¹⁹ Robert Mannyng, Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne’, A.D. 1303, with those Parts of the Anglo-French Treaties on which it was Founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel des Pechiez’, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS o.s. 119, 123 (1901, 1903; rpt. New York: Kraus, 1973), 155. For example, the churchyard of Beverly Minster in the East Riding of Yorkshire was used as a performance space for a resurrection play sometime between 1188 and 1213. The performance was not part of the Easter season, and instead took place ‘ut tempore quodam aestivo intra septa polyandri ecclesiae Beati Johannis, ex parte aquilonari’ (’one summer, within the grave-yard of the church of the Blessed John, on the north side’). There, ‘larvatorum (ut assolet) et verbis et actu fieret repraesentatio Dominicae resurrectionis’ (’the resurrection of the Lord was presented by masked persons [as usual] in both words and action’). See Patricia Badir, ‘Representations of the Resurrection at Beverly Minster circa 1208: Chronicle, Play, Miracle’, Theatre Survey 38 (1997), 9–41. I quote from the account appened to this article, and from Diana Wyatt’s accompanying translation. Other examples of churchyard drama contemporary with the Chester cycle are the Sherborne parish revivals of their Corpus Christi play between 1571 and 1576; see Rosalind Conklin Hays, C. E. McGee, Sally L. Joyce, and Evelyn S. Newlyn, eds, Dorset and Cornwall, REED (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999), 38, 267, 269, 270.

²⁰ The text is divided into two parts, and dialect differences suggest two authors as well. The Treatise appears alongside other Wycliffite writings in British Library MS Additional 24,202, and was probably composed between 1380 and 1425. See Clifford Davidson, ed., A Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge, EDAM Monograph 19 (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan Univ. Press, 1993), 1, 4, 32–3. Most scholars have treated this work as a discussion of biblical drama, but see Clopper’s dissenting analysis in Drama, Play, and Game, 63–107.

²¹ Davidson, ed., Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge, 93. In her edition of the text, Anne Hudson notes that ‘miracle’ here can mean the life of Christ, the miraculous events within that life, or a ‘miracle play’ about the life of Christ. See Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), 188 n 6.