Synopses & Reviews
The Performance of SelfRitual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years WarSusan CraneSuggestive and thought-provoking.--Modern PhilologyCrane builds a strong basis for discussion of a kind of privileged late medieval secularism. The materials she studies are remarkable not only for the striking collocations she produces but for their own inherent fascination, and it is good to have attention directed to them in so focused and timely a way. It is particularly refreshing to have a study of elite activity that is neither idealizing nor reproving.--David Lawton, Washington UniversityCrane's consideration of 'court performances' of later fourteenth- and earlier fifteenth-century English and French literature and culture is both polished and erudite, written both deftly and with clarity throughout. A finely crafted and imaginative study.--Paul Strohm, University of OxfordCrane's readers cannot fail to be engaged with and fascinated by this book's array of late-medieval cultural practices 'performed' by the French and English courtly elite.--SpeculumCrane moves with admirable grace among an array of sources including household accounts, inquisitional records, chronicles, and a wide range of literature. Her interpretive strategies frequently upset received opinion and reverse readers' expectations with exciting results. . . . This book definitely breaks new ground and is an important contribution to the study of late medieval culture.--Journal of English and Germanic PhilologySusan Crane's book . . . is a wonderful contribution to the history of bodily display. . . . Erudite, richly detailed, and suggestive, with excellent footnotes, bibliography, and index, this is a gold mine that readers will happily quarry (and extend to other medieval texts and practices) for some time to come.--Medium AevumSusan Crane is Professor of English at Columbia University and author of Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.The Middle Ages Series2002 - 284 pages - 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 - 4 color, 11 b/w illus.ISBN 978-0-8122-3658-3 - Cloth - $59.95s - 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-1806-0 - Paper - $24.95s - 16.50 World Rights - Literature, Cultural StudiesShort copy: Crane's consideration of 'court performances' of later fourteenth- and earlier fifteenth-century English and French literature and culture is both polished and erudite, written both deftly and with clarity throughout. A finely crafted and imaginative study.--Paul Strohm, University of Oxford
Review
"Crane's book intelligently and creatively investigates the ways in which late medieval subjects are constituted through participation in cultural practices and rituals from 1300—1450, a period of intense cultural exchange between France and England. Crane challenges the idea that, in the context of performance, the body operates as the locus of identity, arguing instead for the importance of bodily gestures, clothing, and ornament as arbiters of identity. The first part of the book discusses the methods through which clothes were designed to speak, that is, to articulate the social and ancestral identity of the wearer, or even to make this identity function as a poetic conceit. In later chapters, Crane explores the ritual inversions of the charivari and interlude, which invite unruly behavior (the staging of the wild man, for instance), and instill oppositional possibilities in the identities of the performers. On the subject of 'cross-dressing,' Crane analyzes how Joan of Arc's clothes served as a means of self-definition, and how during her heresy trial, it was this surface, and not a hidden
interior that became the focus of her inquisitors." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes, charivaris, and masking invited the English and French nobility to assert their identities in gesture and costume as well as in speech. These events presumed that performance makes a self, in contrast to the modern belief that identity precedes social performance and, indeed, that performance falsifies the true, inner self. Susan Crane resists the longstanding convictions that medieval rituals were trivial affairs, and that personal identity remained unarticulated until a later period.Focusing on England and France during the Hundred Years War, Crane draws on wardrobe accounts, manuscript illuminations, chronicles, archaeological evidence, and literature to recover the material as well as the verbal constructions of identity. She seeks intersections between theories of practice and performance that explain how appearances and language connect when courtiers dress as wild men to interrupt a wedding feast, when knights choose crests and badges to supplement their coats of arms, and when Joan of Arc cross-dresses for the court of inquisition after her capture.