Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (The New Middle Ages) - Hardcover

Lerud, T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230603211 ISBN 13: 9780230603219

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Synopsis

Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama uniquely brings together memory theory, medieval and contemporary images, cognition, and the English Corpus Christi drama. Lerud argues that the role of frames or backgrounds is integral to the image and has been underestimated or misunderstood in the study of the drama. Lerud examines the use of doorways, arches, gates, and other significant town spaces in framing or setting off particular pageant images, to achieve a fuller understanding of the longevity of a drama often viewed as "Catholic" that nonetheless survived the dissolution of the monasteries and the turmoil of the early Reformation.

About this title

Review:

"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

Book Description:

A new title in the popular New Middle Ages series

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0230603211
• ISBN 13: 9780230603219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 197