Performing (In)Attention: Ælfric, Ælfric Bata, and the Visitatio sepulchri

The central regulatory document of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform, Æthelwold of Winchester's Regularis concordia, contains an important performance piece: the Visitatio sepulchri, which standard theater histories understand as an anomalous originary text that marks the reemergence...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Representations (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2020-10, Vol.152 (152), p.1-24
Main Author: WEAVER, ERICA
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
10th century
Aelfric (955?-1010?)
Aethelwold (908?-984)
Attention
Bata, Aelfric
British & Irish literature
Drama
English literature
Historical text analysis
Middle Ages
Theater
Theater history
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Summary:The central regulatory document of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform, Æthelwold of Winchester's Regularis concordia, contains an important performance piece: the Visitatio sepulchri, which standard theater histories understand as an anomalous originary text that marks the reemergence of drama in the European Middle Ages. This article resituates it alongside the schoolroom colloquies of Æthelwold's student Ælfric of Eynsham and his student and editor Ælfric Bata to argue that these texts together cultivated monastic self-possession by means of self-conscious performances of its absence. By staging (in)attention, they thereby modeled extended engagement in moments and spaces that could otherwise seem too quiet or empty to hold concentration for long, from the classroom to the sepulcher to the page, while also exposing the limits of "distraction" and "attention" as analytical terms.
ISSN:0734-6018
1533-855X
DOI:10.1525/rep.2020.152.1.1