|
Denise
K. Filios.
Performing
Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Medieval Iberian Lyric.
Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2005.
The
New Middle Ages series.
ISBN
140396730X.
Hardback.
156mm x
234mm.
272pp.
Publisher's
recommended price £40.00
Unruly women constantly
speak out in lyric poetry, their voices brought to life in the bodies
of female singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Performing Women is
the first book-length study of female performers in Galician-Portuguese
and Castilian comic-satiric poetry. Filios reconstructs medieval
women's oral performances by bringing modern ethnographic work and
performance theory to bear on literary and historical evidence. Filios
explores how women's performances (and men's impersonations of women)
contributed to the construction of the court, the marketplace, and the
countryside as cultural spaces defined by certain acts, discourses, and
conflicts. She argues that poetic portraits of sexually aggressive
courtesans, bread sellers, and mountain women allowed elite men to
portray their own sexuality as transgressive and to adopt temporarily a
female identity, enabling them to speak and act as a degraded other.
While these portraits may be misogynistic, they also demonstrate that
poets appreciated marginalized women's characters, placing speeches
overtly critical of dominant power structures in their mouths and
constructing imaginary communities around them. Men wrote these
characters, women appropriated them, ironically performing as
themselves. By situating medieval lyric poems in their dialogic
performance context, this study demonstrates the centrality female
performers in poetic spectacles.
Contents
Introduction: Female Voices in the Medieval Lyric
Women, Performance, and Medieval Iberian Poetry
Performance Spaces: Court, Marketplace, and Mountain Range
Soldaderas' Deviant Performances and Poets' Counter-Poses: Courtly Play
in the Cantigas de Escarnio e de Mal Dizer
Panaderas as Marketplace Orators: Selling Sex, Negotiating Value, and
Evaluating Men
Monstrosity in the Mountains, Courtesy at Court: Contest Space in the
Serranilla
Performing Gender and Class in Medieval Iberia
List of Works Cited
|
|