Prerequisites: Instructor’s permission (Seminar).
We will investigate performances that are not staged (in the conventional sense), such as tournaments, festivals, secular and religious rituals, and banquet entertainments. Such performances were ubiquitous in late medieval England, and participating in them gets frequent representation in chronicles, poetry, and manuscript illumination. Each week of the course gathers sources around one kind of performance, and considers how it shaped and expressed medieval identities. Some dramatic works (mummings, cycle plays) are set in this wider context of performance types. Works to be considered will include records of royal entries, legends of transvestite saints, Lydgate’s mummings, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and Malory’s Morte Darthur.
