This book can be read not only by an academic audience but also by a general public for an understanding and appreciation of two bedrocks, drama and liturgy, a twentieth-century culture.

The author explores the history of God, angels, and men, the Christian experience, and the spiritual battle being waged on the stage of time and eternity. He takes readers through the entire divine story in a rapid and compelling way. (Motivation)

First published in 1974, European Drama of the Early Middle Ages stresses the distinctive variety of the dramatic traditions, both secular and religious, and shows that throughout the period the popular and profane was a constant and lively source of enrichment to the mainstream of charge drama.Dr Axton reconstructs the forms and conventions of the major secular traditions and analyses in detail some of the finest plays of the period from traditions as various as the twelfth century Latin music dramas and the unique drama of Arras in Northern France. Turning finally to late medieval English drama he illustrates and underlines his main theme of the largely unrecognised influence of secular traditions on both the morality and cycle plays. The period from 900 to 1400 was remarkable, as Richard Axton demonstrates, for a dramatic range which accommodated the bawdy, the crude and the fantastic beside the solemn and sacred in its constant preoccupation with man and his identity. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of English and European Literature.

The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany, from 13th-century Helfta to the 15th-century Lüneburg convents. The mystical and devotional writing of Northern Germany is contextualised through chapters on the Netherlands, Scandinavia and East Prussia. The seminal influence of the liturgy on these texts and their transmission is revealed in the creative interplay of Latin and Low German. Through the individual chapters and their appendices, which also contain translations into English, the reader can access a wealth of texts produced by communities of religious and lay women who write learnedly in Latin and fervently in Low German. Together, the chapters and appendices reveal a fascinating regional "mystical culture" which also reverberated across Northern Europe. Contributors include: Jürgen Bärsch, Anne Bollmann, Veerle Fraeters, Ulrike Hascher-Burger, Ernst Hellgardt, Tanja Mattern, Balazs Nemes, Sara S. Poor, Eva Schlotheuber, Almut Suerbaum, and Geert Warnar.

There have been many histories of Christian art and architecturebut none written be a theologian such as Kevin Seasoltz. Following a chapter on culture as the context for theology, liturgy, and art, Seasoltz surveys developments from the early church up through the conventional artistic styles and periods. Comprehensive, illuminating, ecumenical.

Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’ drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.

A collection of scholarly essays about various aspects of the Eucharist, as presented at the 25th anniversary of The Catholic University of America's liturgy program. Topics include prophetic Eucharist in a prophetic Church, ritual studies and the Eucharist, prospects and proposals for liturgical theology, 'in persona Christi' at the Eucharist, and pastoral ecumenism and the Common Lectionary. -- Provided by publisher.