St. Martinville, 1898 Mardi Gras
My current book project is tentatively entitled Coeval Entanglements: Disruptive Chronologies of Late Medieval Performance. This project embraces multiple temporalities, performance theory, and the physics of time to propose fresh methods for the narration of medieval European history. Using liturgical theatre, saints’ plays, ritual processions, meditative practices, and mystères mimés (living tableaux depicting the life of Christ) from women’s religious communities in late medieval France, it seeks to dispense with modernist constructions of time and their rigid imprint on historiographies of the Middle Ages; instead, it foregrounds in these feminine sources an experience of time as affective repetition and embodied narration. In addition to exploring these medieval modes of performance, this project is also interested in their re-performance outside of medieval Europe, francophone regions across the Atlantic such as Acadia, the Caribbean, and south Louisiana, a trajectory that follows my family’s circuitous wonderings from Paris and Caen to Guadeloupe and Acadia and finally to New Orleans and St. Martinville. This project will thus reveal the French premodern as it flickers in carnival festivities, mortuary rituals, saints’ shrines and processions, cultural memory, and the performance of Cajun and Creole ballads and danses rondes, all of which challenge simple notions of an untangled “medieval” past that is indeed past. The book asks how medieval cultural traditions have created and re-created themselves through perpetually reproduceable forms of transmission in performance, literature, ritual, and festival, and it seeks to envision a coeval temporality that insists on access to the deep past through its living traces in the present. It interweaves archival and manuscript research with family and community memory in order to emphasize the multiple, intersecting timelines and cultural accretions through which we come to generate a present reckoning of the premodern past in varied localizations of family, community, school, and popular media.