Orleans on Stage: Reconstructing the Performance History of the French Mistere du siege d'Orleans

Abstract

The nineteenth-century editors of the Mistere du siege d'Orleans declared that the extant manuscript of this fifteenth-century French mystery play could not have been intended for a renewed performance decades after the events that it dramatises. More recently, however, scholars have maintained that the existence of a revised play manuscript necessarily implies a renewed performance of that text. The article examines the historical and compositional evidence that supports the notion of a late revision and performance of this mystery spectacle. Detailed stage directions parallel not only the historical events, but the celebratory activities in which Orleans's citizens participated throughout the fifteenth century, as city records demonstrate. The use of a 'procès de paradis' convention, like the creation of a post-Rehabilitation Joan the Maid, both point to a revision of this play after 1450. Furthermore, the chronicle sources of the Siege d'Orleans were either composed or revised in the 1450s or 1460s. Thus, the revision that has come down to us in manuscript form does indeed imply that the play was revisited later in the century as part of the city's evolving commemorative activities.