The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University: The Works of Thomas Chaundler, by Thomas Meacham

In 2020, the editors of Walter de Gruyter’s publication series on early drama, art and music invited fresh studies on the wider themes of performativity and medievalism. Thomas Meacham’s book is certainly a fresh contribution to this series. It departs from the assertions made by the previous large studies on drama in the medieval world, dating back to Frederick Boas’s study in 1914. All concluded that ‘university drama in England is essentially a post-medieval phenomenon’. By selecting examples from the texts of the university chancellor Thomas Chaundler, Meacham provides the reader with a confident counter-argument. Medieval academic communities experienced ‘performativity’ deep within the daily grind of university life. Meacham suggests a re-focus on the potential of an academic text for both individual and communal performance, and on the liturgical offices and festivities that played a crucial role in medieval university culture.

The first strength of Meacham’s book is his reliance on, and treatment of, historical context. This is a work written for students of literature, theatre and history. The personal story of Thomas Chaundler and the institutional evolution of Oxford as a studium generale are laid out clearly in the Introduction, and link well to Meacham’s chosen textual examples. The dramatic events of the St Scholastica Day Riot—a crucial event that led to the emergence of Oxford’s studium generale—are responded to with Meacham’s earliest example of early medieval ‘performativity’, the Planctus Universitatis Oxoniensis (pp. 9–13). Though brief, the previous canon of university histories is always referenced for further consultation. The evolution of the late medieval school and its system of scholastic pedagogy is a crucial context that Meacham uses to carry out his examination of Chaundler’s Liber Apologeticus. The Liber, written for Chaundler’s patron Thomas Bekynton, is redefined by Meacham as an example of late medieval performativity rather than of the early renaissance period, through examination of its themes and intended audience of ‘Wykehamists’.

The book’s second strength is the fluency with which Meacham combines the historical, the theatrical and the codicological elements in his analysis. Among many examples, he highlights the symmetry between the Liber’s many characters’ doctrinal explications and the typical textual exegesis in university lectures (p. 28); the same analysis for epistolary exchanges that were akin to those recreational and moral exchanges of the Christmas King (p. 130); the relationship between the written word and rubrications in the Libellus de laudibus (pp. 83–8); and the notion of individual readership as a performance, applying the previous research of Mary Carruthers on monastic reading (pp. 50–51). On this point, the reader is provided with a beautiful reproduction of the illustrations from Trinity College MS R.14.5, the parent codex of the Liber apologeticus and the main case-study of Chapter Two. The cultivation of moral virtues, such as piety (pietas), is present in the texts of the Trinity MS and should be seen as a defence of earlier medieval moral philosophy rather than an emergence into a phase coined by Andrew Cole, ‘ecclesiastical humanism’. Meacham proves this by providing a deep textual analysis of the Liber and its many medieval inspirational texts, notably St Bonaventure and Bernard of Clairvaux (pp. 49–50). The illustrations for the Trinity MS are in Appendix 4 and can easily be cross-referenced from Meacham’s analysis (pp. 51–5).

For the doctoral student community, this is a highly researched work with much content and references in each chapter. The language and analysis is clear and accessible, references are conveniently placed at the end of each chapter, individual manuscripts are analysed in a huge amount of complex detail, and Latin quotations are provided alongside the English translations. The Appendices include a useful codicology of All Souls College MS 182, the Trinity MS illustrations, and an extensive list and initial analysis of all manuscripts consulted in the book. Truly, even the undergraduate student could gain much from this book, while also being directed beyond Meacham’s work through its wide bibliography.

Having read this book foremost as a medieval historian, I was reassured by Meacham’s self-reflective reading into his own arguments through each chapter. My first reaction to the word ‘performativity’, a word that was coined by a 1950s scholar rather than one from the twelfth century, was that this word was potentially too modern to apply to a selection of medieval texts. Thankfully, Meacham directly addresses this issue in the Conclusion. On this idea he takes advantage of other recent research into medieval pedagogical practices, including that of Alex Novikoff and Paul Sullivan. As Meacham notes in the Introduction and in other references throughout the book, there is an idea of mimesis or imitation in the different readership opportunities of these medieval texts. What is impossible to decipher, and Meacham appears to know this by referencing other secondary material, is a solid reference to this kind of ‘performance’ by the medieval writers and readers themselves. Each medieval text shares similar themes and details but Meacham also concedes that these texts are unique in both context and readership; there are issues of ownership and editing that hinder the original quality of a written text. These are welcome concessions to a historian. As Meacham ends his book with an open conclusion on the potential for performativity in these texts, it is my hope that other scholars will continue to address these by looking at the other academic texts that are proposed as further exciting examples of a medieval ‘tradition’ of university drama.