What a pleasure to be honoring Matilda, whom I have known for a very long time, and to be thinking – with her decades-long interests in mind – both about medieval court culture and about performance. I loved the piece she did for Cultural Performances in Medieval France, the Festschrift for Nancy Freeman Regalado: “The Pitfalls and Promise of Classroom Performance.”

For us today, The Romance of the Rose is a book, as it was for many people in the Middle Ages as well. It is likely that a wide variety of reading and reception practices were involved in the presentation of the Rose to medieval audiences. I have worked on some of these issues myself. I have argued that the Rose lent itself to “erotic reading”: that is, reading aloud in intimate settings by a man and a woman, one to another – a courtly reading practice that promoted love and couple-formation; I have also argued that divergent, and evolving, reading and performance practices may have fed the famous “querelle du Roman de la Rose.”

Biblical paraphrases in verse survive in most medieval European vernaculars, though sometimes in fragmentary form. They are often short; most commonly they are of single books or extracts from those books, though they may make allusions to the larger themes of the Bible. The following pages focus on general trends and highlight a few important verse paraphrases dating from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries, composed in forms of English, French and German. These three languages were particularly influential in the Middle Ages, exporting literary trends to other parts of Europe. But the languages and the texts described are in any case intended to be exemplary, to suggest something of the shape and nature of vernacular verse paraphrase of the Bible in the Middle Ages.

In the Old Testament, the books most often paraphrased by poets were Genesis, Judith, Psalms, Song of Songs, Daniel and Maccabees. In the New Testament, Christ's life, miracles and passion – especially the latter – were often retold in verse, and were typically derived from a gospel ‘harmony’, or even from the poet's memory, rather than being directly translated from a specific gospel. The Apocalypse received considerable attention too, often with commentary and in profusely illustrated manuscripts. In general, poets and translators were drawn to books or parts of books that told dramatic stories, but in the case of the psalms, which were central to liturgical and sacramental life, the imperative was devotional. Little attention was paid to the Old Testament prophets, with the exception of prophecies about Christ, which were often integrated into translations or paraphrases of the New Testament. The Pauline and Catholic Epistles attracted no direct verse translations, though they did inspire some versified homilies; scenes from Acts, such as the Martyrdom of Stephen and the Conversion of Paul, occur in hagiographical drama.

I happily dedicate this article to Nancy Freeman Regalado, a wonderful colleague. Her collaborative spirit and collegiality, her warm friendship, and her wise counsel have meant a great deal to me in my years at New York University.

The literary works that survive from the medieval period have come down to us in manuscripts. We are grateful for those manuscripts, as we are for the work of the scholars who edit and study them. But we also need to think beyond manuscripts, to the fact that few people in the Middle Ages actually read the words inscribed on those folios. It is through live performance of some kind that most men and women knew, experienced, and appreciated the works contained in manuscripts. In the Middle Ages, works were frequently recited from memory, sung, acted out, or read aloud; private reading was rare, silent reading practically non-existent.

My recent work focuses largely on issues relating to the performance of narrative. We all recognize that medieval plays were intended to be performed dramatically, and songs to be sung. But it is somehow harder for us today to conceive that most medieval narratives were also intended for live performance. (One problem is surely that storytelling in modern Western culture has been relegated to the world of children.) These pages are drawn from a book in progress that evaluates the “performability” of a number of French medieval narratives. My underlying argument is that works often contain within themselves a considerable amount of information as to how they were to be performed: they tell us whether they were to be recited, or acted out by one or more performers, or sung, or read aloud, or read privately; they may also tell us a good deal about the tone, mood, and performance style that are called for.

This article focuses on Aucassin et Nicolette. Many scholars have emphasized its considerable debt to the literature of the period – and indeed epic, historical discourse, romance, lyric, and saint's life are combined and woven together here in a delightful manner. This is a deeply literary work in the sense that what it sets before its audience is not “reality” but rather a mirror reflecting many different kinds of works of literature (or verbal eloquence).