Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays

Like other compilations of medieval urban drama, the plays that were performed in the streets of York on the Feast of Corpus Christi from the late fourteenth century until the third quarter of the sixteenth have most frequently been discussed in the context of the devotional cultures and practices of the later Middle Ages. The pageants' preoccupation with law, and with witnessing in particular, has received much less attention, Emma Lipton observes, yet the cycle of forty-seven plays, which...