"Beginning and Beginning-Again": Processions, Plays, and Civic Politics in York and Chester

Abstract

Inl ate medieval England, the expansion of Corpus Christi festivities to include long sermons, elaborate processions, and dramatic performances suggests widespread enthusiasm for the new feast.1 York and Chester, unusually among English towns, developed processions and biblical play cycles, both civic productions involving the craft guilds, as linked forms of Corpus Christi performance.2 This commonality, together with their abundance of records, invites a comparative analysis of procession and drama in these two towns.3 In York and Chester, the spilling over of the feast to different days bespeaks tension as wellWe would like to thank the anonymous readers for Studies in the Age of Chaucer for helpful suggestions on this essay.We are grateful for comments from participants in the New Medievalisms conference at the University of Western Ontario in 2005, especially Bruce Holsinger for insights on liturgy.Thanks are due members of the Yale University Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium, particularly Marcia Colish and Scott Newstok, for questions on the Chester material.We dedicate this article to Robert W. Hanning, whose scholarship and teaching inspired our work.1 Corpus Christi was universally promulgated in 1317 and

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.