ENG1006H: York's Plays and Records

An archival turn in medieval drama studies began in the 1970s with the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project; it has since been reinvigorated by the digital humanities. For better or worse, we still cannot talk about York's Corpus Christi plays — a cycle of 47 short plays, each based on a different Bible story, each produced on open-air wagon stages by a different local guild from c. 1377 to 1569 — without also talking about York's contemporaneous civic, financial, and legal records. Students will read through all the York plays (at first with help from a modern-spelling edition, then in untranslated Middle English) and through much of the archives gathered in REED's York volume — to discover for ourselves what they may reveal about the extant plays, or about other plays now lost — alongside readings from relevant scholarship. Meanwhile, this course will also offer light training and experience in digital humanities, archiving, and indexing, by teaching students (with help from REED staff) how to convert the old hard-copy text of REED: York into a searchable XML document, and then by requiring them to demonstrate those skills in real (if short) contributions to e-REED's online York Prototype.

0.50
St. George