Marginal Performances by Late Medieval Pigs and Blind Men

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-429
Author(s):  
Marla Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Specific Function ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Multiple Identity ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Living Person

In 1425, Parisians under Anglo-Burgundian rule during the Hundred Years War enjoyed the spectacle of blind men in armor attempting to club a pig to death, in the process clubbing one another. Marginal images in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, a Flemish Romance of Alexander copied and illuminated roughly eighty years earlier, closely resemble this so-called game, and a dozen cities recorded iterations beginning in the thirteenth century and continuing into the fifteenth. The repetition suggests the workings of a scenario, which performance studies theorist Diana Taylor defines as a condensation of embodied practice and knowledge reactivated in multiple times and places to transmit culture from person to living person. Reading through the Bodley 264 Romance of Alexander in order to clarify the scenario's specific function in its Parisian context, this article argues that the strategic battering of marginal beings served to transmit a hierarchically ordered culture while forcefully expelling the Armagnac faction from the hierarchy's highest rank. Within this stark example of public violence that performatively materialized political division, the bodies of pigs and blind men resonated with multiple identity categories, and the dominant group whose power and cohesion the entertainment reinforced both ignored and enjoyed their trauma.

scholarly journals Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Nahyan Fancy ◽  
Monica H. Green
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
A Minor

AbstractThe recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.

scholarly journals Trinitarian Hagiography in Late Medieval England: Rewriting St Robert of Knaresborough in Latin Verse

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 74-95
Author(s):  
Hazel J. Hunter Blair
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
Latin Verse ◽  
Weberian Theory ◽  
Late Medieval England

The Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives (or Trinitarian Order) is one of the least studied continental religious groups to have expanded into thirteenth-century England. This article examines shifting notions of Trinitarian redemption in late medieval England through the prism of the order's writing about Yorkshire hermit St Robert of Knaresborough (d. 1218). Against the Weberian theory of the routinization of charisma, it demonstrates that Robert's inspirational sanctity was never bound too rigidly by his Trinitarian hagiographers, who rather co-opted his unstable charisma in distinct yet complementary ways to facilitate institutional reinvention and spiritual flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Scenarios of style: An exploration of subcultural research as embodied practice in Los Angeles’s vintage Jamaican music scene

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina L. Cole
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Research Setting ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Fashion Studies ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article sets forth a performance studies framework for subcultural research: scenarios of style. This embodied epistemology brings together Diana Taylor’s scenario paradigm with interdisciplinary perspectives on style to provide a means for researchers to explore the ways in which style is constitutive of subcultural life. Twenty-five years of involvement in Los Angeles’s vintage Jamaican music scene and four years of fieldwork – comprised of participant observation, oral history interviews and archival research – undergird my theorization. To communicate individual agency and subcultural traditions of style, this article explores a single case study situated within my larger research setting. Because scenarios of style supports embodied, situated understandings of knowledge and is contextually adaptable, this article posits its broader relevancy for fashion studies research.

Excerpt from “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Walker Bynum
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
Imitatio Christi ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The World ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Women Mystics

In this chapter the renowned medievalist scholar Caroline Walker Bynum brings our attention to a striking historical occurrence: in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe the concern with and attachment to Eucharistic devotion was overwhelmingly female. Why this gender bias, and at that time? Christian women were predominantly “inspired, compelled, comforted and troubled by the Eucharist” and in many different forms—from miraculous apparitions, to experiences of ecstasy connected to the attendance and ingestion of the Eucharist, to the showing of sensorial excesses in its presence. Bynum shows how material and physical receptions of the body of Christ were expressed not only as forms of ecstasy but also as gendered modes of living the Imitatio Christi. This thirteenth-century corporeal, female experience of the Eucharist is connected to a particular moment in the life of Christ—the transition between life and death. Positioned as “brides” and hence as the erotic counterparts of Christ, women and female mystics exploited the full potential of Christ’s own corporeality rather than his otherworldly nature. Bynum’s work constitutes a formative reference point for scholars of Catholicism across a range of disciplines for the obvious reason that it deals so elegantly with themes of substance, gender, bodies, and devotional forms of Catholic practice. Her work continues to be an original source of inspiration for anthropologists because of its remarkable sensitivity to religion as an embodied, practice-generative engagement with the world. Bynum should also be considered as important for the “new” anthropology of Catholicism for her pioneering work on the gymnasticity of gender and for the attention it draws to the sublimated erotic tension that exists between institutional doxa and mystical aesthetics.2 In Bynum’s work, gender is not presented as merely one among a number of potential analytical foci for elaboration of Catholicism; rather, it is the very ontological architecture of the religious, and hence an essential topic for scholars seeking to understand Catholicism as a translocal force.

Amateur Book Production and the Miscellany in Late Medieval East Anglia

Insular Books ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol M. Meale
Keyword(s):  
Family Study ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
University Library

The manuscripts discussed here, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 407 and New Haven, Yale University Library, Beinecke 365, were produced roughly contemporaneously and within a relatively small geographical area. Tanner is the work of one man, Robert Reynes of Acle, and is noted for the eclecticism of its contents. Beinecke, meanwhile, was the work of two scribes, the first anonymous, the second Robert Melton of Stuston. The first copyist’s work is largely religious and exemplary; Melton’s contributions are non-literary, consisting of prayers and copies of accounts and deeds relating to his role of steward to the Cornwallis family. Study of content is complemented by analysis of the structure of each book while comparison of the dramatic texts lends particularity to the taxonomic distinctions which must be drawn between them.

Illuminated Manuscripts in Late Thirteenth-century Konya

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-81
Author(s):  
Cailah Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Visual Properties

This chapter initially focuses on two manuscripts – a small Qur’an and a monumental Masnavi of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Both were produced in 1278, soon after Rum was formally incorporated into the Ilkhanid empire. After discussing their visual properties in depth, the author uses the manuscripts’ production information to analyse the nature of production and patronage in late medieval Konya. This chapter introduces many key themes that are developed throughout the rest of the book, including the role of the Mevlevis in artistic production, the itinerancy of artists, and cosmopolitan nature of Rum’s towns. Based on the examination of these manuscripts, the chapter contends that several currently unidentified or misidentified manuscripts were also produced in Konya. Through an illuminated copy of Ibn Bibi’s Seljuk chronicle produced around 1282, the chapter also considers the part that Ilkhanid officials played in manuscript patronage in Rum.

Communes and Despots: The City State In Late-Medieval Italy

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 71-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in liberta’ etc., and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism.

Rhetoric and Comedy

2014 ◽  
pp. 364-374
Author(s):  
Jody Enders
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Sense Of Humor ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
The Law ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Forensic Rhetoric

The rhetorical tradition demands a sense of humor. Thanks to the highly influential group of late medieval French lawyers and legal apprentices (Basochiens), we know that comedy is deeply imbricated in forensic rhetoric, declamation, and delivery (actio) as well as in the law itself. The farcical, forensic antics of the Society of the Basoche shed new light on the intertwined histories of law, rhetoric, theater, and performance studies. Inasmuch as over 200 French farces are extant—many obsessed with juridical discourse—it is clear that the comedic dimensions of rhetoric constitute far more than a silly footnote. Quite to the contrary, when learned medieval rhetoricians theorized and practiced comedy, they articulated not only a view of the five canons of rhetoric but also a dramatic response against the obscenity of social injustice. In so doing, they also showed the transcendence of an expression that remains popular today: That trial is a farce!

scholarly journals LIVING LIKE THE LAITY? THE NEGOTIATION OF RELIGIOUS STATUS IN THE CITIES OF LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 27-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Important Object

ABSTRACTFramed by consideration of images of treasurers on the books of the treasury in thirteenth-century Siena, this article uses evidence for the employment of men of religion in city offices in central and northern Italy to show how religious status (treated as a subset of ‘clerical culture’) could become an important object of negotiation between city and churchmen, a tool in the repertoire of power relations. It focuses on the employment of men of religion as urban treasurers and takes Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a principal case study, but also touches on the other tasks assigned to men of religion and, very briefly, on evidence from other cities (Bologna, Brescia, Como, Milan, Padua, Perugia and Siena). It outlines some of the possible arguments deployed for this use of men of religion in order to demonstrate that religious status was, like gender, more contingent and fluid than the norm-based models often relied on as a shorthand by historians. Despite the powerful rhetoric of lay–clerical separation in this period, the engagement of men of religion in paid, term-bound urban offices inevitably brought them closer to living like the laity.

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