Thomas Chaundler and academic drama: Performance practices in the medieval English university
Item
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Title
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Thomas Chaundler and academic drama: Performance practices in the medieval English university
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:36a9b3e77228:11511
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identifier
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12006
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Creator
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Meacham, Thomas J.,
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Contributor
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Pamela Sheingorn
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater history | Medieval literature | Education history | ecclesiastical humanism | Liber Apologeticus | medieval drama | medieval performance | Thomas Chaundler | university drama
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Abstract
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Previous scholarship has claimed that university drama did not exist (at Oxford or Cambridge) before the Tudor period. To support this claim, scholars have repudiated medieval pedagogy, in particular, for being unable to generate the kinds of "exploratory" forms of inquiry that would later allow university drama to occur in the early sixteenth century through humanist pedagogy. I contend that medieval or scholastic pedagogy is capable of producing dynamic forms of entertainment and that a vibrant tradition of medieval university drama and performance did occur throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This performance tradition has been unrecognized by scholars not only because of inaccurate assumptions about medieval pedagogy, but also because scholars have not considered the full range of medieval performance practices or "texts" beyond the traditional play text.;My investigation takes as its focus one of the last medieval university plays, Thomas Chaundler's Liber Apologeticus de omni statu humanae naturae (A defense of human nature in every state, c. 1460). The play is typically valued only for its alleged ability to explain the literary transition from medieval to humanist stylistics, and not for its literary qualities and/or performance potential. My dissertation views Liber Apologeticus and the texts of its parent codex, Cambridge: Trinity College MS R.14.5 (in addition to select texts from another manuscript compiled by Chaundler, Oxford: New College MS 288) as representing the culmination of a substantive and nuanced medieval university performance tradition. The texts of the Chaundler MSS incorporate, for instance, medieval pedagogical practices (such as disputation and preaching), devotional practices (such as the observance of the Office of the Dead), and ceremonial practices (such as commendatio speeches and King of Christmas festivities) to produce dynamic and transformative forms of performance. Furthermore, I demonstrate that these texts existed within networks of performative and textual communities that reached beyond the walls of Oxford and were generative of ecclesiastical and pedagogical performance practices and aesthetics that can be traced back to Oxford University's first institutionalization as a corporate body.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Theatre
