Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata, and Their Audiences. Edited by Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017; pp. xiv + 282, 18 illustrations. $99 cloth, $99 e-book.

Abstract

to the scholarship of early performance but also-and especially-to our field at large. In their brief introduction, Butterworth and Normington note that Medieval Theatre Performance emerged out of a particular challenge: the problem of addressing not the contexts of past performances but "performance itself" (1). This challenge will be recognizable to scholars of performance across divisions of geography, culture, and time. What "performance" means in this collection is various, and the editors observe that "the separation of the disciplines of theatre/ dance/puppetry/automata is a fabricated one" (3). Only a quarter of the chapters focus on theatricality within dramatic forms; the rest consider primarily genres that involve dance, built spectacle, puppetry, automata, or some other form of bodily representation or presentation that confounds definition. The essays incorporate innovative methodologies and respond to theories of theatre and performance from Richard Schechner to Carrie Noland. Furthermore, the performances examined are not likely to be well known to most readers. Some highlights include an account of the late medieval frenzy of continental dance epidemics, a collective silent and naked miming of the Crucifixion in a Welsh monastery, and a semiautomaton Christ who/that can move his/its lips and eyes, perhaps while the parish priest speaks next to him/it. Many of the essays contemplate problems of archive and repertoire. The late Claire Sponsler, to whom the collection is dedicated, revisits material from her 2014 monograph and reformulates it into a stand-alone essay, "From Archive to Repertoire: The Disguising at Hertford and Performance Practices." Though focused on a particular English court performance, Sponsler considers broadly "the impact of both the problem of evidence and the problem of methodology"