Early Social Performance

Examines the nature and socialization of disabled performers in the medieval and early Tudor periods.

Investigates the theatrical objects, texts, images, architectures, and performers of late medieval Seville, showing how public spectacle facilitated cultural exchange, forged religious identities, and animated imperial projects among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

A study of medieval Marian laments, a performative genre that offered clerical and lay audiences a deeply inspiring devotional experience.

This study shows the importance of carolling in the celebrations and festivities of medieval Britain and demonstrates its longevity from the eleventh century to the sixteenth.

Performance traditions before 1642 in the northeast of England, and the impulses that affected traditions ranging from wedding revels and sporting activities, through civic plays and processions, to the customary performances of hunters and ploughmen.

At once scholarly and entertaining, Christ on a Donkey is a study of Palm Sunday processions and related royal entries as both spectacular instances of processional theater and highly charged interpretations of the biblical narrative to which they claim allegiance. Harris’s narrative ranges from ancient Jerusalem to modern-day Bolivia, from imperial white horses to wheeled wooden images of Christ on a donkey, from veneration to iconoclasm, and from Christ to Ivan the Terrible. A curious theme emerges: those embodied representations of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem that were labeled blasphemous, idolatrous, or superstitious by those in power were arguably most faithful to the biblical narrative of Palm Sunday, while those staged with the purpose of exalting those in power and celebrating military triumph were arguably blasphemous pageants.