Amid a line-up of intellectuals representing major traditions in pre-modern Europe, a Muslim figure stands out (fig. 1). The only man of color, “aussy noir comme charbon,” as black as coal, he steps out, dressed in a fur-line robe that displays his wealth and prestige. This portrait introduces a Saracen who takes his place with these men of science while he rivals them in all his difference. His authority is doubly challenging. Not only does his presence between a doctor and a Jew raise the Muslim question for intellectual life in late medieval Paris; but he does so at the center of the French Christian tradition.

Honorat Bovet, the author who created this Muslim figure, did so when the kingdom of France was at war, during a “tres perilleux temps, Nombre de XIIII cens ans, au dit commun de maint Crestiens, Juifs, Sarrazins et payens” [very perilous time, 1400, as is commonly said by many Christians, Jews, Saracens, and pagans]. Crusaders had been routed at Nicopolis, and bulletins of their humiliating enslavement sent back to Paris: the Christian world was braced against their adversaries in the East, the Ottoman Turks, for the first time. Bovet admits to his patron, Jean de Montaigu, the dread this situation inspires: “jay paour … et sy doubte que les Sarrazins durement ne griefvent Crestineté” [I fear and am apprehensive of the harm Saracens can inflict on the Christian world, l. 28–29, 60]. It is in this defeatist context, nonetheless, that Bovet invents an eloquent Saracen to ventriloquize a Muslim tradition menacing the French. Rather than keeping the enemy at bay, in a rare move, he entertains its representative. In the Apparicion Maistre Jean de Meun, Bovet designs a political debate that unfolds before Paris's most esteemed vernacular poet, is moderated by his fictive double, the Prior of Salon, and foregrounds the Saracen debater holding forth at great length. Bovet develops his voice strategically. He enlists it to report on the failings of the French, to reckon with their defeat, and to call urgently for reform. He even directs the Saracen's critique to those in power, delivering two manuscript copies of the Apparicion to the circle of Louis, Duke of Orléans, the king's brother.

'Speak firmly and in an orderly rhythm.' 'Make appropriate gestures … manifesting sorrow by falling down on the ground … or showing joy through the face.' These were the instructions given to people playing the first man and woman in the biblical Jeu d'Adam (late twelfth century). Talking in another voice and mimicking another person were the key body languages to master, the skills necessary to acting before others. They defined a practice that did not correspond to any formal conception of genre and extended far beyond what we recognize as theatre today. In a world where culture was transacted orally as much as through hand-written texts or manuscripts and the earliest printed books, such theatrical action informed the way texts were read aloud, the styles of celebrating religious and political occasions, as well as physical play, noise-making. As Paul Zumthor began to argue in the late 1960s, such action animated so many different forms of communication and expression that it is more telling to ask what was not characterized theatrically than to identify what was theatre.

The Parisian schoolman, Hugh of St Victor (died 1141) captured this array of activity when he described in a Latin treatise the 'science called theatrics'. 'Epics were presented either by recitals or by acting out dramatic roles or using masks or puppets; choral processions and dances were held in the porches. In gymnasia, they wrestled, at banquets they made music with songs and instruments. In the temples they sang the praises of God.' Hugh adapted a model that had come from imperial Rome to describe the rituals, sports, and verbal fictions of public life in twelfth-century Europe. He gives us a sense of the many different sites for theatrical action, and the people implicated.

In the murky climate of Paris 1413, on a Mayday when king Charles VI had gone mad, noble factions were killing each other off, and the city in revolt, the major chroniclers focused on one episode. Each narrated the arrest of women attending the queen, Isabeau of Bavaria. Jean Le Fèvre's account presents a menacing break-in (75–79). A crowd of commoners, led by butchers known as the Cabochiens, penetrated the Hôtel particulier of the dauphin demanding that he hand over all traitors in his residence. Next stop: the queen's own Hôtel Saint-Pol where a roll-call of traitors was read out loud in front of Isabeau. Six dames and four damoiselles d'honneur were named and denounced as traitors. Deep into the queen's private chambers, the women were pursued until with much “fear and weeping,” they were led away to prison. The Bourgeois of Paris's version of the damoiselles’ arrest, by contrast, is summed up in a few judgmental lines: thirteen or fourteen of them were taken away for “they were well familiar with evil doing.”

No chronicle mentions these women again. The silence is telling. It suggests how precarious was their social role, how fragile their reputation. It is symptomatic of infamy: the complete loss of name in the public domain. It was as if the damoiselles no longer existed socially speaking, as if they were dead. That infamous disappearing from the record prompted historian Colette Beaune to surmise that once they were imprisoned, they were “badly mistreated, raped.”

Whether this group of women was guilty of any crime is a moot point. These chronicles and their representations were caught in the crossfire of partisan politics in a city riven by civil war and under constant threat of invasion. Were the damoiselles charged and attacked as part of the royal entourage? As members of this or that noble faction? As intimates of one of the most pilloried queens of France, besieged by charges of infidelity and corruption? In such a polarized context, hypotheses about them proliferated. And they prove very difficult to substantiate. Yet one point remains clear: the damoiselles of Isabeau had borne the brunt of repeated verbal attacks. They were hit by accusations from all political sides, represented negatively by preachers, royal propagandists, nobles, and people in the city streets. Systematically the women were stigmatized as disruptive, conniving, malicious, and publicly dangerous.