Wicked Mysteries and Notorious Conjurors: Magic, Rape, and Violence in Two Early Modern Pamphlets

Toward the end of the 1628 pamphlet A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Iohn Lambe, the pamphleteer describes the violence a crowd inflicts on John Lambe, a cunning man who dabbled in the dark arts. This violence, ultimately fatal, seems to be a response to Lambe's rape of an eleven-year-old child, a rape which he is convicted of but ultimately pardoned for. Earlier in his career, however, Lambe is indicted for using magic to disable the body of a gentleman as well as for invoking evil spirits. What connection exists between the charges against Lambe as a witch and magician and the charges against him as a rapist? This essay argues that long before Lambe gives those around him a basis for violence, he triggers anxieties about what he is, and that these anxieties play a role in the violence against him. The text of A Briefe Description demonstrates the way mechanisms of justice ultimately repeat—reenact and perform—versions of the crimes they seek to examine.

Undeadness

What does it mean to think about embodiment without bodies? This essay pursues a question central to all categories of performance—theatrical and extratheatrical—in the early modern period. It explores that question by considering the actions assigned to performers by early modern plays, how the interplay of writing-as-algorithm with known bodily practices might enable interpreters to use the plays to assess the limits and purposes of commodified embodiment—acting—as means to a wider, historical understanding of embodiment. Attending to the embodiment implied by cue-scripts, by affectual speech and speaking, by the penchant for drawing attention demanded from actors, the essay suggests the plays archive a radically mobile, incessantly focalizing, self-dramatizing impulse to embodiment that indexes a way to read the anxious behavioral repertoire of early modern living.

Rogationtide Perambulation as Performative Law

This article draws on performance theory to examine perambulation practices in late medieval and early modern England. Rogation was originally a devotional celebration that also entailed a ritual walking of parish boundaries to define communities as legal and administrative units. Perambulators sometimes seized upon the occasion to draw attention to a culture of obligation that had been neglected. This essay looks at two such moments—the 1381 Revolt of St. Albans, when the commons rose against the abbot in the form of a perambulation, and a 1520–21 property dispute at South Kyme, Lincolnshire at Ashby Heath. In these instances, perambulators used the occasion of the public recognition of property boundaries as an opportunity to stage a complaint in an act of “performative law.” The complainants asserted their rights and liberties by means of a theatrical form that invited participants and spectators to assent in specific legal claims to the land in dispute.

Festive Friars: Embodied Performance and Audience Affect

This essay models a method for unearthing performance traces in texts that seem on the surface to be strictly literary. Centering on Thomas Dekker's The Raven's Almanac, a compilation of stories akin to those in early modern jest books, it analyzes a bawdy tale about a friar and an abbess that reveals deep connections to May games. Festivity constituted a mode of embodied knowledge, a somatic and kinesthetic process that conditioned playgoer responses. This essay demonstrates how examining nondramatic performance, including quotidian, ceremonial, and ritual practices, allows the recovery of ephemeral audience affect. Studying spectators’ emotions is notoriously challenging but can productively complicate concepts such as character and narrative. Moreover, it was through amorphous feelings and sensations that theater actively produced cultural understandings. Expanding the methodological toolkit for investigating performance offers a useful blueprint for researching other ineffable but consequential historical experiences that exceed, by definition, the documentary evidence.

Provoking Performance: Printed Dialogue and Early Modern Publics in Christopher St. German's Salem and Bizance

This essay argues that Christopher St. German made tactical use of the dialogue form to cultivate a public in his print controversy with Thomas More on the subject of reform. Publishing in the early 1530s, More accused St. German of disseminating disgruntled speech in print absent a real constituency of speakers voicing such complaints. St. German countered More's critique by incorporating a dialogue between the characters Salem and Bizance that conflated the reading of his printed works with the speaking and sharing of their political concerns. Although the role of performance in early modern politics has long been recognized in connection to the theater and theatricality, St. German's work demonstrates that early print also invoked the bodily interactivity and iterability characteristic of performance in order to script readers’ use of the relatively new medium. St. German's Salem and Bizance dialogue thus prompted print readers to understand themselves as, and indeed to become, partisan members of a public speaking in and about the debate.

Marginal Performances by Late Medieval Pigs and Blind Men

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.

“Printed follyes”: Mountebanks and the Performance of Ambivalence within the Archive

This article analyzes the ability of archival resources to make the especially transient and unstable performances of early modern mountebanks accessible and meaningful for performance studies research. Because mountebanks were itinerant performers and medical practitioners whose multiple roles challenged regulatory authorities and generated few lasting records, this article argues that mountebank performances may be best recovered and accessed by approaching the available archival materials not as records of fact, but of function. Documents like handbills associated with mountebanks were, after all, functional, inviting their readers to witness performances and test medical services. Self-authored documents like bills as well as representational and fictional texts replicate and reenact performative strategies attributed to mountebanks, namely, the cultivation of ambivalent rhetoric and compulsion to independent judgment of truth.

Afterword: Documenting Performance across the Medieval/Modern Frontier

As an afterword to the special issue of JMEMS “Performance beyond Drama,” this essay reflects on the complex ways that premodern performances and their embodied actors are captured in, mediated by, or dependent on the texts that we use to study them, and on the special importance of examining this process across a temporal framework—the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries—that challenges the periodizing schema of modernity. In particular, three major systemic changes impacted European performance practices and their documentation during this era: the more widespread availability and manufacture of paper, which made writing easier and reading cheaper, coupled with the introduction of print technology after 1455; the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation and its Catholic counterpart, and the bloody aftermath of religious wars, persecutions, and witch hunts that (re)shaped performance traditions; and the commodification and policing of entertainment through enclosure and regulation. Taken together, this special issue's contributions reveal fascinating convergences and continuities in performance across the medieval/modern frontier, while also showing how some medieval practices were made to conform with postmedieval political and religious projects, thereby obscuring or blurring the evidence for those earlier practices.