ThePlateaPre- and Postmodern: A Landscape of Medieval Performance Studies

Abstract

In surveying the field of medieval performance studies, one risks foregrounding approaches that other medievalists will not see as central to the field and, simultaneously, omitting perspectives that still other medievalists might deem crucial. 1 The present essay's view is determined in part by my own biases, of course; however, the very nature of performance studies also renders inevitable these risks of failing to be comprehensive about the field's trends. Performance studies has deliberately indeterminate parameters. If, for instance, the point of terms like performance and performativity is that they exist in complicated, overlapping relation to one another, then it is easy to see how multifarious the definitions of performance might become. 2 What I offer here, then, is a particular take on the landscape of medieval performance studies, one that cannot, by virtue of the field's nature, be comprehensive. My strategy will involve reaching at various points into the realm of contemporary performance and performance theory, some examples of which align themselves more obviously with the Middle Ages than others. I would like, in other words, to experiment with a certain degree of ill fit between contemporary performance studies and medieval studies in order to investigate what their interaction might yield.To some extent, medieval performance studies has been shaped by a debate in performance studies as a whole concerning the relationship between the study of theater and the study of performance. 3 According to older models by which these fields were articulated, performance studies tended to be associated more explicitly with critical theory of various schools, while theater studies encompassed historical research. Such characterizations have always been oversimplifications, but, painted in the broadest strokes, the landscape traditionally appeared this way. More recently scholars have directly addressed a perceived conceptual gap between the two fields, identifying the theoretical stakes -whether implicit, explicit, or potential -in the practice of theater history. Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (2010) and Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (2010) continue a trend initiated by Interpreting the Theatrical Past (1989): all three volumes rethink the

Reflections on Editing Exemplaria, Part III

“…Almost a decade ago Sarah Kay asked, "Is Interdisciplinarity the New Theory?" (2013), and recent work on performance studies (Chaganti 2013), cognitive approaches (Lockett 2016;Neuss 2021), anthropology (McKendry 2020), and law (Lerner 2020), show that this question is still worth asking.…”