Conference
Date: 13–14 November 2025
Location: Sint-Baafshuis – Room 1.07. Biezekapelstraat 2, Ghent, Belgium.
Opposite the ibis hotel, next to the cathedral. Bikes via Kapittelstraat entrance.
Registration via: https://event.ugent.be/registration/medievalperformance
Topic
Performance and performativity have proved to be highly productive concepts for understanding the social worlds of medieval texts in diverse literary, linguistic and historical contexts. Through associable notions of orality, aurality, gesture, ritual materiality, and agency, they have provided fresh ways to historicise texts. This conference seeks to build on such work through a comparative lens, bringing together case studies from different settings, languages and genres, to ask how texts functioned in social contexts, considering their written manifestations as only one part of their lives. What new insights can be gleaned from comparison of, say, Old Norse praise poetry, Latin charters, Arabic letters and Greek hagiographies? What commonalities unite performances in differing medieval literary cultures? What elements are distinct? And to what extent are performances conditioned by the language, genre and physical form of a text?
By bringing together scholars from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, we aim to tackle, amongst others, the following questions:
- How were medieval texts shaped by the performative context in which they were embedded?
- What role did memory, gestures, facial expressions, clothing, music, dance and procession play in performances?What social roles did texts offer individuals in their presentation and reception?What can we deduce about the spatial and temporal conditions in which texts were performed?
- How can we use tentative reconstructions of performances in social contexts to rethink genre designations?
- How did a text’s social performance contribute to the production, reproduction or challenging of social and societal norms and hierarchies?
- What was the disruptive potential of literary performance?
Range of the Conference
Our focus is the period c. 450–c. 1450 CE, which in a European context is conventionally referred to as the Middle Ages. However, the conference also features papers on non-European literary and cultural traditions from this timeframe, including those that follow different periodization systems.
Conference Programme
Organisers:
Jeroen De Gussem, Universiteit Gent
Robert Gallagher, University of Kent
Gowaart Van Den Bossche, Universität Zürich
Dinah Wouters, Universiteit Utrecht and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
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