Women Who Kill

This chapter on murderesses first considers the theatrical training of young men at the collèges and then turns to Jean Bastier de La Péruse’s Médée (1556). The chapter examines how Médée offers a negative example of violence by manipulating the myth of the infamous filicide on the one hand, and, on the other, by gendering violence to show the irascibility of the female monster who escapes man’s control. The fear of and disdain for women in the period underline the topical urgency of this female threat. Indeed, by staging the murder of Médée’s children and placing this violence in the present tense, rather than keeping the filicides offstage, La Péruse’s tragedy suggests that the Medea archetype inspired by Euripides and Seneca was not simply a mythological figure of the past but very much a current concern in sixteenth-century France.