Marginalia

In his game theory V.A. Kolve argues that within the Corpus Christi cycles 'the duration of the play is a momentary interval in, and abstention from, the real concerns of life'.¹ However, the division between the play world and the world of its medieval audience is not necessarily so pronounced. The audience inhabit a cultural matrix of which the plays themselves form only a part, of Church iconography, sermons, and, of course, the Eucharist. The stage is not a window into a distant time or place, the figures depicted on it are recognisable presences in the life of the parish, and what is more, the themes enacted pertain to the ever-pertinent matters of salvation and damnation. Therefore reflections of contemporary practices and concerns will inevitably be identifiable in some instances.

The trial scenes in the N-Town manuscript, The Trial of Mary and Joseph, that of Christ in Passion II, and the council of the Jews which sets the scene for it in Passion I, invite questions about the relationship between the community or communities who watched the plays, and the communities depicted on stage. Whilst it is true that at times the clerical hand can be felt very strongly, for example in the adoption of Love's Contemplacio, this does not necessarily preclude the value of the plays as pieces of popular drama.² There is a difference between works which are popular in origin and popular in destination, and regardless of the final function of the manuscript itself, undeniably the works it contains were at some point intended for public performance. Far from taking the individual into the realm of private devotion, Contemplacio reminds him of his place within the community, issuing that 'Grace, love and charyté evyr be 3ow among!' (Passion II, 1-2).³ This is an explicit statement about the manner in which the audience should aim to live as a community, with the principles of the New Law ever in mind, fostering harmony amongst them.

In comparison to the cycle plays, N-Town distinctly lacks references to local place names, and whilst the linguistic features of the manuscript suggest an East Anglian provenance, the contents of the play do not place it in any one community within that region: any name could stand in for the 'N' of the banns (527).⁴ In addition to the familiar theory of a peripatetic acting company, Peter Meredith raises a second possibility, that the manuscript itself was a travelling script book shared between parishes, where selected plays were performed by local guilds.⁵ If the material of N-Town is aimed in its appeal towards any community in the area, and if reflections of the intended recipient community can be read onto the stage, the community on stage potentially contains elements recognisable within the generic practices of communities in that region.

The Trial of Mary and Joseph, located in what appears to be a dramatic realisation of a contemporary ecclesiastical court, opens with a summoning. Richard J. Moll argues that the list of names summoned (9-32) enumerate the members of a riding set, a riding being a form of charivari, a loud demonstration exerting social pressure on the members of a household in response to allegations such as adultery.⁶ Moll works on the assumption that these names relate to characters processing onto the stage during the opening prologue. The names appear to have been common during this period, and it is possible that the list could in fact be intended as a direct address to the audience, a dramatic device beginning the play. Whilst charivari often parodied legal and religious rituals, audience expectation is not directed towards this end. The prologue is a direct summoning to the court, 'Þe court 3e must com too!' (4), and it is vital that this court is not presented in parody but is familiar as a recognisably functioning institution. The memory of a particular type of social consciousness, operating in the world outside of the stage, is being evoked on the stage, and whilst this is similar in function to the charivari, it is distinct from it. Like the charivari, the ecclesiastical trial at which compurgation was undertaken, to clear a name or establish guilt, was conducted with the public fame of the accused ever in mind.⁷ It was a public forum in which religious prohibitions were enacted socially, and indeed, the opinions of the community, called upon to swear oaths in defence (or accusation), were central in deciding the guilt or innocence of the accused. There is a very strong trace of this practice in Trial.

The social disapproval of certain acts receives literary embodiment in the fabliaux, and this is a form overtly invoked by those members of the community championing the cause of Mary's guilt. The January-May wedding, a theme treated so notably by Chaucer, between 'þat olde cokolde' Joseph, 'evyl beguiled' by 'þat fresche wench' (98-99) Mary; and the snow-child of Latin and French fabliaux – 'And a flake þerof into hyre mowthe crepte,/ And þerof þe chylde in hyre wombe doth growe' (308-9) - are both scornfully applied by the detractors. In the course of the trial such fabliaux constructions are either denied, or, in the case of the latter, revealed as meaning quite otherwise, for a child truly has been conceived without sexual transgression.⁸ The conceit behind the drama lies in the audacity of taking a miracle to trial, for a miracle cannot be bound to figures of either social censure or sanction. Therefore whilst it is essential that the community on stage, who in the very structure of their justice are so familiar, recognise the truth and central religious tenet of Mary's virginity, the holy couple themselves remain outside of the community, although at its centre. A feast is proposed to do them 'hy3 reverens' (381), but Mary is 'not dysposyd to passyn hens froo' (385). Just as the community's condemnation cannot be adequately applied to the holy couple, neither can its celebration, for both of these are conceived of in worldly terms. Such terms cannot be applied to the saintly, for as D.S. Brewer writes, saintliness evokes 'a different standard and a different point of view' which cuts across all other paradigms.⁹

Nonetheless it is essential that the community at large demonstrates this acceptance in social and collective terms, for the impetus behind the play does not lie in the application of the worldly to the heavenly, but the reordering of worldly and social principles in keeping with the divine. The play charts the movement of a focal religious principle from the margins of the community's consciousness to its centre. This faith, absent in the minds of the prosecuting community, is established (and from the vantage point of the audience, re-established) as it accepts the bodily integrity of the Virgin as central to its notions of due reverence, 'We all on knes fall here on grownd' (370).

Lynn Squires argues that this is an overt critique of the contemporary legal system represented by the Old Law, in favour of the simpler alternative of loving one's neighbour under the New.¹⁰ However, the play is critical of contemporary society only insofar as any reflection will include certain less than favourable elements, which, as Alison M. Hunt argues, are rectified as the legal system comes to full health through the movement of faith in the course of the drama.¹¹ The potion test which has its Old Law precedent in Numbers v, is arguably presented in such a way that it is reminiscent of the by then anachronistic English practice of the ordeal, undertaken to authenticate an oath. It is potentially used here as a means of restoring supernatural compulsion to oaths of compurgation. The detractors swear in terms of an entirely self-contained 'I trowe' (69), without any divine invocation, and without this check to conscience prove guilty of 'defamacyon' (375), whilst in comparison, Mary's ordeal is undertaken 'Lord, thorwe þin helpe' (333), a faith which restores due divinity, and thereby justice, to the proceedings.

With the inclusion of the apocryphal trial, N-Town goes further than York, Chester or Wakefield by not confining the questioning of Mary's virginity to Joseph's Doubt, but extending the doubt to her community. It is sometimes argued that the play gives the audience space in which to exhaust religious doubts surrounding the Virgin birth.¹² In a culture in which this and other religious truths are so crucially bound up with the very construction of the social consciousness, it is difficult to claim widespread popular religious doubt, and if the play is taken to have been performed within the context of a community centred around the church and engaged in corporate worship, this is unlikely to be its predominant function. Rather it seems to be reaffirming the value of ecclesiastical legislature if members of the community enter into its rites in correct faith, free from malice. Cindy L. Carlson notes the final enshrining of faith as a movement concurrent with the marginalisation of doubters, who function much like the punished hand of the midwife Salome in the N-Town Nativity.¹³ As the hand is at the margin of the body, Mary's initial doubters are at the margins of the community. The detractors are not respectable witnesses, by the very names by which they reveal themselves to the audience, 'Bakbytere' (62) and 'Reysesclaundyr' (66), they identify themselves as sowers of discord, and at the close of the drama they, and the anti-social forces they represent, are pushed back to the margins. Acceptance of Mary's virginity and the discrediting of the detractors is a matter of public shaming: whilst Mary is proved to be 'a clene mayde' (352), the first detractor is publicly pained for his continued doubting, he exclaims, with all its connotations of damnation, 'myn heed with fyre methynkht is brent!' (365). To doubt in the face of such evidence is to be marginalised, and damned. The play is not necessarily a reaction to, or a settling of, the doubts of the audience, but through its conclusion offers an idealised dramatic presentation of a community casting out malice and embracing faith.

The community on stage constitutes an honour-group in the terms explored by the anthropologist J.G. Peristiany, in that it is governed by two 'social evaluations [... which] participate of the nature of social sanctions', which he identifies as honour and shame. Whilst societies have their own notions of what merits these, honour predominately signifies social inclusion, a place at, or close to, the centre of the honour-group, and shame exclusion. These evaluations are made within the public forum, by the other members of the honour-group, and in such a social construction the individual is constantly 'on show'.¹⁴ This is very much in keeping with limited conceptions of, and indeed resources for, privacy in the medieval parish. The audience community is potentially recognisable as an honour-group model for the one on stage. The presiding bishop Abizachar does not mention the Old Law death penalty for adultery, rather the urgency of the case lies in a matter of public shame over and above all else. He asks the detractors, 'Why speke 3e such schame/ Of þat good virgyn, fayr Mayd Mary?' (106-7), and Mary herself hopes that her name is 'saff and sownde' (210). In contemporary terms compurgation was not just a matter of proving innocence but putting an end to public rumour. It is socially necessary that the defendant is either cleared or condemned in the eyes of the community.¹⁵

The plays resolution not only presents the satisfying configuration of Mary and Joseph, and everything they represent, at the centre of the on-stage community, but places it at the centre of the watching community. Through the movement of faith on stage, the audience are not put in the uncomfortable position of witnessing the exile of the holy couple by a society shaped like their own, and are implicitly reassured that through their own continuing faith they themselves remain part of the community of believers. A certain social anxiety accompanied the public nature of pre-Reformation ecclesiastical trial and penance. The most extreme ecclesiastical response was excommunication, which was in effect total social and economic exile from the community.¹⁶ Judas can be regarded as the first such exile from grace and the honour-group. After his betrayal of Christ in Passion I, Judas receives the sacrament in his un-shriven state, and is charged by Christ, 'Þi body and sowle þu hast shent' (I,996). Prior to this, no doubt in an attempt to dissuade abuses of the Eucharist, Christ offers the Eucharist to the audience as a defence from the fiend only if taken in 'trewe intent' (I,801-2). This importance of purity of intent is also at work in the sacramental force of the Trial potion ordeal. Mary and Joseph take it in good faith and are blessed, whilst the detractor who takes it in doubt is pained. As long as faith remains central not only institutionally but in the conduct of the individual, spiritual and bodily safety is assured. Any such confirmation however, contains within it the implicit fear of its opposite. Sarah Beckwith describes the boundaries of the Christian community, confirmed at the expense of 'those constructed as the enemies of Christ'.¹⁷ To be within is safe, to be cast out perilous.

Comparative literary representations of Mary stress her compliance with tradition. For example, Nicholas Love has her undertake the Old Law purification ritual, 'soþely for ensaumple to vs, shewyng þe trewe wey of obedience'.¹⁸ In Trial she can be offered the possibility of re-integration into a community which has found its basis in faith. However, any depiction of Christ's relationship to the community of the Old Law, essential in telling the stages leading up to the crucifixion, is far more problematic. Though scripturally the New Law is regarded as the fulfilment of the Old (Matthew 5.17), the events which lead to the crucifixion spring from the co-existence of two opposed socially structuring principles: the choice between life under the Old Law, or its negation, the New. And yet the community structured around the Old Law in the N-Town Passion Play represents an honour group in some respects similar to the contemporary watching community. This presents the problem of how the necessarily marginalised status of Christ's body, in contemporary terms held to be synonymous with the social body, can be reconciled with the familiar aspects apparent in the ostracising community.

Whilst exotic elements are inarguably present, unlike the other cycle plays there is much about the N-Town Jewish community which is familiar.¹⁹ For example, the York cycle has Caiphas swear by 'Mahounde' (265), and Annas 'by Beliall bloode and his bonys' (286).²⁰ In N-Town these oaths are sworn by pagans, distinct from the Jews: the soldiers guarding the sepulchre (II,1347,53,59), and Herod (II,26) who by his use of such figures of speech is marked out as an 'exotic eastern potentate' rather than a member of the Jewish community.²¹ The most alien phrase from a member of the Jewish council comes in Caiphas's attempt to 'coniure' a response from Christ 'be þe sonne and þe mone' (II,167), but even this astrological phrase is not irrevocably foreign. The council itself takes a very specific form, meeting in such an environment 'lych as it were a convocacyon' (after I,518). The Jewish assembly is in effect a synod, which does not open with threats against Christ but an assessment of Christ's threat to the laws of the council. The council's primary concern lies in the quelling of heresy. Annas charges, 'Yf any eretyk here reyn, to me 3e compleyn' (I,170). One of the primary accusations against Christ in that preliminary meeting is 'fals wichcraft þe pepyl to blynde' (I,228), echoed at I,325, I,1015, and II,272-3. Until the post-Reformation statutes, witchcraft seems to have served as a banner word for anti-social behaviour, encompassing the charge of false preaching. Indeed the council fear that Christ will 'peverte þe pepyl with his prechyng' (I,218).²² If the play was intended for performance in East Anglia, the site of the largest number of heresy accusations in a single campaign in the fifteenth century, then Caiphas's preference that he 'had levyr he [Christ] were brent' (I,537) carries a very specific cultural resonance.²³

The preservation of the central principles of the community by the public and violent destruction of its enemies would by no means have been a concept alien to the plays original audience. The Middle English Dictionary defines 'shame' as a state of disgrace, extending to the disgrace of physical harm or injury, and in Passion II physical torture is persistently identified as shaming. Having Christ beaten before him, Herod mocks, 'Þu art strong to suffer schame' (II,472), and observing Christ's wounds upon his return to his court, Pilate notes that he has been put 'to so gret schame' (II,574). At the foot of the cross the Virgin Mary laments Christ's 'most shameful deth' (II,794), Pilate issues the instruction that anyone attempting to remove Christ's corpse from the sepulchre must be done to 'shamful deth' (II,1235), and Christ himself announces, 'For man I sufferyd both schame and wo' (II,1891). The notion of a shameful death is perhaps a throwback to Homeric values, where a shameful death is one following from defeat. However, these instances of shame are distinct from this, being specifically dealt out as punishment. The giving of such shame carries a clear sociological function. In Passion I the Jewish council resolve 'Þe worchep of oure lawe to save' (I,570) by the 'shameful deth' of Christ (I,568). Honour and shame move in tandem: by shaming Christ the Old Law is honoured, and as Christ is done honour it is shamed, both cannot reign.

Michel Foucault argues that pre-modern conceptions of torture demand that in its final form it must be public and 'spectacular'.²⁴ The penalty Christ is to face is that of crucifixion, but the council discuss his death in terms of contemporary medieval practices of public execution and exhibition, his body is to be set 'vpon a jebet [...] þat all þe countré may hym se' (I,571-3). Whilst the political function of such displays is clearly that of a negative exemplar, public execution is an extreme version of public branding, marking one out from the community by a shaming rite, an exaggerated version of the burning of the detractor's throat in Trial. Julian Pitt-Rivers discusses the physical granting or withdrawing of honour (I take the latter to be synonymous with the giving of shame) as determined by 'the intimate relation between honour and the physical person'.²⁵ The mock crowning of Christ clearly functions along these lines, pseudo-honour is violently conferred so that it can be removed, and by extension the individual is left without honour; Christ is also physically stripped (after II,698). If to punish the body is to mark it with shame, Pilate's first order prior to the scourging, mock-crowning, and crucifixion sequence, 'þat þer be no man xal towch 3our kyng,/ But yf he be knyght or jentylman born' (II,677-8) is curious. Meredith notes this as 'a rather pathetic indication that Pilate is still far from understanding the nature of Christ's kingship'.²⁶ But Pilate's words seem to be more than a wilful misunderstanding or cruel jibe. His attitude towards Christ's kingship is complex, in that he truly seems to regard Christ as the King of the Jews. He asks the Jews 'Wold 3e 3our kyng I xulde on þe cros don?' (II,651), and refuses to set the condition Caiphas demands, 'þat [so] he namyd himself' (II,878), by the 'Rex Iudeorum' he writes over the cross (after II,874), for 'so ut xal be for me, iwys' (II,880). Although the very act it is issued in conjunction with denies its validity, Pilate's injunction at II,677-8 can be read as an attempt to place Christ within the Jewish honour-group, even at the very climax of his dishonouring at their instigation. The primary effect of this is to place the weight of responsibility more firmly on the Jewish community, to which Pilate can be considered extraneous.²⁷ His refusal to remove Christ from the prosecuting community, which though in itself a theological blindness, for Christ is king of both gentile and Jew alike, is also a refusal to acknowledge Christ's marginalisation from the community he was born into. Dramatically this underlines the very fact of Christ's marginalisation. Through his capacity to bear being ostracised and shamed, Christ is at the centre of a new honour group.

In such scenes a process of affective piety through identification with Christ's bodily sufferings upon the cross is nearly always in evidence. Here it is compounded by the horror of exile, which exists precisely because the Passion Play contains the potential for audience identification with the prosecuting community. This points to a function broader than that identified by Squires as an instigation towards either pious guilt or the desire for social reform.²⁸ Rather it forces the watching community into an absolute position: to stand either within or without. During one of the most intense moments of his shaming, the procession to Calvary, Christ addresses the women of Jerusalem, prefiguring the last judgement. He instructs them, 'for me wepyth nowth,/ But for 3ourself wepyth and for 3our chylder also' (II,707-8). Though these individual women are not the architects of Christ's execution, an entire society through all its generations is damned, and, like the unsuccessful compurgator, they have nowhere to hide. They will cry to the hills and mountains, 'Oppyn and hyde us from þe face of Hym syttyng in trone!' (II,716), all is public before God. This projected figure of Christ's enthroning and the terror of the Jews marks the beginning of the centralisation of the values Christ exemplifies (the movement consolidated in the resurrection), and the marginalisation of the community which cast him out. Such a reaffirmation of values necessitates the drawing of boundaries which even as it embraces some persons, must exile others.

Victoria Flood (MPhil), University of Cambridge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Beadle, Richard, ed., The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982)

Meredith, Peter, ed., The Passion Play From the N-Town Manuscript (London: The Longman Group, 1990)

Sargent, Michael G., ed., Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ, (London: Garland Publishing, 1992)

Spector, Stephen, ed., The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Secondary

Beadle, Richard, ''Devoute ymaginacion' and the Dramatic Sense in Love's Mirror and the N-Town Plays', Nicholas Love at Waseda, 1995, ed. Soichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael S. Sargent (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 1-18

Beckwith, Sarah, 'Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body', Culture and History 1350-1600, ed. David Aers (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 60-90

Brewer, D.S., 'Honour in Chaucer', Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer (London: Macmillan, 1982), 90-103

Brewer, D.S., Introduction to The Morte Darthur: Parts Seven and Eight (London: Edward Arnold, 1968)

Carlson, Cindy L., 'Like a Virgin: Mary and her Doubters in the N-Town Cycle', in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 199-217

Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (London: Yale University Press, 1992)

Fewer, Colin, 'The 'fygyre' of the market: the N-Town Cycle and East Anglian Lay Piety', Philological Quarterly, 77:2 (1998), 117-47

Fletcher, Alan J., 'The N-Town Plays', The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 163-188

Firth Green, Richard, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977)

Helmholz, R.H., Canon Law and the Law of England (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987)

Hunt, Alison M., 'Maculating Mary: The Detractors of the N-Town Cycle's 'Trial of Joseph and Mary'', Philological Quarterly, 73:1 (1994), 11-29

Kahrl, Stanley J., Traditions of Medieval English Drama (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1974)

Kolve, V.A., The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966)

Lipton, Emma, 'Language on Trial: Performing the Law in the N-Town Trial Play', The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), 115-135

Lyman Kittredge, George, Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York: Russell and Russell, 1956)

Moll, Richard J, 'Staging Disorder: Charivari in the N-Town Cycle', Comparative Drama, 35:2 (2001), 145-161

Peristiany, J.G., and Pitt-Rivers, Julian, ed., Honour and Grace in Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Peristiany, J.G., ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965)

Scherb, Victor I., 'Liturgy and Community in the N-Town Passion Play I', Comparative Drama, 29:4 for 1995-6 (1996), 478-492

Squires, Lynn, 'Law and Disorder in Ludus Coventriae', Comparative Drama, 12:3 (1978), 12:3, 200-11

Tasioulas, J.A., 'Between Doctrine and Domesticity: The Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays', Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 222-245

Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973)

Tydeman, William, 'An introduction to medieval English theatre', The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1-37

Woolf, Rosemary, The English Mystery Plays (California: University of California Press, 1972)

Reference

The electronic Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan, 2001), , [last accessed 4. December 2007] The electronic Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan, 2001), , [last accessed 4. December 2007]

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NOTES

1. V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), p.21.

2. Richard Beadle, ' "Devoute ymaginacion" and the Dramatic Sense in Love's Mirror and the N-Town Plays', in Nicholas Love at Waseda, 1995, ed. Soichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael S. Sargent (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 1-18, p.4.

3. The Passion Play from the N-Town Manuscript, ed. Peter Meredith (London: The Longman Group, 1990).

4. The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespsasian D, ed. Stephen Spector, 2v, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Meredith, p.4; Spector, pp.xv-xvi.

5. Meredith, p.9.

6. Richard J. Moll, 'Staging Disorder', Comparative Drama, 35:2 (2001), 145-162. p.145.

7. R.H. Helmholz, Canon Law and the Law of England (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987), p.139.

8. Emma Lipton, 'Language on Trial: Performing the Law in the N-Town Trial Play', in The Letter of the Law, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Cornell University Press: New York, 2002), 115-135, p.123.

9. D.S. Brewer, Introduction to The Morte Darthur: Parts Seven and Eight (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), p. 32.

10. Lynn Squires, 'Law and Disorder in Ludus Coventriae', Comparative Drama, 12:3 (1978), 12:3, 200-11, p.210.

11. Alison M. Hunt, 'Maculating Mary', Philological Quarterly, 73:1 (1994), 11-29, p.13; Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (University of Pennsylvania Press: Pennsylvania, 1999), p.106.

12. Stanley J. Kahrl, Traditions of Medieval English Drama (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1974), pp.81-2.

13. Cindy L. Carlson, 'Like a Virgin', in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 199-217, p.200.

14. J.G. Peristiany, Honour and Shame, ed. J.G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965), pp.9-11.

15. Helmholz, p.139.

16. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), p.181.

17. Sarah Beckwith, 'Ritual, Church and Theatre', in Culture and History 1350-1600, ed. David Aers (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 65-90, pp.72-3.

18. Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent (London: Garland Publishing, 1992), p.46.

19. Whether or not the Jews wear contemporary ecclesiastical/ legal dress is a matter of some debate, see Alan J. Fletcher, 'The N-Town Plays', in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 163-188, p.179; Squires, p.208.

20. 'The Bowers and Fletchers', The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982).

21. Meredith, p.194.

22. George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York: Russell and Russell, 1956), p.24; Thomas, pp.517-9.

23. Hunt, p.21.

24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977), p.34.

25. Julian Pitt-Rivers, 'Honour and Social Status', in Honour and Shame, p.25. Julian Pitt-Rivers, 'Honour and Social Status', in Honour and Shame, p.25.

26. Meredith, p.206.

27. After the crucifixion Pilate talks of 'our lawys' (II,1219), meaning the Old Law. Rather than testifying to his own beliefs however, this is more likely a comment on the supremacy of the law of the prosecuting community in this instance.

28. Squires, p.201