Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture

Description

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of ‛voice’ in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century. Almut Suerbaum, in collaboration with Manuele Gragnolati / Medieval Culture 'betwixt and between'. An introduction 1 I. 'Präsenzeffekte': Performative presence in ritual acts of remembrance Annie Sutherland / Performing the Penitential Psalms in the Middle Ages: Maidstone and Bampton 15 C. M. MacRobert / 'Remember me in your prayers': Reading the Church Slavonic Psalter as an act of commemoration 39 Benjamin Thompson / Performing Parliament in the 'Rotuli Parliamentorum' 61 II. Performing the self: Constructions of authorial identity Monika Otter / Scurrilitas: Sex, magic, rhetoric, and performance of fictionality in Anselm of Besate’s 'Rhetorimachia' 101 Manuele Gragnolati / Authorship and performance in Dante’s 'Vita nova' 125 Almut Suerbaum / Paradoxes of performance: Autobiography in the songs of Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von Wolkenstein 143 Francesca Southerden / Performative desires: Sereni’s restaging of Dante and Petrarch 165 III. Embodied voice: Reading and re-reading Owen Rees / Singing to the Virgin and joking with the singers: Josquin’s 'Inviolata' 199 Melanie Florence / Re-presenting set-piece description in the courtly romance: Hartmann’s adaptation of Chrétien’s 'Erec et Enide' 221 Alastair Matthews / 'Ich pin der haid Aristotiles. ein exempel nemend des': Performing Aristotle’s lessons 245 Fabian Lampart / Dante’s reception in German literature: a question of performance? 277 List of abbreviations 299 Selected bibliography 301 Index 315