ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of the diverse ways in which women engaged with European performance cultures, with a particular focus on how women’s performance labour interlinked across national borders. While it examines evidence of European women performing or contributing to performances for monetary gain, it will also underline the ways in which women’s engagement with performance was a transaction in other forms of capital. It begins by reviewing the current surge in historiography on women’s involvement with European performance, including the transnational scope of their roles as playwrights, performers, producers and patrons. This will provide a critique of some of the terminologies which have both limited a gendered critique of medieval and early-modern performance cultures, and inhibited a cross-period and transnational focus. The development of performance roles for women in Italy is the focus of the first section, which covers early roles for female performers, from mountebank cultures to commedia, including Italian women’s growing influence over both their playing materials and their own troupes.
