York PSim (Pageant Simulator)

On this Page: [ Introduction | What is PSim? | Contents | Links | Acknowledgements ]

Introduction

This image from John Speed's map of Yorkshire, England shows the walled city of York, the site of the brilliant annual spectacle known to its medieval performers and spectators as the "Corpus Christi Play."

The Corpus Christi Play was an annual outdoor event, involving hundreds of actors; it was already a long-established tradition by the end of the 14th century, and continued until suppressed by the Protestant Reformation in the late 16th century.

Dozens of short plays, each mounted on a wagon-stage, began at the Trinity Priory (lower left) and moved through the city streets, stopping at pre-arranged performance locations known as stations (indicated by the large dots on the map above).

What is PSim?

PSim (Pageant Simulator), a teaching aid and research tool, is computer software that models the motion of pageant wagons during a simulated York Corpus Christi Pageant. Dots representing individual wagon-mounted plays move from station to station on a color map of the city, while the computer displays elapsed time. PSim comes with several default data sets that illustrate elements of different production theories, as developed by some of the modern scholars who have tried to reconstruct the medieval performance. The program was originally written for Windows 3.x, but a Java version of PSim is now available via the internet-- although it may load very slowly on some systems. I suggest that you first visit the PSim screen shots, which cover in detail what PSim does.

The program can be used to demonstrate, for instance, the effect of varying the number of performance stations, or the cumulative effect of backups and gaps during the performance. A more ambitious PSim user (Windows 3.x version only, at present) can create custom configurations, by specifying such data as which plays participate in the cycle, the performance length of each individual play, the location of stations, and the travel times between them.

Contents

1. Introduction to the York Corpus Christi Play
1. Context: Religious, artistic, economic and political aspects of the York Corpus Christi Play
2. Content:
1. Brief synopses of the episodes preserved in the York Register
2. York e-texts at the University of Virginia
3. Controversy: Analysis of the scholarly debate over staging
4. Bibliography
2. Pictures and video clips from the 1977 restaging in Toronto
3. Pageant Simulator (2.0 for Windows, 2.1 for Java)
1. PSim screen shots: still pictures of the simulation
2. The PSim Java applet: a computer simulation of the York pageant
3. Understanding the computer program (PSim)
4. General Resources
1. A Christ Taken Prisoner: an historical anecdote illustrating the interdependence of the medieval religious, artistic, political, and economic worlds
2. Glossary of terms: if you are new to medieval religious drama, you might want to learn the difference between:
• Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth
• Assumption and Ascension
• Adoration and Veneration

Links to On-line Medieval Theatre Resources

• For more on-line information on the the York Corpus Christi Cycle, including discussions of textual and iconographical issues, consult the Doomsday Gateway Page, by medieval scholars Meg Twycross and Pamela King.
• NetSERF
• Records of Early English Drama
• The Unviersity of Rochester's Medieval English Drama

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Alexandra F. Johnston and the staff at the Records of Early English Drama, for introducing this student of 20th-century American literature to the York plays; and to Allen Forsyth, Ian Graham, John Bradley, and Rudy Ziegler of the University of Toronto Information Commons, for technical and moral support.