Gayle Austin draws attention to many of the factors that are involved in assessing the place of women within any period of dramatic production. Her strategies have evolved in order to combat several methodological problems that exist when studying women's place in dramatic history. The largest of these is of course that theatre is a temporal form. Although surviving texts make mention of female characters, it is difficult to ascertain how active women were within medieval culture. Fragments of records show that they were present on the medieval ‘stage’, though these appearances are commonly in folk plays, local festive customs, itinerant performance, and in dances and parades held for parish or civic occasions. Because of the paucity of records the extent of women's performance remains open to speculation.