The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity During the Hundred Years War (review)

210 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) Crane, Susan, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity During the Hundred Years War (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; paper; pp. ix, 268; 11 b/w illustrations, 4 colour plates; RRP £14.00; ISBN 081221806X. The Performance of Self argues for a constitutive relationship between the practice of ritual, a vocabulary of clothing and the construction of identity intersecting at, what Crane nominates as, the performance of self. Crane’s thesis, in fact, is that these terms are plural since, in some of the most engaged moments of argument, it is the misreading of them that produces conflicted or misunderstood selves to the point (in Joan of Arc’s case) of death. This argument that courtiers, operating (usually) within elites of privilege, ‘locate selfhood in external performance’ contests two essentialisms of postmedieval thinking. First, from Cartesian subjectivity, that ‘the true self is within, and that self-presentation is therefore more or less a false front’; second, from Johan Huizinga, that such social performance is ‘just “illusion and dream ... only style and ceremony, a beautiful and insincere play”’. Instead, Crane draws on practice theory to counter these ‘mentalist explanations of culture and cultural change’, because it enables her to read ‘thoughts and intentions’as ‘grounded in the repetitive practices of the habitus’. Thus, Crane’s project becomes an interdisciplinary one to produce a medieval cultural studies that draws on, for example, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, a range of anthropological studies that usually work against the tradition of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the textual scholarship and literary criticism in which Crane is an authority. There are five chapters that deal with specific moments of social performance available from a range of visual and textual records. The first chapter, ‘Talking Garments’, begins with Charles d’Orléans who, as a young poet, had song lyrics embroidered on the sleeves of his robes, and opens out into an analysis of the visual representation of mottos, the use of badges and heraldic marks of identity. Garments literally, and therefore symbolically, talk. Crane then considers ‘Luxury Consumption and Fashion’ and thus underlines the strategic use of materialism in her historical account of medieval courtly culture. After considering badges as ‘personal signs’, as distinct from heraldic emblems that nominate the familial, the argument reads such personal signs as ‘secular ritual’. Her example is the meeting at Ardres in late October 1396 between Richard II and Charles VI to effect the marriage between the English king and the seven-year-old French princess Isabel. Crane reads the secularity Reviews 211 Parergon 20.1 (2003) of this ritual away from the tradition of Emile Durkheim and Arnold van Gennep. Jonathan Smith’s account of ritual mimesis allows Crane to argue that this secular ritual effects marriage as a political alliance through the performance of new identities in which the two kings wear each other’s personal signs, process while holding hands, and rewrite the genealogical histories allied in the marriage. Crucially, this symbolically powerful ceremony – at which Isabel was transferred to her new husband’s care – is at some distance from the arrangement sanctioned by the Church in a proxy marriage in Paris in March 1396. A related anthropological paradigm then allows Crane to thematise marriage by asking whether ‘these gestures also elaborate a dehumanising traffic in women between Valois and Plantagenet males?’. Annette Weiner’s work on giftexchange and Marilyn Strathern’s revision of the ‘exchange-of-women’ model then shape Crane’s reading of Griselda’s performance of self – clothed, unclothed and reclothed – in her marriage to Walter in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. Other chapters – on the ritual of Maying, Joan of Arc’s cross-dressing, masking and unmasking in chivalric contest and the play of identities in charivari and interlude – follow similar trajectories, drawing together a diversity of texts, including visual images as evidence of each different and specific habitus. Crane makes no normative or totalising claims: one of the achievements of this project is its acknowledging of limits, boundaries, partialities. Another achievement is its clear insistence that such a project needs to be theorised in order to be effected. Crane...