Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Professor Nelson sets for himself a large task: 'My primary aim is to discover how, when, where, and for whom the Corpus Christi plays were performed. My secondary aim is to discover something about their origins.' By an analysis of a great many unpublished—or inadequately interpreted for him—records, he can conjecture an antecedent procession of the pageant carts followed by the performance of the plays at one central place for gathering of the city's authorities and citizens. Certainly a series of performances at stations throughout the city would take, for his argument, an inordinate amount of time, given the length of the cycle, but at least one recent writer has shown that it was possible. This book is filled with an encyclopedic amount of information; it will challenge even closer examination of those ambiguous medieval documents that may not fully tell us how, when, where, and for whom." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)