Richard Rastall's two books on music in early English religious drama complement each other. Heaven Singing provides an overview of the evidence for music in the plays, and defines the place, nature and cultural contexts of music in the drama; Minstrels Playing is a discussion of the evidence for every play in that repertory, and is therefore concerned with the place and nature of musical performance in each play individually. Where should there be music in an anonymous English religious play of the fifteenth or sixteenth century? What sort of music should it be, and by what forces should it...

Richard Rastall's two books on music in early English religious drama complement each other. Heaven Singing provides an overview of the evidence for music in the plays, and defines the place, nature and cultural contexts of music in the drama; Minstrels Playing is a discussion of the evidence for every play in that repertory, and is therefore concerned with the place and nature of musical performance in each play individually. Following his general discussion of music in the anonymous religious plays of 15th- and 16th-century England in The Heaven Singing (1996), this companion volume turns...

Festive drama, in these studies, includes processions and folk-customs as well as full-blown plays, from Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, and Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). The main focus is the middle ages, but style and approach are as relevant as time-scale, reflecting a culture in which there are no firm divisions between drama and pageantry and traditional ceremonies. Common themes emerge: the world turned upside-down of Shrovetide; the emotive power of religious celebration; and the links between commerce and the demonstration of civic pride. Festive customs...

The essays collected here on the Gawain-Poet offer stimulating introductions to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, providing both information and original analysis. Topics include theories of authorship; the historical and social background to the poems, with individual sections on particularly important features within them; gender roles in the poems; the manuscript itself; the metre, vocabulary and dialect of the poems; and their sources. A section devoted to Sir Gawain investigates the ideas of courtesy and chivalry found within it, and explores some of its...