Julia Prest's well-structured and accessible study of cross-dressing in several theatrical genres in seventeenth-century France has recently been released in paperback. This comes as welcome news for those of us who cover this period in undergraduate and graduate courses in theatre history, particularly because Prest moves beyond the standard fare of Pierre Corneille, Molière and Jean Racine.

Along with an introduction and conclusion that take up issues of cross-dressing in eras other than the main period under consideration (c.1629–c.1691), the book comprises five chapters organized around genre and audience. Chapter 1, ‘Unattractive Women’, examines cross-casting in comedies, focusing on changing character types in Corneille's comedies and on the portrayals of elderly women by male actors in Molière's plays. Prest offers an excellent approach to the reciprocity of text and performance: theatrical fashion caused changes in the structure of plays, and scripts offer clues about their effect in production. In chapter 2, ‘Boys Will Be Girls’, Prest compares the all-male casts of plays produced in Jesuit schools with the all-female casts of plays produced at the girls’ school Saint-Cyr. Having mined archives for spectators’ accounts of these school performances, she pays close attention to deviations from rules set forth in educational manuals for the boys and to the careful surveillance of the erotic danger of girls’ performances.

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the cross-casting of male performers in court ballet, a practice that continued for roles of certain kinds even after women had begun to perform in court ballet. Prest argues that the imperatives of female beauty and modesty constrained female performers more than male performers, both in practical aspects of costume and in the ramifications that a role could have for the performer's day-to-day personal life. Chapter 5 addresses the rejection of castrati in French baroque opera, concluding with an analysis of cross-cast roles in the operas of Lully. This chapter returns to some concerns of chapter 1, as the women played by men in opera tended to be older, monstrous and/or desexualized.

With regard to gender, many of Prest's interventions are more salient for feminist historiography than for queer studies, a position that might spark contentious discussion in a graduate seminar. While the cover art is attractive and thematically relevant, the choice of a 1777 illustration of the Chevalier d’Eon is somewhat puzzling, as this famous eighteenth-century cross-dresser did not live under Louis XIV and is never mentioned in the book. Yet perhaps this illustration is emblematic of one of the book's goals: to connect the practice of cross-casting on seventeenth-century French stages with similar practices in other places and periods. Prest offers points of comparison throughout the book, notably to contemporaneous practices in England and Italy. This comparative focus might help to guide non-specialist readers toward an affinity with seventeenth-century French practices of performance and illuminate a lesser-known area of study.