Medieval Theatre Performance opens numerous windows for the study of performance in the Middle Ages. The volume is a timely contribution that rises from the concern that there is "dearth in research into medieval theatre, dance, puppetry and automata in performance" (1). Throughout the twelve chapters, contributors study the nature and quality of various performances, the conventions of the performed work, what took place in the act of performing, and the relationships between performers and audiences through various approaches. The chapters follow an introduction covering what constitutes performance and performance boundaries and distinctions that exist between different forms like theatre, dance, puppets and automata.
In chapter 1, "From Archive to Repertoire: The Disguising at Hertford and Performing Practices," Claire Sponsler posits what we know versus what we do not know in relation to performance, its nature and investigation. She offers an analysis of John Lydgate's 1427 Disguising at Hertford where she focuses on how performance was enacted. Moreover, she pays attention to practice-based research and reconstructions and the criteria by which Lydgate's play might have taken place. For what is lacking, she resorts to "earlier performance practices" to examine "echoes" that "may be discernible despite historical changes" (29). Sponsler's piece is a call for appreciating the value of practice-based research as she looks into the 1997 modern reenactment of the play at Hertford Castle.
Changing course somewhat, Bart Ramakers's second chapter, "Walk, Talk, Sit, Quit? On What Happens in Netherlandish Rhetoricians' Plays," concentrates on the spatial conventions affected by the features of the playing space and the written requirements of the Rhetoricians' plays (2). Ramakers's contention is that it was not "only topicality that accounted for the zinnespel's appeal, but also its dramaturgical and performative characteristics" where the performance/audience conventional relationship is broken down (37). His analysis is based on a 1601 play, namely Discarded Knowledge, from the collection of the Haarlem Chamber of Rhetoric known as "The Pelicans." Ramakers applies a phenomenological approach to establish what the audience experienced through what they might have heard and seen, which ranges from important props to sound, music and vocal instruments (40).
Likewise, the performance/audience conventional relationship is broken down as Tom Pettitt discusses in chapter 3, "Performing Intrusions: Interaction and Interaxionality in Medieval English Theatre," the different kinds of spatial and social intervention in plays and folk drama (52). He engages with the late medieval "mummings" or "disguisings" that he studies in the form of "intrusions" into larger dramatic productions (52). Based on the literary concept of intertextuality, he coins the term "interaxionality," which encompasses the performance aspects of drama, such as "the appearance...gesticulation, and movement of performers, their interaction with each other, with the performance space, and sometimes with spectators" (53). It covers a wide range of relationships between the recipient work in which the material is intruded and the donor forms that tend at times to be diffuse and difficult to discern (55). His case study is the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament where he identifies "the interaxional intrusion of visit customs into medieval English plays," the disguise that went into them and their function (57).
The next piece, "Player Transformation: The Role of Clothing and Disguise," by Katie Normington, examines how evidence of players' clothing provides us with knowledge of how they performed and the intersection between role and player (2). Normington draws on Sir Philip Sidney's coined term for poetry as a "speaking picture" in the sense that costuming is a speaking picture or a representation (84). Moreover, she links the rise of the importance of clothing in this period to new modes of supply, production and distribution coupled with the economic exchange on the trading routes to the Far East, especially of silk (76). Normington questions the possibility of determining how an actor played from the surviving records of costume disguise and how costume forms part of the representation of a role (83). To answer this question, she investigates legislative, social and cultural documents while considering the influence of sumptuary laws, conduct literature and practices of cross-dressing in medieval England (85).
In chapter 5, "Pavilioned in Splendour: Performing Heaven in Fifteenth-Century Florence," Nerida Newbigin's discussion of the performance context is a segue to the examination of conditions of performance in fifteenth-century Florence where she surveys the Ascension and Pentecost feste performed annually by the confraternities of Santa Maria. For her, "the actual events...were only a small part of the performance; rather, the whole production process should be seen in terms of performance, from the annual purchase of new keys, rat-poison and brooms to the celebratory dinner that followed the festa" (93). To reconstruct the performance, she uses confraternal account books, inventories and meeting records (94).
The relationship between the written text and the absence of the written text is the subject of chapter 6, "Living Pictures: Drama without Text, Drama without Action," where David Klausner investigates performance without evidence of text or recorded action. His example is a performance that appears to have taken place at the Priory of St Mary, Abergavenny, Monmouthshire in 1320, where monks seemingly performed to other monks and there was no text (110). Once more the performance/audience conventional relationship is broken down. Much of the analysis is speculative and comes largely from "descriptive documentary sources" (109). Klausner resorts to linguistic analysis to prove that sometimes it is automata or a series of tableaux rather than the action of the play and players that made the play (116). The various examples of plays he gives are suggestive of "the wide range of performance possibilities available to medieval performance" (122).
Other contributors use the nature of spatial contexts as means of investigating performances. Chapter 7 by Jennifer Nevile, "Performer-Audience Relationships in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Danced Spectacles," is an example of this where she examines the characteristics of dancer/audience spatial, social and political demarcation as a way of assessing performance (2). She demonstrates the interchangeable functions of performer and witness at Court which constantly reaffirmed dance expertise. In this sense, performers performed to other performers and enjoyed each other's skill (125). She applies the term "danced spectacles" to dancing at court events, which suits the fluidity of dance forms of this period (124). Part of the fluidity stems from the fact that dancing masters and members of the elite danced together in fifteenth-century Italy and that the audience participated in the performance at times (125-126). She also "examines the ramifications of the shared social background of audience and performers," thus revealing that in some danced spectacles, the social protocols and rules of decorum were often suspended in performances (126).
The following chapter by Kathryn Dickason, "Decadance in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Choreomania," analyzes the phenomenon known as "Choreomania," which refers to the frenzied dance behavior across Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries (141). She implicitly asks what performance is and if Choreomania could be considered a performance (142). Different from past studies that tie the phenomenon to pathology, this study examines Choreomania as a performance practice within the religious and cultural context (143). Dickason reveals that medieval Choreomania became less deviant and more devotional and contributed to the shaping of late medieval spirituality to the extent that it became integrated into pilgrimage (154). This shift from the deviant to the devotional is accompanied by the shift in performance space from streets to sanctuaries.
Chapters 9 and 10 diverge from human performers as Femke Kramer and Max Harris focus on integral equine performers with varying kinds of religious and theatrical significance as theatrical props. In chapter 9, "Writing, Telling and Showing Horsemanship in Rhetoricians' Farce," Kramer discusses different forms of inanimate horses and their activation by the player (7). She investigates three equestrian farce episodes and examines the theatre culture that saw a change under the Rhetoricians' guidance where the page dictated what happened on the stage (162). Likewise, in chapter 10, "Inanimate Performers: The Animation and Interpretive Versaility of the Palmesel," Harris examines the "palmesel" spirited figures whose processional progress determines the nature of the animation (4). The Palmesel, or a palm donkey, becomes a versatile performer in procession and has "different interpretations and can play the Palm Sunday script in different ways" (180). He draws on present palmesel processions that he actually attended followed by considering the animation and the interpretive versatility of the Palmesel (188).
Along the same lines, in chapters 11 and 12, Leanne Groeneveld and Philip Butterworth respectively examine inanimate performers. In Chapter 11, "'lyke unto a lyvelye thyng': The Boxley Rood of Grace and Medieval Performance," Groeneveld looks at the Rood of Boxley as a semi-automaton rather than a puppet. She considers how medieval audiences are likely to have responded to and read animated sculptures as they performed the character of Christ in liturgical or theatrical contexts, in particular the Boxley Rood of Grace as both performer and performance (197). The volume concludes with Philip Butterworth's chapter on "The Mechanycalle 'Ymage off Seynt Iorge' at St. Botolph's, Billingsgate, 1474," where the author proposes to analyze the description of "The Iorge" in relation to fifteenth-century knowledge "of relevant mechanical principles in order to arrive at a speculative reconstruction" (219). The dragon and saint George are a semi-automaton device; Butterworth provides sketches of possible reconstruction of the device and its uses throughout the chapter.
Part of the discourse of this volume is concerned with the nature of illusion inherent in performance, offering a new understanding of performance. The various chapters successfully show that there were no hard and fast divisions between performance and audience and likewise among the different theatrical performances. Overall, this is a stimulating and rewarding book for those interested in medieval theatre and performance.