Performing Women in the Middle Ages approaches medieval lyric poetry through the lens of gender and performance theory and demonstrates how comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs put identity into play, including sex/sexuality, gender, rank, and social status. Denise Filios draws on modern ethnographic and performance studies to fill gaps in the medieval written record, reconstructing lyric performances, exploring how women performed themselves as poetic characters ventriloquized by male poets, and examining how men impersonated female characters. Many of the Galician-Portuguese and Castilian poems she analyzes are available here in English for the first time. This study also explores the cultural context of these songs, including the sites within which they were sung/set and the underlying erotic associations that inform these comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs.

Denise K. Filios is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa.

"This book is a magisterial synthesis and a major step forward for work on lyric poetry in Iberia and across medieval Europe...A wonderfully fresh and bracing contribution to medieval studies."-George D. Greenia, College of William and Mary, editor of La corónica

"Performing Women provides a bold, new contribution to our appreciation of Medieval Spanish lyric poetry. Drawing on models of gender and performance theory, Denise Filios explores a wide variety of ways in which women are figured in comic-obscene and comic-erotic texts. This is an important study that both illuminates individual texts and reconstructs for the modern reader a wealth of cultural contexts that are essential to our understanding of this influential poetic form."--Marina Brownlee, Princeton University

"I will certainly place the book on my department's graduate reading list and suggest that students read it with close attention. All in all it is a strong, ambitious first book that opens up new approaches to understanding the way the medieval lyric functioned and was constructed in society."--E. Michael Gerli, University of Virginia