UNLIKE the late medieval biblical dramas of Chester, York, and Coventry, whose textual survival is accompanied by a rich documentary record of the contexts and occasions of their performance, extant dramatic texts representing the varied theatrical traditions of East Anglia are not so conveniently situated in historical and social frameworks. Although records of medieval performative activities in the region yield evidence of local habits of staging and theatrical organization, such as theaters in the round and multi-community productions, no surviving notices of East Anglian theatrical endeavor can be linked to extant East Anglian dramatic texts. Paradoxically, the richest regional tradition of late medieval English theater has left the fewest documentary traces. The contextual problems encountered in the contemporary study of late medieval East Anglian theater, then, must come to terms with numerous frustrations: texts that float free of their regional and institutional auspices; dramatic collections such as the N-Town Plays that laconically bear witness to the processes of their own complicated genesis; and long-lost traditions of dramatic production that possessed the requisite theatrical know-how and material resources to mount the ambitious spectacles of a Castle of Perseverance or a Mary Magdalene.

Reflections on the losses that characterize the late medieval East Anglian ‘theater of devotion’ can draw our attention to theoretical frameworks and methodological strategies that might be invoked to recuperate it. Contemporary medieval studies have exhibited a determined interest in pointing out parallels between the losses that constitute the founding condition of studying the medieval past and recent theories of cultural representation and the formation of subjectivity. Paul Strohm has argued that postmodern theoretical formulations underscoring the instability of knowledge and truth claims nonetheless make a space for historical inquiry, not ‘to probe the … depths but to restore … the fully contradictory variety … of the historical surface’. The pursuit of historical meaning in postmodern medieval studies posits neither the total recoverability of the past event nor the certitude of fully rendering up the past to present understanding.

Debates about the prospects for historical inquiry in the practice of inevitably postmodern medieval studies have transpired at some remove from the immediate concerns of medieval English drama scholarship; yet they nonetheless impinge on methodological strategies employed in the study of East Anglian theater to confront the sorts of palpable losses that I have invoked.