Medieval Music-Drama

The Fleury Playbook has been justly celebrated as the most comprehensive extant collection of medieval music-dramas, containing in a single manuscript examples of non-biblical miracle plays, and settings of the Nativity and Resurrection stories, together with accounts of the conversion of Paul and Mary Magdalene. In this the first full-length monograph on the Playbook, Wyndham Thomas places the collection in its historical, cultural and musical context. Each of the 10 plays is treated to a close dramatic and musical analysis and placed in its broader context of musical life in the twelfth century.