"Le jeu d'Adam.--La seinte resureccion.--Le jeu de Saint Nicolas, by J. Bodel.--Courtois d'Arras.--Le miracle de Theophile, by Rutebeuf.--Le garcon et l'aveugle.--Le jeu de la feuillee, by A. de la Halle.--Le jeu de Robin et de Marion, by A. de la Halle."

This book revives what was unique, strange and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in 'theaters' but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a playgoing experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.

"This collection of French medieval plays is the first of its kind in the English language. It presents genuine translations -- not adaptations -- of three secular farces, a humorous miracle play, and a musical pastoral. The translator, Oscar Mandel, himself a playwright, has provided a comprehensive introduction discussing the development of drama in the Middle Ages as well as individual introductions to each of the plays. Comedy of the Middle Ages has its own character, its own strong points, its own limitations. It can be very funny, it is rapid and peppery, but we had better not look to it for acute psychological insights, penetrating criticism of life, philosophical reverberations, or even witty repartee in our sense of the expression. The greatest writers of the time did not write for the stage, and even when serious, the drama was popular and it avoided subtleties. And yet, here and there, something very much like genius winks at us from both the serious and comic drama of these centuries" -- Back cover.