Alison Shell: Staging Magic in Catholic Drama

Staging Magic in English Catholic College Drama Ushaw Lecture by Professor Alison Shell (University College London) --About the Lecture Dramatised magic was popular in early modern theatre, and never more so than within the dramatic corpus of the English Catholic colleges set up in continental Europe after the Reformation. Many of these colleges were controlled by the Jesuit order, who played a major role in developing stage technology in this era. Written for performance by the young scholars at these colleges, these plays constitute a kind of children’s literature, and frequently draw on magical themes. They have a didactic message, pitting devil-worshippers against followers of Christ, and the fantastic element must also have appealed to the schoolboy imagination. Audiences of these popular civic events, whether or not they could understand the Latin in which the plays were performed, would have enjoyed the opportunity for spectacle provided by maguses and conjuring tricks. This lecture is organised by the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, in conjunction with Ushaw College. --About the Speaker Alison Shell was educated at the North London Collegiate School and Oxford University (B.A./M.A. and D.Phil.). After a period as Rare Books Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Alison became a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at UCL between 1994 and 1997. Her first permanent academic post was at the University of Durham, where she worked between 1997 and 2010. Alison is an editor for the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies’ series ‘Catholic and Recusant Texts in Early Modern England’. She reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, the Church Times and a number of academic journals. --About the Ushaw Lecture Series The Ushaw Lecture Series celebrates the cultural and research significance of the remarkable bibliographical, archival and material-cultural collections at Ushaw, and the wider history of which they are expressions. The lectures cover music, art, drama, poetry and literature, architecture, material-culture, politics, science and theology.