The Power of Fruit and Flowers : St Dorothy on the Medieval Stage and Beyond
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Legends of female saints constitute a unique literary genre which helped shape the image of an idealized, morally inspiring woman in the imagination of the medieval mind. In the case of St Dorothy, the model of an immaculate female saint entered the realm of direct participation – the medieval vernacular theatre. The starting point of the discussion will be the oldest extant vernacular miracle play about St Dorothy, the German Ludus de Sancta Dorothea written in the 1340s. However, the medieval ideal of spiritual femininity also found its way on the English stage as well, when St Dorothy’s legend was dramatized for the Jacobean theatre (The Virgin Martyr, 1618), and later adapted during the Restoration period (Injured Virtue, 1714). The 17th-century European Continent saw a boom of St Dorothy plays. The paper traces the transformation of St Dorothy’s legend from a religious exemplary instrument into the 'fixed star' of early modern European theatrical entertainment, and argues that the medieval ideal of spiritual femininity, though subsumed into new meanings of its later staging, remained one of the main reasons for the plays’ long popularity. |
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