2015 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

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1 T H E C I V I C C Y C L E S

2 M E D I E VA L A N D E A R LY M O D E R N Series Editors: David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson R E C E N T T I T L E S I N T H E S E R I E S Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, (2009) Robert W. Barrett, Jr. The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, (2009) Patricia Badir The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, (2010) Nancy Bradley Warren The Island Garden: England s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (2012) Lynn Staley Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2012) Claire Costley King oo The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (2012) Alice Dailey Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry (2013) Katherine C. Little Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More (2013) Thomas Betteridge Unwritten Verities: The Making of England s Vernacular Legal Culture, (2015) Sebastian Sobecki Mysticism and Reform, (2015) Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith, eds.

3 T H E C I V I C C YC L E S Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England NICOLE R. RICE & MARGARET AZIZA PAPPANO University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

4 Copyright 2015 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rice, Nicole R., 1973 The civic cycles : artisan drama and identity in premodern England / Nicole R. Rice & Margaret Aziza Pappano. pages cm. (Nd reformations: medieval & early modern) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (paperback) ISBN (paperback) 1. York plays. 2. Chester plays. 3. English drama To 1500 History and criticism. 4. Literature and society England History To Artisans England History To Theater England York History Medieval, Theater England Chester History Medieval, Religious drama, English History and criticism. I. Pappano, Margaret Aziza, 1967 II. Title. PR644.Y6R ' dc The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

5 To Howard, Toby, and Helena N. R. R. To Adnan and Hamza M. A. P.

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7 Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments ix xi Introduction: Craft Communities and Artisan Drama 1 ONE New Beginnings: Processions, Plays, and Civic Politics 41 in York and Chester TWO Whom Seek Ye, Sirs? : Searching and Salvation in 83 York s Herod and the Magi THREE Fair Trade: Masters, Servants, and Local Identity in 117 the York Cycle FOUR Spinsters, Laborers, and Alewives: The Regulation of 161 Women s Work in Chester FIVE Last Judgment in York and Chester: Artisans, Merchants, 209 and the Performance of Civic Charity Epilogue 255 List of Abbreviations 265 Notes 266 Bibliography 323 Index 343

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9 Figures Figures lacking page numbers are in the gallery following p Figure i.1. First folio of Chester Goldsmiths Company Book (CALS ZG 12/1). Reproduced with permission of the Chester Goldsmiths Company. 29 Figure 1.1. York Corpus Christi Play: Pageant Route of Meg Twycross. Reproduced with her permission. 45 Figure 1.2. Map of premodern Chester. Robert W. Barrett, Jr. Reproduced with his permission. 47 Figure 1.3. God s speech from the York Tanners Play. The British Library Board, Additional MS 35290, fol. 6v. Reproduced with permission. Figure 3.1. Last Supper panel from York Minster. Dean and Chapter of York. Reproduced by kind permission. Figure 3.2. Addition to the York Glovers play by John Clerke. The British Library Board, Additional MS 35290, fol. 23v. Reproduced with permission. Figure 4.1. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. The British Library Board, Royal MS 2 B VII, fol. 4v. Reproduced with permission. ix

10 x Figures Figure 4.2. Figure 4.3. Figure 5.1. Figure 5.2. Figure 5.3. Figure 5.4. Figure 5.5. Figure 6.1. Woman beating man with distaff. Fourteenth-century misericord, Abbey of St. Werburgh s (Chester Cathedral). Photograph by Valerie Hamill. Reproduced by permission of the Chapter of Chester Cathedral. 173 Noah and ark from Mathew Baker s Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry. Reproduced by permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. Undercroft of York Merchant Adventurers Hall, chapel. Author s photograph. 215 Diagram of York Mercers pageant wagon with key. Leeds Studies in English. Reproduced by kind permission. 218 Doomsday painting from Holy Trinity Church, Coventry. Reproduced by permission of Holy Trinity Church PCC, Doomsday painting from St. Thomas s Church, Salisbury. Photograph by Emm Photography. Reproduced with permission. Doomsday painting from St. Thomas s Church, Salisbury, detail of damned souls. Photograph by Emm Photography. Reproduced with permission. Gamull family tomb sculpture, depicting Francis Gamull, from St. Mary-on-the-Hill, Chester. Author s photograph.

11 Acknowledgments This study has evolved with the help of many generous institutions and colleagues. In , we were privileged to receive an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The fellowship enabled us to devote sustained time to researching and writing this book. We are grateful to St. John s University and Queen s University for their ongoing support of our research. We thank the New York Public Library for facilitating research with the MaRLI program and the Wertheim Study. For assistance and patience during our visits, we would like to thank the archivists at the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies office and the York Civic Archive (especially Joy Cann), Jill Redford and Louise Wheatley at the York Merchant Adventurers Hall, and the staff of the British Library. We are grateful to Hilary McNain, the Chester Cordwainers steward, for granting us access to the company s records. We thank Lynn Kinsey and the Friends of St. Thomas s Church, Salisbury (friends@stthomassalisbury.co.uk), as well as Emm Photography, for kind assistance with images. We have learned much from colleagues as we shared work in progress at seminars and conferences. These conversations introduced important new concepts and pushed us to refine our arguments, both large and small. We thank the participants in the Folger Library seminar on artisan epistemology, led by Pamela Smith, and members of the Medieval Club of New York, especially Glenn Burger and Derrick Higginbotham. We are grateful 2015 UNIVERSITY xiof NOTRE DAME

12 xii Acknowledgments to Martha Rust and the New York University Medieval and Renaissance Center Distinguished Speaker series, where we received feedback from Rob ert W. Hanning, Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, and Maryanne Kowa - leski. We thank the members of the Queen s University Medieval Seminar, especially Adnan Husain, Ruth Wehlau, Richard Greenfield, Mat thew Scrib ner, and Agatha Hansen, and the English Department research forum, especially Elizabeth Hanson, Marta Straznicky, and Asha Varadharajan. At various conferences, we received support and valuable suggestions from Mary Agnes Edsall, Dante Pappano, Jill Stevenson, and Pamela King. For reading our work and offering insightful commentary at the start of the project, we are indebted to Theresa Coletti and David Aers. Brian Walsh offered an incisive reading near the end. Thanks are due to the readers for University of Notre Dame Press, who offered encouraging, concrete advice for revision. We are grateful for the support of the ReFormations editorial board and to Stephen Little for supervising the editorial process. We thank Matthew Roby for his acumen and diligence in helping to prepare the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge Elisabeth Magnus for her careful copyediting. Portions of this study appeared in earlier forms in several journals. Part of chapter 1 appeared in Margaret A. Pappano and Nicole R. Rice, Beginning and Beginning-Again : Plays, Processions, and Civic Politics in York and Chester, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 30 (2008): Part of chapter 2 appeared in Nicole R. Rice, Whom Seek You, Sirs? The Logic of Searching in the York Herod and the Magi, Comparative Drama 43, no. 1 (2009): Part of chapter 3 appeared in Margaret Aziza Pappano, Judas in York: Masters and Servants in the Late Medieval Cycle Drama, Exemplaria 14, no. 2 (2002): See /journals/exm. We thank the editors of these journals for permission to include previously published material here. As befits its topic, this book emerged through a collaborative process, characterized particularly by shared planning and working through of ideas and joint revisions. We wrote the Introduction together. Chapters or sections were written individually by Rice (the Chester and Marian sections of chapter 1 and the entirety of chapters 2 and 5) or Pappano (the York section of chapter 1 and the entirety of chapters 3 and 4 and the epilogue) and were then revised in consultation. Finally, we thank our families for everything.