The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances

Abstract

In recent years, the drama of medieval Europe has received an unusual amount of attention, somewhat surprisingly given the marginalization it suffered for most of the twentieth century.' With, however, the decline of the ahistorical formalist paradigm, which favored the more obviously plays of the renaissance and later periods, the study of medieval drama has finally come into its own. An important though often undervalued strain of this new interest has taken the form, broadly speaking, of cultural critique aimed at tracing out the ways in which medieval performances of all kinds-whether plays sponsored by guilds or confraternities, royal entries, processionals, or other sorts of public spectacle-were tied to the economic, political, intellectual, religious, and social practices of their local sites of performance. Systematic archival work such as the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project in Great Britain and Bernd Neumann's comprehensive survey of religious drama in Germany, as well as the more individualized inquiries undertaken at various locations in France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands,2 have made it easier to trace the intricate filiations linking early European performances to the cultures that produced them. This critical activity, itself part of a pervasive shift in focus within literary studies as a whole, has largely moved away from viewing medieval dramatic performances as literary texts or historical documents or even theatrical events, investigating them instead primarily as forms of social practice.