The experience of performance

The essays in this book inspire new appreciation of the art of the medieval storyteller. They show how stories are brought into performance from manuscripts, and from a common fund of narrative motifs and storytelling practices. While several of the articles encourage readers to imagine performance of works now received in writing, the essays by contemporary performers go even further. They show how live performances can be reconstructed from manuscripts, from surviving narrative and musical practices, and from instruments depicted in medieval images or long buried underground; they bring us into the world of professional artists as they tell a tale before an audience. These essays awaken the desire for the experience of performance itself.

To enable readers to view medieval narratives in actual performance, we have created a website—Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase. The website illustrates and complements the essays in this volume with video clips of recent performances by students, scholars, and professional artists (including Azéma, Bagby, and Zaerr, contributors to this book). The clips provide examples of many works discussed in these pages, such as Beowulf, Celtic stories, chivalric romances, pious tales, stories of Renart, and fabliaux. They represent several genres, periods, and languages, and demonstrate a broad range of performance styles and strategies. The website also offers clips of performances of narratives that are analogous to medieval works (such as contemporary epics from Egypt and Turkey); these clips, recorded by anthropologists and historians of performance, suggest how similar medieval narratives might have been performed.

Readers of the essays in this volume may use its companion website to further their appreciation of medieval narrative in performance. Experiencing narratives through performance enables readers to consider these works through different faculties and senses: to see performers’ bodies in motion, hear their voices and instruments, and witness audience response. As the studies in this book demonstrate, medieval narratives were not conceived to be read only privately and silently, which is our norm today; they invited and were intended for performance.

Evelyn Birge Vitz

Nancy Freeman Regalado

Marilyn Lawrence