Ebook: The Vengeance of Our lord: The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Conversion of Rome in Medieval Drama

The dissertation offers the first comprehensive study of an important and largely neglected European dramatic tradition. Its subject is the large family of late medieval plays which re-enact episodes drawn from a complex network of historical and legendary narratives concerning the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian and the inauguration of a triumphant Christian empire in Rome. By analyzing the unique structural patterns employed by each of the dramatists in question, a great deal can be learned not only about how medieval playwrights and their audiences understood the distant past, but also about how they perceived their own present position within the vast plan of Christian salvation history.

In addition to performance records describing more than twenty non-extant plays, the dissertation concentrates primarily on four surviving texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis (the so-called Innsbrucker Mariahimmelfahrtsspiel), the fragments of an otherwise lost Thuringian play known as the "Gothaer Botenrolle," the Mors Pilati episodes from the Cornish Ordinalia, and Eustache Marcade's La Vengance Jhesucrist.

An introductory chapter discusses the significance of the first-century events which provide the historical background of the plays, proposes reasons for the lack of scholarship in this area, and examines the relationship of the plays to their sources in Biblical, historical, and legendary narratives, in liturgical practices and medieval homilies, and in vernacular romances. Subsequent chapters analyze each of the four extant works in turn. After describing the play's provenance and the manner in which it was performed, each chapter devotes particular attention to the problem of how the structural design of the text is indicative of the playwright's attempt to interpret the past in such a way as to reflect specifically Christian themes. Thus, the dissertation demonstrates how the plays seek to reconcile the inherently antithetical claims of Christian doctrine and heroic subject matter within the context of the social ideology and religious values of their respective sponsors, namely, a militant monastic order, a prosperous urban population, a learned community of secular canons, and the powerful ducal court of Burgundy. A concluding chapter surveys the widespread popularity of the tradition as a whole, with particular emphasis on the diversity of the plays in terms of their provenance, patronage, plot design, and central thematic concerns.