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Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama
8
Edited by
Wim Hüsken
Volume 1: English Parish Drama
Volume 2: Civic Ritual and Drama
Volume 3: Between Folk and Liturgy
Volume 4: Carnival and the Carnivalesque
Volume 5: Moving Subjects
Volume 6: Farce and Farcical Elements
Volume 7: Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays
Volume 8: Acts and Texts
Acts and Texts
Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance
Edited by
Laurie Postlewate
and
Wim Hüsken
Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007
Cover design: Studio Pollmann
All titles in the Ludus - Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama
series (from 2002 onwards) are available to download from the Ingenta web-
site http://www.ingenta.com
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents
- Prescriptions pour la permanence".
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2191-4
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Laurie Postlewate
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Power of Performance
Dallas G. Denery II
The Preacher and His Audience: Dominican Conceptions
of the Self in the Thirteenth Century . . . . . . . . . 17
Joyce Coleman
Public-Access Patronage: Book-Presentation
from the Crowd at a Royal Procession . . . . . . . . 35
Amy Schwarz
Eternal Rome and Cola di Rienzo’s Show of Power . . 63
L. Caitlin Jorgensen
Diversity in Unity: Elizabeth’s Coronation Procession . . 77
Alejandro Cañeque
On Cushions and Chairs: The Ritual Contruction
of Authority in New Spain . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Performance and the Page
Adrian P. Tudor
Talking Pictures: Performance on the Page . . . . . 151
Kathryn A. Duys
Medieval Literary Performance: Gautier de Coinci’s
Guide for the Perplexed . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Paul Creamer
Privatizing the Conte du Graal: How Renaissance
Printers Reformatted Chrétien’s Public Text for
Private Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Contents
Nancy Freeman Regalado
A Contract for an Early Festival Book: Sarrasin’s
Le Roman du Hem (1278) . . . . . . . . . . . 249
William E. Engel
Death Slips Onto the Renaissance Stage:
Morris Dancing, Mimed Moors, and Nascent Rituals
in Fletcher and Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . 269
Evelyn Birge Vitz & Linda Marie Zaerr
Experimenting with the Performance of
Medieval Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
The Performance of Gender
Marilyn Lawrence
Yseut’s Legacy: Women Writers and Performers
in the Medieval French Romance Ysaÿe le Triste . . . 319
Felicity Henderson
‘A Bawdy Lecture unto Ladies’: Music Speeches
at Early-Modern Oxford . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
6
Introduction
Laurie Postlewate
In the pre-modern era, communication was almost strictly viva
voce and through the physical presence of its agents. For the
Middle Ages and Renaissance—before the dissemination of the
printed (much less the broadcast) word—meaning and power
were created and propagated through public performance. By per-
formance we mean here the actual, physical, visual, and audible
manifestations of bodies and voices which communicated to their
publics through symbolic systems and codes. Scholars today are
increasingly aware of the importance of these instances of display
and performance which reveal so much to us about the mentalités
of their actors and audiences. Processions, coronations, speech-
es, trials, and executions are all types of public performance that
were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave
them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a
trace of their actual performance. Literature, as well, was for the
pre-modern public a type of performance: throughout the medie-
val and early modern periods we see a constant tension and nego-
tiation between the oral/aural delivery of the literary work and the
eventual silent/read reception of its written text.
The current volume of essays examines the plurality of forms
and meanings given to performance in the Middle Ages and Re-
naissance through discussion of the essential performance/text re-
lationship. The authors of the essays represent a variety of scho-
larly disciplines and subject matter: from the “performed” life of
the Dominican preacher, to coronation processions, to book pre-
sentations; from satirical music speeches, to the rendering of
widow portraits, to the performance of romance and pious narra-
tive. Yet in spite of the diversity of their objects of study, all of
Introduction
the essays in the volume examine the links between the actual
events of public performance and the textual origins and subse-
quent representation of those performances.
Part One of the volume, “The Power of Performance,” in-
cludes chapters on how social structure and political power were
constructed, destroyed, and recorded through public rituals such
as coronations, processions, tournaments, and court entertain-
ments. Special attention is given in these chapters not only to the
actual events of performance, but also to the representation of
those events in the texts that record and comment on them. In the
first essay, ‘The Preacher and His Audience: Dominican Concep-
tions of the Self in the Thirteenth Century’, we see how within
the Dominican order, the dynamic between performer and au-
dience was extended to influence the notion of the self. Dallas G.
Denery, drawing on a variety of texts including preaching aids
and novice manuals, discusses how the Dominican imperative to
adapt one’s preaching style to various audiences also shaped the
brothers’ behaviour generally; this included not only their conduct
before the laity to whom they might preach, but also before their
fellow brothers in the priory, and indeed before themselves and
God. The notion of constant self-presentation before the gaze of
God and other people, implied also constant self-adjustment—
“the heuristics of adaptation”—which required study and a new
kind of speculatio focusing less on inward contemplation and
more on informed calculation of outward behaviour.
Public rituals, normally highly regulated and orchestrated
events, were also by their very public-ness open to the possibility
of the un-programmed and unexpected. Joyce Coleman, in her
essay ‘Public-Access Patronage: Book-Presentation from the
Crowd at a Royal Procession’, discusses a curious episode in
which the normally elegant and noble ceremony of the book-
presentation was imitated by a lowly and unknown author in his
attempts to procure patronage for his work. The event is recorded
in the proem to the work being presented, Knyghthode and Ba-
taile, and reportedly took place in the procession of Henry VI
8
Laurie Postlewate
and Margaret of Anjou on the famous Love-Day, a celebration by
the Lancastrian Henry of the peace he had negotiated with the
Yorkist lords. Coleman examines how the etiquette of the courtly
book presentation was exploited here by a member of the general
public, offering insight into contemporary ideas about the role of
ritual in bringing majesty—and power—closer to the aspiring ob-
scure. Coleman furthermore considers the possibility that the ac-
tual presentation recounted never happened but was a fantasized
“textual performance” that, nevertheless, reveals much about me-
dieval views of patronage.
The power of public performance is again evidenced by the
political feats of Cola di Rienzo in fourteenth-century Rome. In
her essay ‘Eternal Rome and Cola di Rienzo’s Show of Power’,
Amy Schwarz documents the series of public processions and
ceremonies orchestrated by the ambitious notary Rienzo in 1347.
Exploiting the established practice of manipulating and combining
the traditions of the Roman triumph with those of Christian litur-
gy, Rienzo achieved his own “coronation” as Tribune of Rome;
one step in his objective to establish his own authority as the head
of government and embark on a campaign of reform in a Rome
ravaged by plague, famine and civil strife. Schwarz analyses the
political context of Rienzo’s use of public performance and estab-
lishes links with contemporary pictorial representation of his civic
processions.
L. Caitlin Jorgensen’s essay, ‘Diversity in Unity: Elizabeth’s
Coronation Procession’, examines how the civic pageants that
were an essential part of the 1559 coronation processions of Eli-
zabeth I, emphasized the idea of mutuality between the monarch
and her subjects as a means of promoting the theme of national
unity. Jorgensen bases her argument on one important narrative
account of the procession, Richard Mulcaster’s The Quenes
Maiesties Passage, which reveals how Elizabeth’s self-presen-
tation as both actor in and spectator of the pageants was calcu-
lated to emphasize mutuality—and not hierarchy—in the relation-
ship between the queen and her people. Jorgensen then discusses
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