Alexandra Johnston Award for Best New Conference Paper in Early Drama Studies by a Graduate Student | 2006 | Christopher Lee, "Jews as Didactic Instruments" delivered at the New Medievalism II conference, University of Western Ontario, March 2005. | Christopher Lee's paper, "Jews as Didactic Instruments," argues that medieval playmakers employed Jewish characters to instruct their audiences about proper semiotic interpretation, particularly on how spectators ought to arrive at Christian truth. In the process, the dramatists also explored the pedagogical effectiveness of their own dramatic signs. His analyses of the Jeu d'Adam and the Benediktbeuern play offer real interpretive power, as he argues for the connection of belief to learning in the Anglo-Norman play, and he extends this insight in his reading of the Benediktbeuern Christmas Play, seeing the debate between Archisynagogus and the Prophets as "a parody of the interreligious debate format and the scholastic methods of instruction." All the judges were impressed by the way his paper covered a broad swathe of medieval drama and seemed to add something genuinely new to the often narrow discussion of anti-Semitism in medieval drama. While all the nominees were excellent in their distinct ways, Mr. Lee's piece was notable in the way it managed to be theoretically sophisticated without being jargon bound, and also in the manner it applied its analytic perspective to a diverse group of plays.
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Spring 2012 - Colophon
