For a handy and amusing (and profanity-laced) introduction to my approach to medieval plays, check out Michael Lueger’s 2017 interview with me at “Theatre History Podcast #39: Dr. Matthew Sergi and the Surprising Truth About Morality Plays.”
Publications
“Building a Medieval Drama Curriculum: A Defense of Periodization.” In Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, eds. John Sebastian and Emma Lipton (MLA, Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, forthcoming in 2024).
Review of Tison Pugh’s On the Queerness of Early English Drama. In Modern Philology 119.4 (2022).
Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
(Honorable Mention for the New York University 2022 Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama and Theatre; Honorable Mention for the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s 2021 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies: “Sergi’s Practical Cues seems to be the fullest answer to the promise contained within David Bevington’s From Mankind to Marlowe, that performance is part of the bones of what remains of medieval play-texts like the Chester cycle. This book speaks to both theatre-makers and theatre-scholars about the types of embodiment these play-texts afford or ‘cue.’ Sergi balances close reading of texts and records with practical questions about embodied performance, putting to use his own experience as both a practitioner and a scholar. Particularly in his use of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Sergi’s book suggests exciting avenues for more work that engages Performance as Research in early theatre studies.”)
(Reviewed by Alexandra Reider in The Medieval Review, 21.03.21: “In a tour de force, Matthew Sergi performs multiple kinds of analysis in ‘Un-dating the Chester Plays: A Reassessment of Lawrence Clopper's 'History and Development' and MS Peniarth 399’ to demonstrate that ‘no material in the Chester plays, and certainly not the plays taken in toto as a univocal cycle, should be tethered...to any range of dates more narrow than c. 1421-1591’ (73). Combining textual exegesis of Lawrence Clopper's actual argument as presented in his 1978 article, a reception history of Clopper's article, and a paleographical consideration of Cestrian letter-forms in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399, Sergi dismantles the idea of the Chester Plays as ‘datable’ with every instrument available to him (and two very informative tables).”)
(Winner of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s 2016 Martin Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies: “This essay achieves that rare feat of making scholars completely reassess a critical commonplace previously thought settled and uncontroversial. It had seemed so obvious that theatrical banns were for advertising, but Sergi convincingly demonstrates that they were not primarily marketing tools for plays but rather fundraising appeals. Sergi makes a clear case for why such a difference matters, showing the ways in which the ‘community of communities’ producing drama and its banns participated in mutually supportive economies. His illuminating reading of primary evidence, including REED records, is undergirded by a theoretically informed understanding of economics of gift exchange. Early drama, he contends, was not so much a capitalist venture in which actors competed for spectators, but a social practice enmeshed in networks of local identity, hospitality, and fellowship. Sergi’s work serves as a model for ensuring we understand the evidence of past times using the contexts that mattered then, rather than our own. What’s more, he achieves all this in lucid and engaging writing: his prose style is energetic, personal, and plainspoken, and his argument is precise and tightly crafted. Fascinating in its subject matter and truly significant in its implications, Sergi’s essay is a major contribution to early drama scholarship that will be important for years to come.”)
(Reviewed by Peter W. Travis in the Winter 2013 issue (66.4) of Renaissance Quarterly: “Part 2, ‘Faith and Doubt,’ comprises four essays, each an impressively original contribution… Matthew Sergi, reading the Chester Passion with the acumen of a stage director (and gambling expert), correlates the artificiality of the torturers’ game of dice with ‘aggressive Henrician reforms of recreation.’”)
(Winner of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s 2012 Barbara Palmer Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Archival Research: “The judging panel unanimously agreed that the 2012 Palmer Prize should go to Matthew Sergi, for his article entitled ‘Festive Piety: Staging Food and Drink at Chester,’ published in Medieval English Theatre 31, 89-136. Sergi proposes that, at Chester, believers negotiated the paradoxes of sacred gluttony and festive piety by incorporating them into a play cycle that both decried and celebrated conspicuous consumption as a proof of humanness, reaffirming the Eucharist's continuity with essential secular feasts, while simultaneously enacting and deferring the divine punishment that might restrain human appetites. The Chester food and drink episodes allow the Cestrian laity to enter into taverns with a clear conscience, despite the familiar homiletic warnings against them — to show their Whitsuntide devotion in their revelry. The judging panel also agreed that there was a very strong group of nominees overall, constituting a partial ‘who's who’ of the field and collectively demonstrating the state of the art. All were a pleasure to read. However, Sergi's article stood out as being the most original and innovative, particularly in its focus on what happens before, during, and after the theatrical performance itself. Its approach and methods are highly valuable even to those who work outside the field of early English drama, and the writing itself playful and entertaining as well as informed. They conclude, ‘We are sure that Barbara Palmer herself would have approved, both of the paper and of this approach to devotion.’”
Talks
“Comments (Embodying Belief, Touching Believers).” Prepared remarks as respondent for the “Embodying Belief, Touching Believers (ii)” panel at the 47th Annual Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, University of the South, Sewanee, TN, April 2022.
“Live Performance.” Presented as part of the “David Bevington: In Memoriam Amici Nostri” roundtable at the 56th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Online, May 2021.
“A Data-Driven Humanities Pedagogy: Undergraduates at REED.” Presented as part of the “Digital and Print Resources: Records of Early English Drama as a Teaching Tool” panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Online, January 2021.
“On Seriousness and Camp in Medieval Performance: Dux Moraud.” Invited presentation and workshop at “From Page to Stage: Medieval Drama and Modern Theater,” a symposium at Indiana University, Blomington, December 2019.
“The Middle of Mankind: Skipping to the Funny Parts of Moralities.” Presented as part of the “Sacred Comedy in Medieval Culture” roundtable at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2019.
“The Six Viewpoints and Medieval Performance.” Invited lecture and practical theatre workshop (combined into a two-hour session, at “Playing with History: A Performance-Based Historiography Symposium,” York University, Toronto, October 2018.
“The Chester Goldsmiths’ Innocents: Comedy and Infanticide.” Full invited lecture with respondent, at Caltech-Huntington Humanities Collaborations Workshop, Violence and Art: Reflections on the Premodern, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, April 2017.
“Retrofitting Medieval Performance.” Invited Speaker and Guest Instructor at the Folger Institute Yearlong Colloquium on Teaching Medieval Drama and Performance (directed by Theresa Coletti) at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, March 2017.
“Restoring Liberties: Site-Specific Performances of Mankind, The Pride of Life, and Robin Hood in 2015-16.” Presented as part of the “Medieval Drama and Its Afterlives” panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Philadephia, January 2017.
“Incompletion and Interaction: Teaching The Pride of Life.” Presented at the 20th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, Queen Mary-University of London, July 2016.
“REED: The Next Fifty Years.” Presented at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2015.
“That’s My Boy: Generations Onstage in the Chester Cycle.” Presented at “Playing Age: A Symposium” at the University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, February 2015.
“The Banns of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” Presented as part of a seminar on “The Boundaries of Medieval Drama” at the 19th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, July 2014.
“Amateurs and Compensation in Medieval Performance and Revival.” Presented at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2014.
“The East Anglian Banns: Advertising and Audience Expectations.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of Medieval English Theatre (“Audiences: A Conference in Memory of David Mills”), Cambridge University, March 2014.
“Advertising and Fundraising for Drama, 1450-1550.” Presented at the 4th CRRS Celebration of Early Modern Studies, University of Toronto, March 2014.
“Let’s Get Loud: Festivity and Containment in Revivals of the Chester Plays.” Presented at the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2013.
“Collaboration in the Chester Plays.” Opening remarks for an invited roundtable discussion on medieval collaborations at the 30th Annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Conference, University of Connecticut-Storrs, March 2013.
“Source Texts and Performance in Early Chester.” Invited hour-long address at the Harvard Medieval English Colloquium, November 2012.
“Body-Play in the Middle English Chance of the Dice.” Presented at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2012.
“Chance at Chester’s Passion.” Presented at the Chester 2010 Symposium: Drama and Religion, 1555-1575, University of Toronto, May 2010.
“A People’s History of the English Language: Pedagogy.” Presented at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2010.
“Tourism and Spectacle Along England’s Western Border.” Presented at the 16th International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Wales, Swansea, July 2008.
“Witnessing Food in Chester’s Plays and Records.” Presented at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2008.
“Demon Barbers: Endangering Boys in Medieval Performance at Chester.” Presented at the Conference on Medieval Children, 1200-1500, University of Kent, Canterbury, June 2006.