Performance-based research in the medieval convent

This article begins with Adrian Armstrong’s discussion of the coterie poetry composed by Charles d’Orleans and his associates at Blois to explore the ‘epistemic value and qualities’ not of communal poetry but rather of communal theatre within a quite different social group: a convent of Carmelite nuns in late-fifteenth-century Burgundy. In it I suggest that some of the ways in which Armstrong conceptualises the processes by which lyric poetry was explored and produced at Blois may be fruitfully brought to bear on thinking about the epistemological implications and consequences of ‘making’ theatre (in the sense of composing and performing it) within this medieval women’s religious house.