Theatre and Conversion in Early Modern Zürich, Berne and Lucerne

The limits of theatre as a medium for religious indoctrination became an object of exploration, debate, and censorship in the Swiss cities of Zürich, Berne and Lucerne. This chapter addresses how the civil and religious authorities of these cities struggled to control not just the content, but the audience’s interpretations of religious plays in the context of the Reformation.

A Study of the Poetic Foundations of Three Prominent Contemporary Poets Mehdi Akhavan Sales, Ahmad Shamloo and Hamid Mossadegh with an Approach to European Literature

Literary schools in the West are influenced by the social and political conditions prevailing in those societies; This means that each school in line with the political and social developments of its time has undergone structural and content changes and gives way to a school with a different perspective. In the second half of the sixteenth century, medieval civilization collapsed and underwent many social, political, and religious changes. The group of many high-ranking landowners and feudal lords who had been forced to pay large sums of money as a result of the successive defeats of France in the Hundred Years' War were gradually forced to sell their lands and properties with all legal rights. The tribal kings belonged to it. This caused the landowners to lose their influence and power, and the government to change from a form of sectarian monarchy to an absolute monarchy. The king, like the ancient Romans, was considered to have absolute authority in the administration of the affairs of the country, and the lords of all lands served the king. By order of the Shah, ministries, the army, the Court of Accounts and the judiciary were formed; The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, entered government positions because of the prosperity of the commercial and industrial market, the wealthy and influential. Other important events, such as new inventions, new naval discoveries, as well as wars known as the Italian Wars, all went hand in hand and completely changed the way of life and the situation of French society. With the advent of Luther and Calvin and fundamental religious reforms, popular belief in the teachings of the clergy waned, and since then Christianity has been limited to a set of rites and ceremonies held by Catholic priests. In addition, Christian theologians gradually found themselves without the need for direct reference to Christian scriptures and recklessly discussed religious issues. On the other hand, in literary works, the desire for great ideas disappeared and literature, which was based on spiritual favors, became frozen. Religious plays lost their religious and heavenly appeal and took on the color of hypocrisy and trade; In this way, almost all the systems and laws that ruled France for centuries were questioned at the beginning of this century, and fundamental changes took place in Europe at that time; But it was not long before the great scientific and maritime discoveries showed him the power of human thought and greatness, and showed him that human endeavors must expand without borders, and that in a world full of contradictions and contradictions, he is free to go his own way. Choose. From then on, people liked what they thought was beautiful and charming; Therefore, not only the manifestations of the world of sensations and the world of nature were in the center of attention, but also the literary works of ancient writers and poets, especially ancient Greece, were doubly valued by them. This gradually led to the formation of a new attitude.

Hurtling off a Precipice, Falling into a River: A Nahuatl Metaphor and the Christian Concept of Sin

This article centers on a contextual analysis of the Nahuatl metaphor atoyatl tepexitl as attested in the colonial sources belonging to different genres: from devotional literature, like doctrinal treatises and religious plays, to sacred narratives on pre-Hispanic gods (e.g., the mockeries of Tezcatlipoca in Tula). Due to its compatibility with the Christian negative valuation of falling and the existence of similar expressions in Spanish, this couplet was adopted by friars to render the concept of sin. The article points to possible ambiguities and confusions that establishing such equivalency must have caused early after the conquest, and attempts to unravel the possible pre-Hispanic ramifications of the metaphor.

The Pursuit of Pilgrimage, Pleasure, and Military Alliances

Nagaridas’s Tīrthānand (1753) is the memoir of a two-year pilgrimage to Braj composed by Nagaridas, also known as Savant Singh, the deposed king of Kishangarh in Rajasthan. Pauwels delineates how the ‘culturally mediated category’ of pilgrimage structures Nagaridas’s experience and its narratological reconstruction in the versified memoir. Just as pilgrimage itself is a polysemous experience that satisfies multiple goals and needs, so the Tīrthānand too works at multiple levels. As Nagaridas narrates events in the mundane world—visits to temples, devotional singing, religious plays, and the like—he frequently elevates these happenings onto the mythological plane of Radha and Krishna’s eternal Braj. Yet contemporary political circumstances and errands of royal necessity intrude at critical junctures of the narrative. The Tīrthānand is thus a tribute to mythical Braj, a travelogue, and a chronicle of contemporary political and social developments.

The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants, ed. Christina M. Fitzgerald. Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2018, pp. 405, 11 b/w ill.

We can only be thankful for any efforts to make major or minor medieval texts available to our students today because the knowledge of medieval Latin or vernacular languages is disappearing at an alarming rate. Christina M. Fitzgerald here presents in a very reader-friendly version a selection of pageants in The York Corpus Christi Play from the late fourteenth century (earliest, 1376), consisting of 47 plays in total, 27 of which are reproduced here, and couples those with a selection of contemporary texts to illustrate better the global interest in religious topics for public performance at that time. This is a most important literary document mirroring popular culture during the late Middle Ages, and so we cannot overestimate the <?page nr="490"?>pedagogical value of this new text selection. After all, The York Corpus Christi Play consists of over 300 speaking parts and more than 14,000 lines, which required a large involvement of the urban population to carry out the performance, very similar to the continental religious plays during the entire late Middle Ages and beyond.

Theatre

How did the relation between Christianity and drama evolve during the long nineteenth century? How were Christian beliefs represented, promoted, and interrogated through drama? What part did Christianity play in the changing kinds, spaces, and genres of theatre? This chapter analyses the creation, production, and reception of a range of dramatic forms, including melodramas, musicals, ‘classics’, comedies, and tragedies, as well as explicitly religious, and later in the nineteenth century, cinematic dramas. Plays by George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, and Henrik Ibsen are scrutinized alongside early silent films and the evolving passion and religious plays tradition. The chapter teases out a number of underlying tensions relating to the place of Christianity within popular and respectable theatre, romantic and realistic drama, and theatrical and screen drama. The chapter highlights how Christian beliefs were creatively used by playwrights, actors, and theatre-goers, in theatrical, domestic, and public spaces.

Ars Memorativa, Ars Oblivionis in Middle English Religious Plays

This paper investigates the multi-layered violence of religious representation in the late medieval York biblical plays, with a focus on the Supper at Emmaus. I read Emmaus (Y40), a play which commemorates the Crucifixion and openly encourages strong anti-Judaism, alongside scenes in an early predecessor pageant, The Crucifixion (Y35), within their contemporary devotional and mnemonic practices, i.e. the confessional Book of Margery Kempe and Thomas Bradwardine’s tract on ars memorativa. Emmaus in particular demonstrates how a fundamentally violent ars memorativa, the legacy of ancient rhetoric to the Middle Ages, also underpins the instruction of the laity in the basics of Christian faith, here with the aid of highly musical prosody and repetition, and thereby hones a biased, intolerant and violence-inured Christian collective memory. To study the York play’s position relative to late medieval mnemonic practices, I frame my analysis within memory studies, enriched with the more specific insights offered by social-psychological, neurobiological and cognitivist studies of memory.