Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9295072
C. Symes
As an afterword to the special issue of JMEMS “Performance beyond Drama,” this essay reflects on the complex ways that premodern performances and their embodied actors are captured in, mediated by, or dependent on the texts that we use to study them, and on the special importance of examining this process across a temporal framework—the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries—that challenges the periodizing schema of modernity. In particular, three major systemic changes impacted European performance practices and their documentation during this era: the more widespread availability and manufacture of paper, which made writing easier and reading cheaper, coupled with the introduction of print technology after 1455; the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation and its Catholic counterpart, and the bloody aftermath of religious wars, persecutions, and witch hunts that (re)shaped performance traditions; and the commodification and policing of entertainment through enclosure and regulation. Taken together, this special issue's contributions reveal fascinating convergences and continuities in performance across the medieval/modern frontier, while also showing how some medieval practices were made to conform with postmedieval political and religious projects, thereby obscuring or blurring the evidence for those earlier practices.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9295030
D. Hopkins
The royal entry of King James I into London in 1604 serves as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between public, urban performance and the primary sources that ostensibly document it. The author revisits his own past study of this occasion, revising and expanding previous conclusions about early modern English performance in light of new research and theory. The article deploys new thinking about performance historiography, arguing that such perspectives unsettle the easy placement of an event in historical chronology, disrupt archival logic, and insist on a degree of historiographical ambiguity. The legacy of new historicism is considered in tandem with current theories of performance history, and a hybridization of new historicism and performance theory is considered in relation to historiographic practice.
1604年，英国国王詹姆斯一世（King James I）正式进入伦敦，这为我们提供了一个重新思考公共、城市表演与表面上记录它的主要来源之间关系的机会。作者回顾了自己过去对这一场合的研究，并根据新的研究和理论对先前关于早期现代英语表演的结论进行了修订和扩展。文章对表演史学进行了新的思考，认为这种观点扰乱了事件在历史年表中的容易位置，扰乱了档案逻辑，并坚持一定程度的历史模糊性。新历史主义的遗产与当前的表演史理论相结合，新历史主义和表演理论的混合与历史实践相结合。
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Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9295002
I. Murakami, Don Sherman
The field of performance studies has invigorated premodern scholarship by directing critical attention to live, ephemeral events that unsettle the textual archive. This special issue of JMEMS builds on this work by stepping away from the usual emphasis on theater and its texts to examine “performance” conceived more broadly. With case studies that range from a pig-clubbing “game” in medieval festivals to the gnomic utterances of secretive eighteenth-century philosophical rituals, these essays ask how we study a medium that has, by its nature, disappeared. How, in other words, do we engage textual remnants to locate traces of embodied action? A forum midway through the issue offers speculative and provocative answers to this question, and an afterword takes a wider view of the enterprise to think through its implications for periodization and historical analysis.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9295051
Sarah Mayo
This article analyzes the ability of archival resources to make the especially transient and unstable performances of early modern mountebanks accessible and meaningful for performance studies research. Because mountebanks were itinerant performers and medical practitioners whose multiple roles challenged regulatory authorities and generated few lasting records, this article argues that mountebank performances may be best recovered and accessed by approaching the available archival materials not as records of fact, but of function. Documents like handbills associated with mountebanks were, after all, functional, inviting their readers to witness performances and test medical services. Self-authored documents like bills as well as representational and fictional texts replicate and reenact performative strategies attributed to mountebanks, namely, the cultivation of ambivalent rhetoric and compulsion to independent judgment of truth.
{"title":"“Printed follyes”: Mountebanks and the Performance of Ambivalence within the Archive","authors":"Sarah Mayo","doi":"10.1215/10829636-9295051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-9295051","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the ability of archival resources to make the especially transient and unstable performances of early modern mountebanks accessible and meaningful for performance studies research. Because mountebanks were itinerant performers and medical practitioners whose multiple roles challenged regulatory authorities and generated few lasting records, this article argues that mountebank performances may be best recovered and accessed by approaching the available archival materials not as records of fact, but of function. Documents like handbills associated with mountebanks were, after all, functional, inviting their readers to witness performances and test medical services. Self-authored documents like bills as well as representational and fictional texts replicate and reenact performative strategies attributed to mountebanks, namely, the cultivation of ambivalent rhetoric and compulsion to independent judgment of truth.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42606155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9295037
Erika T. Lin
This essay models a method for unearthing performance traces in texts that seem on the surface to be strictly literary. Centering on Thomas Dekker's The Raven's Almanac, a compilation of stories akin to those in early modern jest books, it analyzes a bawdy tale about a friar and an abbess that reveals deep connections to May games. Festivity constituted a mode of embodied knowledge, a somatic and kinesthetic process that conditioned playgoer responses. This essay demonstrates how examining nondramatic performance, including quotidian, ceremonial, and ritual practices, allows the recovery of ephemeral audience affect. Studying spectators’ emotions is notoriously challenging but can productively complicate concepts such as character and narrative. Moreover, it was through amorphous feelings and sensations that theater actively produced cultural understandings. Expanding the methodological toolkit for investigating performance offers a useful blueprint for researching other ineffable but consequential historical experiences that exceed, by definition, the documentary evidence.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9295065
Pannill Camp
In eighteenth-century Europe, ritual performance behavior was consciously used for philosophical purposes. The richest documented instances of this involved Freemasonry, a voluntary fraternal order that drew tens of thousands of men, across Europe and beyond, into a secretive ritual practice. Masons understood ritual, the core of Masonic “craft,” as a philosophical activity in itself. Supporting this claim requires a critique of the prevalent view that Freemasonry was uniquely compatible with specific Enlightenment philosophical constructs—constitutional monarchism in political thought and deistic Newtonianism in natural philosophy. Rather than expressing these specific philosophical views, Masonic ritual effectuated philosophical reflection apart from the outside world. John Toland's proto-Masonic ritual document Pantheisticon shows how early modern rituals fostered thinking in lodge settings and distinguished between Masonic and “profane” entities. On this basis it can be argued that performance in this era and beyond should be understood as the generative containment of knowledge.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9295009
Marla Carlson
In 1425, Parisians under Anglo-Burgundian rule during the Hundred Years War enjoyed the spectacle of blind men in armor attempting to club a pig to death, in the process clubbing one another. Marginal images in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, a Flemish Romance of Alexander copied and illuminated roughly eighty years earlier, closely resemble this so-called game, and a dozen cities recorded iterations beginning in the thirteenth century and continuing into the fifteenth. The repetition suggests the workings of a scenario, which performance studies theorist Diana Taylor defines as a condensation of embodied practice and knowledge reactivated in multiple times and places to transmit culture from person to living person. Reading through the Bodley 264 Romance of Alexander in order to clarify the scenario's specific function in its Parisian context, this article argues that the strategic battering of marginal beings served to transmit a hierarchically ordered culture while forcefully expelling the Armagnac faction from the hierarchy's highest rank. Within this stark example of public violence that performatively materialized political division, the bodies of pigs and blind men resonated with multiple identity categories, and the dominant group whose power and cohesion the entertainment reinforced both ignored and enjoyed their trauma.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8929038
P. Godman
This article focuses on the significance of two letters in Petrarch's Rerum familiarum libri which were probably composed in or around 1351, arguably but not demonstrably on the basis of previous versions, and addressed to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, who had passed away during the plague of 1348. Petrarch's letters enable us to perceive how he shaped his early experiences in the mold of his later misfortunes. Imperialism, cultural and political, provided Petrarch in 1351 with rhetorical materials to refashion setbacks endured during the previous decade, which had turned his attention back to Germany and a Roman empire that no longer existed. That is why Familiares 1.4 and 1.5 single out, among several other places in Northern Europe which he reports having visited, two German towns, Aachen and Cologne. The letters offer testimony of Petrarch's attitude toward “barbarians,” seen in the light of his cultural politics.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8929045
A. Kelner
Julian of Norwich intervened in the clerical discourses surrounding the discernment of spirits (Latin discretio spirituum), a method for observing differences between divine and diabolical causes of visionary experience. During the late Middle Ages in Europe, churchmen used methods of discernment in some prominent trials to examine female visionaries for sanctity or heresy. In these instances, discernment offers a medieval analogue to what critics such as Rita Felski, following Paul Ricoeur, have termed paranoid reading practices or the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” premised on demystifying the illusory nature of signs, as opposed to reparative reading practices or the “hermeneutics of trust,” which calls for restoring their meaning. In a climate when discretio spirituum came to prominence, Julian responded to the suspicious techniques developed to interpret women's visions and bodies by incorporating an innovative guide for discernment in A Revelation of Love that prioritizes trust over suspicion. Julian's trusting form of discernment offers a way to recuperate one of the most stigmatized aspects of femininity: woman's perceived susceptibility to diabolical influence. A Revelation of Love shows how apparently diabolical signs can indicate God's divine presence.
诺里奇的朱利安(Julian of Norwich)介入了神职人员关于精神辨别(拉丁语discretio spirituum)的论述，这是一种观察神性和恶魔性原因之间的差异的方法。在中世纪晚期的欧洲，神职人员在一些著名的审判中使用辨别的方法来检查女性幻想者是否神圣或异端。在这些例子中，辨析提供了一种中世纪的类比，就像丽塔·费尔斯基(Rita Felski)等批评家追随保罗·里科尔(Paul Ricoeur)所说的偏执阅读实践或“怀疑的解释学”，其前提是消除符号的虚幻本质，而不是修复性阅读实践或“信任的解释学”，后者要求恢复其意义。在谨慎精神变得突出的气候下，朱利安回应了可疑的技术，通过在《爱的启示》中结合创新的辨别指南来解释女性的视觉和身体，优先考虑信任而不是怀疑。朱利安的信任形式的洞察力提供了一种方式来恢复女性气质最耻辱的方面之一:女性对恶魔影响的感知敏感性。《爱的启示》展示了恶魔般的迹象如何表明上帝的神圣存在。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8929052
Felisa Baynes-Ross
Among vernacular religious manuals composed for women in the fourteenth century, Book to a Mother takes the unusual position of rejecting cloistered life for a widow's emulation and presents an alternative program of reading based on love and imitatio Christi. This essay reexamines Book to a Mother's adaptation of allegories of the cloister and its transformation of clerical practices of reading alongside lollard polemical writings that also sidestep priestly authority and institutional religion in Christian life. Although Book's use of polemical discourse has been downplayed or treated as separate from its devotional aims, this essay argues that Book combines devotion and dissent to empower the mother's reading, preaching, and living, and that such a dialogue is characteristic of lollard forms of living. In its attention to polemic, this analysis is significant for understanding the history of vernacular theologies and their experimentation with different rhetorical modes for reshaping belief and practice.
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