For all the scholarly literature on Medieval drama, there has yet been no social analysis of its origin, says Goldstein. Now retired in Germany after a long peripatetic academic career, he begins the task. Along the way, he proposes a new theory, which he confesses cannot be proven however much supporting evidence is presented. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses.
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The liturgical drama arose in a period of rapidly integrating feudalism. Christians experienced the contradictions between the Church that offered salvation in the Eucharist and the Church that through its increasingly large holdings of property in land exploited large numbers of peasants. The resulting diminution of faith led the clergy to attempt to revitalize it by creating new theology, new music, new prayers, tropes, new rituals, and the drama. Though the content of the play is theologically sound, the little play carried within itself the social contradiction of communalism and property that it hoped to overcome. The method of analysis here is Marxist, for it understands the formation of concepts in their historical concreteness. The study concludes that the drama does not emerge out of the Mass as an actualized potential, for the Mass is communalistic and cannot legitimate property without destroying itself. Rather, the drama develops out of the cultural and religious consequences of the new form of property in feudalism.