French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater

This book revives what was unique, strange, and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance taking place, not in “theaters,” but in churches, courts, and city streets. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a play-going experience associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of a late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.

Laura Weigert is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University, New Jersey. She is the recipient of grants from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Humboldt Foundation, and she was a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and a Felix Gilbert Member at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her publications include Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (2004) and articles in Art History, the Oxford Art Journal, Gesta, Studies in Iconography, The Art Bulletin, Art Journal and EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, as well as in numerous collections of essays.