The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War. Philadelphia: Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, 2002
Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes,... more Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes, charivaris, and masking invited the English and French nobility to assert their identities in gesture and costume as well as in speech. These events presumed that performance makes a self, in contrast to the modern belief that identity precedes social performance and, indeed, that performance falsifies the true, inner self. Susan Crane resists the longstanding convictions that medieval rituals were trivial affairs, and that personal identity remained unarticulated until a later period.
Focusing on England and France during the Hundred Years War, Crane draws on wardrobe accounts, manuscript illuminations, chronicles, archaeological evidence, and literature to recover the material as well as the verbal constructions of identity. She seeks intersections between theories of practice and performance that explain how appearances and language connect when courtiers dress as wild men to interrupt a wedding feast, when knights choose crests and badges to supplement their coats of arms, and when Joan of Arc cross-dresses for the court of inquisition after her capture.
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Books by Susan Crane
The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.
Focusing on England and France during the Hundred Years War, Crane draws on wardrobe accounts, manuscript illuminations, chronicles, archaeological evidence, and literature to recover the material as well as the verbal constructions of identity. She seeks intersections between theories of practice and performance that explain how appearances and language connect when courtiers dress as wild men to interrupt a wedding feast, when knights choose crests and badges to supplement their coats of arms, and when Joan of Arc cross-dresses for the court of inquisition after her capture.
Chapters on Masculinity, Feminine Mimicry and Masquerade, Gender and Social Hierarchy, Subtle Clerks and Canny Women, and Adventure draw on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer’s profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance.
This book is also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D80C4W4W.
Chapters 1 and 2: Romances of English heroes assess the political ideas sustaining the shift from feudal toward national organization. Chapter 3: Pious romances counter the church's vision of irreconcilable opposition between worldly ambitions and devotion to God. Chapters 4 and 5: Romances concerned with courtliness question the hermetic elevation and spiritual refinement of conventional “courtoisie.”
This book is also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8QZ2B94.
Papers by Susan Crane
The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.
Focusing on England and France during the Hundred Years War, Crane draws on wardrobe accounts, manuscript illuminations, chronicles, archaeological evidence, and literature to recover the material as well as the verbal constructions of identity. She seeks intersections between theories of practice and performance that explain how appearances and language connect when courtiers dress as wild men to interrupt a wedding feast, when knights choose crests and badges to supplement their coats of arms, and when Joan of Arc cross-dresses for the court of inquisition after her capture.
Chapters on Masculinity, Feminine Mimicry and Masquerade, Gender and Social Hierarchy, Subtle Clerks and Canny Women, and Adventure draw on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer’s profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance.
This book is also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D80C4W4W.
Chapters 1 and 2: Romances of English heroes assess the political ideas sustaining the shift from feudal toward national organization. Chapter 3: Pious romances counter the church's vision of irreconcilable opposition between worldly ambitions and devotion to God. Chapters 4 and 5: Romances concerned with courtliness question the hermetic elevation and spiritual refinement of conventional “courtoisie.”
This book is also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8QZ2B94.