Laurie POSTLEWATE et Wim HÜSKEN, Acts and Texts. Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi (Ludus - Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama), 2007, 361 p.
ISBN 978-90-420-2191-4
SUMMARY
For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created andpropagated through public performance. Processions, coronations,speeches, trials, and executions are all types of public performancethat were both acts andtexts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them theirideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of theiractual performance. Literature, as well, was for the pre-modern publica type of performance: throughout the medieval and early modern periodswe see a constant tension and negotiation between the oral/auraldelivery of the literary work and the eventual silent/read reception ofits written text. The current volume of essays examines the pluralityof forms and meanings given to performance in the Middle Ages andRenaissance through discussion of the essential performance/textrelationship. The authors of the essays represent a variety ofscholarly disciplines and subject matter: from the “performed” life ofthe Dominican preacher, to coronation processions, to bookpresentations; from satirical music speeches, to the rendering of widowportraits, to the performance of romance and pious narrative. Diversein their objects of study, the essays in this volume all examine thelinks between the actual events of public performance and the textualorigins and subsequent representation of those performances.
CONTENTS
Laurie POSTLEWATE: Introduction
The Power of Performance
Dallas G. DENERY II: The Preacher and His Audience: Dominican Conceptions of the Self in the Thirteenth Century
Joyce COLEMAN: Public-Access Patronage: Book-Presentation from the Crowd at a Royal Procession
Amy SCHWARZ: Eternal Rome and Cola di Rienzo’s Show of Power
L. Caitlin JORGENSEN: Diversity in Unity: Elizabeth’s Coronation Procession
Alejandro CAÑEQUE: On Cushions and Chairs: The Ritual Contruction of Authority in New Spain
Performance and the Page
Adrian P. TUDOR: Talking Pictures: Performance on the Page
Kathryn A. DUYS: Medieval Literary Performance: Gautier de Coinci’s Guide for the Perplexed
Paul CREAMER: Privatizing the Conte du Graal: How Renaissance Printers Reformatted Chrétien’s Public Text for Private Reading
Nancy Freeman REGALADO: A Contract for an Early Festival Book: Sarrasin’s Le Roman du Hem (1278)
WilliamE. ENGEL: Death Slips Onto the Renaissance Stage: Morris Dancing, MimedMoors, and Nascent Rituals in Fletcher and Shakespeare
Evelyn BIRGE VITZ & Linda MARIE ZAERR: Experimenting with the Performance of Medieval Narrative
The Performance of Gender
Marilyn LAWRENCE: Yseut’s Legacy: Women Writers and Performers in the Medieval French Romance Ysaÿe le Triste
Felicity HENDERSON: ‘A Bawdy Lecture unto Ladies’: Music Speeches at Early-Modern Oxford
List of Illustrations
Contributors