... those acts, the Croxton play provides critical distance on the very performance it enacts. Ultimately, it replaces the Passion play with, and judges it inferior to, a more decorous and authoritative processional ritual. Moreover, in presenting a Christian merchant as the catalyst for the Jews' actions...

...James Paz Is it possible to reach a deeper understanding of early medieval science through poetry of the period? This article examines how Anglo-Saxon scientia was performed in a practical way, as a kind of craft, in the Old English metrical charms and poetic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. In the...

...Holly Dugan © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 a Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Late Medieval and Early Modern England...

...Catherine Sanok © by Duke University Press 2002 a Performing Feminine Sanctity in Late Medieval England: Parish Guilds, Saints’ Plays, and the Second...

... literary text, and language as a system and its relation to performative speech acts. Considering the prevalence of oaths in Shakespeare's texts, the first part argues that the perfomative requirements of this speech act demand a minimal conception of literary character as an entity that can perform a...

... Stanley, the Earl of Derby. This performance is reconstructed to show how, well after Reformed religion had become entrenched in England, Catholic expressive forms might function in novel ways within civic space, simultaneously supporting authoritative regimes, inspiring new collaborations, and...

...Claire Taylor Jones This essay explores how the performance of the liturgy was integrated into late medieval education of nuns, for whom liturgical text conveyed both linguistic and spiritual knowledge. In southern German Observant Dominican convents, Latin language was systematically taught to...

...Ashley Denham Busse This essay explores the early modern stage convention of the discovery space and use of other curtained and costumed spaces to argue that such conventions performed and materialized the experience of abjection, those terrifying reminders of man’s material origins and his destiny...

...Holly A. Crocker This article argues that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida continues an important late medieval poetic tradition that highlights the troubling consequences of virtue’s performativity for idealized women. If Chaucer is pessimistic about the potential for Criseyde’s ethical agency...

... also represent a genre of life narrative that profits from the insights of literary and feminist theory. This essay reads the rich harvest of fifteenth-century Burgundian pardon letters as collaboratively authored textual performances as it explores the relationship of these micronarratives to the...

..., and perform other civil actions? While the question of the “civil rights” of conjoined twins in the early modern period usually remained truly academic (as few such births survived), a whole series of other conditions–some unusual, some very common–raised similar medico-legal issues. Pregnancy, mental...

... built environment of the 1599 Globe Theater, we discover not one measure of space but ten: (1) geographical, (2) temporal, (3) fictional, (4) characterological, (5) social, (6) political, (7) interpersonal, (8) performative, (9) receptive, and (10) phenomenal. The confluence of the ten measures of space...

... that reimagines sacred space by developing mediatory interactions between what feminist geographer Gillian Rose terms fantasy, discourse, and the body in the performance of space. © 2013 by Duke University Press 2013 a “Here at the Fringe of...

... shoe found in the Museum of London’s archaeological excavation of the Rose theatre where Dekker’s play was first performed, the essay argues that far from putting us in touch with a bygone artisan’s utopia, Dekker’s play stages a native industry transformed by economic expansion, yet unhobbled by the...

... marketing scheme — pitched themselves first as how-to manuals and then as “why-to” guides that turned the enjoyment of hot beverages into a performance of sociability. Those published in France accomplished these tasks by inaugurating a new trend: they grouped coffee, chocolate, and tea together in a single...

...Mary Baine Campbell This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed...

... they do not render visible: the human figures who enacted each ritual performance. In the Processional’s paintings the beholder is instead offered a vision of liturgy as an assembly of vasa sacra and ornamenta , invested with considerable authority, even agency, by the artist’s brush. This essay...

... present to past. This essay focuses on the afterlife of the East Anglian N-Town plays, exploring the ways that the Cotton Vespasian D.8 manuscript continued to be “performed” (in an extended sense of that word) in ideologies of recusancy and antiquarian possession in the life of its little-known early...

... special issue do not revolt against the prospect of death, do not neglect what in the early modern period was called “the art of living and dying,” but perform their own version of the “dance of death” as they reconstruct in multifaceted layers the social and at times the political reality of dying...

...Sara Petrosillo This essay examines representations of the womb across late medieval and early modern performance. The N-Town Mary plays and the Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc are separated by less than a century but are rarely examined in light of one another. Using microhistorical methods and...