Colette de Corbie was one of the most important reformers of the Franciscan order in the late Middle Ages. Looking back at her long career, one has to conclude that she was a natural-born leader, inspiring some of the most powerful men and women of her time, both secular and ecclesiastical, to lend support to her foundations and reforms. This support was monetary as well as spiritual and crossed the “party lines” drawn in the last stages of the Hundred Years War. Together with other saintly personages, like Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), she worked to end the Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417). She lived to see the end of that Schism at the Council of Constance, but not the end of the next conflict that pitted Pope Eugene IV (d.1447) against Amadeus of Savoy (1383–1451), elected as antipope Felix V in 1439 during the long drawn-out Council of Basel (1431–1449). In the midst of seemingly endless war and multiple ecclesiastical conflicts Colette managed to steer a course focused on founding new Franciscan houses and reforming existing ones. It is Colette's identity as a reformist leader and the strategies she used to implement her reforms that are at the center of this essay.

Colette's identity has a variety of facets, some of them contradictory; there appears to be a tug-of-war between acknowledgment of her leadership qualities and efforts to “contain” her in a straitjacket of saintly models, depending on the witnesses we consult. Thus, the image that her biographers Pierre De Vaux and Perrine de la Roche created of her in two biographies, dating from shortly after Colette's death in 1447 and around 1477 respectively, do not always correspond to the testimonies of other people who knew her or to those of the chroniclers who wrote about her. Nor do they square with the Colette we find in her long-delayed bull of canonization in 1807. Her quest for authority – and its success – is depicted differently in all these sources, yet a number of coherent strategies emerge. In the framework of this chapter I can touch only briefly on some of the elements that come together to create our view of Colette as a charismatic and forceful leader.

The relationship between the Church and medieval theater was fruitful and complex but it was also contested. Was the medieval Church a facilitator of, or an impediment to, the development of the theatrical form? How, for example, can one define the relationship between the dramatic elements of the liturgy and religious theater? Long ago Karl Young studied the drama of the medieval Church and its relation to the liturgy and posited rather rigid boundaries between the two. For him, any text that does not clearly indicate that human actors impersonate or perform specific characters is not a play. But as Carol Symes has shown in an important study of early medieval theater in France, our modern notions of what constitutes a text meant for performance are inadequate when it comes to the actual written documents and their manuscript context. The “arbiters of genre” Symes skewers want to see watertight categories of plays and non-plays in medieval culture; Symes, by contrast, sees fluid boundaries between a variety of performative texts. Indeed the drama of the medieval Church does not necessarily play itself out on a stage. Symes's study encourages us to rethink definitions of medieval theatricality and the different ways in which the medieval period approached the idea of performance.

For medieval writers there were many ways to stage performances without any explicitly theatrical accoutrements: allegorical psychomachias or interactive dream visions are just two examples of dramas that lose none of their vividness by not being actually performed by human actors. In this essay I propose to look at the notion of performance and its relationship to the medieval Church from a slightly different angle. Here the spotlight will not shine on the question of how the Church influenced the development of medieval theater but on the Church as “actress”: the star performer of my contribution to this volume is Ecclesia herself. My focus will be on the Church shown as suffering from one particular ill: one of the many schisms that again and again tore up her holy body over many centuries. We will see that Ecclesia's troubles are staged in a variety of texts and contexts: sacred and secular poetry, dream visions, and complaints cast in judicial language. In each case we witness a dramatization of a political crisis, a kind of allegorical drama, starring the Church as a complex female personification.