Speaking Flesh: Embodied Knowledge in Medieval Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and Performance

Heather Jennings
English
UC Davis

In her dissertation, Jennings explores medieval instruction in grammar and rhetoric as a means for understanding and interpreting performance in the Middle Ages. Rather than assuming a “third wall” in the theater, medieval drama relied on a dynamic relationship between performer and audience in which the actor’s body functioned as a medium for transforming the audience’s emotions as a way of making meaning.  Jennings argues that this interest in the body as a medium of communication was shaped in large part by the educational practices of the medieval classroom.  Using treatises on conduct, grammar, and rhetoric; school notebooks; poetry composed for pedagogical purposes; and other material related to education, she examines performance’s essential role in classroom instruction as well as how pedagogical practices shaped educated readers’ and viewers’ encounters with performance outside the classroom.  Her project explores how classroom exercises and performances shared with popular drama a reliance on sensory experience as a means of instruction, and then turns to examine how individual plays interrogated the relationship between performance, knowledge, and the bodies of the audience and performers.

Drawing on theories of performance and cognition, Jennings’s dissertation casts into relief productive correspondences between premodern and postmodern theorizations of the mind, the body, and the performer.  Her project uses medieval drama, which actively incorporated the audience into the play, as a fruitful site for considering how performance creates empathy among performers and audience.

Cognitive theory’s investigation of how embodied minds interpret the actions of others serves as a framework for her exploration of medieval theorizations and practices of performance as dynamic, embodied communication.