Fleury Playbook Research Articles

The Fleury Playbook: liturgical drama and its production in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire

The Fleury Playbook: liturgical drama and its production in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire

Demonstration Performance of the Cividale Planctus Mariae : A Report

Demonstration Performance of the Cividale Planctus Mariae: A Report Eric Strand (bio), Matthew Steel (bio), and Clifford Davidson (bio) Audrey Ekdahl Davidson’s transcription of the Planctus Mariae contained in Cividale, Reale Museo Archeologico Nazionale, MS CI, fols. 74r–76v, was originally prepared in 1986,1 but remained unpublished and used only for a performance in 2006 after being checked for accuracy by her a little more than six weeks before her death on June 11 of that year. Since she had been involved in directing nearly a dozen productions of medieval music dramas, including Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum, during her career,2 she was well aware of the sharp debates over how such dramas can or should be revived. Each performance for her was an experiment, and each was different in some way from the others that she directed. In this manner, albeit necessarily working with local singers essentially untrained in early music, she entered into the discussion about authenticity in performance that was being argued in the latter part of the twentieth century. The argument over authenticity tended to focus on a number of important matters, including vocal production and style, instrumental technique, choice of instruments, improvisation, articulation, phrasing, accurate regional pronunciation, and even fidelity to the notes as written. 3 At the heart of the discussion is the question of how to restore lost traditions, or indeed whether they should be restored. It is obvious that the expectations of original audiences, particularly in the case of a musicdrama sung within liturgical settings, could not be precisely replicated in our time. Chant techniques, which must have differed from region to region, and its notation have long been the subject of controversy. The project would require not only to resurrect what was heard but also to discover what was seen, the latter actually somewhat less problematic than the former in the case of the Cividale Planctus Mariae on account of the presence of extensive rubrics in the manuscript and the availability [End Page 287] of iconographic evidence for the laments at the foot of the Cross. What strategies should be taken to “show it as it really was,” as the saying is? How are these aims consistent with performances that are convincing as both music and drama? Should the music-drama, closely tied to the liturgy as it was, be expected to resume its connection to ritual in order to achieve its maximum effectiveness? That such medieval plays, separated from their normal religious context, can be tremendously effective as drama in our own time has been demonstrated on numerous occasions in the years since large audiences responded to The Play of Herod presented by Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica in the early 1960s—a production that powerfully staged the killing of the children from the Ordo Rachelis that was added to complete the story of the Herod, both edited from the Fleury Playbook in collaboration with William L. Smoldon.4 Greenberg and his company made significant compromises, however, not the least of which were to amalgamate these two separate plays from the same manuscript source into a single drama and to obtain the services of a stage director without the encumbrance of significant knowledge about the original presentation of these dramas. Yet these performances were very convincing at the time, while they also implicitly suggested a number of options for subsequent productions of other examples of this genre. After Greenberg, two directions were taken by those who produced the medieval music drama: (1) to attempt to achieve as much authenticity as possible, especially by embedding the plays in liturgy and producing them in locations that give the “feeling” of the original; and (2) to aim for musical and theatrical effectiveness in our time without concern for questions of authenticity. Fletcher Collins’s film of the Visitatio Sepulchri is a very effective example of the second direction, its setting in the monastic church of the Abbaye St. Benôit-de-Fleury at St. Benôit-sur-Loire providing atmospherics rather than a view of “how it was done” in the thirteenth century when the manuscript of the Fleury Playbook was compiled. The Society...

Pilgrims and Prostitutes: Costume and Identity Construction in Twelfth-Century Liturgical Drama

Compiled sometime the last quarter of the twelfth century at the Benedictine monastery at St.-Benoit-sur-Loire, the Fleury Playbook contains the record of a highly unusual theatrical event. (1) It is found the Raising of Lazarus, a play that scholars believe may have originated at Fleury. (2) The action begins conventionally enough with Christ and his disciples dining at the house of Simon. But not long after the play begins, Mary Magdalen enters the scene in ... meretricio, or, costumed like a streetwalker. (3) The dignified Latin of the original text does not seem to capture fully the shocking quality of the staged performance it describes, that of a pious cleric entering the church dressed like a prostitute. One might reasonably ask what the assembled congregation would have made of such a spectacle. Or for that matter, what the monk-actors could have been thinking by presenting it. The mystery deepens when we consider the monks' peculiar staging choice the context of the heretofore established costuming techniques prescribed for liturgical dramas. For at least two centuries, tropes such as the visitatio sepulchri, Mary Magdalen and other female characters had simply been represented through the artistic draping of priestly vestments near to hand. (4) But the phrase habitu meretricio would seem to indicate clothing not likely to be found the sacristy, and therein lies the shock value of the diclascalia. But addition to appearing somewhat bizarre to the modern eye, they also document a contemporary costuming revolution: they are the first known examples medieval theater of a prescribed costume that was not a liturgical vestment. The monks of Fleury did not restrict their costuming innovation to Lazarus alone. In another of the Playbooks scripts, Peregrini, a male character appears ad modern Peregrini--in the manner of a pilgrim--a outfit that includes a tunic, a hat, a staff, and significantly, a leather purse or wallet. (5) Representing a pilgrim with that particular accessory is another innovation attributable to the monks of St.-Benoit-sur-Loire. (6) With its appearance the didascalia, the mystery of the Fleury costuming practices grows not only deeper, but darker--for the researcher is confronted with the intriguing and disturbing fact that, the long history of medieval liturgical theater, the first two characters ever represented through secular costume are a prostitute and a man with a wallet. Why nonliturgical costuming arose when it did, and why the practice was inaugurated such a seemingly unexpected fashion, is the subject of this essay. The tendency among medieval theater scholars has been to situate the Fleury plays within a progressivist narrative that charts successive attempts toward Dunbar Ogden labels the Fleury innovations touches Similarly, Theodore Komisarjevsky speaks of more the matter of costumes as the Middle Ages progressed. Karl Young writes of other plays which liturgical vestments were supplemented by realistic or symbolic objects and about how one case realism is increased when the angels are provided with wings. (7) But that interpretation attributes modern aesthetic sensibilities to medieval dramatists and denies the highly symbolic nature of medieval theater. A desire for is not a suitable explanation of a choice by medieval monks suddenly to incorporate individualized costuming into their theatrical presentations. Fleury's revolutionary theatrical conventions must have arisen from conditions and concepts unique to twelfth-century France. I argue that the Fleury monks' choice to forego universalizing liturgical vestments favor of particularized secular garments reflected a contemporary fascination with identity construction. I further contend that the characters of the pilgrim and the prostitute served as gendered role models for contemporary audiences their construction of new social identities. …

Jews in the Fleury Playbook

COMPARATIVE 9?F???F Volume 38 No. 1 · Spring 2004 Jews in the Fleury Playbook Theresa Tinkle If the Saracens are to be detested ... how much more are the Jews to be execrated and hated who, utterly insensible to Christ and the Christian faith, reject, blaspheme, and ridicule that Virgin Birth and all the sacraments of human redemption? Nor do I say this to incite royal or Christian sword to slay their wickedness.... God wishes them not to be killed, but to be preserved in a life worse than death, like Cain the fratricide , for greater torment and greater ignominy.. . . I . . . exhort that they be punished in a way suitable to their wickedness. —Peter the Venerable1 ... the quality ofhostility against Jews cannot be determined by premises about Jews, for it is a characteristic of the mentality of non-Jews, not of Jews, and it is determined, not bythe objective reality ofJews,but by what the symbol "Jews" has signified to non-Jews. —Gavin I. Langmuir2 The FleuryPlaybook,a manuscript collection often Latin plays,includes a surprisingly broad range ofmedieval dramatic types: four miracles of Saint Nicholas, five episodes from Christ's life, and a conversion ofSaint 2 Comparative Drama Paul. The Playbook covers a broad range ofsubjects, includes both liturgical and nonliturgical plays, suggests diverse performance conventions (both monastic and nonmonastic), and employs several musical styles. The collections heterogeneity arguably points to multiple authors and multiple points of origin (I in fact assume that there were multiple authors,though my argument does not depend on this point).After scrutinizing these aspects of the Playbook's diversity, C. Clifford Flanigan persuasively concludes that the only unifying principle is the redactor's interest in drama for its own sake, regardless of its subject matter or connection to the liturgy. In other words, the Fleury collection demonstrates one redactor's "horizon ofexpectations"about drama as a genre.3 Flanigan's conclusions are persuasive, his theoretical approach compelling . In fact, his argument has broader implications than he explicitly recognizes, for the "horizon of expectations" refers to the entire literary experience of readers, encompassing genres, styles, themes, and historical events.4 This and complementary theoretical models would encourage us to look at historicallyspecific reader expectations other than genre in relation to the Playbook.5 Historical specificity is, of course, a relative goal, particularly with medieval manuscripts.This manuscript was mostlikely copied in northern France in the thirteenth century; we know that it resided in the library ofthe Benedictine abbey ofFleury (Abbaye Saint Benoît de Fleury, at Saint Benoît-sur-Loire) in the thirteenth century.6 Fleurywas the preeminent Benedictine abbey of the Orléanais, esteemed for its learning and literary innovations, its possession ofSaint Benedicts relics, and its royal privileges.7 Scholars usually suppose the collection was composed at the monastery (some countertheories notwithstanding), though a definitive provenance cannot be established on existing evidence.8 Still, the Playbook obviously contributes to the literary and dramatic culture of thirteenth-century northern Europe, and we may assume the Fleury monks read it as we assume they read other works in their library. We cannot assume they witnessed performances of the plays: the Playbook is not connected to any service books or performative context, and there is no evidence of performances at Fleury or elsewhere. Still, the manuscript clearly presents drama as enacted mimesis. The texts sometimes detail performance conventions (costumes,processional routes,gestures, Theresa Tmkle3 and the like); they certainly encode meaning through such conventions. The manuscript thus offers historical evidence ofdrama presented both as a performative text and as a genre appropriate for reading, and the Playbook is best approached with both performances and readers in mind. In what follows, I aim at this ideal,though my theoretical perspective leads me to emphasize the verbal works, and to consider rubrics for performance primarily as they suggest meanings to a learned reader. One of the most obvious features of the Playbook is its repetitive, stereotypical anti-Semitism, and contemporary readers no doubt approached these passages with a "horizon of expectations" formed by the literature and events oftheir time. A thirteenth-century churchman would encounter destructive images of Jews in many discourses:9 exegesis presents Scripture...

Performative Exegesis in the Fleury Interfectio Puerorum

Performative Exegesis in the Interfectio Puerorum. A music drama in the twelfth-century Fleury Playbook representing the Massacre of the Innocents shows the influence of the exegetical and liturgical traditions associated with the story in the gospel of Matthew and with the feast of the Innocents. In the central Middle Ages, Innocents' Day was characterized by a juxtaposition of mourning and joy: liturgical commentaries emphasize the commemoration of Rachel's grief, while the feast was the occasion for one of the clerical celebrations of the Christmas octave. The play embodies this contrast, particularly in the lengthy dialogue between the lamenting Rachel and her consolers. Rachel's lament, which is based on a sequence by Notker Balbulus, also extends the exegetical tradition by reinforcing the Marian typology inherent in the sequence. Throughout the play, the intersection of liturgical chants with newly composed material creates a complex temporality that effectively dramatizes the multiple ...

Reviews

Reviews Get access T. P. Campbell and C. Davidson (eds), The Fleury Playbook . Pp. xx + 169 (Early Drama, Art and Music Monography Series, 7: Medieval Institute Publications). Kalamazoo : Western Michigan University , 1985 . JOHN STEVENS JOHN STEVENS Magdalene CollegeCambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 36, Issue 1, March 1989, Pages 90–91, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/36-1-90 Published: 01 March 1989

The Staging of Twelfth-Century Liturgical Drama in the Fleury Playbook

1 COMPARATIVE drama Volume 18 Summer 1984 Number 2 The Staging of Twelfth-Century Liturgical Drama in the Fleury Playbook David Bevington In what sense do the ten plays of the so-called Fleury Playbook employ a common theatrical tradition of staging and presentation? Do they share, among themselves and with other twelfth-century church dramas at Beauvais and elsewhere, cer­ tain assumptions about the architectural church interior as stage space, or is their approach to staging the haphazard result of varying sources and redactions?1 Did the Benedictine brethren who mounted these plays have in mind a common method of dramaturgy for their productions? What conventions of pre­ sentation can be adduced from regarding the Fleury play texts collectively as scripts indicative of theatrical performance? Through what sort of figurative language do gesture and stage movement convey meaning? These are the questions I should like to pursue here, much as Bernard Beckerman, John Styan, Ann Slater, and others have recently looked at Shakespeare’s DAVID BEVINGTON, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has published extensively on both the medieval theater and Renaissance drama. He is the editor of Homo, Memento Finis, a collection of essays on the Last Judgment in drama and art to be published by Medieval Institute Publications. 97 98 Comparative Drama play texts as primary indications of how the plays were per­ formed.2 The method of analysis is a fairly recent one, even for Elizabethan and Jacobean drama,3 and has been applied only seldom to medieval church drama.4 The clear advantage of doing so is that play texts and their stage directions or rubrics in any age both explicitly and implicitly contain vital informa­ tion about staging not always reliably available through iconographical or other external sources. To move from the now-familiar terrain of stage-oriented analysis of Shakespeare’s plays into twelfth-century church drama, on the other hand, is to encounter immense differences in the very concept of stage “action” and the symbolic meaning of gesture. Medieval religious drama began with no clearly recognized view of itself as dramatic spectacle. The earliest tropes and dramatic ceremonials celebrated as part of the order of worship for Easter, in various monastic communities of the tenth and eleventh centuries, derived their language from the liturgy and their visual images from ritual practice. From a theatrical point of view, the language is repetitive, characteriza­ tion is often inadequately motivated, and gesture is ceremonial. Even though some rubrics encourage the participants to use affective gesture, as in the Regularis Concordia at Winchester where three brethren dressed as the three Marys are to move haltingly to the sepulcher “in the manner of seeking for some­ thing” as though in imitation (ad similitudinem) of the women coming to anoint the body of Jesus,5 the event remains liturgical rather than theatrically mimetic. In such a liturgical milieu, we need to be cautious about assuming that “performance” could aim at expressive use of gesture or arrangement of theatrical space in any consciously theatrical sense. The concept of an “audience” was essentially foreign to the conditions under which the early ceremonials were performed: monastic brethren chanted an office among themselves, even when tropes of a dramatic character were added. In the choir where they assembled, they had little occa­ sion to worry about “sight lines.” The structures and properties they employed were by and large liturgically determined. Be­ cause the story being presented was so well known and the occasion it celebrated so close at hand, their very texts need not concern themselves with consistency of characterization or motivation.6 The lines of sung dialogue in Easter dramatic ceremonials were to be found in the liturgy, and were ultimately David Bevington 99 based on scriptural account. Bearing such sanction, they did not require further elucidation. Nonetheless, as liturgical drama began to achieve self-aware­ ness of its potential for theatrical performance, it inevitably needed to deal with such considerations of dramaturgy as audience, stage movement, employment of properties and struc­ tures, and the like. This essay proposes that the Fleury Playbook gives evidence of such increased theatrical awareness. The Fleury Playbook holds a key position among collections...

The Fleury Playbook and the Traditions of Medieval Latin Drama

The Fleury Playbook, containing verbal and musical texts for ten plays and now a portion of MS. 201 in the Orleans Municipal Library, is the most extensive surviving collection of medieval Latin music-dramas. Four of these plays have as their subjects episodes from the St. Nicholas legend, while the remaining six include the Herod and Innocents plays made famous by the New York Pro Musica productions, a Lazarus play, extensive Visitatio and Peregrinus plays, and a play about the conversion of St. Paul. All have received a great deal of previous attention. Five of them are included in David Bevington's anthology Medieval Drama, and Fletcher Collins has edited all ten plays in his book of performing versions of seventeen plays from the music-drama repertory. Similarly, Gustave Cohen devoted more than forty percent of his collection of French liturgical drama to plays from the Fleury collection. Indeed, among the anthologists of the Latin music-drama of the past half-century, only Karl Langosch, with his evident bias for German culture, has chosen to omit the Fleury dramas from his book. Clearly these plays are among the most favored of all medieval dramas. 1 This predisposition for the Fleury plays is understandable; by any standard they are extraordinary creations. The very excellence of the individual plays has in fact tended to draw attention away from the collection as a whole. It is true that Giampiero Tintori edited the collection in 1958, and that a continuing controversy had grown up around Solange Corbin's claim that the manuscript was not written at the monastery of St. Benoit-sur-Loire.2 But these scholarly works are only exceptions that point to the relative lack of attention to the collection

The Iconography of Herod in the Fleury Playbook and the Visual Arts

Twelfth-century art and drama are rich in representations of Herod the Great. The sculptural decorations and stained glass windows of the cathedrals being built in France provided excellent opportunities for artists to portray large-scale cycles of the Infancy and Passion of Christ, while in England manuscript illuminators were using similar subject material for cycles of the Life of Christ which were prefixed to the text of the Psalter. Since there also was an increasing interest at this time in the story of the Magi, their visit to Herod was often portrayed within Magi cycles as well as in series of paintings devoted to the Infancy of Christ. Twelfth-century art is notable not only for the variety of contexts in which Herod appears, but also for the dramatic changes which take place in the iconography of this king. He becomes less and less regal, and, with the introduction of devils to advise him and a sword to replace his scepter, he is now unmistakably associated with the forces of evil.

Modal and Motivic Coherence in the Music of the Fleury Play Book

The Music of the Medieval Church Dramas by the late William L. Smoldon, published in 1980 six years after the author's death, brought to light scores of melodies from liturgical dramas, including many from the so-called Fleury Play Book, Orleans, Bibliotheque de la Ville, MS. 201.1 Although Smoldon in this publication has transcribed certain melodies, his purpose was not to become too involved with melodic analysis; hence our understanding of this repertory's musical excellence still requires additional scholarly attention. However, when we direct our energy toward what Walther Lipphardt called unity2 we can, through modal and motivic analysis, expose these slimly explored facets of the plays' music, and we can also provide bases for comparing musical effects of other manuscripts. Indeed, Lipphardt's understanding of tonale Einheit is reasonable, since entire series of antiphons maintaining a single mode are to be found in chant repertories. 3 John Stevens pertinently remarks that in the Fleury Visitatio the mode is retained up to scene changes, while the Tres Filiae maintains a single melody throughout. 4 How many other modal and motivic continua are to be found in the remaining St. Nicholas and Temporale tetralogies and biblical miracles associated with St. Paul and Lazarus in the Fleury Play Book? To launch this investigation, some preliminaries relative to the technical and terminological frameworks of medieval music may prove useful. For the transcriptions in the examples which I present, I adopt the system of notation used by F. A. Gevaert in his study of modal melodies in the tenth-century chant catalog,

The Two Cities in the Fleury Playbook

The Two Cities in the Fleury Playbook Thomas P. Campbell The collection of plays found in MS. Orleans 201 is one of the great achievements of medieval literature. Individual dra­ mas—the Play of Herod, the Son of Getron, Lazarus—have become familiar to students of medieval drama partially because of their successful production in modem times. Yet, little critical attention has been paid to the collection as a whole. In fact, we are very far from knowing why it was brought together, or even where it was originally written. The purpose of this essay is to present an assessment of its literary value and to suggest some principles of coherence that apply to the group of plays collected in the manuscript. Despite its uniqueness, the Fleury Playbook has been seen by most scholars as basically a compilation of liturgical plays available from other sources. According to such thinking, a redactor, or redactors, simply copied versions of the plays, perhaps with slight modification, and bound them into the book. But why would so many plays—more than exist in any other manuscript of Latin drama—have been collected? And why from so many diverse traditions? I would like to suggest that, contrary to the prevailing view, the Fleury plays form a coherent and distinct group, and that a clear purpose guided their selection and presentation. I propose that the playwright who was responsible for the Fleury plays was strongly influenced by the Augustinian doctrine of the Two Cities, and that he modified, adapted, or created dramas which illustrate this concern. Augustine articulated the theme of these two communities in The City of God thus: THOMAS P. CAMPBELL teaches at Wabash College. His previous publications on medieval drama include papers in Comparative Drama and the American Benedic­ tine Review. 148 Thomas P. Campbell 149 What we see, then, is that two societies have issued from two kinds of love. Worldly society has flowered from a selfish love which dared to despise even God, whereas the communion of saints is rooted in a love of God that is ready to trample on self. The city of man seeks the praise of men, whereas the height of glory for the other is to hear God in the witness of conscience.! And, although man was created capable of achieving the City of God through his own merits, he has fallen because of sin into bodily corruption: It was surely enough that on that day [i.e., the day on which Adam and Eve ate the fruit] their nature became defective and was changed for the worse, and that, by being justly deprived of the tree of life, they became subject to that necessity of bodily death, which is now for us innate.2 It is not not until Christ established a “model” through his Resurrection that man was delivered from the worldly death he had created for himself.3 This philosophical interpretation of history established by Augustine became the predominant form of Christian historio­ graphy during the Middle Ages. In fact, the Universal History, tracing the conflicting fates of good and evil men beginning with Adam and continuing to the date of composition, is found in every era from Fulgentius in the early sixth century to the end of the Middle Ages.4 Nor was the primary importance of Augustine’s work forgotten. Charlemagne, according to his biographer Einhardt, read the City of God daily, and by the mid twelfth century, the work became the very basis of the most highly regarded medieval history, the Chronica of Otto, Bishop of Freising. As Otto acknowledges in his Prologue: Sequor autem in hoc opere preclara potissimum Augustinum et Orosium ecclesiae lumina eorumque de fontibus ea, quae ad rem propositumve pertinent, haurire cogitavi. Quorum alter de gloriosae civitatis Dei exortu sive progressu debitisque finibus, quomodo inter mundi cives semper profecerit, quique eius cives vel principes quibus principum seu civium seculi temporibus extiterint, acutissime disertissimeque disputavit. (In this work I follow most of all those illustrious lights of the Church, Augustine and Orosius, and have planned to draw from those fountains what is pertinent to my theme and my purpose. The one of these has discoursed most keenly...

The Fleury Raising of Lazarus and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought

The Fleury R a isin g o f L azarus and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought Kathleen M. Ashley For the non-theologian attempting to understand the intel­ lectual background of medieval literature, undoubtedly one of the most influential modem essays has been the last chapter in R. W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle AgesA The chapter puts the twelfth-century literary shift from epic to romance— from the Chanson de Roland to Chretien de Troyes—into the broader perspective of a whole society newly interested in spiritual introspection and human emotions, and delineates succinctly the parallel theological shift from the “Abuse of Power” doctrine to a theory of redemption in which Christ’s humanity was the functional element. The model Southern proposed for distinguishing early from late medieval art, literature, and piety was immediately per­ suasive because of its clarity and elegance, but its very appli­ cability may have had the unfortunate result of blunting the sensibilities of those who read later medieval religious literature because their expectations were formed before they actually confronted the text. (The text had been “pre-read,” so to speak.) Southern himself points out that the emphasis on Christ’s humanity was not felt everywhere in Europe at the same time. It should therefore come as no surprise that there would be a period of transition during which both the older and the newer emphases might co-exist in various combinations. In this paper I would like to propose that the Raising of Lazarus from the Fleury playbook exhibits just such transitional features. Considerable injustice is done to this play if we attempt to restrict it exclusively to one mold when its distinctiveness lies in the fact that elements of both the newer and the older theology are combined in the character of Christ and the meaning given the action by the twelfth-century dramatist, who 139 has enriched the biblical story by means of the intellectual emphases of his day. In order to appreciate the twelfth-century dramatic version we must first return to the meanings which earlier commentators perceived in the biblical narrative of John 11.1-45. According to these exegetes, the Lazarus story provided evidence for both Christ’s historical humanity and his supernatural powers. The Lazarus miracle was seen as proof of Christ’s divinity, and as a préfiguration of his own resurrection; the power thus mani­ fested was further a sign of the power which could release all sinners from their spiritual death. The Lazarus story thus pro­ vided the perfect setting for the image of Christus Victor, the resurrected Christ, triumphant in his divinity over the power and wiles of Satan, sin, and death. At the same time, the biblical story says that “Jesus wept” (John 11.35) over the grave of Lazarus, and this was taken in all exegesis as evidence of Christ’s human affections and thus as definitive proof of his humanity.2 Some early theologians like Clement of Alexandria, much influenced by Stoic philo­ sophy to elevate the virtue of impassibility, the imperviousness to all transient human emotions, had presented a Stoic Christ, serenely and immutably above the fray of human emotional and physical life; this is the image of the crucifixion presented in most early sculptures, illuminations, and hymns.3 But the Lazarus story suggested an Incarnate Savior whose emotions were truly human, whose affections could be moved by love and sorrow, and it thus became a crux for theological discus­ sions of Christ’s humanity. To cite the most eminent theologian of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, who calls on the model of a grieving Christ to justify his own expressions of grief on the death of his brother Gerard: Ille flevit compatiendo, et ego patiendo non audeam? Et certe ad tumulum Lazari nec fientes arguit, nec a fletu prohibuit, insuper et flevit cum flentibus: Et lacrymatus est, inquit, Jesus. Fuerunt lacrymae illae testes profecto naturae, non indices diffidentiae. Denique et prodiit mox ad vocem ejus qui erat mortuus, ne continuo putes fidei praejudicium dolentis affectum. Sic nec fletus utique noster infidelitatis est signum, sed conditionis indicium. (PL 183.911) He wept over the sorrows of others...

The Home of the Fleury Playbook

The late 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. Benoit de Fleury at St. Benoit-sur-Loire, to proclaim indeed that Le manuscrit [of the Playbook] ne provient pas de Saint-Benoit, 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 Strati ordon-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, impressively 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

The Shorter Latin Poems of Master Henry of Avranches Relating to England. Josiah Cox Russell , John Paul Heironimus , Master HenryFour Latin Plays of St. Nicholas from the 12th Century Fleury Play-Book. Otto E. Albrecht , St. Nicholas

The Shorter Latin Poems of Master Henry of Avranches Relating to England. Josiah Cox Russell , John Paul Heironimus , Master HenryFour Latin Plays of St. Nicholas from the 12th Century Fleury Play-Book. Otto E. Albrecht , St. Nicholas

Four Latin Plays of St Nicholas from the Twelfth-Century Fleury Play-Book

Four Latin Plays of St Nicholas from the Twelfth-Century Fleury Play-Book

Four Latin Plays of St. Nicholas from the 12th Century Fleury Play-Book. Text and Commentary, with a Study of the Music of the Plays, and of the Sources and Iconography of the Legends.

Four Latin Plays of St. Nicholas from the 12th Century Fleury Play-Book. Text and Commentary, with a Study of the Music of the Plays, and of the Sources and Iconography of the Legends.