A small group of devotional, literary, and spiritually instructional texts from late thirteenth and early fourteenth century Flanders and Northern France contain a remarkable array of marginalia depicting performance practices and play, ranging from puppet shows to violent ball sports. In the environment that produced these books, reading, especially in a devotional vein, was not merely transactional or functional, and the books are part of a performance culture in which engaging in various outward behaviours, especially those associated with “play” in all its aspects was critical to creating the awareness of and experience of inwardness, including a heightened sense of one’s spiritual visibility to the divine. Drawing on scholarship in dance history, performance studies, and the history of sports, and responding to recent work by fellow art historians focusing on the nexus of sensory experiences – haptic, visual, aural, gustatory, and olfactory – that constitute what is sometimes characterised as “medieval somaesthetics,” this work situates the illuminated manuscripts and the acts of reading they engendered as indices of a much larger realm of experience and practice that constituted the prima materia of late medieval selfhood. Understanding how these particular objects, images, and performances constituted the field of its enactment, is pertinent to twenty-first-century phenomena of self-formation and self-perception within the relentlessly performative realm of media culture.
Alexa Sand is Professor of Art History and Associate Vice President for Research at Utah State University, where she has taught since 2004. She earned her Ph.D. in art history from UC Berkeley, with an emphasis on medieval French art and literature. Her book, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2014. Her most recent work has focused on medieval puppetry, including her 2021 essay in Gesta, “Puppets, Manuscripts, and Gendered Performance in the Hortus deliciarum.” She is cohost of the podcast Real Fantastic Beasts.
Organised by Dr Jessica Barker, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History, The Courtauld. This event is kindly supported by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), and the drinks reception sponsored by Sam Fogg. This Series made possible through the generosity of William M. Voelkle.
