Event

This talk critiques how, in order to understand the beliefs of historical people, scholars do not DO—instead, ironically, we read. We make ourselves immune to the affects of doing so as not to bias our “objective” analyses. As historians we restrict ourselves to what is in physical archives—meaning the texts and material remains of the past, the “empirical data” that allows us to claim that past events are objectively available for discovery. In this mode, modern scholars of religion particularly interpret religious experience especially as functionally synonymous with ideology, and cast historical religious people as dissembling and manipulative actors, not breathing, believing human beings. In order to understand medieval religious experience particularly, I propose that historians like myself also need to find extra-textual ways of understanding medieval religion. Performance Studies has long grappled with the differences between the archive and the repertoire, between the records of performance and the embodied movements, memories, and emotions of the performance itself which are often deemed unknowable by historians. If we want to understand how medieval people felt connected to their religion and devotional practices, we need to change the ways historians explore this history, going beyond textual evidence and resuscitating the “traces” of embodied experience cultivated by medieval religious ritual and present in medieval sources. We need to use performance to do history.  We still need rigorous archival research to reveal medieval practices, to be sure; but, if we don’t embody them as well, do we even fully understand what we’re reading from the archive? Isn’t the more ‘unscientific’ approach of doing worth the risk, if it testifies to the medieval religious commitment to durational devotional practice? Isn’t the risk of romanticization and anachronism involved in a re-performance exercise worth it, if it means we won’t neglect the history of embodied experience? If a scholarly audience drops all its defenses and allows itself to be perforated and taken in by historicized actions, how might our field—and our understanding of historical experience—transform?

Lauren Mancia is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and Professor of Medieval Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also a staff lecturer at The Met Cloisters. Mancia is the author of two books, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety at the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (2019) and Struggling Towards God: Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery (2023). A third book, Reperformance and Embodiment as Rigorous HIstorical Method, is coming out as a Cambridge Element in 2026.