IMC 2016: Sessions

Although performativity as a methodological framework has long been used by scholars of gender in the Middle Ages with rich results, it has rarely been used in an explicit way to explore the identities of female religious. The papers in this session take innovative approaches towards the performance of identity by women religious from the early to late Middle Ages. The first paper takes a new approach to abbatial leadership - discussion of which is often restricted to evidence of male religious - in 9th- to 11th-century Saxony, by exploring how abbesses performed their own roles as leaders of religious communities, and how societal expectations shaped the way in which they did so. The second highlights the importance of materiality in Anglo-Saxon saints' lives, by demonstrating that the female body was used performatively in these texts as way of communicating orthodox faith. The third discusses how the staging of Easter cycle plays in Irish Dominican convents in Spain transformed the convent space into theatres, how far the nuns living in the convents themselves shaped the space in this way, and how the use of convents as theatres created social bonds between the convent and the wider community.