**Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England by Ruth Nisse** Explore the vibrant intersection of theatre and political thought in late medieval England with Ruth Nisse’s *Defining Acts*. This compelling study examines how 15th-century English plays served as battlegrounds for competing interpretations of power, religion, and social order. Nisse delves into the era’s crucial questions: Who has the right to interpret religious texts, define morality, and shape societal norms? Beyond simply analyzing the plays themselves, *Defining Acts* contextualizes medieval drama within its rich literary and social milieu. Nisse connects these works to influential texts like *The Canterbury Tales* and *Piers Plowman*, revealing how playwrights engaged with contemporary theological debates and social anxieties. She analyzes plays such as the York Plays, Towneley Plays, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, examining how they grapple with themes of gender, class, religious difference, and the authority of interpretation. Nisses innovative approach highlights how theatrical performance transformed abstract intellectual concepts into engaging public spectacles, making complex ideas accessible to a broader audience. Through rigorous analysis and insightful interpretation, *Defining Acts* offers a fresh perspective on the cultural and political significance of late medieval English drama. Perfect for scholars and students of medieval literature, theatre history, and political thought.
Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretaion in Late Medieval England
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Defining Acts considers how the surviving English theatrical works of the fifteenth century represent competing practices of interpretation. The plays take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of textsmen or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jewsand transform these questions for audiences far beyond their original medieval academic contexts. Ruth Nisse focuses in particular on how theater translates the temporal ideas of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama, therefore, both in its vernacular literary setting, as a genre composed against the same cultural background as The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, and The Book of Margery Kempe, and in its performances, which negotiate a range of contemporary social and political issues.
Defining Acts begins with an introductory chapter that reveals the dangers and pleasures of theater in a reading of Chaucer’s antic Miller’s Tale and the violently anti-theatrical Wycliffite Treatise of Miracle Playing. These two radically different works provide a dialectic entry into late-medieval controversies over biblical interpretation and vernacular theology, versions of which then reappear in dramatic texts themselves. 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.
By reading medieval drama in relation to its intertexts, Nisse explores the 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.
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| ISBN-10 | 0268036020 |
| ISBN-13 | 9780268036027 |
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| Pages | 176 |
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| Year published | |
| Weight | 245 |
| Dewey decimal | 822/.109358 |
