Performing women : gender, self, and representation in late medieval Metz /

Crowder, Susannah,

Performing women : gender, self, and representation in late medieval Metz / Susannah Crowder - Manchester : Manchester University Press, (c)2018. - 1 online resource (x, 263 pages) : illustrations, maps - Manchester medieval literature and culture ; 22 .

Includes bibliographies and index.

Acting as Catherine: writing the history of female performers -- 'I, Catherine': biography, documentary culture, and public presence -- Performance and the parish: space, memory, and material devotion -- Negotiated devotions and performed histories: laywomen in monastic spaces -- 'Call me Claude': female actors, impersonation, and cultural transmission

This book takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the 'exceptional' staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Exploring the lives and performances of these previously anonymous women, the book brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage. It integrates new approaches to drama, gender and patronage with a performance methodology to explore how the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that extended beyond the theatre. For example, decades before the 1468 play, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of an impersonator named Claude. Offering a new paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture, Performing women is essential reading for scholars of pre-modern women and drama, and is also relevant to lecturers and students of late-medieval performance, religion and memory



9781526127242 9781526141989


Catherine, of Siena, Saint, 1347-1380 --In literature.


Actresses--History.--France--Metz
Drama--History and criticism.--15th and 16th centuries


Electronic Books.

PN1590 / .P474 2018