This anthology of scholarly translations of medieval French farces continues Jody Enders's recovery of a repertoire that remains surprisingly little known. While more than 200 comedies have survived from late medieval and early Renaissance France, they remain marginalized in part because of the politically incorrect and over-the-top humor they represent. Nevertheless, in this book, they are rendered in eminently readable, stageable, classroom-friendly, and funny fashion through Enders's translational practices, dubbed "feminist dramaturgy" and "virtual dramaturgy." Through these methods of translation Enders mines the silences of a literary text and cues for performance in order to recover nonverbal language to speak to audiences in new ways. The twelve plays presented are dedicated to academia, as well as to lesson-teaching and lesson-learning more broadly, and are intended to be studied, taught, and read for pleasure.

Jody Enders is Distinguished Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. In 2024, she won the Modern Language Association's Lois Roth Award for Literary Translation for Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). She has widely published in performance studies, theater history, literary theory and criticism, Medieval and Renaissance studies, production/dramaturgy, translation studies, law and literature, and popular culture.