Performance culture in medieval Metz, c. 200--1200.
Item
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Title
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Performance culture in medieval Metz, c. 200--1200.
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Identifier
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AAI3311208
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identifier
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3311208
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Creator
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Crowder, Susannah.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Pamela Sheingorn
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, Medieval | Theater | Religion, History of
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the history and culture of performance in the city of Metz, located in the Lorraine in the northeast of modern France, from the third through twelfth centuries. It realizes two goals: to situate the surviving evidence for medieval performance in its specific cultural and social context, and to develop new interpretive possibilities in the discipline of history through the use of the category of "performance" as a tool for the study of cultural and social history. Structured as a series of chronological case studies, this project brings together the disparate scholarly narratives of late antique, early medieval, and high medieval performance history through the combination of evidence for ceremony, ritual, and theater. As a Gallo-Roman city with a sizable amphitheater, the traditions of Roman imperial performance significantly shaped the public practices and material culture of late antique Metz. The city repeatedly employed that legacy for contemporary rituals and performances over the following millennium. This persistence of practice was not the result of simple, unconscious inheritance, however. Instead, contemporary performers and writers chose to preserve specific, useful elements of previous performance conventions in order to claim a special heritage for Metz and its communities. Chapter One gives an overview of Gallo-Roman Metz, then examines a Merovingian marriage ceremony that intertwined imperial and Frankish traditions to integrate a foreign bride into a new cultural and political context. Chapter Two studies the eighth-century regulation of religious processions, performance spaces, and financial stipends under the archbishops Chrodegang and Angilram, revealing the implantation of ecclesiastical controls within the cathedral chapter through liturgical performance and the mapping of distant places onto local geography. Chapter Three explores the later Carolingian era and the episcopacy of Drogo, showing how text and image in an Ordo for church dedication prescribed a physical practice that could create a lineage of local saintly bishops and export episcopal authority. Chapter Four investigates how the preservation of a Greek Laudes at the imperial religious foundation of St-Arnoul contributed to the retelling of institutional history in the new Ottonian era, decades after its original composition. In these chapters, the methodology of performance makes an understanding of the crucial importance of physical practice and its record newly available to historians. In each period, the reconsidered and innovative use of past performance practice played a central role for individuals and groups in their shaping of and participation in the social, religious, political, and cultural life of Metz and the broader world.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
