The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University

Download or read book The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University written by Thomas Meacham and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a truly paradigm-shifting study that reads a key text in Latin Humanist studies as the culmination, rather than an early example, of a tradition in university drama. It persuasively argues against the common assumption that there was no "drama" in the medieval universities until the syllabus was influenced by humanist ideas, and posits a new way of reading the performative dimensions of fourteenth and fifteenth-century university education in, for example, Ciceronian tuition on epistolary delivery. David Bevington calls it "an impressively learned discussion" and commends the sophistication of its use of performativity theory.