Performing women

Gender, self, and representation in late medieval Metz

Susannah Crowder

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526106407
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526106414
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

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.

1
Acting as Catherine: writing the history of female performers

Introduction

Scholarship on the medieval theatre encompasses a striking contradiction: although the 1468 Saint Catherine jeu is widely noted due to its female lead, the young woman herself is virtually unknown. Sixteenth-century sources depict her as having a prodigious memory, and as producing overwhelming emotions in the audience that secure her an advantageous marriage. Indeed, these and her sex are the characteristics for which the actor is currently noted. Although the melodramatic nature of such detail holds a certain appeal, as ‘history’ it is nonetheless problematic. The actor's personal and family identity, and her social and cultural context, remain mysterious. This state of obscurity is shared with other female actors of the later Middle Ages, whose biographies and circumstances remain largely hidden.¹ Yet the evidence still is tantalising: how is it possible to write the history of an actor who is described as remarkable, but who nonetheless goes unnamed?

In the case of the Catherine actor and Metz, this seeming problem offers an opportunity to reorient the study of female performance. In this chapter, I return women to centre stage, first investigating the impact of local narrative depictions of women upon understandings of them as actors, performers, and historical agents. Over time, the Metz chronicles transformed the figure of the Saint Catherine actor, eliding contemporary detail in favour of a cohesive, charming story. However, an unstudied early chronicle preserves identifying information that positions the actor in relation to her family, the patron of the jeu, and a regional culture of women's promotion of Saint Catherine. Additional archival documentation, manuscript culture, and visual imagery each testify to the deeper meanings that underlie her performance; together, these reveal how the actor transformed herself through participation in the jeu. Although the actor's low status constrains the direct evidence for her identity, broader study of the jeu nonetheless indicates that she and the patron produced a performance that positioned them and other women at the forefront of the worship of Catherine of Siena. The jeu situated its performers in relation to local and regional devotional trends, asserting ties with particular political and cultural movements. In the process, the actor took on a new, long-lasting role in which she embodied Saint Catherine within Metz. Ultimately, the process of re-contextualisation, amid local patterns of cultural expression, permits the Catherine actor and the larger devotional framework of the Saint Catherine jeu to be seen fully once more.

Although this rich backdrop lessens the exclusive position of the chronicle material, this genre nonetheless provides essential evidence for the actor, patron, and jeu. Moreover, the disproportionate impact of the Metz sources upon understandings of Continental female actors necessitates an approach grounded in the fundamentals. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the male citizens of Metz produced an impressive number of chronicles.² These texts depict the city as a centre for commerce, political intrigue, and cultural exchange. Not only do they document the Saint Catherine jeu, one of the best-known instances of women participating in the francophone theatre, but they also provide evidence for an extensive dramatic culture seen as analogous to those of other northern European cities such as Valenciennes, Bourges, or Lille.³ From the early fifteenth century onwards, narrative sources document the production of large-scale drama in Metz.⁴ Subjects included biblical narratives, saints’ and miracle plays, and moralities. Though no scripts and few archival records survive from Metz that correspond to a documented performance, various contemporary chronicles describe the staging of widely attended municipal dramas as well as smaller, private entertainments.⁵ This tradition positions a study of Metz to inform understandings of medieval performance more broadly. Chronicle authors form the primary source of information about actors and their performances in Metz, and the perspectives and biases of these texts continue to dominate.⁶

Taken as a whole, chronicle depictions of the Messine theatre provide an extensive catalogue of dramatic titles and a narrow perspective on historical practice. Despite the celebrated inclusion of the Catherine actor, depictions of female performers are scant and isolated overall. Narrative diversity has been narrowed further by the loss of the official annals and many civic records of Metz, producing a sometimes uncritical reliance upon chronicle evidence for the history of the city and its theatrical traditions.⁷ In the first portion of the chapter, I thus briefly evaluate the conventions that govern the Messine chronicles’ depictions of women, offering valuable context for interpreting the ways that such texts constitute female actors. This analysis suggests the systemic elimination of women's voices and agency, with serious consequences for their representation.

I then move to the known chronicle evidence for the 1468 staging of the Saint Catherine jeu. Current understandings of this event are based upon well-known sixteenth-century sources, which describe the romantic fate of the Catherine actor and the sponsorship of Catherine Baudoche.⁸ Neither an original script nor direct archival evidence for the jeu has survived, and, in isolation, these later chronicles provide little basis for social or cultural analysis. However, a fifteenth-century chronicle reveals new, contemporary evidence for the episode that underscores how depictions of the actor changed over time. Even within the confines of the genre, variations among the texts demonstrate the distorting effects of a ‘traditional’ composition of female performance and the loss of vital detail about the actor. The transformation of female participation in the Saint Catherine jeu, effected through the writing of historical narrative, indicates that additional lenses are needed to see female performance clearly.

In a final section, I thus integrate biography and cultural history to illuminate the Catherine actor and lay the groundwork for my larger project. Although the chronicles record identifying information about the two female participants, neither their lives nor the wider backdrop for the performance have been explored. I resituate the performers and their actions within the immediate circumstances of production and transmission, integrating the chronicle evidence with new and unstudied archival, manuscript, and visual material.⁹ These additional layers offer a novel way to understand this jeu and other female performances: as historical events mediated by individuals who chose performance as a way to participate in local and larger movements. Regional veneration of Catherine of Siena portrayed laywomen as leaders in her worship. Through the promotion of Saint Catherine's cult in varied media that included drama, architecture, and pious imagery, the actor transformed herself into a living representative of the saint, and the patron nurtured her existing institutional and political affiliations. The Saint Catherine jeu participants took part in a performance that incorporated multiple expressive modes to construct public voice and identity through shared devotions. These female performers ‘acted’ as independent agents exercising power, providing a vantage point for the questions of gender and performance addressed throughout this book.

‘Exceptional’? Depictions of women and dramatic roles in the Messine chronicles

Chronicle representations of the Saint Catherine jeu form the primary evidence for the Catherine actor; these narrative texts position her and the patron within a tradition that determines the contours of current knowledge. Yet such authors did not shape their histories randomly; their depictions of women, the theatre, and of actors demonstrate specific, generic formulations that influence the representation of female performance and performers. Depictions of actors – male and female alike – are few and far between, and archetypes for female figures are limited in scope, representing extreme and didactic examples. Thus the chronicle evidence for the Saint Catherine jeu – and for female performance in these narratives more generally – must be understood as the product of structural tendencies as well as specific historical events.

Given the broadly male paradigm of the chronicle genre and its prioritisation of men as authors, audiences, and subjects, the under-representation of female performers in Messine works is unsurprising.¹⁰ Scholarly reevaluations have identified the chronicles as functioning in performative ways to promote active agendas through both composition and transmission.¹¹ However, such critical readings of the genre have not been applied widely to the evidence for female performance. Moreover, approaches to the history of Metz have yet to incorporate methodologies that address gender and women's studies; this omission, combined with a continued reliance upon chronicle sources, has meant that women are eclipsed in studies of the city's past.¹² Through an unquestioning acceptance of the gendered perspectives of medieval authors, modern historians writing about Metz have reproduced the chronicles’ account of a period without women. As a result, scholarship on women and the theatre has been unable to assimilate the ‘isolated’ Messine material. The invaluable records of performances in which women took part – such as the 1468 jeu – have been interpreted as inescapable proof of the exceptional nature of female actors.

Overall, the Metz chronicles identify only a handful of actors; most are men. Twelve individuals are named in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century sources, a small fraction of the total number who performed.¹³ Writing of the effort to document female artists, Therese Martin argues, ‘it is clear that we are looking at the issue through the distortions of our contemporary lens. We want biographies of great artists, even as we recognise that any name at all, male or female, is an anomaly in the Middle Ages.’¹⁴ The evidence from Metz suggests that Martin's critique applies equally to the study of medieval actors: any name is an anomaly. Since most chronicle authors record dramatic performances in a haphazard manner, showing irregular interest in the details of who performed what, actors’ names appear only sporadically.¹⁵ So, although the evidence of the chronicles suggests that women appeared less often on stage than men, it also reveals the under-representation of actors more generally within the genre.

Generic perspectives shape the depiction of female performers in the Metz sources through gender-based filtering and distortion, as well. The written histories contain depictions of women that can be clustered into a few categories: perpetrators and victims of violence, religious curiosities, and participants in lay celebrations.¹⁶ Female figures feature regularly at the centre of violent episodes, engaging in independent actions that are condemned implicitly by their outcomes. A tellin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Plates and figures
• Preface
• Notes and abbreviations
• Family tree of Catherine Baudoche and Catherine Gronnaix
• Introduction
• 1 Acting as Catherine: writing the history of female performers
• 2 ‘I, Catherine’: biography, documentary culture, and public presence
• 3 Performance and the parish: space, memory, and material devotion
• 4 Negotiated devotions and performed histories: laywomen in monastic spaces
• 5 ‘Call me Claude’: female actors, impersonation, and cultural transmission
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Color Plates