Performance, which can be generically described as the enactment of a ceremony, ritual, play, or work of music, dance, or visual art, has only recently been explored as an interpretive framework in medieval studies. Tracing its origins to research undertaken in the 1940s and 1950s, performance theory crystallized as a distinctive interdisciplinary field in the 1980s and 1990s, encompassing anthropology, art history, communication arts, critical gender studies, ethnic studies, film studies, linguistics, literature, and theater studies. Although performance can be construed as adhering to an orderly structure, recent scholarship has emphasized its liminality, its capacity to cross boundaries and resist authority, as well as its potential to define and transform individual and collective identity. Conventional distinctions between performer and audience have also been called into question. Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, a collection of essays in four parts, is commendable for its range of subjects and approaches, and for its engagement of both the theories and practices of performance, rooted in concrete, historical case studies.

Editor Elina Gertsman introduces the collection by surveying different approaches to performance theory and suggesting the range of medieval contexts to which it might be applied: mystery and morality plays, feast day processions, liturgical rituals, musical performances, and dance. Taking into account this inherent complexity, Gertsman wisely refrains from establishing a single definition of medieval performance, preferring to “reconsider the interconnections between medieval theater, images, texts, and practices of viewing, reading, listening and enacting” (2).

Part 1, “Visual Performance: Word, Image, Body,” focuses on how individual works of art and architecture both facilitate and reflect performance practices. Christina Maranci shows how relief sculptures and dedicatory inscriptions on the exterior of seventh-century Armenian churches functioned as cues for rites of consecration and commemoration, stimulating oral performance of texts and serving as a model for the circumambulation of the church during these rites. Concentrating on the fourteenth-century English illuminations of the Trinity Apocalypse, Richard K. Emmerson insists that the pictorial narratives of John’s life that preface the Apocalypse stage “a detailed and emphatic performance for the manuscript’s viewer/reader” (34). He argues that the pictorial images and their accompanying texts foster interaction with the viewer/reader of the manuscript by using framing devices, manipulating performative signs (including gestures, poses, facial expressions, costumes and stage props, captions and texts on scrolls), deploying “twice-performed behaviors,” and representing John as a “liminal figure” who mediates between heaven and earth. Emmerson borrows the concept of “twice-performed behaviors” from theater historian Richard Schechner, who argues that all forms of performance do not so much record actual behavior as represent a symbolic, multi-vocal “restored behavior.”

Pamela Sheingorn considers a late fourteenth-century French manuscript of Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Drawing both on performance theory (Judith Butler’s concept of identity formation) and phenomenology, Sheingorn argues that the miniatures illustrating the manuscript as well as the captions and rubrics enhance the affective devotions that Guillaume’s writing aims to inspire. These additions to the text activate the viewers’/readers’ senses of sight and hearing, inviting them to participate fully in the dialogue, liturgical prayers, and hymns of the poem, and ultimately to identify both mentally and bodily with the chief witness of the poem, Guillaume, and with Christ himself.

Gertsman’s essay turns to a late medieval type of interactive sculpture, known as the Vierge ouvrante, in which the body of the Madonna and Child opens to reveal the Trinity (Gnadenstuhl) in sculptural form and painted scenes of the life and Passion of Christ on the wings. Gertsman argues that these objects were designed to “stage the simultaneous performance of Christ’s birth and death” on the major feast days during which the priest unfastened the womb to reveal the figure of Christ on the cross within. She further argues that the incarnation and Passion were performed once again in the memories and bodies of the viewers, who regard, and thus participate in, the “drama” of Christ’s life as represented within the womb of the Virgin Mary.

The essays in part 2, “Devotional Performance: Preaching, Prayer, Vision,” examine female visionaries and the transformative powers of their religious performances. Beverly Kinzle reconstructs Hildegarde of Bingen’s performance of her own sermons on the Gospels through close textual analysis and early narratives of Hildegarde’s life. Citing J. L. Austin’s linguistic theory, Kinzle emphasizes that Hildegarde’s performance was affected by its framing; introduced by prayer and liturgical readings, her preaching constituted a “liturgical act.” Furthermore, Hildegarde’s interpolation of dramatic passages into the biblical narratives, as well as her modulation of voice quality, intonation, and gesture, gave her the capacity to move and transform her audience.

Carolyn Muessig explores the intense re-enactments of the Passion by three late medieval female mystics and one male preacher: Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Margarita of Cortona, Gertrude van der Oosten, and the Franciscan preacher, Ladislaus of Gielniow. Stimulated by beholding a crucifix, each of the three women performed the Crucifixion, both by acting it out before the community and by displaying the stigmata on their own bodies as a result of this intense identification with Christ. The Franciscan preacher, by contrast, brought the Passion alive to a large crowd by using a series of stage props, special lighting and sound effects, and pulleys and ropes to help him re-enact Christ’s bodily ascent. All of these figures raised awareness of the Passion by appealing to the senses and emotions of their audiences.

Mary Suydam focuses on female visionaries in the Low Countries who belonged to the Beguines. Her main point is that Beguine women experienced their visions in public, often within the context of the liturgy, but because they were not priests, they had to create a temporary sacred space adjacent to but outside the official sanctuaries.

Mary Frohlich draws on Michel de Certeau’s theories of space to argue that Saint Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle uses words to create imaginative spaces by evoking concrete itineraries or stories drawing on the material of Christ’s life and earlier meditational guides such as the Meditationes Vitae Christae. By moving through these concrete spaces in which she encounters the fleshly Christ, she is ultimately imprinted or engraved in her soul with the image of Christ.

Part 3, “Social Performance: Identity, Language, Authority,” considers rituals that constitute communal identities, often highlighting tensions between the public and private persona. Jonathan Decter explores the ceremony that officially vested leadership of the Jewish community in Abbasid Cairo in the Exilarch. Decter argues that the investiture ceremony is a “performance” that represented core values of medieval Jewish culture through symbolic actions that projected the idealized Jewish social order within the Islamic world. Drawing on Jewish traditions and Abbasid court rituals, costumes, stage props, and acts of obeisance, enthronement, veiling, and revealing, the ceremony reinforced the Exilarch’s social position within Jewish society as well as his role as mediator at the Abbasid court.

Daisy Delogu uses a mid-fifteenth-century, French pseudo-romance entitled the Jehan de Saintré by Antoine de la Sale to consider how power relationships and distinctions between private and public selves were performed at the French court. An aristocratic woman, Madame des Belles Cousines, controls the young page, Jehan de Saintré, grooming him for knighthood and her own personal love interest, by dictating everything from his choice of wardrobe to the real-life actions he performs before distinctive audiences ranging from the broader public to the most intimate settings. Jehan learns the lessons of performing identity so well that he is eventually able to escape Belles Cousine’s control and unmask her true motives at court. This text challenges modern notions that public performance reflects private identity, highlighting the crucial roles of deception and dissimulation in the performance of medieval identity.

Helen Swift’s chapter on Jean Bouchet’s Jugement poetique de l’honneur feminin (1538) deals with a very different text—a series of epitaphs of famous women, ranging from the biblical character of Eve to Louise of Savoy, mother of Francois I, in whose honor the poem was composed. Offering a detailed linguistic analysis, harking back to Austin’s foundational text on performative utterances, Swift argues that the each of these first-person epitaphs performs the woman’s identity by contrasting her supposed private self, as represented at the moment of speaking the first-person “je,” with multiple layers of reputation set by others. Although the epitaphs are composed by a male author, they deliberately offset a more positive view of these women against their misogynist detractors, thus playing memory against counter-memory.

Rebecca Zorach returns to the theme of communal ceremony, focusing on the triumphal entry of Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici into Rouen in 1550. Although such royal entries routinely enact royal ideology, with the entire community forcibly paying homage to the institution of the monarchy, Zorach highlights a series of varied responses to the triumph in texts and images that demonstrate ambivalence to royal power. Zorach concludes that the historian’s role is to highlight such tensions lest “we simply replicate an age-old view of powerful people and institutions.”

Part 4 is entitled “Lived Performance: Theatre, Dance, Music.” Erika Fischer-Lichte challenges a traditional distinction made between theater and ritual, according to which the former entails a separation between actors or performers and spectators, while the latter involves the active participation of the “audience.” Echoing theories of Schechner and Victor Turner, she argues that all theater actually involves some form of dialogue between actors and audience, that ritual and theater involve transformative experiences for actors and spectators, and that both affirm community, using symbols to convey a meaning beyond the individual performance in question. Medieval religious theatre in particular cannot be strictly separated from ritual in that it often parallels or complements major religious feasts and incorporates liturgical elements, including prayers and hymns, and was considered to function much like a sacrament. Furthermore, attendance at or participation in religious plays was officially sanctioned by the granting of indulgences.

Glenn Ehrstine’s chapter likewise emphasizes the transformative power of experiencing late medieval religious theater. Focusing on the Donaueschingen Passion Play of 1480, he discusses how late medieval Passion plays were staged in physical space, presenting “figures” or tableaux of biblical narratives to stimulate meditation during the performance and cultivate locational memory as the basis for future meditation.

Yossi Maurey turns to the problem of reconstructing “authentic” performances of medieval music. Although medieval musical notation serves primarily as an aide-mémoire rather than a guide to performance, Maurey argues that one can glean much about performance traditions within a particular locale by considering a wide range of evidence drawn from detailed service books such as ordinals, customaries, processionals, and even records of payment to musicians. Focusing on the office of Saint Martin in a twelfth-century notated breviary from the collegiate church of Saint-Martin at Tours, Maury confirms that alternate sections of prosas were sung by distinct groups of singers, and that on special feast days certain chants were sung in polyphony for three voices.

The final paper in the volume, by Jennifer Nevile, highlights the late medieval ambivalence toward dance: on one hand, it was considered a positive expression of knightly virtue and was used routinely to celebrate lay authority and military triumph; on the other hand, ecclesiastical authorities frequently condemned dance as a pagan activity that encouraged illicit sexualized behavior. Even within Christian writings about dance, however, Nevile demonstrates that under certain conditions dance could be understood in more positive terms.

There is always a certain risk in applying contemporary critical theory and its terminology to the pre-modern period, but as the current volume clearly illustrates, it also opens up new, very productive interpretive possibilities. These essays prompt scholars to think more deeply about the transformative nature of medieval performances, the role of physical or imagined objects and places as stimuli to performance and memory, the dynamic dialogue between performer and audience, and the often unacknowledged tensions within performance between different social groups or between private and public identities.

While no single collection can claim to be comprehensive, the selected essays have certain limitations within the vast territorial and chronological frame of “medieval.” All but two of the essays focus on medieval Western Europe from the thirteenth-century onward (Maranci, chap. 1; Decter, chap. 9). Although Byzantium and medieval Islam are excluded, the inclusion of essays on early medieval Armenian liturgy and Jewish ceremonial in Abbasid Cairo should have prompted a consideration of how performance theory might be modified to reflect these distinctive religious and geographical spheres. As many of the individual essays in this volume indicate, performance is very much about engaging the body and the senses (esp., Sheingorn, chap. 3; Ehrstine, chap. 14). Thus, it would be interesting, for example, to assess the ways in which an increased interest in optical science and the valorization of sensory experience in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries affected Western European performances of religious dramas, or devotional exercises that were encouraged to foster internal mental images.

Since the volume’s title explicitly privileges “visualizing performance,” one might also question the inclusion of at least three essays that say nothing about visualizing, even in a figurative way (Swift, chap. 11; Fischer-Lichte, chap. 13; and Maurey, chap. 15). Nevile’s essay (chap. 16) alludes at various points to visual representations, but does not take the time to examine any one image in detail for the kinds of dance iconographies that are represented and the extent to which they may draw on long-standing visual conventions as opposed to “recording” actual contemporary practices.

These questions hardly detract from the great value of the collection as an unparalleled introduction to the broad ranges of the theories, practices, and perceptions of medieval performances. Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts also marks a rare achievement in its thorough interrogation of the ways in which contemporary critical theory can be responsibly extended to the study of the Middle Ages.