Medieval Women and the "Problem" of Performance

This paper seeks to expand our understanding of late-medieval, urban women and their relationship to performance through a study of the intersection of gender and practice in fifteenth-century France.  Revisionist scholarship has upended older assumptions about medieval women and their connections to drama and patronage:  female contributions to these areas are no longer seen as being exceptional.  Instead, scholars in varying disciplines have positioned women as actors in and makers of local dramatic and visual culture.  My project adds a new perspective to the conversation, using performance theory to meld these approaches in order to trace the ways that women took part in the varied categories of performance that included and extended beyond scripted drama.  This paper surveys a spectrum of economic, visual, textual, and archival evidence within historical context in order to map the ways that women used performance to represent and memorialize their varied identities.  I argue that women regularly accessed performance and its networks of expressive, performative, commemorative practice in order to participate in and create urban culture in significant and vital ways.