Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville

Christopher Swift is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York, New York City College of Technology. He researches and teaches performance architecture, puppetry, and medieval theatre.

Ritual and spectacle have long fascinated historians of late medieval Iberia (this reviewer among them). Surviving traces of liturgical, civic, and royal performances reveal tempting glimpses of how an oppressive and divided society imagined itself. In Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre, Christopher Swift analyzes these performances as theater, thereby bringing the tools of performance studies to bear on Iberian material, and bringing Iberia into a scholarly conversation on medieval theater that has hitherto focused mainly on England and France. Swift follows Carol Symes, Jessica Brantley, and others in widening the scope of theatrical subject matter to include “social performances.” Within this broad category of “public acts,” the book’s three chapters focus on those that inscribed religious identity and the hierarchies of imperial power in and around Seville between its Christian conquest in 1248 and the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century. As the origin point of the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391, the initial site of the Spanish Inquisition in 1480, and the gateway to the Spanish New World in the sixteenth century, Seville is an eminently logical context for a study of this kind, although the book focuses more on broader cultural trends than on the local politics of the city itself.[...]Historians of Iberia will find here familiar material analyzed from a performance studies perspective, with particular attention to physical and emotional impacts. Those who are less familiar with the region will find good summaries of the existing historio graphy. There are a few places where the synthesis is a little thin—most notably in the discussion of the vexed term convivencia. I would have liked to see a bit more clarity and nuance in the treatment of this concept, particularly given its centrality to the book. Overall, the book brings a welcome new lens to the ritual cultures of late medieval Iberia.

• Notes and AbbreviationsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Theatres of AbsenceChapter One: Theatrical Acculturation and the Andalusi ColonyChapter Two: Penance, Conversion, and Affective ConvivenciaChapter Three: Strange Infidels in the Imperial MetropoleConclusion: Walking GhostsBibliographyIndex