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  3. Early Social Performance

This series publishes monographs, themed collections of essays, and editions relating to performance in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period that includes, but is not confined to, drama, visual art, music, and dance. It addresses those areas of social performance which slip down the conventional disciplinary cracks, such as processions, tournaments, proclamations, and other courtly, civic, and rural ritual practices. It also considers treatments of, for instance, clothing, poetry, architecture, sport, story-telling, and any other human social activity which can be construed as performative.

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4 results in Early Social Performance

Performing Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Britain
  • Mark C. Chambers
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 April 2024
  • Performing Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Britain is a landmark examination of performance history in the medieval and early modern era. Seeking to provide a fact-based assessment of disabled performance, this survey examines the nature and socialization of disabled performers in the medieval and early Tudor periods. Using Records of Early English Drama, literary representations, and targeted histories of disability in the medieval period, this study takes a new and welcome look at the evidence for, and the conceptualization of, 'impairment' as a performative act in the premodern era.

    It features discussions on the different societal constructions pertaining to 'disability' (mental incapacity, blindness and deafness, dwarfism, gigantism, etc.), and how the evidence for such conditions was socialized through performance.

    Taking an evidence-based and multidisciplinary approach to perceptions of identity and 'othering' in premodern society, this study is certain to appeal to a wide audience, including historians of theatre and performance, disability advocates and theorists, and social historians.

Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville
  • Performing Empire
  • Christopher Swift
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    22 February 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2023
  • From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity.

    Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.

Medieval Laments of the Virgin Mary
  • Text, Music, Performance, and Genre Liminality
  • Eliška Kubartová Poláčková
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    28 December 2023
    Print publication:
    30 April 2023
  • Laments of the Virgin Mary represent a devotional genre that offered its clerical and lay audiences of the High and Late Middle Ages a deeply inspiring, yet at the same time ambiguous, religious experience. Through the deeply emotional and markedly animated representation of the Passion, seen as if through the eyes of the mother of God, audiences and performers were not only reminded of the redemptive power of the Cross, but encouraged to experience Christ's sacrifice in a more personal and intimate manner. In the pious practice of imitatio Mariae, believers mirrored the sorrow of the mother through their own bodies in order to develop a kind of visceral empathy towards, and hence a deeper understanding of, the divine.

Secular Carolling in Late Medieval England
  • Edited by Frances Eustace
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 October 2022
  • This study shows the importance of carolling in the celebrations and festivities of medieval Britain and demonstrates its longevity from the eleventh-century to the sixteenth. It illustrates the flexibility of the English carole form for adaptation to include content in high and low registers and its suitability for use on all occasions and by different communal peer groups. Although the vast majority of extant texts in carol form from the late medieval period are religious in subject content, secular carolling was far more prevalent than the textual record implies. The dance-song elements of the medieval carole were so strongly woven into the vernacular cultural fabric of the British Isles that their threads can be traced through the folk songs and dances of subsequent centuries. This study contextualizes the written evidence and re-integrates the various components of the activity in order to illuminate our understanding of the universally popular medieval, participatory, pastime of carolling.