Performing women

"Performing Women in the Middle Ages approaches medieval lyric poetry through the lens of gender and performance theory and demonstrates how comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs put identity into play, including sex/sexuality, gender, rank, and social status. Denise K. Filios draws on modern ethnographic and performance studies to fill gaps in the medieval written record, reconstructing lyric performances, exploring how women performed themselves as poetic characters ventriloquized by male poets, and examining how men impersonated female characters. Many of the Galician-Portuguese and Castilian poems she analyzes are available here in English for the first time. This study also explores the cultural context of these songs, including the sites within which they were sung/set and the underlying erotic associations that inform these comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs."--Jacket.