The Theatre of Medieval Europe brings together the work of thirteen internationally recognized scholars of early drama to give a comprehensive account of recent findings in the field. Whilst reflecting the large body of research on English drama, the book widens the focus of its survey to represent the continental theatre of the period, with a succession of essays covering England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, central Europe and the Low Countries. In addition, it deals with Latin musical and liturgical drama, and addresses both the archival and stage-orientated aspects of theatre research....

This study reconstructs German carnival theatre from performance records, most published here for the first time, and with the help of plays and their manuscripts that tell us when, how and why towns began to stage such theatricals. Play texts survive only from a few towns where scribes happened to copy them into manuscripts designed for reading. Because most scripts were lost, only the performance records (521 from 59 towns) allow us to write a reliable history of carnival theatre.