cycling through
With the exam next week, I have a bit of a backlog right now of books I've read that still require posts. I'll do a quick nod now to the York Mystery Plays, the oldest text on the list. This series of short plays was written sometime in the fourteenth century (when York hit its heyday after the Black Death), but continued to be performed well into the sixteenth century.
The "cycle" of plays was performed each year for the springtime Corpus Christi festivities. Rather than being shown on a central stage, the plays were performed from on top of a series of wagons that would process throughout the city, stopping to deliver different parts of the play. Think the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade… but the symbolism's in soliloquies instead of in Mylar.
Taken all together, the York Mystery Plays recount, like, all of the Christian religious narrative. But they're broken down into forty-eight parts, each of which was assigned to a particular guild, or type of craftsmen. So the Skinners do one part, and the Scriveners do one part, and the Mercers finish the whole thing off. The word mystery at the time mainly meant "occupation" or "trade," and was unrelated to the contemporary meaning of the word. Only around this time, in the fourteenth century, do you get the first stirrings of the idea of mystery as a religious revelation -- and it's that root that eventually morphed into the word we know and use today.