Introduction – Chanita Goodblatt and Eva von Contzen
Part I: Medieval drama
1 Lay piety and impiety: the role of Noah’s wife in the Chester play of Noah’s Flood – Lawrence Besserman
2 Typology, community, and stagecraft in the N-town ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’ – Jonathan Stavsky
3 Embodiment and joint attention: an enactive reading of the Middle English cycle plays– Eva von Contzen
Part II: From medieval to early modern drama
4 From medieval to early modern choric threnody in biblical plays – Silvia Bigliazzi
5 The itinerant healer as a stage role: its origins in religious drama – M. A. Katritzky
6 Citing scripture in later medieval and early modern English morality drama – Cathy Shrank
7 Religious violence and dramatic innovation in the Tudor interlude: John Heywood’s The Pardoner and the Friar – Greg Walker
8 Elizabethan biblical drama – Paul Whitfield White
Part III: Early modern drama
9 Protestant place, Protestant props in the plays of Nicholas Grimald– Elisabeth Dutton
10 Staging prophecy: A Looking Glass for London and the Book of Jonah– Hannibal Hamlin
11 Early modern dramatic martyrdom– Monika Fludernik
12 ‘Samson Figuru nese’: biblical plays between Czech drama and English comedy in early modern Central Europe– Pavel Drábek
13 To play the Fool: the Book of Esther in early modern biblical drama– Chanita Goodblatt
Index

This volume offers new perspectives on the crucial role played by the Bible in medieval culture and in the wake of the Reformation across Europe. The thirteen chapters open up new horizons for the study of biblical drama by putting special emphasis on periodisation, the intersections of biblical narrative and performance, and the strategies employed by playwrights to rework and adapt the biblical source material.

The book is based on a framework of multitemporality, transnationality, and the modalities of performance and form in relation to the uses of the Bible in late-medieval and early modern drama. These aspects are not to be treated as separate or distinct phenomena, but are intertwined: particular modalities of performance evolve, adapt, and are recreated as they intersect with different historical times and circumstances. These intersections pertain to aspects such as dramatic traditions, confessional and religious rites, dogmas and debates, conceptualisations of performance and form, and audience response – whenever the Bible is evoked for performative purposes.

Stressing the presence of both biblical and contemporary concerns in the periods under discussion, Enacting the Bible conceives of biblical drama as a central participant in the dynamic struggle to both interpret and translate the Bible. The double focus on formal elements and the multilayeredness of time allows us to cast the idea of the Bible as a generator of meaning into sharper relief.