-About this site
-Using this site
-Credits
-About the musical instrument classification
-Technical FAQ
Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase offers resources for scholars, teachers, students, and performers to explore contemporary performance of medieval narrative. Our purpose is to see how medieval stories can be brought to life in performance for modern audiences, and how performance can be used to teach medieval literature in the classroom. We hope as well to promote a better understanding of ways in which medieval narratives may have been performed for their original audiences.
Video clips constitute the primary resource here. The clips feature a variety of actors, storytellers, singers, musicians, mimes, puppeteers, and dancers, who are professionals, skilled amateurs, teachers, and students. They perform scenes drawn from a wide range of medieval narrative genres, including epics, romances, lais, saints’ lives, allegorical works, tales, fabliaux, and others. The website has had something of a focus on Western Europe, but the linguistic and geographical range of works is becoming increasingly broad. The website also includes performances of narratives from analogous traditions, such as Egyptian Hilali epic.
This site focuses exclusively on the performance of narrative, as broadly defined. While many recordings and websites are devoted to medieval music and drama, the performance of medieval narrative is only beginning to be appreciated as an important fact. Modern performers and scholars have long recognized that medieval plays were intended to be played and lyric poems were meant to be sung. Yet medieval epics were likewise typically sung with instrumental accompaniment, verse romances were often recited and even acted out from memory, and fabliaux and other tales were performed by minstrels and other entertainers. Public reading of stories to assembled audiences also became an important performance mode. But private, silent reading, which is the norm today, was extremely rare in the Middle Ages. In short, medieval narratives were created and intended to be performed. Their “performability” was, and remains, part of their fundamental character, affecting in significant ways audience response. This site aims to make these works live again in performance.
Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase was originally launched as a pilot website, in spring of 2004, with a different URL. The new site contains a great many more clips, and we will continue to increase the number of clips and the range of traditions covered. The original site complemented a book of essays, Performing Medieval Narrative, edited by the co-founders of this site, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2005). Information about this book is available at http://www.boydell.co.uk/43840391.HTM. The present site also complements a book in progress, entitled Performability of Medieval French Narrative, by Vitz.
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Website Advisory Board:
Performers:
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Special thanks:
We especially want to thank our most generous donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, without whom this project would not have been possible.
We are deeply appreciative for support from Edward Sullivan, Dean for Humanities, School of Arts and Science, and from Matthew Santirocco, Dean of the College of Arts and Science, at New York University.
We are also grateful for the generous support of NYU's departments of French, English, and Comparative Literature; NYU's Medieval & Renaissance Center; and "Storytelling in Performance," a workshop of the NYU Humanities Council.
The musical instrument classification system used on this website is based on the system published in 1914 by Erich vol Hornbostel and Curt Sachs. "Under this system - now accepted by musicologists all over the world - instruments are categorized according to the way in which sound is produced" (Diagram Group, Musical Instruments of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia with more than 4000 Original Drawings, New York, Facts on File, 1976).
These are the five categories of instruments in the Hornbostel/Sachs classification, with examples of some instruments within each category:
We welcome your feedback on this site. You can email us at: perf-med-narr@lists.nyu.edu