This collection of essays abounds in interesting and frequently provocative questions, many raised only in recent times. The foremost question is what constitutes performance? We all assume that medieval morality plays were “performed.” But is theater necessary for performance? Most recognize that liturgy in a cathedral was more than a didactic exercise, but was the space also “performative”? And what of the iconography within this space? Or on the exterior? Extend these questions to manuscript illuminations, preaching, poetry, spirituality in general, and performance practice, and one begins to get an impression of the richness of this fledgling field for a deeper understanding of medieval life as it was lived and experienced. And one also begins to grasp the content of this excellent collection of essays.
Some years ago when Margaret Miles published Image as Insight (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), the work seemed like a lonely enterprise. But steadily, with similar attempts to expand our focus from “objects” to the act—the “performance”—of perceiving and assigning significance, the field has widened and become increasingly fruitful for understanding ordinary people, social status, exchange of power, and even that elusive term “meaning.” Robert Scribner's phrase “sacramental gaze” comes to mind as it applies to a viewing experience in which the holy suddenly breaks in (9).
“Performance theory” has become ever more sophisticated in differentiating one kind of performance from another, but, as Mary Suydam points out in her essay, this methodology poses a special challenge for medievalists who depend on written texts and the “ghosts of past performances,” while much else of material culture has been lost or destroyed. Older or more traditional historians who are at home with texts and textual criticism also wonder about a drift toward an ephemeral and “anything goes” mentality (143, 155).
Two principles help to alleviate these fears: an interdisciplinary approach, and clarity about theory and method. The first key locates this research, in the editor's words, “within an intricate webbing of the somatic and the spiritual, the ocular and the aural, the textual and the verbal” and thus necessitates contributions from, among others, history, art history, literature, theater, musicology, social and religious studies (3).
The second key, theory, leans heavily on Victor Turner for the significance of ritual and Richard Schechner, the founder of performance studies, for an inclusive definition of theater. Behind both is a fundamental shift in perception: from stage to audience, from object to viewer. Richard K. Emmerson's essay clarifies Schechner's four principles of performance theory, beginning with how objects perform. Framing devices construct spaces that invite participation. Performative signs indicate ways that events are staged as well as described. Twice-behaved behavior reminds us that manuscripts, sculptures, and even writing do not show actual behavior but behavior that comes back to us loaded with meaning. Liminality involves that critical moment in a rite of passage when an initiate is suspended between one context and another.
This volume derives from a conference at the University of Chicago entitled “Performance/Performativity in the Middle Ages.” The result is not a loose collection of disparate papers, however, but supports the editor's desire to demonstrate how performance studies illumine a surprisingly wide spectrum of human activity by tightly organizing sixteen concise essays around four themes.
The first relates to visual performance in word, body, and image, and begins with Christina Maranci's inquiry into the relationship between exterior images and processional rites in early medieval Armenian churches. Richard K. Emmerson investigates the viewer's experience of a thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the apocalypse. Pamela Sheingorn analyzes reader responses to the fourteenth-century Pélerinage de Jesuchrist. And the editor, Elina Gertsman, considers the interaction between three bodies—Mary, Christ, and the viewer—in late medieval Vierge Ouvrante sculptures.
The second theme, religious performance from preaching to devotional practice, is addressed first by Beverly Mayne Kienzle who views Hildegard of Bingen's homilies as dual performances in which Hildegard transforms both the Gospel stories and the audience. Carolyn Muessig explores the “sacramental efficacy” in the lay reception of Passion dramas. Mary Suydam argues for the need to reclaim the “performativity” of Beguine spirituality. And Mary Frohlich shows how readers experienced the presence of the divine in the “Christic” performance of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle.
Jonathan Decter, who opens discussion of the third theme, social performance, concentrates on the installation of an Exilarch, the secular leader of a medieval Jewish community in Baghdad where identity within a Jewish–Muslim context plays a critical role. Daisy Delogu asks how social identity takes shape when juxtaposed to courtly roles in the late medieval pseudo-romance, Jehan de Saintré. By examining its first-person female epitaphs, Helen Swift finds interest in the apparent monotony of Jean Bouchet's Jugement poetic de l'honneur femenin, a debate poem written in defense of women. Rebecca Zorach asks what performance theory can tell us about animating the past and community frictions in the enactment of Henry II and Catherine de Medici's entry into Rouen in 1550.
The last word goes to the fourth theme—lived performance in theater, dance, and music—beginning with Erika Fischer-Lichte, who argues that the constitutive element in medieval religious plays was their connection to Christian festivals rather than a distinction between theater and ritual. Glenn Ehrstine discusses the importance of staging for the “salvific embodiment” of late medieval Passion plays. Yossi Maurey suggests that the scholarly yet imaginative reconstruction of a musical performance from medieval documents is a performative act in itself. Finally, Jennifer Nevile considers the ambivalent attitudes toward dancing and how Renaissance treatises about dance, dancing masters, and new dances offered the elite a palpable status symbol.
While the book deserves our applause, its technical jargon and narrow focus may appeal primarily to specialists.
