A cultural history of gesture: England c.1380-1559

It exposes a void in current scholarship to suggest that gestural performances lie at the centre of contemporary modes of learning, highlighting how embodied engagements with faith allow for a new analysis of the nature of late medieval religious practices and teaching. The study establishes a sustainable grammar of religious gestures in late medieval England, tracing sources of encouragement for embodied performance before examining how established corporeal regimes could be distorted and re-appropriated.

The thesis begins with an introduction to the engagements with gestural politics that have emerged in medieval textual studies in recen t years to suggest that gestural studies may be a tangible, flowering field. I turn to the liturgy as the starting point for my own examination of the gestural culture of late medieval Christianity, exploring verbal and bodily engagement by preachers and congregants with generalised notions of gestural behaviour, while highlighting distortions of practice in relation to the liturgical year.