramatic texts written for both private and public entertainment, encompassing both religious and secular topics. This is the first time since 1934 that many of these poems have been reprinted or reedited. They are published here with an extensive gloss and notes, as well as a glossary and an introduction, making them accessible to a new generation of students of the Middle Ages. These works are indispensible to any study of medieval English drama.
£17.50
