The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary by Seeta Chaganti

The conceptual complexity of Chaganti's argument in her opening chapters makes succinct summation difficult, and so I believe attending more fully to that complexity will best represent the book for potential readers. This review will focus on Part One of the book, as those initial chapters set the conceptual stage for the case studies in Parts Two and Three. Throughout, the footnotes are crucial, often clarifying the book's methodology. Parts Two and Three present case studies of the poetic and artistic dimensions of danse macabre and carole/carol, respectively. Part One of the book includes chapters that define key concepts and Chaganti's application of them to considerations of poetic form. Both black and white images and color plates present manuscript images, in-situ and reconstructed mural art, and stills from performances of twentieth- and twenty-first century dance. Twenty-four black and white images are interspersed throughout the text, and ten full-color plates are collocated in the center of the book. Strange Footing is divided into three parts of two chapters each along with an introduction and conclusion. The titular phrase registers Brecht's concept of Verfremdungseffekt, a term uncited by Chaganti, but which one might variously translate as alienation-effect, defamiliarization, or estrangement. Instead such a turn engenders 'strangeness' (4). She argues that a turn to the medieval need not reify discourses of unity and proportion.

Her account of experience and performance nevertheless emerges from the medieval rhetorical concept of ductus, which she characterizes as 'the experience of the work engages the viewer's participation, skill, habituation, and perception' (43).

Chaganti acknowledges that her method for thinking about these perceptual experiences turns not to 'traditional historicist interpretive practice' but 'the present's perspective on performance' (42). In Strange Footing, the 'collusion' between poetry and dance concerns how 'perceptual experiences' of participants and spectators in one art form can inform experiences of the other art.

The book is of a piece with Chaganti's previous book, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, which links poetry and material culture. California State University, Chaganti's Strange Footing revels in the 'material collusion' between dance and poetry, arguing for formal interactions between the two arts beyond discourses of analogy.

The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary by Seeta Chaganti