ENG 1006 — Medieval Drama: York Plays / York Records

In 1971, Alexandra F. Johnston came upon a single-sheet manuscript among York’s fifteenth-century civic records: known as the 1433 Mercers’ Indenture, it shifted our understanding of medieval guild performance and led directly to the founding of the University of Toronto’s Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, marking an archival turn in the field that still is underway (though not without resistance), newly invigorated by the digital humanities. For better or worse, we now find that we cannot talk about York’s Corpus Christi plays, perhaps the highest literary achievement of fifteenth-century drama — a cycle of forty-seven short Middle English plays, each based on a different Bible story, each produced on open-air wagon stages by a different local guild from c. 1377 to 1569 — without also talking about the mass of York’s civic, financial, and legal records that survive from that period, because so much of the meaning and power of the plays depend on the local contexts witnessed in those records. And we can no longer talk about archival study without talking about the digital humanities.

So our course will read through all forty-seven extant York plays (some with the help of Christina M. Fitzgerald’s modern-spelling edition), as well as a selection of scholarly articles, chapters, or books about performance at York (Johnston’s work will be well-represented, as will work by King, Lipton, Rice/Pappano, Beckwith, and others). But we will also do something bolder, tougher: we will read through all of the records, as far as the year 1585, compiled in Johnston’s REED: York volume (which alternate between untranslated Middle English and Latin, with accompanying modern English translations for the Latin) — to approach these records as texts in themselves, and to discover for ourselves what the archives may reveal about the extant York plays, or about other York plays now lost. This is a course for students who enjoy deep-diving into the details of things, to find the curiosities and beauties reserved only for keen and slightly obsessive observers. Part of our deep interaction with REED: York will take form in basic digital humanities training: students in ENG 1006, in addition to two in-class presentations and an end-of-term seminar paper, will be trained, through a series of workshops with REED staff, in how to digitize REED records — and then each student so trained will actually do some of that coding, realized as real contributions to REED’s online York Prototype, so that future students of the York plays will be able to access and search those foundational, field-changing records from anywhere in the world.

Class Meetings

Starting on Wednesday, 13 September 2023, this course will meet once per week on Wednesdays, usually for two hours (10am to 12 noon), except on days when REED staff conduct in-class workshops (on those days, class will run three hours, 10am to 1pm).

Meetings will be in person in the Jackman Humanities Building (JHB), room 616, on the University of Toronto campus, on the shared territory of many First Nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, and under Treaty 13 between the Mississaugas and subsequent settlers.

I keep Zoom (or an equivalent application) open on my laptop during all meetings; I audiorecord all meetings through that application. While I prefer that students attend my graduate seminars in person, any student in these seminars can thus opt to attend remotely at any time.

I do require attendance, whether in-person or remote, at every meeting. If a student misses a session for any reason, that student must listen to the audiorecording of each missed session, then email our course list to share thoughts and comments on that session, including in that single email individualized responses to every student who spoke up during the meeting.

I have no attendance policy other than that. Make-up emails must be sent as soon as possible, and no later than four weeks, after the missed class session; however, the last day I’ll accept make-up emails will be two weeks after our final class meeting, so class sessions later in term may have to be made up more quickly. Two weeks after our final class meeting, I will deduct one grade level (i.e., from A to A-) for any missed session for which a student has not sent the required email responses during the required span of time.

Required Texts for Purchase

You’ll have to purchase three texts for this course, all available at the U of T Bookstore:

The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants, ed. Christina M. Fitzgerald (Broadview Press, 2018, ISBN 9781554814299)

The York Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Clifford Davidson (TEAMS edition — Medieval Institute Publications, 2011)

Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (U Chicago Press, 2003)

We’ll be reading many more texts than those (see below, and our Google Drive file), but the rest of the readings are available to currently registered students for free, through the U of T Library website or (in the case of the REED records) at the Internet Archive. You can also access the REED pdfs easily here or find them in six different campus libraries . Important: the York index at REED Pre-Publication Collections has superseded since the 1979 edition.

Course Requirements/Grading Weight

Engagement and Participation in class discussions
(or, if necessary, in substantial email commentary after the fact), 20%

Two 10- or 15-Minute Presentations during class discussions, 15% each (totalling 30%)

Conference-Length Research Paper (20 minutes of material, with an option to extend length),
delivered at the final class meeting in mock-conference style, 40%

Contributions to REED: York Digitization, 10%

Every student must attend all class sessions (or make them up, as above), must be reachable by and responsive to an email list shared with the full class, and must purchase all required books and have them ready to hand on the day we are scheduled to discuss them.

10- or 15-Minute Presentations

Every student is required to give two 10- or 15-minute presentations during term (if there are 7 or fewer students enrolled in the seminar, the presentations should be 15 minutes; if there are 8-12 students enrolled, the presentations should be 10 minutes; if there are more than 12 students enrolled, then I will reduce the number of presentations per student to one). As long as you present one at some point during weeks 3 through 6, and the other at some point during weeks 7 through 10, it’s fine by me — just give me a week’s advance warning when you’re ready (I won’t allow more than three presentations per session, and prefer to have two, so I may ask you to delay a week). Every presentation should involve a visual aid of some kind (slides, a handout, or something similar); include therein any long passages you will read, as well as clean citations for all sources you’ve consulted. You can choose any one of the following three prompts for your presentation (and yes, you can use the same prompt twice):

Option 1: choose any academic article or chapter we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present) and present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) critique and analysis of that chapter. Your aim is to provoke conversation; it will be your job, after your presentation, to moderate your fellow students’ discussion for about 20 further minutes.

Option 2: choose any three-minute passage from a play or record we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present), memorize it, and perform it as a dramatic piece (you can do so in the original early English, or in a light adaptation/translation). After that, offer us an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) close reading and analysis of that passage. (You can also do analysis first, then performance).

Option 3: seek out, and read, any text that is not already on our list of readings, but that would fit well into our class. Present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) lecture on that chapter, which includes a rough summary, basic historical contexts, an original bit of analysis, and at least short passage of the text to be read aloud (it doesn’t have to be a dramatic reading; you can also prompt us to read dialogue with you).

Conference-Length Research Paper

By the end of term, each student must produce a conference-length research paper (20 minutes) that takes any one of the plays on our syllabus as its primary subject. 20-minute conference papers are usually about 2000-2500 words long, but it is up to each student to determine their best length (by practicing the paper aloud). Each student will present their conference paper during our final class session (we may also add a supplementary session to that final meeting, scheduled according to student availability, if there is not enough time for everyone to present papers on that day). From there, you will have two options for handing in the final written document:

Option 1: At our in-class conference, immediately before presenting, you may email me your final polished draft, about 2000-2500 words. That will be your final paper of the semester, due on the day of the mock-conference. I will do much of the marking during and immediately following your delivery of the paper, taking into account your handling of the Q&A (and the quality of the Q&A that your paper provokes), then send you a summary of my comments by email soon after.

Option 2: After our in-class conference, you may return to your ongoing research and produce a longer article-length paper, about 5500-7500 words, due by email exactly two weeks after our final class. (Note: I only make this option available in graduate seminars; fourth-year undergraduate seminars must use only the shorter option).

We’ll work together in class sessions to develop our ideas; you can choose to build your paper out of one of your presentations, if you wish.  It is up to you, over the course of the term, to determine — in dialogue with me and with your classmates — which critical questions and hypotheses will form the core of your project, and whether that project is most appropriate for a conference paper or for a longer work.  Each student is required to meet with me at least once, for a one-on-one Office Hours session in Week 7 or earlier, to informally propose and discuss their research paper; depending on the quality of that proposal, I may withhold approval of the project and require further work and a subsequent meeting.  Research papers will not be accepted unless they have been proposed to me in person and received my approval; however, it is acceptable for papers to evolve and change, deviating significantly from the initial proposal if necessary.

REED: York — Digitizing the Archives

During term, we will host four in-class workshops on digital humanities training (again, on those four days, class will run three hours instead of two): very basic stuff, only as much as will allow each student to convert an assigned set of pages from REED: York (1979) into a digital, searchable, tagged document compatible with eREED standards. All the software we’ll use is free of charge.

IMPORTANT: This part of the class is a first-time-ever pilot program, hopefully initiating a long-term partnership between REED and Prof. Sergi’s graduate seminars. Prof. Sergi has been working with REED periodically across the last year to develop this program, but he is still very new to Digital Humanities himself. So, for this initial run (and probably the next one), when we switch into Digital Humanities mode, Prof. Sergi will delegate his role as course instructor temporarily to REED staff — and will join the workshops as a student himself: he’ll be completing these assignments right alongside the rest of the students (and he’ll receive grades too). So we’ll all work together to try and make these assignments doable (and not unnecessarily time-intensive) and change them as we go if need be — so please share feedback on this assignment freely and frequently.

Over the course of these workshops, each student (including the prof!) will be responsible for the following:

  1. Transcription of the REED entries in their assigned pages, including all explanatory notes, dates, shelfmarks, and translations attached to them, into an XML file (i.e., formatting that will appear clearly and cleanly at the eREED website, using the same mise-en-page that eREED already uses), using Transkribus.

  2. Mark-up of the assigned pages with EATS tagging, using Visual Studio Code, according to instruction provided by the eREED staff. Be sure to use the York index at REED Pre-Publication Collections, which supersedes the 1979 version, in your tagging.

  3. Proofreading of the marked-up XML file and of a fellow student’s XML file (partners will be assigned by me), to ensure faithfulness to the original documents.

From there, we will collaboratively submit our work to REED’s current staff; they will be able to enter our work into eREED itself as part of the York prototype! You and your partner will receive the same grade; you will both earn an A as long as you both complete your portion of the work and diligently ensure that the work is relatively free of errors. This assignment presents an opportunity to dip your toe into the digital humanities (and to get real DH experience under your belt!), to fine-tune your command of Middle English, to gain a practical and deep experiential understanding of how archives and archival research (both digital and analog!) are put together, and to become deeply familiar with one particular area in REED: York and in northern dramatic history (I will strongly encourage you to build your term paper out of one or more of the records in your assigned section).

Schedule of Meetings and Readings

NOTE: Given the nature of REED: York and our aim to look through so much of it, it’s impossible to line the assigned records up neatly with corresponding readings — pay attention to how ongoing dramatic and secondary readings may resonate with past records you’ve examined!

If you are new to Middle English, I'm happy to share with you some handy materials I've used in my undergraduate classes. Email me for links.

Wed 13 September, 10am-12 noon:

We’ll read a set of texts together in class: York’s Crucifixion and Doomsday (Plays 35 and 47, Davidson and Fitzgerald versions); the 1433 Mercers’ Indenture (REED), and the 1415 Ordo Paginarum (REED). In so doing, we’ll figure out where we all stand in terms of Middle English.

Wed 20 September, 10am-12:30pm.

Before this class meets:

  • read the remaining handouts from our first meeting (you can also find the texts in the Fitzgerald and/or Davidson and in REED) : York’s Doomsday play (Play 47, in Davidson or Fitzgerald’s version); the 1433 Mercers’ Indenture (REED), and the 1415 Ordo Paginarum (REED).

  • read Johnston and Dorrell,“The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday, 1433-1526,” and Donley, “Mercers, Mercantilism and the Maintenance of Power: The York Last Judgment and the York Register.”

  • spend one hour looking through REED: York, reading any Mercers’ entries you find interesting (each record is marked with a heading — look for Mercers Account Rolls, Mercers’ Pageant Documents, Mercers’ Chartulary, etc). Whatever you get done in one hour is what you’re assigned to do. As you read, try to identify any Mercers’ entries that interest you in particular: by 27 Sept, you’ll need to claim 120 lines of text as your contribution to the REED assignment. When you are ready to claim an entry as your own, type it into this shared document (if an entry has already been claimed, you’ll have to choose a different one).

  • (Optional:) If you’re feeling brave, try to feed a bit of REED material into Transkribus, following Illya’s instructions (see the class Google Drive file for his slides). Once you have registered for your Tranksribus account, send Illya (illya.nokhrin @ mail.utoronto.ca) a quick message with the email that you used for your Transkribus account. He will use this to add you to the REED York Digitization Project "Collection" on Transkribus. 

  • (Optional:) If you’re interested in learning more about the U Toronto June 2025 production of the York plays, you can also check out this webpage and video (and please spread the word).

During this class, we’ll hear a special presentation from Alexandra F. Johnston.

Wed 27 September, 10am-12 noon:

Before this class meets:

  • read REED: York pages ix to xlvi (all the introductory matter),

  • then Fitzgerald’s Introduction to her edition,

  • then York Plays 34-46, Not all the plays are in the Fitzgerald edition; all are in the Davidson, but they’re harder to read that way: be sure you’re reading the full range of plays assigned!

  • and then spend one hour looking through REED: York, reading any Mercers’ entries you find interesting, and choosing which entries you want to claim — when you are ready to claim an entry as your own, type it into this shared document (if an entry has already been claimed, you’ll have to choose a different one). Once you have found and claimed your entries, if an hour still hasn’t elapsed, start exploring other entries.

  • Start the process of feeding your entries into Transkribus, following Illya’s instructions. Once you have registered for your Tranksribus account, send Illya (illya.nokhrin @ mail.utoronto.ca) a quick message with the email that you used for your Transkribus account. He will use this to add you to the REED York Digitization Project "Collection" on Transkribus. 

Wed 4 October, 10am-1pm:

Before this class meets:

This class will conclude with a visit and workshop with REED staff member Illya Nohkrin; note the extended time.

Week of 11 October:

IMPORTANT — our class will NOT meet this week; as per the plan we discussed in class, we will instead extend our scheduled class sessions on Wed 25 Oct and Wed 15 Nov. Still, during this week, read the entirety of Beckwith, Signifying God and be ready to discuss it in future classes.

Wed 18 October, 10am-1pm:

Before this class meets:

  • read York Plays 27, 29, 30, 31, 33;

  • read Groeneveld, “The York Bakers and Their Play of the Last Supper” and Johnston, “The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York – The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play”,

  • spend one hour looking through REED: York, ideally looking for records relevant to our readings this week.

  • We will also discuss Beckwith today (see above).

  • Start working on the mark-up of your digitized text, using Visual Studio Code, according to instructions provided by the eREED staff. Be sure to refer to the York index at REED Pre-Publication Collections, which supersedes the 1979 version, in your tagging. Illya adds:

    • In addition to installing VSCode, you will also need to install the VSCode XML extension. You can find it at the following link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.vscode-xml. Once you have installed VSCode, clicking "Install" at that link should open VSCode and take you through the installation steps for the extension. 

    • By default, VSCode seems to set the language of documents you are working on to HTML. To get the proper syntax highlighting, you will need to change the language to XML. To do so, click on the bit of text that says "HTML" on the bottom menu bar (it'll probably also say something like "Ln 1, Col 1 Space: 0 UTF-8" etc.), then type in "XML" (without quotes) in the search bar and click on the pop-up that says XML. The bottom menu bar should now say XML. There are visual instructions for how to do this in the PDF version of the slides. 

    • If you want to stop VSCode from auto-generating closing XML tags every time you insert an opening XML tag, go to File -> Preferences -> Settings in the top menu, search for "Auto Close Tags" (without quotes), and uncheck the check-box beside "Enable/disable autoclosing of XML tags". 

This class will conclude with a trip to the REED offices (two floors up), where we’ll meet with REED staff Illya Nohkrin and Patrick Gregory; note the extended time.

Wed 25 October, 10am-1pm (note new time!):

Before this class meets:

  • read York Plays 3-11,

  • finish Beckwith, Signifying God.

  • Continue working on the mark-up of your digitized text, using Visual Studio Code, according to instructions provided by the eREED staff. Be sure to refer to the York index at REED Pre-Publication Collections, which supersedes the 1979 version, in your tagging. Illya adds:

    • In addition to installing VSCode, you will also need to install the VSCode XML extension. You can find it at the following link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.vscode-xml. Once you have installed VSCode, clicking "Install" at that link should open VSCode and take you through the installation steps for the extension. 

    • By default, VSCode seems to set the language of documents you are working on to HTML. To get the proper syntax highlighting, you will need to change the language to XML. To do so, click on the bit of text that says "HTML" on the bottom menu bar (it'll probably also say something like "Ln 1, Col 1 Space: 0 UTF-8" etc.), then type in "XML" (without quotes) in the search bar and click on the pop-up that says XML. The bottom menu bar should now say XML. There are visual instructions for how to do this in the PDF version of the slides. 

    • If you want to stop VSCode from auto-generating closing XML tags every time you insert an opening XML tag, go to File -> Preferences -> Settings in the top menu, search for "Auto Close Tags" (without quotes), and uncheck the check-box beside "Enable/disable autoclosing of XML tags". 

This class will include two presentations (Anna and Raphael), then conclude with a visit from Illya and a trip to the REED offices (two floors up); note the extended time.

Wed 1 November, 10am-1pm:

Before this class meets:

Wed 8 November: NO CLASS (Reading Week)

Wed 15 November, 10am-1pm (note new time!):

Before this class meets:

  • read York Plays 12-15 and 17-20

  • read King’s York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (parts 1 and 3),

  • start working on your final paper presentation.

  • spend half an hour looking through REED: York, ideally looking for records relevant to our readings this week.

    Tan will be presenting in class today. This class will also conclude with a final visit to REED.

Wed 22 November, 10am-12 noon:

Before this class meets, finish and proofread your EATS tagging if you can and read Lipton’s Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays in its entirety. Sarah will be presenting in class today.

Wed 29 November, 10am-12 noon:

Before this class meets:

Wed 6 December, 10am-1pm (note new time!):

Final paper presentations in class (20 minutes for each paper — leaving 23 for intros, transitions, and hiccups — followed by 10 minutes Q&A per presenter); be sure to bring an EXTRA HARD COPY of your paper to this session, so I can mark it up as you read:

10:10am Anna
10:33am Sarah
10:56am Raphael
11:19am 30-minute Q&A for Anna, Sarah, Raphael
11:49am 5-minute break (quite short!)
11:54am Hero
12:17pm Tan
12:40pm 20-minute Q&A for Hero and Tan

Reminder: this paper presentation can be the final thing you do for our class, if you wish — just let me know to expect it, and I’ll send you comments etc on the paper you hand me. Or you can opt if you wish to write a longer-form seminar paper (see above) — just let me know to expect that, and when to expect it.