Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

This brilliant and transformative study completely redefines the conventional accounts of medieval and early modern theatre by exploring the wide range of evidence (which has been almost completely ignored) for girls acting in plays, usually ones written specifically for them. From Germany and France to drama in the English court, schools, households and streets, Williams is a sure guide to a field of performance we had for so long managed to forget about. * Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA *
Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is suffused with an affirmative spirit, revealing girlhood as a creative oasis in diverse medieval and early modern women’s lives. With dazzling learning and linguistic dexterity, Williams illuminates dramatic writing and performance, religious devotion, visual art, song and book culture. The archival evidence she mobilizes establishes, irrefutably, "a whole new cultural tradition". * Sophie Tomlinson, University of Auckland, New Zealand *
In a momentous departure from previous studies of both the advent of actress on the English stage as well as from critical work on women’s writing, this pathbreaking book demonstrates that while female performers were indeed excluded from the public stage in Elizabeth and Jacobean England, girls rather than women nonetheless participated in a wide range of entertainments and enactments from the medieval to the early modern period. Girls of all ages were not just singers or bit-part players, but also writers and composers and were actively engaged in significant acts of performance and cultural production. Deanne Williams’ startling insights into this girl culture are derived from a wealth of meticulous archival research and from acute critical assessment of both new and more familiar texts of the period. * Dympna C. Callaghan, Syracuse University, USA *
By identifying "girl culture" as a richly multifaceted phenomenon and locating it at the heart of her study of pre-modern performance, Deanne Williams offers a transformative new perspective on both theatre history and the history of childhood. Transnational and multilingual in its scope, expansive in its chronological reach and methodologically capacious, this bold and ambitious book makes plain the remarkable and shaping role girls have played in the production of culture. * Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle University, UK *
[A] fascinating new study … builds a compelling case for the unique contribution of medieval and early modern girls to a number of cultural spheres, opening up new readings of canonical texts as well as introducing even expert readers to a host of likely unfamiliar materials … Offers scholars and students alike a new model of reading early modern girlhood across cultures and genres. Together with Williams’s accompanying, open-access online database, Girls on Early English Stages (GEES), the book provides an extraordinarily generous archive of the dramatic and cultural agency of premodern girls which will doubtless encourage future researchers to continue moving these figures out from the margins to centre stage. -- Harry R. McCarthy, University of Exeter * The Review of English Studies *