Seasons & elements: a study of debates on European stages during the late Middle Ages

Vanden winter ende vanden somer is a Dutch play using allegorical characters. Although less common in the Dutch-language corpus, this type of representation certainly flourished in Europe from the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries. This is why we would like to compare the abele spel from the Van Hulthem manuscript to two of its French and English counterparts, the Moralité des quatre éléments and the Four elements composed by John Rastell. Our aim is to study both the use of allegorical characters and the semantic networks they conjure up in order to shed some light on the inclusion of this spectacle in the European corpus of the early sixteenth century.