Performing women 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. Despite the perceived rarity of this well-known episode, its creators have remained anonymous. Yet the study of their performances and lives brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage.Beginning with the play and expanding outward, Performing women integrates new approaches to drama, gender, and patronage with a performance methodology to trace connections among the activities of the actor, the patron, their female family members, and their peers. It explores how the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that included and extended beyond the theatre. For example, decades before the play was staged, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of a young woman named Claude, who was acknowledged formally in a series of civic ceremonies. An in-depth investigation of the full spectrum of evidence for these performances - drama, liturgy, impersonation, devotional practice, and documentary culture - creates a unique portrait of the lives of individual women, and reveals a framework of ubiquitous female performance. The Catherine of Siena play represents a new paradigm: women forming the core of public culture. Networks of gendered performance offered roles of expansive range and depth to the women of Metz, and positioned them as vital and integral contributors to the fabric of urban life. Essential reading for scholars of pre-modern women and drama, Performing women is also relevant to lecturers and students of late-medieval performance, religion, and memory.
