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Written in Middle English during the Tudor period, “Everyman” is the most famous example of the medieval morality play. Popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th century, morality plays were allegorical dramas in which the protagonists are met with the personifications of personal attributes and tasked with choosing either a good and godly life or evil. “Everyman” is the archetypal morality play, as the main character, Everyman, represents all of mankind. God, frustrated with the wicked and greedy, sends Death to Everyman and summons him to account for his misdeeds and sins. It was believed that God tallied all of one’s good and evil deeds in life and then one must provide an accounting before God upon one’s death. During Everyman’s pilgrimage to God, he meets many characters, such as Fellowship, Good Deeds, and Knowledge. Everyman asks them all to join him in his journey so that he may improve his reckoning before God. In the end, it is only Good Deeds that stays with him before God and helps Everyman find salvation and eternal life. In addition to “Everyman,” this volume contains several other morality plays from medieval Europe.

The medieval morality play, which became popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th century, is a allegorical drama in which personal attributes are personified and the moral of choosing good over evil is generally conveyed. In this volume you will find one of the most famous examples of this genre in the play «Everyman» along with the following other plays: «The Deluge», «Abraham, Melchisedec, And Isaac», «The Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play», «The Coventry Nativity Play», «The Wakefield Miracle-Play Of The Crucifixion», «The Cornish Mystery-Play Of The Three Maries», «The Mystery Of Mary Magdalene And The Apostles», «The Wakefield Pageant Of The Harrowing Of Hell», and «God's Promises.»

Eighteenth-century English literature, art, science, and popular culture exhibited an unprecedented fascination with small male bodies of various kinds. Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays drew packed crowds, while public exhibitions advertised male dwarfs as paragons of English masculinity. Bawdy popular poems featured diminutive men paired with enormous women, and amateur scientists anthropomorphized and gendered the «minute bodies» they observed under their fashionable new pocket microscopes. Little men, both real and imagined, embodied the anxieties of a newly bourgeois English culture and were transformed to suit changing concerns about the status of English masculinity in the modern era. The Little Everyman explores this strange trend by tracing the historical trajectory of the supplanting of the premodern court dwarf by a more metaphorical and quintessentially modern «little man» who came to represent in miniature the historical shift in literary production from aristocratic patronage to the bourgeois fantasy of freelance authorship. Armintor's close readings of Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Sterne highlight little recognized aspects of classic works while demonstrating how the little man became an «everyman.»