Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 1-6

3. Medieval Culture and the Memory Arts

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 7-13

4. The Position of Theater in the Thought of Augustine of Hippo

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 15-23

5. Medieval Aristotelianism and the Poetics of the English Corpus Christi Drama

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 25-39

6. Thomas Aquinas and the Rehabilitation of the Image: A Context for the Development of Medieval Drama

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 41-50

7. Drama as “Quick Image”: The Fifteenth-Century Context

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 51-62

8. Corpus Christi Drama and the Places of Memory: Liturgical Precedents and Illuminated Manuscript Analogues

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 63-93

9. Plays, Places, and the Dramatic Records

   • Theodore K. Lerud

   Pages 95-104

10. A Bird in the Hand: Shifting Politics and Processions in Chester

    • Theodore K. Lerud

    Pages 105-119

11. Reinventing the Cycle: The Banns, the Text, and the Pentecostal Design

    • Theodore K. Lerud

    Pages 121-133

12. The Missing Link: Spaces, Places, and the Chester Whitsun Plays

    • Theodore K. Lerud

    Pages 135-146

13. Back Matter

    Pages 147-181

    PDF

Bringing together memory theory, medieval cognition of images, and the English Corpus Christ drama in an innovative way, this study argues that the relationship of frames or backgrounds to the image has been misunderstood in the study of drama.

• argue
• corpus
• culture
• design
• drama
• English
• manuscript
• memory
• model
• Ovid
• play
• poetics
• reformation
• symbolism
• Thomas Aquinas
• russian and post-soviet politics

"In accounting for the certainly real influence of image theory on the development of English theater, Lerud s book opens up, with understated audacity, new space for further serious thinking about poetics in the study of medieval drama free from the influence of Renaissance ideologies, and it will be of much interest to scholars of the plays." - Speculum

"Lerud's book on the English Corpus Christi drama brings together memory theory, both medieval and modern, with images that focus on memory systems and with the Corpus Christi drama itself in a way that seems to me entirely new and provocative in the best sense. The book makes a compelling case that frames and backgrounds of medieval images are fundamental to an appreciation of the drama. The images of gateways and other framing structures illustrate brilliantly how space functions in the performance of certain key Corpus Christi pageants." - David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago

"Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama is a broadly informed study of medieval theatricality whose special merit is to explore the mutually determining semiotic link between the presupposed cognitive dynamics of the beholder and the dramatic action that he or she beholds." - Eugene Vance, Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Professor of Comparative Religion, University of Washington

THEODORE K. LERUD is Professor of English at Elmhurst College, USA.

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