The Home of the Fleury Playbook

The late and revered Professor Solange Corbin seems to have intended her 1953 Romania article to be controversial. 1 She wished to challenge the presumed origin of the famous Fleury Playbook2 as the Abbaye St. Benoit de Fleury at St. Benoit-sur-Loire, to proclaim indeed that "Le manuscrit [of the Playbook] ne provient pas de Saint-Benoit," and that the Abbaye St. Laumer3 in Blois was a preferable location. In her challenge were echoes of Baconian and other Shakespearean lost causes that took a hundred years to run their courses and return us to a conviction that William Shakespeare of Strati ordon-Avon is the best candidate for the composition of the plays attributed to him. Questions of place and authorship are often more difficult in respect to medieval religious plays than to those of the Elizabethans, for a manuscript containing liturgical material was in mortal jeopardy from the time of the Reformation, and frequently survived destruction only by going underground. In that process its origin was often deliberately obscured and its authorship unacknowledged. Hence any strong skepticism in these matters, particularly from a highly respected scholar, is likely to result in discrediting the existing assumption. For this reason the twenty-seven years since the Corbin article appeared have not been filled with rejoinders and counter-claims; indeed, the Fleury stronghold of nearly two centuries fell with hardly a shot fired in its defense. Most scholars in the field apparently believed that Professor Corbin knew more than they did, impressively paleographical and bibliographical as her presentation was. Several scholars among them Grace Frank, Jean LaPorte, and Richard B. Donovan4 were not intimidated by the article. The present writer, while more cautious in 1972 than he now would be, even then dissented: "Her hypothesis does not work