Winner: King, Pamela M. The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City. Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2006.
It is an enormous honor - and a personal pleasure - to present the 2007 David Bevington Award for the best new monograph in early modern drama studies to Professor Pamela M. King. I am especially grateful for her own cogent summary of her prize text, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City, at yesterday's session "Why Everything We Thought We Knew about English Medieval Drama Is Wrong."
In The York Mystery Cycle, Pamela argues that the York Cycle "evolved as a celebration of Corpus Christi Day" (16), reading the Cycle "not simply as dramatized biblical narrative produced as an adjunct to the feast of Corpus Christi, but as a customized celebratory event" (28). In this richly detailed, documented, and textured study, she identifies the dominant organizational principle of the York Cycle as not biblical but sacramental, not a historical narrative but a calendrical sequence of liturgical readings. For once and for all, I hope, she has settled the issue of why the episodes in the York Old Testament sequence and the less-standard episodes of the New Testament ministry were chosen; and she has clearly demonstrated the formative relation between the York Missal readings and the Cycle episodes from Epiphany to Palm Sunday.
The book is a treasure, as has been Professor King's generous service to the profession. Although she now is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol, and recently has placed her professorial posterior in Bristol's newly-constructed Chair in Medieval Studies, I find her earlier title, "Head of the School of Culture, Media, and the Environment," at St. Martin's College, Lancaster, more expressive of her talents. She has published widely and influentially on Chaucer, the Coventry plays, the York plays, early theatre in performance (both English and Continental), iconography (particularly her work on cadaver tombs), civic and social history, confraternities, and lay piety. Co-director since its inception of the York Domesday Project, a large-scale, multi-media computing project on mystery plays, Professor King also is a past president of SITM; European Council member of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society; and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Education, and Industry.
Memorable as these many achievements may seem, however, they pale in comparison to what many of us think of as Pam's finest academic moment, when she strutted and fretted her hour upon the 1998 York Symposium stage in Toronto. In a room filled with such York Cycle luminaries as Johnston, Rogerson, Beckwith, Beadle, Twycross, and, of course, King, one rather expected epiphanic wisdom. Instead, one got Pam and Meg as two Yorkshire housewives doing a Monty Pythonesque critique of the butcher's son's performance (and physique) as Christ in the Crucifixion pageant—"oooh, don't he look skinnier than last year, luv"—was one memorable bit of dramatic criticism.
Pam, for both this lovely book and for your many, many contributions to the field of medieval studies, I am happy to present you with this award of $150, which is practically worthless given the exchange rate, and with a two-year complimentary membership in the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society.
Citation by Barbara D. Palmer. Awards announcement and presentation took place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.