IMC 2015: Sessions

The Middle Ages have left their traces in a plethora of texts of different kinds, for example in liturgical texts, vernacular lyric, epic poetry, manuscript illuminations, paintings, musical notation, and archival records. Many of these traces are performative in a two-fold manner: they allude to, mediate, document, or prefigure an act of performance, while also bearing a performative function themselves, deliberately impacting their users. Performing Medieval Text provides a fresh approach to several textual sources of the Middle Ages by highlighting their bi-focal status as performed/performing and performative. By uniting contributors from a range of academic interests - German and French literature, linguistics, and musicology - and by presenting repertoires which are temporally and geographically spread across the Middle Ages - from the late 13th to the 15th century, from north-east Germany to urban Paris and comparative European perspectives - the session demonstrates the significance of performance to numerous fields of medieval research. Indeed, like the medieval texts themselves, many questions of performance extend beyond the specialism of any single academic discipline. Opening windows onto post-medieval performances of these repertoires, the three papers engage with and illustrate the continued relevance of issues of performance in today’s reception of the Middle Ages.