Renaissances

Ritual, Ceremony and Performance

Re-opening Ceremony and Ritual Ceremony, Performance and Practice in Shakespearean Drama

Professors Findlay and Twycross and Drs Appelbaum and Oakley-Brown are members of this interdisciplinary University-based research grouping which brings together colleagues from History, Literary Studies, Musicology, Theatre Studies, Management and Organisation Studies, and Criminology to explore how ritual and ceremonial practices are re-placed across time, space, and across the boundaries of cognate human sciences.

Professor Twycross researches civic rituals, processions, and performance practices of the late medieval period in England and the Southern Low Countries using forensic examination of the damaged manuscript of the 1415 Ordo paginarum, York’s official checklist of the Corpus Christi celebrations. Dr Appelbaum is working on the literature of terrorism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship for 2007-8. His research on representations of violence in English and French drama and historical records, such as The Massacre at Paris and Chantelouve’s Tragedie de feu Gaspar de Colligni (1575), explores the categorization of violence as ‘ritualistic’. Professor Findlay is researching the performative character of ceremonies in sixteenth and seventeenth-century drama to interrogate the conclusion that the staging of rituals effectively ‘empties them’ of significance and presented a paper on ceremonies to the seminar on ‘Shakespeare and the Court’ as the Shakespeare Association of America Conference (2008). Dr Oakley-Brown is reading the work of Thomas Churchyard (1520-1604), a former soldier, as Protestant rites of passage through which literature fashions earlier rituals or pilgrimage to construct orderly (and disorderly) identities. She has recently published The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern.

Two initial interdisciplinary symposia with speakers from the States, Britain and Europe were held at Lancaster in the Institute for Advanced Studies to reopen the discursive frame within which ceremony and ritual are understood: as historical phenomena, as artistic practices, as religious media, as disciplinary structures and as disorderly fields of resistance.

Liz Oakley-Brown & Louise J. Wilkinson, eds., The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern (Four Courts Press 2009)

The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern explores the ways in which, whether a consort or a ruler in her own right, the late medieval and early modern queen was a pivotal, and often controversial, figure. By examining the historical character of the queen as represented in letters, chronicles and documents of state, as well as her fashioning (and re-fashioning) in a range of literary works and visual media, the essays in this collection interrogate the role of the female monarch, primarily within the British Isles, both as a symbol of harmony and dynastic stability and as a potential focus for political factionalism, disunity and discontent. The Review of English Studies (May 2010) writes, "The essays are of a uniformly high quality and make an important contribution to our current understanding of female magistracy in the pre-modern world... Oakley-Brown and Wikinson have done a masterful job of assembling an array of new scholarly perspectives on the field of early modern queenship."

Ritual, Ceremony and Performance

Liz Oakley-Brown & Louise J. Wilkinson, eds., The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern (Four Courts Press 2009)