N-Town Cycle | Gail McMurray Gibson (essay date 1993-94)
Gail McMurray Gibson (essay date 1993-94)
SOURCE: "Writing Before the Eye: The N-Town Woman Taken in Adultery and the Medieval Ministry Play," in Comparative Drama, Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter, 1993-94, pp. 399-407.
[Here, Gibson argues that the Woman Taken in Adultery play enacts the Christian mystery of the connection between the flesh and the divine.]
Richard Beadle has recently observed [in a review in Medium Aevum 60, 1991] that "If any area of medieval English studies can be said to have changed out of all recognition over the past twenty years or so, it must be that of the drama." Certainly, twenty years ago I could have asserted the perversity of teaching a field of scholarly inquiry—the medieval English mystery play—whose very name ("mystery" play) was a modern scholarly invention perpetuating a linguistic confusion. As E. K. Chambers had nagged [in The Medieval Stage] in 1903, the word 'mystery' "is...
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