Strong Female figures in the Medieval French Theatre (XIV-XVI centuries): a comparative study

This work aims at giving an overview of late medieval theatrical performances inspired by female heroines between the XIV century and the beginnings of the XVI. The main cultural and liguistic area taken into account is the French one, but it is extended to some Provencal and Tuscan plays when there is track of their representation in France but their text has gone lost. The main character of the majority of the plays come down to us is the ‘heroine of faith’: the research focuses on those plays representing female Holy Martyrs. Then, from a comparative perspective that considers the diachronic axes, on the one hand, the study will analyse two dramatic dialogs from Hrotsvit (X century), the most ancient example of medieval drama inspired by female martyrs. On the other, the research will offer some digressions on devotion and iconography and a comparison with female saints’ hagiographic lives. By observing the texts of the corpus as fully theatrical, their analytical and comparative analysis not only reveals their dramatic qualities and their performative potential, but also presents the thematic and dramaturgical leitmotiv linking those texts and the specificities that divide them. Finally, this study on heroine martyrs will provide a comparison between the corpus and two European plays of the same period, which respectively represent an historical heroine (Joan D’Arc) and a legendary one (Popess Joan), both belonging to the worldly realm. The research aims at showing how the issues treated by these texts on a thematic, scenic, ethic and aesthetic level (the stigmatization of the free female subject, the violent repression of resistance and the contradiction between vulnerable bodies and powerful words) are highly interesting not only for expert readers, but also for a potential contemporary spectator, thus justifying the rediscovery of those medieval plays in nowadays theaters.