Performative Literary Culture (1200-1700)
Performative literary culture refers to the Western European civic culture of plays, songs, and poems performed for live audiences and the non-professional late medieval and early modern institutions sponsoring and organizing meetings and events for literary performances.
Poems, songs and plays were created and performed in the connaisseur-environment of friends and fellows, but also in open-air and public space during secular and religious feasts and in local and regional festive competitions held at regular or irregular intervals.
The regional networks and clusters of related organizations of performative literary culture were formative in the creation of regional cultural and civic identities. This was the case in the Dutch-speaking Low Countries with the chambers of rhetoric and in the French-speaking Low Countries and Northern France with the joyous companies and confraternities of the Puys, in Southern Germany with the companies of Meistersinger, in the Occitan world with the Consistories of Joyous Knowledge, and in Italy and Spain with the academies.
Performative literary culture created interfaces between practices and ideas from oral and performative culture, the culture of manuscript and printed book, and visual culture. It also mediated between local and universal cultures of learning. Many organizations of performative literary culture were explicitly dedicated to the seven liberal arts (music and rhetoric in particular).