Abstract EN:

This study is based on fourteen french passion plays in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and includes ninety-two different female figures. The first chapter is an analysis of names applied to women and shows the importance of words setting the tone of close friendship and kinship among certain women. A short biography of each character is given in the second chapter to identify the plays in which she appears, her proper names, her text of origin and what she says and does. The characters are divided into three groups: biblical, non biblical, allegorical women and others. An overall portrait of the characters is drawn up in the third chapter. We point out their social position, their marital status, their vertues and their vices, and their relationships among themselves as well as with jesus, men and children. In chapter iv we look at the dramatic contribution of female roles and stress their use of liturgical and lyrical language. With some women, the language is comical and based on specific aspects of a medieval woman's daily life. In chapter v we study in detail the variation of treatment from one author to another for certain roles (eve, mary magdalen, herodias and her daughter, the mother of a man blind from birth and the blacksmith's wife). The study of character details tends to suggest an image of women or an attitude toward women specific to each passion and this is discussed in the conclusion.