‘Putting People in their Place in French Hagiographic Mystery Plays’: The Craft(s) of Medieval Theatre: Spaces and People

Since the 1970s, scholars of medieval theatre have described late medieval vernacular performances as communal events on the one hand and as vehicles for demonstrating social authority on the other. This article steps into the space between collective intention and particular agency to compare three late medieval performance remnants with different histories. Using textual evidence of three types -prologues and epilogues, marginal staging notations, and embedded (spoken) cues about staging - 'Putting People in their Place in French Hagiographic Mystery Plays' re-imagines the spatial dimensions of three very different venues, including the construction of their stages, the relationship between player and spectator, and the social implications thereof. Ultimately, this study builds a case for the individual mandates, traditions, and performances of the Mystere de saint Laurent, which survives in an early sixteenth-century edition, the Jeu de saint Estienne pape et martire, a sixteenth-century manuscript copy of a three-session play that was performed in Saint-Mihiel (Belgium) in 1548, and the Mystere de saint Christofle, which survives in two sixteenth-century editions.