Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Author: Mark Cruse
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503579870
Category : Performance
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume is a contribution to the cross-cultural study of theater and performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The studies gathered here examine material from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Spain from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Underlying all of these essays is the understanding that performance shapes reality--that in all of the cultural contexts included here, performance opened a space in which patrons, rulers, writers, painters, spectators, and readers could see themselves or their societies differently, and thereby could assume different identities or construct alternative communities. Addressing confession and private devotion, urban theater and pageantry, royal legitimacy and religious debate, and a wide range of genres and media, this volume offers a panoramic mosaic of the world-making role of theater and performance in medieval and early modern European societies.

Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Author: Mark Cruse
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503579870
Category : Performance
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume is a contribution to the cross-cultural study of theater and performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The studies gathered here examine material from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Spain from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Underlying all of these essays is the understanding that performance shapes reality--that in all of the cultural contexts included here, performance opened a space in which patrons, rulers, writers, painters, spectators, and readers could see themselves or their societies differently, and thereby could assume different identities or construct alternative communities. Addressing confession and private devotion, urban theater and pageantry, royal legitimacy and religious debate, and a wide range of genres and media, this volume offers a panoramic mosaic of the world-making role of theater and performance in medieval and early modern European societies.

Medieval Fantasy as Performance

Medieval Fantasy as Performance PDF Author: Michael A. Cramer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810869950
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In this book, Michael Cramer views the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), an organization that studies and recreates the middle ages, as a case study for a growing fascination with medieval fantasy in popular culture. He explores the act of medieval re-creation as performance by focusing on the SCA, describing the group's activities, investigating its place in popular culture, and looking at the SCA not so much as a historical society but as an on-going work of performance art; a postmodern counter-culture riff on what it means to be "medieval." Cramer examines the group's activities, from persona and character development to theatrical performance and personal interaction; from the complex official ceremonies to full contact armored combat with mock broadswords. He explores the SCA in detail to discover how its members adapt and employ ideas about the Middle Ages in performance, ritual reenactment, living history, and re-creation, analyzing the performance of identity through ritual, sport, drama, and personal interaction, and he focuses on the reconstruction of the medieval "king game," a game in which a mock king is chosen to reign over a mock court. The book also studies various ideas about medievalism, including the contrast between reenactment and re-creation, and places these activities in the context of contemporary American society. With three appendixes, a bibliography, and a selection of photos, Cramer demonstrates how and why medieval fantasy is increasingly used in popular culture and analyzes the dissatisfaction with contemporary culture that leads people into these realms of fantasy.

Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110623072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

Catastrophes and the Apocalyptic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Catastrophes and the Apocalyptic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Author: Robert Bjork
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503582979
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
In the twenty-first century, insurance companies still refer to 'acts of God' for any accident or event not influenced by human beings: hurricanes, floods, hail, tsunamis, wildfires, earthquakes, tornados, lightning strikes, even falling trees. The remote origin of this concept can be traced to the Hebrew Bible. During the Second Temple period of Judaism a new literary form developed called 'apocalyptic' as a mediated revelation of heavenly secrets to a human sage concerning messages that could be cosmological, speculative, historical, teleological, or moral. The best-known development of this type of literature, however, came to fruition in the New Testament and is, of course, the Book of Revelation, attributed to the apostle John, and which figures prominently in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This collection of essays, the result of the 2014 ACMRS Conference, treats the topic of catastrophes and their connection to apocalyptic mentalities and rhetoric in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (with particular reference to reception of the Book of Revelation), both in Europe and in the Muslim world. The twelve authors contributing to this volume use terms that are simultaneously helpful and ambiguous for a whole range of phenomena and appraisal.

Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047408802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
No volume about the spectacles and public performances of early modern England could pretend to treat comprehensively a body of materials so conspicuously vast. Rather than efforts to survey the territory, these essays are best understood in the original sense of the term as “essays”—as trials, attempts, experiments to open alternative ways of understanding that vast corpus of mystery plays, civic pageants, court masques and professional dramas that constitute its subject. The book crosses traditional period lines, including studies of Medieval as well as Renaissance entertainments. Once more, the essays are not organized according to a single critical or historical methodology. They employ an eclectic range of interpretive practices, reflecting the variety of interpretive approaches now current in the field. Contributors include: Tiffany J. Alkan, Robert W. Barrett, Jr., Sarah Beckwith, Tom Bishop, Peter Cockett, Richard K. Emmerson, Peter Holland, Nora Johnson, Richard C. McCoy, Lauren Shohet, and Robert E. Stillman.

French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater

French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater PDF Author: Laura Weigert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316412121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This book revives what was unique, strange and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in 'theaters' but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a playgoing experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.

The Great Western Schism, 1378–1417

The Great Western Schism, 1378–1417 PDF Author: Joëlle Rollo-Koster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316733831
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
The Great Schism divided Western Christianity between 1378 and 1417. Two popes and their courts occupied the see of St. Peter, one in Rome, and one in Avignon. Traditionally, this event has received attention from scholars of institutional history. In this book, by contrast, Joëlle Rollo-Koster investigates the event through the prism of social drama. Marshalling liturgical, cultural, artistic, literary and archival evidence, she explores the four phases of the Schism: the breach after the 1378 election, the subsequent division of the Church, redressive actions, and reintegration of the papacy in a single pope. Investigating how popes legitimized their respective positions and the reception of these efforts, Rollo-Koster shows how the Schism influenced political thought, how unity was achieved, and how the two capitals, Rome and Avignon, responded to events. Rollo-Koster's approach humanizes the Schism, enabling us to understand the event as it was experienced by contemporaries.

The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature

The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Raluca Radulescu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429588984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern interpretations such as race, gender studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism. Draws on the combined extensive experience of teaching and research in medieval English and comparative literature within and outside of anglophone higher education and looks to the future of this fast-paced area of literary culture. Contains an indispensable section on theoretical approaches to the study of literary texts. This Companion provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to medieval literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on English literature.

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jody Enders
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350135313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Historically and broadly defined as the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages encompass a millennium of cultural conflicts and developments. A large body of mystery, passion, miracle and morality plays cohabited with song, dance, farces and other public spectacles, frequently sharing ecclesiastical and secular inspiration. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of theatre between 500 and 1500, and imaginatively pieces together the puzzle of medieval theatre by foregrounding the study of performance. Each of the ten chapters of this richly illustrated volume takes a different theme as its focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

Reading in the Wilderness

Reading in the Wilderness PDF Author: Jessica Brantley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226071340
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.