Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays

Sarah Beckwith

2003

University of Chicago Press

First staged as early as 1376, the York Corpus Christi plays were performed annually until the late 1500s and involved as much as a tenth of the city in multiple performances at a dozen or more locations. Signifying God shows how organizing the plays served as a political mechanism for regulating labor, and how theater and sacrament combined in them to do important theological work.