Playtexts of European Medieval Drama

International scholarship on medieval and early modern drama and theatre has flourished in recent decades, devoloping and revisiting the major cornerstones of the research in the discipline as they were established at the beginning of the twentieth century. The map of theatrical performance in pre-modern Europe is well-filled, especially with regard to Western Europe, the Anglophone tradition largely dominating in terms of range and number of topics covered in reference works, subjects of international conferences, and conceptions of trans-regional research projects. While the rich dramatic traditions of other languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Latin) have been researched by specialists in their respective cultures, the limited knowledge of these languages among medievalists in general has, over time, created an epistemological gap that prevents an adequate assessment of phenomena that have transcended the borders of modern national states. The proposed series aims to remedy this situation by making key texts from the non-English dramatic traditions available to an international medievalist audience in up-to-date editions and translations. The volumes of the series will include an extensive introduction and commentary in English, followed by the edited text(s), supplemented by explanations of its linguistic and semantic lyers, identification of relevant transtextual and historical references, and manuscript variants, as well as the historical contexts and the documentation of the performance tradition related to the given text(s).
This endeavour will enable past patterns of dramatic and theatrical production to be assessed in unreduced form as profoundly trans-national phenomena. It will allow researchers to see links between similar material in different language variants and, consequently, to make more qualified claims about the production and dissemination of medieval and early modern dramatic works. It will be possible to grasp the details of the complex rhizomatic modes of the transfer of dramatic texts, motifs, themes, and strategies across the continent. Such reaserch is welcome not only because it can expand the current knowledge of pre-modern theatre, but also because it has the potential to revise the earlier imballance in the assessment of European medieval culture, which tended to privilege Anglophone cultural phenomena over those of other linguistic traditions. We believe that the time has come to shift attention from individual dramatic works to the aesthetic, social, political and performative networks of which they were part of. For such a perspective, the avalability of works from different linguistic traditions in English seems absolutely essential.