Abstract: The oldest and most representative of French religious morality plays (as opposed to the political ones). Bien Avisé and Mal Avisé (Good Judgment and Bad Judgment) personify strength and weakness in scenes staged to act out moral choices of human behavior. The audience comes to grips with virtue (self-discipline, responsibility, charity) and vice, mainly represented by overindulgence of the appetites (sex, food and wine, fine clothes, money). Gallimard�s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade publishes definitive editions of the classics of French literature. Théâtre français du Moyen Age, nearing completion by a seven-member research team under the direction of Jean-Pierre Bordier, was originally planned by Daniel Poirion to present an anthology of major genres & works of medieval French theater.

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Abstract: In early modern Europe�with no newspapers and few books�the major forms of what we call �mass media� were performance genres: preaching and theater. Both illustrate how popular culture acts out anxiety and aggression. Popular theater�skits and plays�does more than the word �play� implies. Acting out cultural crises, performing them before local audiences reflects and inflects�gives shape and meaning�to collective fears about life and death, and life after death. In 16th-c. France, no issue more urgently raises these questions than open adherence to militant Protestantism (the subject of these plays), which in France was punishable by death. Yet by the beginning of the Religious Wars (45 years after Luther�s theses), there are three million Protestants in France, 15% of the population. How can such large numbers be explained? In an age of minimal literacy (5-10% in urban areas), three million new Protestants were not converted by reading Farel or Viret (in French), nor the learned treatises of Luther, Erasmus, Lefèvre, and Calvin. But a reforming preacher, or group of actors staging an outdoor performance of a play of the type included here, could reach in a single day a larger audience than all the books published in Paris in an entire year (88 in 1501, to be exact; 332 in 1549). Six of the most trenchant of the surviving "moralités polémiques" are edited here with historical and theoretical background situating them in the tradition of polemical religious theater or �propaganda� plays (originally the word means "ad propagandam fidem")�that spans the Reformation in France from its roots in 15th-century conciliarism. CONTENTS: {I} Préliminaires : Comment, pourquoi lire les "moralités polémiques" ? : l'horizon des préventions. {II} Arrière-plan littéraire (1) Le recueil La Vallière; (2) Le genre : qu'est-ce qu'une "moralité polémique"? (3) Recherches antérieures sur le théâtre réformiste et gallican. {III} Arrière-plan historique : (1) Propagation de la Réforme en Normandie; (2) Rouen et le théâtre polémique ca 1520-1560; (3) Orientation confessionnelle et contenu doctrinal des pièces (conservatisme orthodoxe, gallicanisme, réformisme, luthéranisme); (4) Orthodoxie et hérésie : "Ce qui est à croire" en 25 points, d'après la Sorbonne (1543). THE PLAYS: Edited here each with an Introduction and critical notes : (1) L'Eglise et le commun, (2) L'Eglise, Noblesse, et Povreté qui fait la lessive, (3) Le Ministre de l'Eglise, (4) Science, son clerq, Annerye, et son clerc, (5) Heressye, Frere Symonye, Force, Scandalle, Proces, et l'Eglise, (6) Le Maistre d'escolle.