Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

This thesis explores the implications of the relationships between building trade guilds and the pageants they produced in York, and examines this relationship over the two-hundred-year production of the York Cycle. Because this relationship and the reception of any dramatic performance is heavily influenced by context, we need to look closer at the social, political, and economic environment of late medieval York in order to better understand the range of interpretations available to the Cycle's original audience. Doing so also allows us to witness the issues of identity and community that are negotiated throughout these plays. Chapter 1 examines the guilds responsible for most day-to-day construction (the plasters, tilers, and carpenters) and explores the interpretations that the conjunction of guild casting, play text, and historical context invites. The Plasterers' "Creation" deals with issues of labour and political power, economic fluctuations influence representations of family and community in the Tilers' "Nativity," and the Carpenters' "Resurrection" explores issues of integrity and urban corruption, while also representing a struggle for social authority. Chapter Two considers the participation of groups outside of civic jurisdiction, most particularly the Masons, and investigates the ways in which the York Cycle may have cut across boundaries (or united "separate" groups) instead of, or as well as, reinforcing them. Finally, the changing contexts that in turn changed (or re-focused) the meanings of these texts reveal the boundaries over and through which concepts of identity and community were negotiated.

This thesis explores the implications of the relationships between building trade guilds and the pageants they produced in York, and examines this relationship over the two-hundred-year production of the York Cycle. Because this relationship and the reception of any dramatic performance is heavily influenced by context, we need to look closer at the social, political, and economic environment of late medieval York in order to better understand the range of interpretations available to the Cycle's original audience. Doing so also allows us to witness the issues of identity and community that are negotiated throughout these plays. Chapter 1 examines the guilds responsible for most day-to-day construction (the plasters, tilers, and carpenters) and explores the interpretations that the conjunction of guild casting, play text, and historical context invites. The Plasterers' "Creation" deals with issues of labour and political power, economic fluctuations influence representations of family and community in the Tilers' "Nativity," and the Carpenters' "Resurrection" explores issues of integrity and urban corruption, while also representing a struggle for social authority. Chapter Two considers the participation of groups outside of civic jurisdiction, most particularly the Masons, and investigates the ways in which the York Cycle may have cut across boundaries (or united "separate" groups) instead of, or as well as, reinforcing them. Finally, the changing contexts that in turn changed (or re-focused) the meanings of these texts reveal the boundaries over and through which concepts of identity and community were negotiated. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study reaffirms the traditional theory of processional staging of the cycle of plays, collectively known as the Corpus Christi Play, that was performed at York in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Because comparative studies of the various cycles are of little value, this thesis focuses on an examination of surviving civic records, as well as current scholarship, to confirm that the plays at York were performed processionally. An analysis of the relationship between the liturgical Corpus Christi procession and the Play indicates that the two, although concurrent, were separate events.

Several earlier generations of historians described the later Middle Ages as an 'age of fear'. This account was especially applied to accounts of the presumed mentality of the later medieval layperson, seen as at the mercy of the currents of plague, violence and dramatic social, economic and political change and, above all, a religiosity characterised as primitive or even pathological. This 'great fear theory' remains influential in public perception. However, recent scholarship has done much to restitute a more positive, affective, incarnational and even soteriologically optimistic late-medieval vernacular piety. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the positive and recuperative approach of this scholarship, it did not attend to the treatment of fear in devotional and literary texts of the period. This thesis responds to this gap in current scholarship, and the continued pull of this account of later-medieval piety, by building an account of fear's place in the rich vernacular theology available in the Middle English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It takes as its starting point accounts of the role of fear in religious experience, devotion and practice within vernacular and lay contexts, as opposed to texts written by and for clerical audiences. The account of drede in Middle English strikingly integrates humbler aspects of fear into the relationship to God. The theological and indeed material circumstances of the later fourteenth century may have intensified fear's role: this thesis suggests that they also fostered an intensified engagement with the inherited tradition, generating fresh theological accounts of the place of fear. Chapter One begins with a triad of broadly pastoral texts which might be seen to disseminate a top-down agenda but which, this analysis discovers, articulate diverse ways in which the humble place of fear is elevated as part of a vernacular agenda. Here love and fear are always seen in a complex, varying dialectic or symbiosis. Chapter Two explores how this reaches a particular apex in the foundational and final place of fear in Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and is not incompatible even with her celebratedly 'optimistic' theology. Chapter Three turns to a more broadly accessed generic context, that of later medieval cycle drama, to engage in readings of Christ's Gethsemane fear in the 'Agony in the Garden' episodes. The N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York plays articulate complex and variant theological ideas about Christ's fearful affectivity as a site of imitation and participation for the medieval layperson. Chapter Four is a reading of Piers Plowman that argues a right fear is essential to Langland's espousal of a poetics of crisis and a crucial element in the questing corrective he applies to self and society. It executes new readings of key episodes in the poem, including the Prologue, Pardon, Crucifixion and the final apocalyptic passus, in the light of its theology of fear.