Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts (review)

{ 259 } Book Reviews \ \ Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts. Edited by Elina Gertsman. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2008. 348 pp. $114.95 cloth. Gertsman begins her introduction to this collection of essays with a question: “What do we mean when we refer to medieval performances?” (1). The advent of performance studies as a discipline has made this question increasingly vital, and the answer lies somewhere in the interstices between the sixteen essays the editor has selected for this volume. The contributors—­ medievalists across a range of disciplines—offer examinations of some sort of medieval performance, ranging from Christina Maranci’s explication of possible performance practices connected with external inscriptions on medieval Armenian churches to Jennifer Nevile’s examination of the effects of an emergent written dance culture on dance performances. The collection, which developed out of a 2005“Performance/Performativity in the Middle Ages”conference organized by Gertsman at the University of Chicago, takes as its mandate the necessity for an interdisciplinary approach to medieval studies, an approach particularly suited to the opportunities afforded by the application of performance theory. Gertsman’s collection stands as a response, in part, to a challenge issued by one of the volume’s contributors, Mary Suydam, in her essay “Women’s Texts and Performances in the Medieval Southern Low Countries.” Suydam encourages a new methodological approach to medieval visionary phenomena that might just as fruitfully be applied to any number of medieval subjects:“I therefore issue a call for both particularity and interdisciplinarity. . . . We need more teamwork among art historians, historians, linguists, and scholars from theater studies, sermon studies, and religious studies, just to name a few” (155). Suydam acknowledges some of the difficulties attendant upon applying performance theory to medieval texts, given the often fragmentary nature of the evidence involved, but nonetheless urges “a methodology that incorporates imagination in regard to narratives of past performances” (155). Gertsman’s introduction wisely avoids trying to recapitulate the entirety of performance theory, focusing instead on a brief overview of some of the field’s central definitional moves. With much of the material in the present volume concerned with sacred performance, the collection reveals a decided (and understandable ) emphasis on Richard Schechner’s distinction of ritual from theatre on the efficacy-­ entertainment continuum. In part, the book’s emphasis on performativity in medieval studies reveals the breadth of what might truly be considered performance, and Gertsman’s contributors take the broadest pos- { 260 } Book Reviews sible view in an effort to reconfigure the practices related to the production and reception of such “texts.” The volume is divided into four sections, each containing essays concerned with a different type of performance, and Gertsman makes explicit her inten­ tion that the essays be read as a unified, if not always univocal, whole. The first section, “Visual Performance: Word, Image, Body,” attends to a variety of different “fluid performative spaces, activated by their respective audiences” (3). Included in this section are the aforementioned Maranci essay, as well as Richard K. Emmerson’s examination of the Trinity Apocalypse, ­ Pamela Sheingorn ’s phenomenological exploration of the performative reading of illuminated manuscripts, and Gertsman’s own fascinating essay on the simultaneous performances of birth and death in Shrine Madonna statues. In this essay, Gertsman argues for the statue as a “performing object” and attributes to it qualities that underscore the manner in which performance is figured throughout the collection: “unstable and unfixed, transformative and transforming, constituted through and triggered by the presence of the beholder” (99). This emphasis on the interaction between beholder and that which is beheld, between visionary and field of vision, serves as an effective transition into the book’s next section. The second section, titled “Devotional Performance: Preaching, Prayer,­Vision,”focuses on religious performances and brings to the foreground the question of embodiment. Here, the essayists carefully interrogate the relationship of the personal to the spatial, both physical and metaphysical. Beverly Mayne Kienzle examines the homilies of Hildegard of Bingen for traces of or­ ality and suggests that such traces offer new ways of viewing Hildegard’s corpus as a whole. Carolyn Muessig’s “Performance of the Passion: The Enactment of Devotion in the Later Middle Ages” treats primary...