Medieval Drama Studies: A Performance Review

Abstract

Medieval drama studies is undergoing a period of welcome growth, bringing with it new voices, new approaches, and fresh perspectives, qualities shared by the books reviewed here. Much is happening in drama studies that would interest a wide range of medieval, Early Modern, and theater scholars interested in devotional culture, material culture, the mercantile and artisan classes, the history and theory of theater, performance theories, the history of literacy and consumption of literature and art, and more. Yet, too often it seems that medieval drama scholars are speaking only to and being read only by other medieval drama scholars. The two books I review here offer the potential to reach a broader array of scholars and practitioners. Each is focused on performance in one way or another—practical or theoretical; historical or modern—and it may be performance, in theory and in practice, that finally opens up the field of medieval drama studies to a larger audience of scholars, students, and interested general audiences. Attention to the performance of medieval drama, not only in the past but also in the present, has the potential to open up the field to new research opportunities that we might not see from the vantage point of the various historicist-oriented approaches that currently dominate the field. The approaches taken by the two books reviewed here show the compatibility of a focus on performance with a range of historically minded methods, but they also move out of the archive and even out of the Middle Ages to capture the vitality and energy of medieval drama in performance. This is a welcome broadening of the field, for at times the