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The Home of the Fleury Playbook Fletcher Collins, Jr. The iate and revered Professor Solange Corbin seems to have intended her 1953 Romania article to be controversial.1 She wished to challenge the presumed origin of the famous Fleury Playbook2 as the Abbaye St. Benoît de Fleury at St. Benoît-sur-Loire, to proclaim indeed that “Le manuscrit [of the Playbook] ne provient pas de Saint-Benoît,” and that the Abbaye St. Laumer3 in Blois was a preferable location. In her challenge were echoes of Baconian and other Shakespearean lost causes that took a hundred years to run their courses and return us to a conviction that William Shakespeare of Stratfordon -Avon is the best candidate for the composition of the plays attributed to him. Questions of place and authorship are often more difficult in respect to medieval religious plays than to those of the Elizabethans, for a manuscript containing liturgical material was in mortal jeopardy from the time of the Reformation, and frequently survived destruction only by going underground. In that process its origin was often deliberately obscured and its authorship unacknowledged. Hence any strong skepticism in these matters, particularly from a highly respected scholar, is likely to result in discrediting the existing assumption. For this reason the twenty-seven years since the Corbin article appeared have not been filled with rejoinders and counter-claims; indeed, the Fleury stronghold of nearly two centuries fell with hardly a shot fired in its defense. Most scholars in the field apparently believed that Professor Corbin knew more than they did, im pressively paleographical and bibliographical as her presentation was. Several scholars—among them Grace Frank, Jean LaPorte, and Richard B. Donovan4—were not intimidated by the article. The present writer, while more cautious in 1972 than he now would be, even then dissented: “Her hypothesis does not work 312 Fletcher Collins, Jr. 313 any better than the assumption she disturbs.”5 But the Abbaye St. Benoît de Fleury, as soon as it became aware of Corbin’s attack on the assumption, withdrew from guide book and guided tour all mention of the plays, formerly a bright jewel in Fleury’s medieval crown. The purpose of the present re-appraisal of Corbin’s argument is to foreshorten the winter of our disbelief by carefully scrutin izing her evidence, and by offering additional circumstantial evidence for renewed acceptance of the Fleury abbey as the most probable home of the Playbook in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From the forty-three pages of Corbin’s article can be sifted five major points on which she based her statement that the Playbook came not from Fleury but probably from St. Laumer de Blois. I propose to give a fair summary of each point and to attempt to dispose of it. 1. Bibliothèque de la Ville, Orléans, MS. 201, a total of 251 pages, is in anyone’s eyes a compilation. The bulk of it is Marian homilies (pp. 1-175), the remainder the Fleury Play book (pp. 176-243) and sequences to the Virgin and to St. Laumer (pp. 244-51). Of these three sections, only the latter two have musical notation, though such notation is lacking in the sequence to the Virgin in the third section. Corbin finds fault with the notation of the plays as being “légèrement nég ligée’^ in its confusion of punctum and virga symbols, and correctly observes that the style of the notation is unlike that of other liturgical manuscripts in the same library. Orléans MS. 129, for example, can be traced to a Fleury origin in the early thirteenth century.7 The presumption therefore is that because MS. 201 cannot be so traced some other abbey in central France must be proposed as the source of that manuscript, including the Playbook. So runs her first argument. The section of MS. 201 containing the plays was, as Corbin herself states, bound into a volume with the other sections of that manuscript in the sixteenth century, four hundred years later than the date of the Playbook. Thus the nature of this total manuscript, a post-medieval compilation, is quite different from...
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