Subtheme:
Performing Celebration; Celebrating Performance

For the jubilee of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, I can think of no better way to honor our celebrations by considering the ways in which medieval performances approached celebrations---whether pageants, plays, dance, mummings, disguisings, etc. Indeed, such work celebrates the very multi-faceted nature of performance. This performance subtheme, then, doubly performs and doubly celebrates. As the kids used to say, “Go big or go home.”

 

Medieval drama studies have come a long way over the last fifty years. Our field continues its meticulous work with records (such as Records of Early English Drama) and manuscripts, but we have invested a great deal of attention and scholarship, too, into performance as research. To understand the extant dramatic texts we have, we first must remind ourselves that these texts are but resonances of more elaborate performances in most cases. (There are of course outliers. See The Towneley Play.) And even though medieval drama studies was perhaps a bit slower than other subfields of medieval studies to adopt innovative theoretical approaches, we are beginning to see the vibrant potential of speculation vis-à-vis gender, queer, trans, and critical race studies.

 

In more recent years, medieval drama studies has also begun some self-reflection when it comes to genre. What defines drama in the Middle Ages? Are there more texts that we might consider through performance than we have heretofore recognized? What does the field of dance studies offer to us? How might both drama and dance participate in a medieval performance culture that often gets overlooked in our work with the mere textual echoes we have left?

 

The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS) enthusiastically sponsors this thread, seeking papers that address the above topics and others that consider how/what performances marked celebrations. Submitters should feel free to define performance as broadly as possible to celebrate such performances of celebration.

 

Additionally, Research Opportunities for Medieval and Renaissance Drama (ROMARD) has granted us a special issue based on this thread if it runs. The MRDS will work with panelists to revise their presentations into articles. We think this opportunity is in keeping with the spirit of celebration and, perhaps more importantly, with the ethos of the colloquium, fostering intellectual and scholarly growth through collegial joie de vivre.

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