Inscription et Performance dans le Testament Rhetoricael d’Eduard de Dene (Bruges, 1562)

Abstract

The study of literary performance is generally limited to the oral presentation of texts by one or more performers in front of an audience. This article argues that this approach is too limited if we want to understand the performative possibilities of late medieval Dutch literature. On the basis of the work of Richard Schechner I offer a performative analysis of a type of text that is generally not considered as a form of literary performance, namely verse inscriptions, poems that circulated in written form outside of books. My corpus consists of a group of verse inscriptions written by the Bruges poet Eduard de Dene and included in his so-called Testament rhetoricael (1562). I show that analyzing these texts as a kind of performance, by looking more particularly at their interaction with a specific geographical location, audience and moment in time, can yield new insights into the functioning of late medieval poetry.