Introduction: Gender, Cultural Mobility, and Theater History Inquiry

this series of essays takes as its central focus female theatrical agency in early modern Europe across linguistic and geographic borders, both at the heart of commercial theater in capital cities and in less frequently studied settings such as the convent, the court, and the salon. The four essays that make up this special section address women players, theater managers, and playwrights in Italy, Spain, France, and Bavaria, with a particular eye to their circulation of novel theatrical materials, forms, and practices within and across national theater traditions. These essays discuss mixed-gender as well as singlesex female troupes and consider their imbrication with cross-gender casting involving male actors both on the “all-male English stage” and on the continent. Conversation among contributors to this special section began with a 2015 Modern Language Association (MLA) roundtable on “Worldly Women: Cosmopolitanism and Transnational Female Performance in Early Modern Europe,” sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. The organizers of this session, Melinda Gough and Pamela Allen Brown, opted for a roundtable format with two main goals in mind. First, a typical conference panel structure would limit the session to three speakers, whereas a roundtable would accommodate a larger number of scholars representing fields usually kept separate, thanks to disciplinary distinctions established on the basis of linguistic or geographic focus. Second, the roundtable format would help to facilitate greater cross talk among speakers so that the particular expertise of each participant might be better harnessed toward new, collectively generated insights regarding early modern women’s theatrical participation, agency, resiliency, and movement. During the months that preceded our session, the task of generating “key