Performing Medieval Narrative (review)

This edited collection of essays is divided into four parts – 'Medieval performers of narrative and their art,' 'Medieval performance and the book,' 'Performability and medieval narrative genres' and 'Perspectives from contemporary performers' – and combines contributions from a diverse group of established and highly credentialed European and Anglo-American scholars and contemporary artists. Their project is 'to reread each medieval narrative [their essays consider] toward performance' (p. 11) and is grounded in the editors' long-term commitment to the study of both medieval narrative and performance. Their conviction is that '[t]he power and pleasure of medieval narrative in performance opens pathways for us as it did for medieval audiences ... where we may hear the old stories made new through performance;' even though, as Joyce Coleman concedes in her essay, 'efforts to reconstruct the precise context' of performance topoi 'must remain speculative' (p. 39). What is really at stake in these essays is the claim that textual references suggesting performance 'should have some validity, along with other, supporting evidence, in demonstrating the complexity of performance and reception formats' available to audiences. The question is: what kind of validity – given that performance is, on the one hand, a mode of repetition and, on the other hand, also ephemeral?

Putting one form of the limit case, Linda Marie Zaerr notes '[t]he question of whether the Middle English verse romances were performed at all has been the subject of some controversy;' though, more recently, '[e]xternal historical records and new textual evidence strongly indicate at least some instances of performance of late-medieval romance.' So, the worst-case scenario is an epistemological problem of a fairly difficult kind: the absent object of study. It is at this point that a more rigorous investment in theory might have provided a solution, albeit a heuristic one, to the collection's most troubling but interesting effect – the piling up of disparate case studies. The essays range from considering medieval Welsh narratives to Old French verse narrative, fabliaux, the Decameron and Arthurian interludes, minstrel traditions to performance in the ars praedicandi and that of the living Turkic epic bard, the reading of rhetorical topoi of various shapes and sizes to reaching toward different modes of reading and, while the inclusion of contributions from modern performers of medieval texts is engaging, the material, cultural and historical contingencies of those same modern performances beg more questions than can be settled. The editors might have made a virtue of this necessity, though, for the intellectual drive of this project implies a shared conceptual focus in what we might call 'performativity;' in the sense of the OED's 'Of or relating to performance' rather than the more specific and technical application in speech act theory (performative as distinct from constative utterances). Such a focus, by establishing a meta-level on which both textual effects and historical particularities might have been modeled, would perhaps have obviated the otherwise inevitable collapse into accumulated detail and random speculation.

This is not to gainsay the collection's achievements, which begin with a mapping of the terrain on which performance is situated: discussions circulate around performance and silent reading, performance and theatre, performance and consumption, authenticity and innovation, modal and scored readings, often conceptualized as binary oppositions and thus begging for an interrogating of that structure; the work of Paul Zumthor and especially his notion of mouvance; the nature and status of ephemera – which would have been an important discussion on its own. Individual essays provide provocative insights: John Ahern reminds us of the evidence of reading practice found in the composition of individual manuscripts, especially in terms of their chronologies. A pre-1350 manuscript such as Palatino 566 (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale) consists entirely of novelle and 'appears to have been produced by merchants' while 'Gaddiano reliqui 193 (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, after 1315), reflects the moralizing, heterogeneous interests of its public'. Keith Busby draws our attention to '[m] ise en text as [an...