In/Attention: Classroom Distraction and Early English Drama

CMRS Roundtable

Standard histories of drama understand the emergence of liturgical performance—as recorded in Æthelwold of Winchester’s late tenth-century monastic customary, the Regularis Concordia—in isolation. In this talk, Erica Weaver (English, UCLA) situates it alongside contemporaneous school texts to establish that it is actually part of a wider performative mode that promoted heightened concentration as the ultimate goal of monastic life.