"The Rhetorical Feminine takes a fresh look at theatreincluding the important new genre of opera - in early modern Germany. Central to this study is the relationship of the stage with ideas of order or social control. Early German school drama was designed to teach rhetoric to boys: a detail which has up to now been accepted by scholars without further questioning. This investigation focuses on how that rhetoric was used, with particular reference to ideas of the feminine and of the islamic world. Both are constructed as the potentially threatening 'others' of early modern patriarchal Christendom. In containing the threat, the stage becomes the controllable version of the early modern theatrum mundi."--BOOK JACKET.