Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata and their Audiences ed. by Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington (review)

Medieval Theatre Performance aims to fundamentally reconsider the things categorized, researched, and analyzed as early "performance." While projects such as the Records of Early English Drama have made possible a great deal of work on performance contexts, this volume turns its attention to the act of performance itself. Arguing that "the separation of the disciplines of theatre/dance/puppetry/automata is a fabricated one," it contributes to recent arguments made by Philip Butterworth that common modern theatrical descriptors cannot properly assess medieval performance forms (3). This participates in a wider conversation, which includes Charlotte Steenbrugge's exemplary 2017 analysis of sermons as performances, which aims to broaden our understanding of medieval performance forms. The trans-European range of Butter-worth and Katie Normington's collection also responds to an established call for a greater focus on the geographical interconnectedness of performance forms—as demonstrated in a consideration of the cultural exchange of fabrics and costume construction methods through trade routes with India and Africa, as well as in chapters focusing on the drama of the Low Countries, dance in the courts of Europe, the Florentine feste, the Palimsel in the Tyrol, and the trans-European choreomania phenomenon. The volume also examines complementary questions of spectatorship, noting that relationships between spectator and performers were not only more fluid than we might suppose, but that the nature of spectatorship changes for performing objects. This fills a gap left by John McGavin and Greg Walker's theorization of the medieval spectatorship of (human) performers.

The opening chapters consider the challenges of analyzing a three-dimensional, transient form through textual sources. In an analysis of performance evidence for John Lydgate's Disguising at Hertford, Claire Sponsler calls for a rethinking of the hierarchies of value ascribed to archival (as opposed to practice-based) research, showing where each can help overcome the limitations of the other. Bart Ramakers likewise argues that a long-held focus on the text and discourse of sixteenth-century Netherlandish zinnespel has caused theatre historians to overlook the genre's significant, dynamic use of visual and aural techniques. His chapter provides new information about movement, visual properties, and the use of singing and rhythm. Responding to Claire Sponsler's call to balance literary and theatrical approaches, Tom Pettitt argues for performance "interaxionality" as well as intertextuality. He analyzes the power structures between traditional visitation performers and their hosts before making the persuasive argument that their appearance in other forms, including morality and mystery plays, indicates a shared body of dramatic tradition.

Where these chapters use text as their major source of performance evidence, David Klausner examines sources in which one of the commonly held criteria for classifying dramatic performance—either performance text or the intention that it be "acted upon a stage" (107)—is missing. This, with two chapters on dance by Jennifer Nevile and Kathryn Emily Dickason, marks the importance of challenging assumptions generated by later theatre practices. Where Nevile emphasizes the permeable categories of audience and performer in the court dances of France, Italy, and England, Dickason turns her attention to choreomania: a dance epidemic that troubles the idea of performance requiring spectator-ship. Moving away from medicalised readings, she presents the epidemics as agency-bearing practices consistent with the dancers' religious cultures. While these chapters contribute to the volume's reconsideration of what performance is, they also indicate a broader need for scholars to rework thinking around the power dynamics inherent in acts of spectator-ship and performance.

The book's commitment to nontextual sources also encourages a focus on the physical elements of performance-making. Nerida Newbegin's examination of the feste of fifteenth-century Florence is testimony to just how much can be gained by work that takes the entire production process into account. Covering rehearsal practices, illumination, fireworks, the extraordinarily complex stage machinery, and the transposition of religious locations onto extant sites, she stresses the relative unimportance of the spoken word...