Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Flesh And Spirit Onstage: Chronotopes Of Performance In Medieval English Theatre, Gregory Lee Cavenaugh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study uses Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope, which is the informing principle of one's experience of space and time, to explore different relations among space, time, actors, and audience in medieval theatre. Relations between the material and spiritual worlds as understood in the Middle Ages are considered in the context of relations between performers and audience members with two goals. First, I explore how the ontological status of the metaworld created through performance changed in the context of specific chronotopes. Second, I explore how diverse religious discourses affected medieval modes of representation. This study posits three chronotopes of performance informing medieval …