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This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages. By Michal Kobialka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999; pp. 328. $49.50 cloth.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 September 2002
Extract
Like other postmodern historians in the line of Foucault and de Certeau, Michal Kobialka treats surviving documents not as markers of historical facts but as traces of discursive fields. This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages takes four “epistemological fragments” of the period, some of which have been read by theatre historians as evidence of the origins of medieval drama and theatre, and analyzes the heterogeneous “representational practices” they embody. According to Kobialka, a representational practice determines “what is possible to be thinkable and expressed” within a given discursive field (282). As an antidote to the homogeneous notion of representation in the Middle Ages frequently construed by traditional theatre historiography, Kobialka lays bare the power relations and discursive instabilities that underlie a network of such practices in the early Middle Ages (970–1215).
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- © 2002 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.