Author: Ardis Butterfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781910887134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Insight into the rich cultural canvas of the Middle Ages is granted by a host of texts: liturgical manuals; manuscripts of epic poetry, vernacular lyric, and music; paintings, and many more. Adopting a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-literary studies, liturgical studies, iconography, and musicology-this collection of essays reveals the two-fold performative nature of such texts: they document, mediate, or prefigure acts of performance, while at the same time taking on performative roles themselves by generating additional layers of meaning. Focussing on acts, authors, and receptive processes of performance, the authors demonstrate the significance of the performative to the culture of the High and Late Middle Ages (c.1000-1500), from chant to Chaucer, from Scandinavia to Imperial Augsburg.
Author: Evelyn Birge Vitz
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9781843840398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
This book provides the first comprehensive study of the performance of medieval narrative, using examples from England and the Continent and a variety of genres to examine the crucial question of whether - and how - medieval narratives were indeed intended for performance. Moving beyond the familiar dichotomy between oral and written literature, the various contributions emphasize the range and power of medieval performance traditions, and demonstrate that knowledge of the modes and means of performance is crucial for appreciating medieval narratives. The book is divided into four main parts, with each essay engaging with a specific issue or work, relating it to larger questions about performance. It first focuses on representations of the art of medieval performers of narrative. It then examines relationships between narrative performances and the material books that inspired, recorded, or represented them. The next section studies performance features inscribed in texts and the significance of considering performability. The volume concludes with contributions by present-day professional performers who bring medieval narratives to life for contemporary audiences. Topics covered include orality, performance, storytelling, music, drama, the material book, public reading, and court life.
Author: Marla Carlson
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.
Author: Michael Issacharoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512802875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
Author: Elisabeth Kempf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110522586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This study conceives of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (1410-1413) as an essentially performative text, one that expresses its awareness of the manuscript culture in which it is so firmly rooted. The openness of manuscripts is a recurring subject in the Regement and is not only expressed through mere descriptions of, but through complex references to this manuscript context. Performances of manuscript culture manifest themselves in several aspects of the text. The first is the narrator persona, and especially the question of how persona and text are intertwined. The second is the constantly recurring interpretation of quotes from authoritative sources that pervades the Regement. This urge to interpret is expressed both in the tradition of adding marginal glosses and in the process of subjecting the text to an exegetical reading. The third aspect is the relation between text and images in the Regement’s manuscripts, which shows how mediality is performed and how the manuscript context is made the focus of this performance. In this monograph, all of these aspects are studied in a mindset that combines the concept of performativity with the postulations of Material Philology.
Author: Sarah Kay
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150176389X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouvères from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera contends that song is not best analyzed as "words plus music" but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather than situating them in their immediate period, Sarah Kay fruitfully listens for and traces crosscurrents between medieval French and Occitan songs and both earlier poetry and much later opera. Reflecting on a song's songlike quality—as, for example, the sound of light in the dawn sky, as breathed by beasts, as sirenlike in its perils—Kay reimagines the diversity of songs from this period, which include inset lyrics in medieval French narratives and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are actually sung and heard. Kay understands song in terms of breath, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. Her method also draws inspiration from opera, especially those that inventively recreate medieval song, arguing for a perspective on the manuscripts that transmit medieval song as instances of multimedia, quasi-operatic performances. Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera features a companion website (cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song) hosting twenty-four audio or video recordings, realized by professional musicians specializing in early music, of pieces discussed in the book, together with performance scores, performance reflections, and translations of all recorded texts. These audiovisual materials represent an extension in practice of the research aims of the book—to better understand the sung dimension of medieval song.
Author: Claire Sponsler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Throughout the Americas, performances deriving from medieval European rituals, ceremonies, and festivities made up a crucial part of the cultural cargo shipped from Europe to the overseas settlements. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from Plymouth, England, to Newfoundland, bringing with him "morris dancers, hobby horses, and Maylike Conceits" for the "allurement of the savages" and the "solace of our people." His voyage closely resembled that of twelve Franciscan friars who in 1524 had arrived in what is now Mexico armed with a repertoire of miracle plays, religious processions, and other performances. These two events, although far from unique, helped shape initial encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples; they also marked the first stages of the process that would lead—by no means smoothly—to a distinctively American culture. Ritual Imports is a groundbreaking cultural history of European performance traditions in the New World, from the sixteenth century to the present. Claire Sponsler examines the role of survivals and adaptations of medieval drama in shaping American culture from colonization through nation building and on to today's multicultural society. The book's subjects include New Mexican matachines dances and Spanish conquest drama, Albany's Pinkster festival and Afro-Dutch religious celebrations, Philadelphia's mummers and the Anglo-Saxon revival, a Brooklyn Italian American saint's play, American and German passion plays, and academic reconstructions of medieval drama. Drawing on theories of cultural appropriation, Ritual Imports makes an important contribution to medieval and American studies as well as to cultural studies and the history of theater.
Author: Elizabeth V. Phillips
Publisher: New York : Schirmer Books
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
This is a practical and systematic introduction to all major categories of the ensemble repertory from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The book stresses basic principles of performance that are both historically sound and viable for today's musicians. Includes performance guides for specific works of this period, with some biographical and historical background of the works and their style.
Author: Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134737556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
This book challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified. Kelly analyses a variety of medieval Western European texts - including medical treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historical and legal documents. The main focus is the representation of both male and female virgins in saints' legends and romances. The author also makes a comparative study of examples from contemporary fiction, television and film in which testing virginity is a theme. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages presents a compelling and provocative study of the parodox of bodily and spiritual integrity as both presence and absence.
Author: Jonathan Holt Shannon
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253017742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Performing al-Andalus explores three musical cultures that claim a connection to the music of medieval Iberia, the Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus, known for its complex mix of Arab, North African, Christian, and Jewish influences. Jonathan Holt Shannon shows that the idea of a shared Andalusian heritage animates performers and aficionados in modern-day Syria, Morocco, and Spain, but with varying and sometimes contradictory meanings in different social and political contexts. As he traces the movements of musicians, songs, histories, and memories circulating around the Mediterranean, he argues that attention to such flows offers new insights into the complexities of culture and the nuances of selfhood.
