If you were fortunate enough to be living in the city of Lübeck between 1430 and 1540, then in its glory days as queen of the Hanseatic League, you could have witnessed the performance of about two hundred carnival plays. Some were the usual kind, called Einkehrspiele, that young men put on in many German towns. In a medieval form of home invasion, costumed mummers would go from house to house and perform brief sketches before carnival revelers gathered in a large room. In Lübeck, most players were choristers from the four church schools, making the rounds in groups of two to six, often led by their teachers. Their playlets dramatized traditional comic themes: the wicked old hag, the widow too easily comforted, here comes the judge, the marriage game. These plays, some eighty in number, have all been lost. We know about them because one carnival theatre stop was the clubhouse of a merchant confraternity – called Greveradenkompanie after its founder – whose stewards recorded the tips paid out to carnival ‘rhymers’ (rymers), as they refer to them, in the company book of 1495 to 1539 that happens to survive.

That the hand of time is hard on light student sketches is perhaps not surprising. But in Lübeck, carnival playmaking was also the concern of men who governed the largest and most powerful north German city and ran its trading economy, its merchants and administrators. They socialized and protected their interests in two elite confraternities. The old money belonged to the Squire Company or Confraternity of the Zirkel, meaning ‘compass’, an emblem symbolic of the Trinity. The new rich who hoped to become Squires one day joined the Merchant Company. Both confraternities produced carnival plays and staged them on wagons drawn to the marketplace.

This volume gathers together thirteen papers reporting on medieval drama research since the 1960s prepared for a conference convened by the Committee on Medieval Studies of Harvard University, 9–11 October 1986. The scholars participating were kind enough to read the papers in advance. At the meeting they were then joined by some local medievalists to discuss each report in detail. The discussion was taped so that the editor might use it in devising instructions for revision. As they enter the present volume, then, as a guide to research, the papers bear the imprint not of one but of a team of editors for whose help I am most grateful.

Although five of the chapters are devoted to English drama, it was not this field that prompted the editor to persuade a reluctant Committee to sponsor a conference. Scholars of English drama have been talking to each other since the 1950s, not only in seminars at MLA meetings and the Kalamazoo International Congresses but in journals such as Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama and Medieval English Theatre. It seemed to me, however, that they have done this largely without the rest of us. This conference, then, was intended to help scholars of continental drama to join the conversation and to encourage all of us to begin looking over national fences.