The Day of Judgment - A Mystery Play

14th Century France

 

"The manuscript of the 14th-century mystery play 'The Day of Judgment,' includes roles for 94 characters, 89 miniatures depicting the action of the play and three musical pieces. Grace Frank gives this plot summary in The Medieval French Drama, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 132-33:

After an introductory sermon by Le Prescheur we find Satan and his devils preparing to send one of them, disguised as an elegant youth, to seduce a woman of the tribe of Dan in Babylon. This devil, Angignars, speedily accomplishes his purpose and Antichrist is born of the union. The devils now begin instructing Antichrist in all their arts, and presently he is able to make the blind to see, to cure the leprous, rivive the dead, and heap riches upon the poor. He readily wins over the Jews and grows so powerful that even kings and cardinals pay him homage. Only the Pope himself and Enoch and Elijah who have been sent by God to wage war against the enemy are able to resist the magic of Antichrist.

[. . .] Antichrist is overthrown, Enoch and Elijah who have been killed by his orders are resurrected, and the damned, as in so many poems concerned with the Harrowing of Hell or the Dance of Death, pass in review before us. Here they include an abbess and bishop who have sinned together, a king, bailiff, provost, lawyer, adulterous queen, erring prioress, a usurer, his wife, his servant, and even his small child. Although eight pages of the manuscript are missing, it is obvious that the God of our author was especially condemnatory of all who lived on the fruits of usury and was especially concerned with those who were kind or unkind to the poor . . . . In the final reckoning angels pour out vials of wrath, apostles and saints aid in the task of separating saved from damned, and eventually the just are duly rewarded and the wicked driven to hell by menacing devils. The play ends with a few unique lines of seven syllables spoken by St. Paul, who says that the damned have been taken to hell for eternal torment."

Mystere dou jour dou jugement
Besançon, Bibliothèque Municipale ms. [M] 579
22 March 1999 By Jesse D. Hurlbut
http://toisondor.byu.edu/dscriptorium/jugement/jugement.html

Pages by Mrs. D

"One of the most admirable things about history is, that almost as a rule, we get as much information out of what it does not say as we get out of what it does say. . . . History is a frog; half of it is submerged, but he knows it is there, and he knows the shape of it."

"The Secret History of Eddypus", Mark Twain