On June 7, 2025, the performance group Poculi Ludique Societas (“The Drinking and Gaming Society”) staged an all-day outdoor production of fifty medieval plays at the University of Toronto. From 6 AM to late at night, seventeen groups from Canada and the US performed selections from the York Plays, a series of short verse dramas depicting Christian history from the creation of the universe to the Last Judgment.1 Dating from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, these dramatic recreations of biblical (and apocryphal) narratives were originally presented during the springtime feast of Corpus Christi by the craft guilds of the city of York, in northern England. The 2025 performances were edited and modernized to various degrees, but maintained the lighthearted irreverence, calls for audience participation, and iconic staging principles of the original productions.2 Notably, these plays preserved the medieval tradition of using wagons as mobile stages, which actors wheeled through the performance area after each show.
In many ways, the 2025 production was a resounding success. The performances were engaging, exuberantly DIY, and strikingly well attended, with crowds lingering at each of the three staging locations. Yet the event was marked by several calamities. In 2022, a fire destroyed the original PLS wagons, built for the first staging of the York Plays in 1977. The society spent the ensuing years raising funds and constructing new wagons according to the same historical principles. Then, shortly before the performance, another series of fires struck. In late May, a surge of unusually severe wildfires rampaged across millions of acres of the Canadian boreal forest.3 Saskatchewan and Manitoba declared states of emergency, while smoke drifted over Toronto and Montreal on its way to Europe. By the afternoon of June 6, Toronto’s air quality had plummeted almost to the bottom of world rankings, surpassed only by Detroit.4
A lapse in urban air quality is a relatively minor concern amid a wildfire season that has already seen the deaths of two people in their home and tens of thousands of evacuations.5 But a few unnerving thoughts occurred to me as I watched the York plays through a haze of particulate matter, peering over one of the KN-95 masks I have worn intermittently since 2020. For one thing, the experience seemed to literalize the veil through which modern readers perceive the past. Scholars inevitably superimpose their own perspectives on historical literature, though our training may help us to navigate this tendency. Despite the distance of the Middle Ages, current social issues inflect research in this discipline—and in 2025, it is difficult to ignore the ecological shifts occurring around us.
The York cycle is unusual within medieval drama in staging the Christian creation story—from the origin of the angels to the fall of humanity—over no fewer than six plays, all of which featured in the Toronto performances. Shannon Gayk discusses these plays in her recent book Apocalyptic Ecologies, arguing that their depictions of more-than-human life dwell in the paradoxes of medieval thought (31).6 For instance, the York Plays represent humans as both distinct from other creatures and “bound in some physical way to the earth” (52). And while humans are eventually granted dominion over living things, the “Creation” play, which takes place before the advent of humanity, offers a biocentric vision of plants flourishing and producing fruit for their own sake, “productive but not yet instrumentalized” (41). Of course, this scene of nonhuman thriving is staged by human actors; in Toronto, human hands held up reprinted medieval images of birds and fish, suggesting a highly mediated view of nonhuman animals. And the smog overlaying this scene of abundance underscored that there is no longer any “nature” unaffected by human actions, no place on this planet that pollution cannot touch.
Perhaps most relevant to this discussion is the “Expulsion from the Garden” play, in which Adam and Eve bemoan the suffering that they face after Eden. As Gayk points out, its fourth-wall-breaking conclusion reminds spectators of the corrupted state of their world:
At the end of the play, Adam and Eve would, presumably, come down from the stage and step into the crowd, walking from Eden into the world of late medieval England. In so doing, they perform the continuity of then and now that many accounts of the expulsion narrate. The human condition they now embody is shared by those watching or reading the story of their fall. … They enter the disquieting world of the present (79).
Viewing this scene through smoky air, I considered the perennial question of how to live well in a flawed world, a world from which there is no turning back. I thought, as well, of the differences between premodern and contemporary forms of disquiet. Medieval audiences knew ecological upheavals and attributed these to human actions; while poets connected natural disasters and plague to human sin, legislators attempted to reduce the extraction of resources such as fish and wood.7 Medieval scholars also mistrusted “corrupt air” or “miasma,” which had been associated with disease since Hippocrates.8 However, as Mica Jorgenson observed about an earlier smoke season, history offers few precedents for the alarming scales and speeds of today’s anthropogenic ecological changes. These comparisons may be informative, but they are rarely comforting.
Eventually, the creation pageants trundled off and gave way to Noah’s Ark, one of the most prominent narratives of ecological disaster in premodern Europe.9 The birds loudly trilled from the trees. As the morning wore on, the sun emerged from behind the skyscrapers, lighting the clouded sky and the fragile earth below.
Feature Image: Alessandra Cavallini as Mary in the “Nativity” pageant. Centennial College (Toronto), dir. Ara Glenn-Johanson, York Plays 2025, Toronto. Photo: Tommy Nguyen (@tommy2ng).
Notes
1 For a list of all participating troupes and pageant masters, see https://www.yorkplays.ca/plays. Matthew Sergi (Univ. of Toronto) served as general director of the event.
2 For more information about staging, see the excellent production website. The base edition was Christina M. Fitzgerald, The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2018), although Fitzgerald created some new editions for the 2025 performances.
3 Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, “National Wildland Fire Situation Report,” updated Jun 11, 2025; Nick Murray, “The 2025 wildfire season is on track to be Canada’s 2nd-worst on record,” The Canadian Press, Jun 12, 2025.
4 “Toronto air quality ranked second worst in the world on Friday,” Toronto Today, Jun 6, 2025.
5 Darren Bernhardt, “Wildfire deaths in Manitoba turn ‘an emergency into a tragedy’: Premier Wab Kinew,” CBC News, May 15, 2025; “Thousands evacuated in 3 provinces as Canadian wildfires threaten air quality into some US states,” Associated Press, Jun 1, 2025.
6 Parenthetical references are to Shannon Gayk, Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).
7 Gayk, Apocalyptic Ecologies, 100–2; Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 186–7, 194.
8 The notion of miasma could coexist with theories of person-to-person contagion. See Annemarie Kinzelbach, “Infection, Contagion, and Public Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Imperial Towns,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61.3 (2006): 369–89, doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrj046.
9 Lydia Barnett, Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, Noah’s Arkive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
