Search results for ""Author Emma Lipton""
University of Pennsylvania Press Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays
Like other compilations of medieval urban drama, the plays that were performed in the streets of York on the Feast of Corpus Christi from the late fourteenth century until the third quarter of the sixteenth have most frequently been discussed in the context of the devotional cultures and practices of the later Middle Ages. The pageants' preoccupation with law, and with witnessing in particular, has received much less attention, Emma Lipton observes, yet the cycle of forty-seven plays, which together tell the story of human history from the Creation through the Last Judgment, contains an extended sequence that stages the trials of Christ leading up to the Crucifixion, and legal discourse features prominently elsewhere as well. While the play collections associated with other cities also engage with legal concepts, the York Plays devote an unusual amount of attention to the law, Lipton contends. It is no coincidence that the plays themselves are preserved alongside a wide range of legal records in the York Memorandum Books, repositories of civic documents that were kept in the city's guildhall. Engaging both theater and legal studies, Lipton is concerned in particular with the interfaces in the York Plays between dramatic practice and legal concepts of witnessing. In medieval English courts, witnesses were defined as neighbors; they spoke both to what they had seen and heard and also to common knowledge of events. At the same time, many legal theorists were concerned by how the temporal gap between initial experience and testimony might reshape the record of the past in light of the motives and emotions of individual witnesses and allied groups. With chapters focusing on space, speech, affect, and temporality, Cultures of Witnessing considers how civic performance and the legal theory and practice of witnessing promoted a shared sense of urban citizenship, and how this in turn provides a way to theorize late medieval religious drama, whose players performed on the streets and neighborhoods in which they conducted their daily lives.
£52.20
University of Notre Dame Press Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature
Affections of the Mind argues that a politicized negotiation of issues of authority in the institution of marriage can be found in late medieval England, where an emergent middle class of society used a sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy. Emma Lipton traces the unprecedented popularity of marriage as a literary topic and the tensions between different models of marriage in the literature of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by analyzing such texts as Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the N-Town plays. Affections of the Mind focuses on marriage as a fluid and contested category rather than one with a fixed meaning, and argues that the late medieval literature of sacramental marriage subverted aristocratic and clerical traditions of love and marriage in order to promote the values of the lay middle strata of society. This book will be of value to a broad range of scholars in medieval studies.
£81.00
