Moralité à six personnages

Medieval theater was street theater and a place for protest, in which the polysemy of the expression « public space » is well-situated. The La Vallière collection remarkably illustrates this, alternating four plays : two farces, each followed by a morality play. Of these, the morality plays justify the collection’s existence. Joël Blanchard has already published the first of these, Moralité à cincq personnages, and now publishes Moralité à six personnages, an exceptional text that combines theater, astrology and politics, denouncing the governmental methods of Louis XI at the time of the Estates General of 1484. The author, possibly Henri Baude, was a man of the courts, aware of university and political mores, and a gifted rhetorician. Publishing Moralité à six personnages for the first time, Joël Blanchard deciphers a difficult text, offering new light on the political and cultural history of the second half of the fifteenth century.