Martin Stevens examines the four extant complete cycles of Middle English mystery plays in light of the most recent research on the manuscripts, sources, and records relating to the medieval drama. The first comprehensive treatment of all four of the cycles, the book emphasizes the study of the surviving manuscripts as texts distinct from their performance history. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An award-winning scientist offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the mind-body connection and its profound impact on everything from advertising to romance.The human body is not just a passive device carrying out messages sent by the brain, but rather an integral part of how we think and make decisions. In her groundbreaking new book, Sian Beilock, author of the highly acclaimed Choke, which Time magazine praised for its “smart tips...in order to think clearly...and be cool under pressure,” draws on her own cutting-edge research to turn the conventional understanding of the mind upside down in ways that will revolutionize how we live our lives. At the heart of How the Body Knows Its Mind is the tantalizing idea that our bodies “hack” our brains. The way we move affects our thoughts, our decisions, and even our preferences for particular products. Called “embodied cognition,” this new science—of which Beilock is a foremost researcher—illuminates the power of the body and its physical surroundings to shape how we think, feel, and behave. Beilock’s findings are as varied as they are surprising. For example, pacing around the room can enhance creativity; gesturing during a speech can help ensure that you don’t draw a blank; kids learn better when their bodies are part of the learning process; walking in nature boosts concentration skills; Botox users experience less depression; and much more. From the tricks used by advertisers to the ways body language can improve your memory, Beilock explains a wealth of fascinating interconnections between mind and body and how mastering them can make us happier, safer, and more successful.

Product Description: The civic religious drama of late medieval England—financed, produced, and performed by craftspeople—offers one of the earliest forms of written literature by a non-elite group in Europe. In this innovative study, Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano trace an artisanal perspective on medieval and early modern civic relations, analyzing selected plays from the cities of York and Chester individually and from a comparative perspective, in dialogue with civic records...read more

Product Description: A literary reading informed by the recent temporal turn in Queer Theory, this book analyzes medieval Biblical drama for themes representing modes of power such as the body, politics, and law. Revitalizing the discussions on medieval drama, Sturges asserts that these dramas were often intended not to teach morality but to resist Christian authority...read more

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama is the authoritative secondary text on Tudor drama. It both integrates recent important research across different disciplines and periods and sets a new agenda for the future study of Tudor drama, questioning a number of the central assumptions of previous studies...read more

Product Description: How was medieval English theatre performed? Many of the modern theatrical concepts and terms used today to discuss the nature of medieval English theatre were never used in medieval times. Concepts and terms such as character, characterisation, truth and belief, costume, acting style, amateur, professional, stage directions, effects and special effects are all examples of post-medieval terms that have been applied to the English theatre...read more

Product Description: Contents: Martha Bayless, Merriment and Entertainment in Anglo-Saxon England: What is the Evidence?; Christopher Crane, Taking Laughter Seriously: The Rhetoric of Humor in Middle English Drama, Sermon Exempla and Spiritual Instruction; Paul Hardwick, Making Light of Devotion: The Pilgrimage Window at York Minster; Dana Symons, Comic Pleasures: Chaucer and Popular Romance; Christian Sheridan, Funny Money: Puns and Currency in the Shipmans Tale; Laurel Broughton, From Buttfaces to Turd Bowling: Physical Humor in the Margins; Sandra M...read more

This is the first major study of the use of other languages in medieval and Renaissance English drama. For the period 1400 to 1600 Janette Dillon examines why other languages increasingly invade English plays, and how their significance is illuminated by developments in church and state, in particular the advancing Reformation and expanding English nationalism. In marked contrast to other related studies, Dillon focuses on drama as performance and employs a wide range of works, from the mystery cycles to The Spanish Tragedy, and finally Shakespeare.

Product Description: The York mystery plays, forty-eight pageants covering sacred history from the creation of the world to the last judgment, are known from a single manuscript (dating from around 1463-1477). This book presents a major reconsideration of the York plays, arguing that they show a sophisticated use of Boethius' theories about time...read more

Product Description: In a distinguished career of teaching, research, editing, and writing, Clifford Davidson has produced an impressive number of publications. For more than thirty years he was an editor of Comparative Drama, the standard journal in the field...read more

Defining Acts considers how the surviving English plays of the fifteenth century represent and transform competing late-medieval practices of interpretation. These works take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts - men or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jews - and stage these texts for audiences far beyond their original academic contexts. of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama both in its vernacular literary setting, as a genre composed against the same cultural background as The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, and in its performances, which negotiate a range of current social and political issues. Defining Acts begins with an introductory chapter that reveals the dangers and pleasures of theatrical representation in a reading of Chaucer's antic Miller's Tale and the violently anti-theatrical Wycliffite Treatise of Miracle Playing. Subsequent chapters engage problems such as the clash between civic rule and the authority of women's visionary experiences in the York Plays; competing ideas of labor and poverty in the Towneley Plays; and theories of Jewish exegesis that continue to haunt Christian and national understandings of history in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. ways in which ideas previously limited to academic discourse become elements of public theatrical performances, available to new audiences. Her pathbreaking approach to the study of medieval drama makes this book required reading for scholars and students alike.

Product Description: For too long, a large part of the corpus of Tudor drama has languished in the shadow of Shakespeare and his late-Elizabethan contemporaries. The essays in this collection offer a timely re-assessment of pre-Shakespearean theater in all its aspects, from the practicalities of staging and touring to issues of representation and ideology...read more

Product Description: The focus of this book is on the reality of evil for medieval and Renaissance dramatists and their audiences. What propels the work beyond similar critiques is the author's insistence that evil is not an outmoded feature of past societies, but an active ingredient of contemporary life...read more

Product Description: Professor Davidson is concerned here to chart public theatrical display as a barometer of developments in the English Middle Ages and Renaissance. This book brings together twelve previously published articles on historical and religious aspects of the early English theatre as well as an original essay on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Papacy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Insults, abuse, oaths, scatological and bawdy language - these form the subject of Lynn Forest-Hill's study on "bad" language in the late Middle Ages. She demonstrates how, in mediaeval mystery plays and morality plays, dramatists used outrageous language with great sophistication and subtlety to create characterizations and define characters' moral status, to reflect on social conditions, to condemn social evils, and to comment upon sensitive cultural, political and religious topics of the 16th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: An in-depth survey of drama in English up to 1590 which is based upon close readings of selected plays, including Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy". The text covers many types of drama such as mystery cycles and the interludes, as well as comedy and tragedy. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)