In Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture, Jill Stevenson uses cognitive theory to explore the layperson s physical encounter with live religious performances, and to argue that laypeople s interactions with other devotional media - such as books and art objects - may also have functioned like performance events. By revealing the remarkable resonance between cognitive science and medieval visual theories, Stevenson demonstrates how understanding medieval culture can enrich the study of performance generally. She concludes by applying her theories of medieval performance culture to contemporary religious forms, including creationist museums, Hell Houses, and megachurches.

In Sensational Devotion, Jill Stevenson examines a range of evangelical performances, including contemporary Passion plays, biblical theme parks, Holy Land re-creations, creationist museums, and megachurches, to understand how they serve their evangelical audiences while shaping larger cultural and national dialogues. Such performative media support specific theologies and core beliefs by creating sensual, live experiences for believers, but the accessible, familiar forms they take and the pop culture motifs they employ also attract nonbelievers willing to “try out” these genres, even if only for curiosity’s sake. This familiarity not only helps these performances achieve their goals, but it also enables them to contribute to public dialogue about the role of religious faith in America. Stevenson shows how these genres are significant and influential cultural products that utilize sophisticated tactics in order to reach large audiences comprised of firm believers, extreme skeptics, and those in between. Using historical research coupled with personal visits to these various venues, the author not only critically examines these spaces and events within their specific religious, cultural, and national contexts, but also places them within a longer devotional tradition in order to suggest how they cultivate religious belief by generating vivid, sensual, affectively oriented, and individualized experiences.

This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays bring recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition is seen as distributed across brain, body and world. The volume includes essays on law, history, drama, literature, art, music, philosophy, science and medicine, covering topics such as the mind, life and soul; the body and environment; the emotions; language and linguistic theories; theory of mind and interaction theory; the self and subjectivity; social, material and conceptual environments; the memory arts, orality and literacy; and literature and the arts.

The interdisciplinary volume Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives examines the interaction between medieval English worshippers and the material objects of their devotion, with chapters that extend the temporality of objects and buildings beyond the Middle Ages.

Interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of the middle ages, from illuminated manuscripts to church architecture.

In Cultures of Witnessing, Emma Lipton considers the plays that were performed in the streets of York on the Feast of Corpus Christi from the late fourteenth century until the third quarter of the sixteenth and shows how civic performance and the legal theory and practice of witnessing promoted a shared sense of urban citizenship.

This book explores new developments in the dialogues between science and theatre and offers an introduction to a fast-expanding area of research and practice.The cognitive revolution in the humanities is creating new insights into the audience experience, performance processes and training. Scientists are collaborating with artists to investigate how our brains and bodies engage with performance to create new understanding of perception, emotion, imagination and empathy. Divided into four parts, each introduced by an expert editorial from leading researchers in the field, this edited volume offers readers an understanding of some of the main areas of collaboration and research: 1. Dances with Science 2. Touching Texts and Embodied Performance 3. The Multimodal Actor 4. Affecting Audiences Throughout its history theatre has provided exciting and accessible stagings of science, while contemporary practitioners are increasingly working with scientific and medical material. As Honour Bayes reported in the Guardian in 2011, the relationships between theatre, science and performance are 'exciting, explosive and unexpected'. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science charts new directions in the relations between disciplines, exploring how science and theatre can impact upon each other with reference to training, drama texts, performance and spectatorship. The book assesses the current state of play in this interdisciplinary field, facilitating cross disciplinary exchange and preparing the way for future studies.