Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (Ludus) by Laurie Postlewate

For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created and propagated through public performance. Processions, coronations, speeches, trials, and executions are all types of public performance that were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of their actual performance.