Languages Low and High: Translation and the Creation of Community in the Chester Pentecost Play

The festive implications of England’s northern cycle plays have been well studied in recent decades, particularly with regard to the plays’ connections to the Feast of Corpus Christi (the Thursday after Trinity Sunday). The primary point of departure for this line of inquiry was the embodied model of civic community outlined by Mervyn James in 1983: I propose to argue that the theme of Corpus Christi is society seen in terms of body; and that the concept of body provided urban societies with a mythology and ritual in terms of which the opposites of social wholeness and social differentiation could be both affirmed, and also brought into a creative tension, one with the other. The final intention of the cult was, then, to express the social bond and to contribute to social integration.1.