This article is a regular feature of Fifteenth-Century Studies. Our intent is to catalogue, survey, and assess scholarship on the staging and textual configuration of dramatic presentations in the late Middle Ages. Like all such dated material this assessment remains incomplete. We shall therefore include 2004 again in the next listing [vol. 31]. Our readers are encouraged to bring new items to our attention, including their own work. Monographs and collections selected for detailed review will appear in the third section of this article and will be marked by an asterisk in the pages below.

During the time span 2002...

The passage above (in my translation) presents the incipit of the Passion Isabeau (1398 — hereafter: PI), a narrative text leading readers and listeners through Holy Week, a sacred period fraught with potential for gestural expression (e.g., ritualistic, experiential, theatrical). When viewing the illuminated scenes of this text, one is struck by the intriguing gestic language used by the persons depicted, attesting to the miniaturists’ skill while, at the same time, evoking the tableaux vivants of paradramatic stagings.¹ What is interesting about gestures is that the bodily movements of the persons captured on canvas or elsewhere are frozen in time but...

During the late 1400s, an important shift in the spiritual and factual orientations of humankind began to take place, as Christian teleology became challenged by a worldly anthropology. Whereas before, God and religious concerns held sway in the world, now secular matters came to preoccupy the lives and fears of humankind and became the center of attention. As Georges Duby observes, “there can be no doubt that a subjective experience of the presence of evil did exist; but, as has often been observed, the most frightening demons are those within.”¹ Duby’s comment captures the temper of an individualistic era, one...

Christ’s miracles as dramatized in the York cycle of Corpus Christi plays convey a representative selection of the Savior’s works, attesting to his efficacy. His miracles of physical regeneration can be strikingly theatrical as borne out through contemporary production: the lame man hurls his crutches aside; and Lazarus staggers from his tomb resuscitated, still encumbered by his funeral garments. In addition to these works conducive to stage action, spiritual healings unaccompanied by physical metamorphosis are also enacted, though such transformations are less disposed toward external manifestation, making it necessary for spectators to imagine what the wondrous act, once effected, would...

In 1979, the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired a small, well-preserved panel of St. John the Baptist (fig. 1), its composition suggesting that it was once the right wing of a triptych.¹ Temporarily ascribed to the circle of Jan van Eyck, the panel was later (and more precisely) attributed by several critics to Petrus Christus. Principal among these scholars was Maryan Ainsworth, who advocated including such an ascription in the 1994 catalogue for the retrospective of Christus’s work to be housed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; for instance, she noted the work’s “similarities in technique and execution” to...