Abstract

Drama is fundamentally an embodied and social medium, and medieval audiences are likely to have been far more conscious of this than many modern theatre-goers. During the late-medieval period, all plays were performed in spaces used and designed for non-dramatic, everyday purposes, a fact that shaped not only how they performed but also their audience demographic and how the plays made meaning. Drama was, moreover, not primarily designed for entertainment and was, instead, occasional, with plays participating in important local and national religious feasts and holidays or commissioned as part of socio-political events, such as the banquets in royal and noble households and guild halls. This meant that medieval drama was intrinsically connected with and responsive to site, audience, and the important social and religious issues of the day. However, medieval plays were more than cognitive scaffolds, used by a community to extend individual cognitive processes, like contemplating the Nativity or debating the nature of true nobility; instead, I argue, the medieval dramatic event itself constituted a cognitive process. Drawing on Richard Menary’s concepts of integrated and enculturated cognition, and combining it with current site-specific performance theory, this essay will explore how medieval plays constructed unique cognitive niches, with actors and audiences contributing to a collaborative cognitive practice. In doing so, it will also consider the construction of space and the use of site, the relationship between medieval actors and audiences, the ontology of medieval performance, and to what extent site and the bodies of players and audiences might function as ‘cognitive artefacts’, participating in the cognitive process of meaning making, both within and beyond the theatrical frame. While many studies have advanced our understanding of the social and spatial contexts of medieval drama, and the importance of a flexible player-spectator boundary has been widely acknowledged, there are still considerable gaps in our understanding of the complex, dynamic interactions between performance, audience, site, and medieval culture more broadly. Integrated social cognition can help to address those gaps, highlighting important factors, beyond the actors and the play’s narrative, that actively participate in meaning making, elements like the performance site and the audience themselves.