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Articles 1 - 30 of 44
Full-Text Articles in Theatre History
Ritual, Spectacle, And Theatre In Late Medieval Seville (Chapter 1), Christopher B. Swift
Ritual, Spectacle, And Theatre In Late Medieval Seville (Chapter 1), Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theater by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville …
Accommodation And Coping In Medieval Catholic England: A Historical Dramaturgy Casebook For The Chester Mystery Cycle’S Play 14: Christ At The House Of Simon The Leper, Christ And The Moneylenders, And Judas’ Plot, Andrew J. Roberge
Senior Projects Spring 2022
In this historically focused dramaturgy casebook for the medieval Catholic Chester Mystery Cycle's Play 14, Christ at the House of Simon the Leper, Christ and the Moneylenders, and Judas’ Plot, I offer suggestions for Play 14's production as it might have appeared in the cycle's final year of performance, 1575. I contextualize and grapple with the play's antisemitisms, and also offer a brief history of antisemitism in medieval Europe. I also analyze Play 14 and the Chester Mystery Cycle for their rhetorical appeals to the medieval vernacular language, contexts, and events, as well as their anachronistic temporal and geographic …
Baccio Del Bianco At The Court Of Spain: Early Modern Scenic Design In Context, Pamela Thielman
Baccio Del Bianco At The Court Of Spain: Early Modern Scenic Design In Context, Pamela Thielman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the life and work of seventeenth-century artist and architect, Baccio del Bianco, to imagine alternative research strategies for histories of theatre. Traditional scholarship of theatre design is rooted in art historical practices, which has limited the consideration of influences beyond visual culture. It has also posited Italian theatre culture as the driver of innovations in Early Modern theatre design. In this project, I argue for and engage in a practice of scenic design historiography that replaces Italy as the dominant actor in the theatrical scene of this period with a more nuanced approach that places emphasis on …
Adapting The Hellmouth In The Office Of The Dead From The Hours Of Catherine Of Cleves: An Experiment In Using A Dramaturgical Approach To Medieval Studies, Tatiana A. Godfrey
Adapting The Hellmouth In The Office Of The Dead From The Hours Of Catherine Of Cleves: An Experiment In Using A Dramaturgical Approach To Medieval Studies, Tatiana A. Godfrey
Masters Theses
This thesis is an artefact documenting the process of adapting a late medieval painting of hell into a short horror film. The process of adapting the Three Mouths of Hell, housed within the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, serves as an experiment in applying a dramaturgical approach to medieval studies. The process of adaptation and production, informed by critical research about the Hours of Catherine of Cleves and its Three Mouths of Hell, yields new frameworks for understanding the history of Catherine of Cleves, her Book of Hours, and the Three Mouths of Hell.
Masks: A New Face For The Theatre, Alexi Michael Siegel
Masks: A New Face For The Theatre, Alexi Michael Siegel
James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)
This study seeks to reimagine and reinvigorate modern theatre’s relationship with mask work through text-based historical research and practice-based artistic research. It focuses on three ancient mask traditions: pre- and early Hellenistic Greek theatre, Japanese Noh theatre, and Nigerian Egungun masquerades. Research on these mask traditions and recent masked productions informed the development and staging of a masked performance of Charles Mee’s Life is a Dream. The production featured sections for each of the ancient masking styles and a final section that explored masks in a contemporary theatrical style. As a whole, this creative project pulls masks out of …
The Edict Of King Gälawdéwos Against The Illegal Slave Trade In Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 -- Featured Source, Habtamu M. Tegegne
The Edict Of King Gälawdéwos Against The Illegal Slave Trade In Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 -- Featured Source, Habtamu M. Tegegne
The Medieval Globe
This study explores the relationship between documentary-legal prescriptions of slavery and actual practice in late medieval Ethiopia. It does so in light of a newly discovered edict against the enslavement of freeborn Christians and the commercial sale of Christians to non-Christian owners, issued in 1548 by King Gälawdéwos. It demonstrates that this edict emerged from a dramatic and violent encounter between the neighboring Sultanate of Adal, which was supported by Muslim powers, and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which had the support of expanding European powers in the region. The edict was therefore issued to reaffirm and clarify the principles …
Land And Tenure In Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing The Sapci, "That Which Is Common To All", Susan E. Ramirez
Land And Tenure In Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing The Sapci, "That Which Is Common To All", Susan E. Ramirez
The Medieval Globe
This article compares and contrasts pre-Columbian indigenous customary law regarding land possession and use with the legal norms and concepts gradually imposed and implemented by the Spanish colonial state in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Natives accepted oral histories of possession going back as many as ten generations as proof of a claim to land. Indigenous custom also provided that a family could claim as much land as it could use for as long as it could use it: labor established rights of possession and use. The Spanish introduced the concept of private property …
Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
The Medieval Globe
This article focuses on a set of legal questions about ṣīnī vessels (literally, “Chinese” vessels) sent from the Jewish community in Aden to Fustat (Old Cairo) in the mid-1130s CE and now preserved among the Cairo Geniza holdings in Cambridge University Library. This is the earliest dated and localized query about the status of ṣīnī vessels with respect to the Jewish law of vessels used for food consumption. Our analysis of these queries suggests that their phrasing and timing can be linked to the contemporaneous appearance in the Yemen of a new type of Chinese ceramic ware, qingbai, which confounded …
The Future Of Aztec Law, Jerome A. Offner
The Future Of Aztec Law, Jerome A. Offner
The Medieval Globe
This article models a methodology for recovering the substance and nature of the Aztec legal tradition by interrogating reports of precontact indigenous behavior in the works of early colonial ethnographers, as well as in pictorial manuscripts and their accompanying oral performances. It calls for a new, richly recontextualized approach to the study of a medieval civilization whose sophisticated legal and jurisprudential practices have been fundamentally obscured by a long process of decontextualization and the anachronistic applications of modern Western paradigms.
Editor's Introduction To "Legal Worlds And Legal Encounters" -- Open Access, Elizabeth Lambourn
Editor's Introduction To "Legal Worlds And Legal Encounters" -- Open Access, Elizabeth Lambourn
The Medieval Globe
This introduction presents and draws together the articles and themes featured in this special issue of The Medieval Globe, “Legal Worlds and Legal Encounters.”
Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner
Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner
The Medieval Globe
This essay examines the similarities and differences between legal and other precepts outlining corporal punishment in ancient and medieval Indian and early medieval European laws. Responding to Susan Reynolds’s call for such comparisons, it begins by outlining the challenges in doing so. Primarily, the fragmented political landscape of both regions, where multiple rulers and spheres of authority existed side-by-side, make a direct comparison complex. Moreover, the time slippage between what scholarship understands to be the “early medieval” period in each region needs to be taken into account, particularly given the persistence of some provisions and the adapatation or abandonment of …
Common Threads: A Reappraisal Of Medieval European Sumptuary Law, Laurel Wilson
Common Threads: A Reappraisal Of Medieval European Sumptuary Law, Laurel Wilson
The Medieval Globe
Medieval sumptuary law has been receiving renewed scholarly attention in recent decades. But sumptuary laws, despite their ubiquity, have rarely been considered comprehensively and comparatively. This essay calls attention to this problem and suggests a number of topics for investigation, with specific reference to the first phase of European sumptuary legislation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It argues that comparative study demonstrates that this chronology closely parallels the development of the so-called “Western fashion system” and that the ubiquity of sketchy or nonexistent enforcement is evidence for the symbolic importance of sumptuary legislation, rather than its instrumentality. Comparison across …
Toward A History Of Documents In Medieval India: The Encounter Of Scholasticism And Regional Law In The Smṛticandrikā, Donald R. Davis Jr.
Toward A History Of Documents In Medieval India: The Encounter Of Scholasticism And Regional Law In The Smṛticandrikā, Donald R. Davis Jr.
The Medieval Globe
In order to understand the legal use and significance of documents in medieval India, we need to start from the contemporaneous legal categories found in the Sanskrit scholastic corpus called dharmaśāstra. By comparing these categories with actual historical documents and inscriptions, we gain better insight into the encounter of pan-Indian legal discourse in Sanskrit and regional laws in vernacular languages. The points of congruence and transgression in this encounter will facilitate a nuanced history of documents and their use beyond unhelpfully broad categories of written and oral. A new translation of one major scholastic discussion of documents is presented as …
Research And Study Of Fashion And Costume History Spanning From Ancient Egypt To Modern Day, Kaitlyn E. Dennis Miss
Research And Study Of Fashion And Costume History Spanning From Ancient Egypt To Modern Day, Kaitlyn E. Dennis Miss
Posters-at-the-Capitol
Through a generous donation to Morehead State University, research has been conducted on thousands of slides containing images of artwork and artifacts of historical significance. These images span from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the inaugural dress of every first lady of the United States. The slides are in the process of being recorded and catalogued for future use by students in hopes of furthering academic comprehension and awareness of the influence of fashion and costume history through the ages. Special thanks to the family of Gretel Geist Rutledge, faculty mentor Denise Watkins, as well as the Department of Music, Theatre, and …
Tilting Toward The Light: Translating The Medieval World On The Ming-Mongolian Frontier, Carla Nappi
Tilting Toward The Light: Translating The Medieval World On The Ming-Mongolian Frontier, Carla Nappi
The Medieval Globe
Ming China maintained relationships with neighboring peoples such as the Mongols by educating bureaucrats trained to translate many different foreign languages. While the reference works these men used were designed to facilitate their work, they also conveyed a specific vision of the past and a taxonomy of cultural differences that constitute valuable historical sources in their own right, illuminating the worldview of the Chinese-Mongolian frontier.
Japan On The Medieval Globe: The Wakan Rōeishū And Imagined Landscapes In Early Medieval Texts, Elizabeth Oyler
Japan On The Medieval Globe: The Wakan Rōeishū And Imagined Landscapes In Early Medieval Texts, Elizabeth Oyler
The Medieval Globe
This essay explores how the poetry collection Wakan rōeishū becomes an important allusive referent for two medieval Japanese works, the travelogue Kaidōki and the nō play Tsunemasa. In particular, it focuses on how Chinese poems from the collection become the means for describing Japanese spaces and their links to power, in the context of a changing political landscape.
The Painter, The Warrior, And The Sultan: The World Of Marco Polo In Three Portraits, Sharon Kinoshita
The Painter, The Warrior, And The Sultan: The World Of Marco Polo In Three Portraits, Sharon Kinoshita
The Medieval Globe
In the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism and postcolonial theory, Marco Polo is often cast as a quintessentially Western observer of Asian cultures. This essay seeks to break his text out of the binaries in which it is frequently understood. Returning the text to its original title, “The Description of the World,” it reconstructs the diversity of late thirteenth-century Asia through the portraits of three figures who were Marco’s contemporaries.
Towards A Connected History Of Equine Cultures In South Asia: Bahrī (Sea) Horses And “Horsemania” In Thirteenth-Century South India, Elizabeth Lambourn
Towards A Connected History Of Equine Cultures In South Asia: Bahrī (Sea) Horses And “Horsemania” In Thirteenth-Century South India, Elizabeth Lambourn
The Medieval Globe
This article explores ways that the concept of equine cultures, developed thus far principally in European and/or early modern and colonial contexts, might translate to premodern South Asia. As a first contribution to a history of equine matters in South Asia, it focuses on the maritime circulation of horses from the Middle East to Peninsular India in the thirteenth century, examining the different ways that this phenomenon is recorded in textual and material sources and exploring their potential for writing a new, more connected history of South Asia and the Indian Ocean world.
The Geographic And Social Mobility Of Slaves: The Rise Of Shajar Al’Durr, A Slave-Concubine In Thirteenth-Century Egypt, D. Fairchild Ruggles
The Geographic And Social Mobility Of Slaves: The Rise Of Shajar Al’Durr, A Slave-Concubine In Thirteenth-Century Egypt, D. Fairchild Ruggles
The Medieval Globe
Large numbers of outsiders were integrated into premodern Islamic society through the institution of slavery. Many were boys of non-Muslim parents drafted into the army, and some rose to become powerful political figures; in Egypt, after the death of Ayyubid sultan al-Salih (r. 1240–49), they formed a dynasty known as the Mamluks. For slave concubines, the route to power was different: Shajar al-Durr, the concubine of al-Salih, gained enormous status when she gave birth to his son and later governed as regent in her son’s name, converting to Islam after her husband’s death and then reigning as sultan in her …
Identity In Flux: Finding Boris Kolomanovich In The Interstices Of Medieval European History, Christian Raffensperger
Identity In Flux: Finding Boris Kolomanovich In The Interstices Of Medieval European History, Christian Raffensperger
The Medieval Globe
The politics of kinship and of monarchy in medieval eastern Europe are typically constructed within the framework of the modern nation-state, read back into the past. The example of Boris Kolomanovich, instead, highlights the horizontal interconnectivity of medieval Europe and its neighbors and demonstrates the malleability of individual identity within kinship webs, as well as the creation of situational kinship networks to advance individuals’ goals.
Periodization And “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation, Kathleen Davis, Michael Puett
Periodization And “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation, Kathleen Davis, Michael Puett
The Medieval Globe
The period categories “medieval” and “modern” emerged with—and have long served to define and legitimate—the projects of western European imperialism and colonialism. The idea of “the medieval globe” is therefore double edged. On the one hand, it runs the risk of reconfirming the terms of the colonial, Orientalist history through which the “medieval” emerged, thus homogenizing the plural temporalities of global cultures and effacing the material effects of the becoming of the Middle Ages and its relationship to conditions of globalization. On the other hand, “the medieval globe” brings to bear a comparative focus that does not ask when and …
Editor’S Preface, Carol Symes
The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2016), Carol Symes
Iconography: A Checklist Of Some Useful Sources For Scholars And Students Of Medieval Art And Drama, Clifford Davidson
Iconography: A Checklist Of Some Useful Sources For Scholars And Students Of Medieval Art And Drama, Clifford Davidson
Clifford Davidson
A classified bibliography of scholarship on medieval drama, art, and music compiled by Clifford Davidson in 2002. This reprint was created in 2014 for ScholarWorks at WMU, with some corrections to the content and the formatting of the 2002 version.
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …
Editor's Introduction To Pandemic Disease In The Medieval World: Rethinking The Black Death, Monica H. Green
Editor's Introduction To Pandemic Disease In The Medieval World: Rethinking The Black Death, Monica H. Green
The Medieval Globe
Extraction of the genetic material of the causative organism of plague, Yersinia pestis, from the remains of persons who died during the Black Death has confirmed that pathogen’s role in one of the largest pandemics of human history. This then opens up historical research to investigations based on modern science, which has studied Yersinia pestis from a variety of perspectives, most importantly its evolutionary history and its complex ecology of transmission. The contributors to this special issue argue for the benefits of a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to the many remaining mysteries associated with the plague’s geographical extent, rapid transmission, …
New Science And Old Sources: Why The Ottoman Experience Of Plague Matters, Nükhet Varlık
New Science And Old Sources: Why The Ottoman Experience Of Plague Matters, Nükhet Varlık
The Medieval Globe
Reconstructing the Ottoman plague experience is vital to understanding the larger Afro-Eurasian disease zone during the Second Pandemic. This essay deals with two different aspects of this experience. On the one hand, it discusses the historical and historiographical problems that rendered this epidemiological experience mostly invisible to previous scholars of plague. On the other, it reconstructs the empire’s plague ecologies, with particular attention to plague’s persistence, focalization, and transmission. Further, it uses this epidemiological experience to offer new insights and complicate some commonly held assumptions about plague history and its relationship to plague science.
Plague Depopulation And Irrigation Decay In Medieval Egypt, Stuart Borsch
Plague Depopulation And Irrigation Decay In Medieval Egypt, Stuart Borsch
The Medieval Globe
Starting with the Black Death, and continuing over the century and a half that followed, plague depopulation brought about the ruin of Egypt’s irrigation system, the motor of its economy. For many generations, the Egyptians who survived the plague therefore faced a tragic new reality: a transformed landscape and way of life significantly worsened by plague, a situation very different from that of plague survivors in Europe. This article looks at the ways in which this transformation took place. It measures the scale and scope of rural depopulation and explains why it had such a significant impact on the agricultural …
Diagnosis Of A "Plague" Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale, Monica H. Green, Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Wolfgang P. Müller
Diagnosis Of A "Plague" Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale, Monica H. Green, Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Wolfgang P. Müller
The Medieval Globe
This brief study examines the genesis of the “misdiagnosis” of a fourteenth- century image that has become a frequently used representation of the Black Death on the Internet and in popular publications. The image in fact depicts another common disease in medieval Europe, leprosy, but was misinterpreted as “plague” because of a labeling error. The error was then magnified because of digital dissemination. This mistake is a reminder that interpretation of cultural products continues to demand the skills and expertise of humanists. Included is a full transcription and translation of the text which the image was originally meant to illustrate: …