Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.

This book presents an important re-theorisation of gender and anti-Semitism in medieval biblical drama. It charts conflicts staged between dramatic personae in plays that represent theological transitions, including the Incarnation, Flood, Nativity and Bethlehem slaughter. Interrogating the Christian preoccupation with what it asserted was a superseded Jewish past, it asks how models of supersession and typology are subverted when placed in dramatic dialogue with characters who experience time differently. The book employs theories of gender, performance, anti-Semitism, queer theory and periodisation to complicate readings of early theatre’s biblical matriarchs and patriarchs. Dealing with frequently taught plays as well as less familiar material, the book is essential reading for specialist, undergraduate and postgraduate researchers working on medieval performance, gender and queer studies, Jewish-Christian studies and time.

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.

Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. The author explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England; brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past; and addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were, after the Reformation, increasingly viewed as disturbing.

This study argues that late medieval English 'mystery plays' were about masculinity as much as Christian theology, modes of devotion, or civic self-consciousness. Performed repeatedly by generations of merchants and craftsmen, these Biblical plays produced fantasies and anxieties of middle class, urban masculinity, many of which are familiar today.

Medieval English Drama provides a fresh introduction to the dramatic and festive practices of England in the late Middle Ages. The book places particular emphasis on the importance of the performance contexts of these events, bringing to life a period before permanent theatre buildings when performances took place in a wide variety of locations and had to fight to attract and maintain the attention of an audience. Showing the interplay between dramatic and everyday life, the book covers performances in convents, churches, parishes, street processions and parades, and in particular distinguishes between modes of outdoor and indoor performance. Katie Normington aids the reader to a fuller understanding of these early English dramatic practices by explaining the significance of the place of performance, the particularities of spectatorship for each event and how the conventions of the form of drama were manipulated to address its reception. Audiences considered range from cloistered members, congregations and parish members to urban citizens, nobles and royalty. Undergraduate students of literature of this period will find this an approachable and illuminating guide.

Although representations of medieval Christians and Christianity are rarely subject to the same scholarly scrutiny as those of Jews and Judaism, "the Christian" is as constructed a term, category, and identity as "the Jew." Medieval Christian authors created complex notions of Christian identity through strategic use of representations of Others: idealized Jewish patriarchs or demonized contemporary Jews; Woman represented as either virgin or whore. In Western thought, the Christian was figured as spiritual and masculine, defined in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish. Women and Jews are not simply the Other for the Christian exegetical tradition, however; they also represent sources of origin, as one cannot conceive of men without women or of Christianity without Judaism. The bifurcated representations of Woman and Jew found in the literature of the Middle Ages and beyond reflect the uneasy figurations of women and Jews as both insiders and outsiders to Christian society. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare provides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature. Focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Lampert explores the ways in which medieval and early modern authors used strategies of opposition to—and identification with—figures of Jews and women to create individual and collective Christian identities. This book shows not only how these questions are interrelated in the texts of medieval and early modern England but how they reveal the distinct yet similarly paradoxical places held by Woman and Jew within a longer tradition of Western thought that extends to the present day.

Power in medieval society has traditionally been ascribed to figures of public authority--violent knights and conflicting sovereigns who altered the surface of civic life through the exercise of law and force. The wives and consorts of these powerful men have generally been viewed as decorative attendants, while common women were presumed to have had no power or consequence. Reassessing the conventional definition of power that has shaped such portrayals, Women and Power in the Middle Ages reveals the varied manifestations of female power in the medieval household and community--from the cultural power wielded by the wives of Venetian patriarchs to the economic power of English peasant women and the religious power of female saints. Among the specific topics addresses are Griselda's manipulation of silence as power in Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale"; the extensive networks of influence devised by Lady Honor Lisle; and the role of medieval women book owners as arbiters of lay piety and ambassadors of culture. In every case, the essays seek to transcend simple polarities of public and private, male and female, in order to provide a more realistic analysis of the workings of power in feudal society.

Publisher description

"A broad and deep analysis of Mary Magdalene's prominence through overlapping discourses of late medieval English culture. . . . An elegantly written and valuable resource on theater, gender, and religion."—Baylor Journal of Theater and Performance