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.
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