Abstracts

As one of the few extant large-scale textiles from the Middle Ages, the Bayeux Embroidery continues to challenge scholars who endeavor to unlock its meaning, identify its function, and illuminate the circumstances of its production. The Embroidery can be experienced on many different levels—as a superb example of medieval craftsmanship; a heroic story of war, kingship, and conquest; a picture of post-conquest national identity; or a moralizing tale about breaking solemn oaths—and yet, when we look more closely, another layer begins to emerge. Incorporated into its borders, I suggest, is the story of the women of the embroidery workshop who added their viewpoints about the Conquest to the work in the form of marginal imagery. Relegated to the sidelines, the women who brought the Embroidery to life with needles and woolen thread provide the viewer with a series of disparate commentaries on the story of the Norman conquest of England by populating the borders with fanciful animals, fables, and a variety of characters and scenes.

The narrative of Islamic art (especially for the caliphal period from 660 to 1236 CE) constructs the framework for artistic patronage almost exclusively through the figure of the ruler (caliph) and the dynasty. As a result it is difficult to discern a role for women and others whom historians have relegated to the margins due to gender and/or legal status (i.e. freeborn, enslaved, or freed), even when such women and men were part of the ruling class. This is the case for early Islamic Córdoba during the reign of the Andalusi Umayyads (r. 756-1031 CE), whose monuments (especially the Great Mosque of Córdoba) and artworks are canonical in early Islamic art history. Using Umayyad court chronicles and material evidence (monuments, objects, and epigraphy) I argue that court concubines were among the most active patrons of architecture in early Islamic Córdoba. Wealthy and influential, their commissions were conducted at the highest levels of patronage and formed part of the dramatic urban expansion of this celebrated medieval city in the ninth and tenth centuries. The article argues, therefore, that the caliphal period, usually seen as a period adverse to women's patronage, in fact provides an important context for their later active involvement in the arts in the early modern period. The Umayyad concubines nevertheless should not be seen in isolation, I will argue, but are part of a larger picture of art and architecture patronage and even design by other "marginalized" court elites, especially high-ranking eunuchs.

At the end of the fourteenth century, the General of the Dominican Order was alarmed at the lack of observance among the religious communities under his control. Especially appalling were the arrangements favored by the Dominican nuns who resided in comfort, disregarding the goals of discipline and piety that were the core of the Dominican Order. The reform’s model convent was St. Katherine’s in Nuremberg. Although it twice had violently resisted reform, in 1428 the sisters there rededicated themselves to faithful devotion and practical work, including copying and illustrating of manuscripts.

My essay will examine an illuminated manuscript that was produced at St. Katherine’s during this reform, the Schwesternbuch von Töß by Elsbeth Stagel (Stadtbibliothek, Nuremberg, Cent V, 10a). The Töß stories, like all Schwesternbücher, recount the visions of mystical thirteenth-century Dominican sisters. The reformed sisters copied and decorated the Nuremberg Töß manuscript around 1454, creating the only known Schwesternbuch to be illustrated (twenty-three historiated initials). In general, the images in Töß reflect a language of persuasion whose chosen elements contemporized the mysticism of a past generation and remade Töß into a didactic tool advertising the rewards of faith. Its scenes reflect Hans Belting’s assertion that in the Late Medieval world, the theological and the emotional existed side by side. I will show that both elements can be conveyed through a female vocabulary.

The Nuremberg volume represents an unparalleled attempt to develop a visual imagery that pairs the didactic and polemical aims of the Schwesternbuch with the practical vision and devotional piety forming the core of the Dominican reform. In addition, Cent V. 10a provides us with an important example of an extensive illustration cycle created by females, for a female audience and concerning female religious subject matter. Finally, the volume allows us a glimpse into a late fifteenth-century female discourse on proper devotion

It is well known that the Portuguese princess Isabel (1397-1471), daughter of King João I and the English duchess Philippa of Lancaster, played a significant role in the European scenario of the fifteenth century. Known in historiography as ‘Isabelle de Portugal,’ this duchess of Burgundy is one of those noblewomen who, by means of her political and economic power as wife (in her case, of Philip the Good, 1396-1467), held a central position as patron of the arts. While it may seem that an analysis of her role in cultural patronage has already been done, the issue calls for an exhaustive, systematic examination. Little work has been carried out, for example, on Isabel's patronage in fifteenth-century Portuguese artistic history.

We have a variety of data, resulting from archival and material evidence, on her involvement in the fifteenth-century European artistic process. A fertile vein of inquiry, Isabel’s patronage raises many questions that have yet to be investigated. For a start, scholarship has taken for granted her sponsorship under the influence of the far better studied cultural deeds of her husband and her son, Charles the Bold. An investigation into the duchess's patronage must consider the course of her own life circumstances (princess, wife/duchess, mother, widow), addressing such issues within the complementary roles played by Isabel in art production, whether as facilitator or recipient.

Blandy-les-Tours is a fortified castle situated 50 km from Paris, near the royal city of Melun. This castle was built in the thirteenth century by the viscounts of Melun. The first viscounts belong to the family of Chailli, but soon, through alliances with illustrious families, they rose in importance and became close to the king of France. Having entered the family of Tancarville with Marguerite de Melun, they became allied to the family of Harcourt in 1417. Then in 1429, Marie, a woman of the Harcourt family, married Jean (the illegitimate son of the royal family of Orléans), called “Dunois”.

            But the role of women at Blandy really took off with Agnès of Savoy, the widow of François I of Orléans (d. 1491), count of Dunois and Longueville, who in 1508 drew up a 600-page document, called a terrier, which is the only written documentation to have reached us concerning the seigneury of Blandy. Their son, Louis I of Orléans, married Jeanne de Hochsberg, marchioness of Rothelin-en-Brigsau, in 1504. Jeanne brought the castle up to date in accord with current tastes, transforming it into a pleasant Renaissance residence (wall paintings, tin glazed stone floors) with all modern comforts (ceramic frying pans brought from her original region, the county of Neuchâtel).

Melisende (d. 1161) inherited the Latin Kingdom from her father and became queen, together with her husband, the new king, in a coronation ceremony held in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1131. William II, archbishop of Tyre and author of the History of Outremer, celebrates her rule as strong, wise, and judicious. He documents in detail her foundation and embellishment of a convent at Bethany with two churches for her sister, Yvetta. He also refers to the tomb of Melisende at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary in Jehosaphat. No king of Jerusalem was given such a handsome burial chamber. William provides these selected references to the substantial art patronage of Melisende during her long and productive career as queen. But he does not mention the most famous work, the c. 1135 Psalter of Queen Melisende. This luxury prayerbook has been the object of intensive research as scholars have sought to understand exactly what Melisende's role was in its execution. Nor does William comment on Melisende’s involvement in other important commissions with which she was connected, namely, the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the abbey of St. Samuel, the Templum Domini, the church of the Ascension, the church of St. Anne, and the church of St. James. Why does William choose to mention just two works linked to Melisende’s patronage? What exactly was her role as patron in these and other projects between 1131 and 1161: initiator, sponsor, maker, facilitator, recipient?

While men and women shared a common culture and both were active as artistic patrons at this time, the way in which men and women identified themselves was different. Consequently there are certain themes and ideas that are particularly relevant to women, among them personal piety, family, and domestic circumstances. These will be examined in the social and spiritual context of their patronage. The women who were artistic patrons had similar interests and aims in their piety and social concerns, but their requirements were often very specific to themselves as individuals and reveal much about their personalities, priorities, circumstances and lives.

As the study of women in the Middle Ages proceeds into the twenty-first century, it becomes ever more clear that women wielded greater influence and power in both governance and the arts than was previously assumed. One problem has been the lack of documentation: recorded information for any individual, male or female, outside of royal personages, is largely non-existent. Fortunately, both anecdotal and financial accounts, along with illuminated manuscripts that can be connected to Mahaut d’Artois (c. 1270-1329) exist, offering a view of a woman as ruler and donor. As countess, she is revealed to be tough and wily as she sidestepped the juridical efforts of her nephew to unseat her. Her sense of fun, sometimes at the expense of others, comes through in descriptions of the design of her gardens. And her aesthetics, along with the value she placed on art and learning, are visible in her many artistic commissions and the manuscripts with which she has been associated.

My research demonstrates that these views, while reasonable given current scholarship on devotional art, do not accurately reflect the historical record. In-depth study reveals that the Vierges ouvrantes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries appealed not to any particular gender, audience, or devotional practice, but rather to all simultaneously in areas ranging from Spain to Germany. This raises the question of how to make sense of patterns that contradict our assumptions of gendered appeal, authority, and agency. The collapse of seemingly stable categories encourages us to engage critically with current methods and formulate new perspectives that will energize and advance the field at a crucial point in its history

A great part of what we know about medieval artists is based on the inventory and analysis of signed works and self-portraits (to say nothing of textual evidence). Yet, signatures give ambiguous information on the authorship of the work of art, since the artist, the designer, the entrepreneur, and the patron were all engaged in the process of “making”, and all may rightly be characterized as creators of the work. It is the aim of this chapter to study visual arts (portraits and self-portraits) and textual sources (mostly signatures, but also narratives, diplomatic sources, etc.) and to propose a “transverse” study of works “made” by women, crossing lexical, art historical, historical, and theological fields. In particular, my intention is to look closely at the implications of the use of the verb “facere” to describe art making. It is well known that books and textiles are the genres in which one most consistently finds women named, and so it is in these that one can best ponder the issues of women’s artistic productivity. But the ways in which women artists sign or represent themselves in their work remains uncertain. The creative gesture was valued, from the 11^th century on, as a performative one copied from the sacerdotal gesture of benediction, and was even viewed / understood as homologous to the creation of the body of Christ at the altar. Yet women were excluded from the priesthood, and this very fact disqualifies them as teachers or mediators of the spiritual, such as their male counterparts. How are the signatures of, and self-portraits of women artists to be understood within such a dynamic?

‘The woman who embroiders earns more profit even than queens’, states a maxim from the early Irish law tract, Bretha im Fhuillema Gell. Yet for the learned class who wrote such tracts, the two categories, queen and embroiderer, must have blurred almost imperceptibly across the margin defined by birth, which made it not an art, but an elegant and appropriate accomplishment: embroidery was a skill taught only to aristocratic girls, as other legal texts make clear. The aristocratic woman’s defined role in early Irish society relegated the sphere of her activities to the domestic; her contractual capacities were far less than those of her husband, father or brothers, yet in the disposal of the work of her needle, and her jewels, she could take responsibility; likewise contracts entered into with craftsmen and poets were amongst the few which were binding without legal sureties, and which women could therefore make. The altar-cloths, jewels and small portable objects donated by women to the church were therefore the combined result of specific social and legal possibilities, and, to an extent, an appropriate femininity in terms of medium. To regard them, however, as lower in value than other more lasting works in stone, is a mistake, as revealed by the mournfully recorded lost or ‘drowned’ vestments of contemporary chronicles. But could women’s engagement with art go beyond this? Although sparse, a number of queens in ninth- to twelfth-century Ireland are recorded in hagiographical and chronicle sources as being actively involved in building work; hagiographies of female saints, moreover, indicate similar activities, while the legal tracts suggest the possibility of female craftsmen in stone or wood. 

This paper will trace the documentary evidence for women’s engagement with visual art from the earliest historical period up to c.1200 and beyond, taking into account recent methodological work on the role of women as poets and patrons of poetry and literature, in the same period. Where it is possible to identify the objects/buildings from the documentary sources, these will also be discussed.

In 1482 the Condestable de Castilla, Pedro Fernández de Velasco, left Burgos to lead the Catholic Monarchs' army against the Kingdom of Granada. The Condestable (d. 1492) would invest the last ten years of his life in the war, while his wife Mencía de Mendoza (1422-1500) ran the family’s household in the far-away Castilian town of Burgos. Before leaving for Andalusia, the Condestable hastily wrote a document that gave Doña Mencía remarkably full powers over the administration of their wealth. The daughter of the Marquis of Santillana, Mencía belonged to one of the most important lineages of Castile; her patronage became very active after 1482, and even moreso in the final years of her life. During those two decades, she vigorously supported the reform of the Franciscan Order in Burgos, built the most exhuberant funerary chapel of her time (the so-called Capilla de los Condestables) in Burgos Cathedral, and completely rebuilt her family’s urban palace (Casa del Cordón). The last two initiatives led to a judiciary process against her first-born son, who felt that his mother was overtaking his heritage rights; the resulting documentation offers extremely interesting information for understanding the significance of Mencia’s enterprise.

Barring a few very exceptional cases, written documentation from the ninth to thirteenth centuries makes only rare mention of the intervention of a woman (queen, princess, or other) in the construction of a palace or a castle, or indeed in the management or occupation of the various spaces of civil architecture. Such allusions may refer to direct involvement by women, as we have in the cases of the construction of the tower of Ivry by Aubrée, wife of Count Raoul of Ivry, or the decoration of the chamber of Adèle of Blois. However, these references are more commonly indirect allusions to such spaces as the children´s room. Two scenarios are possible: either the woman acts in her capacity as regent, or she exercises control over territory that is more strictly her own, such as dower lands.

Not much work has been done on the art patronage of the queens of Portugal in the Middle Ages. Yet we dispose of abundant material for the study of the treasuries of Queens Isabel (of Aragón, 1269?-1336) and Beatriz (of Castile, 1293-1359) and their respective husbands, the Kings of Portugal Dinis (1278-1325) and Afonso IV (1325-1347), and also of the monasteries they founded to house their mortal remains. In this paper, we will therefore compare the patronage of these queens and kings, along with the composition of their treasuries, in order to see the extent to which they were gender-determined. To perceive if there were regional and/or “national” differences, the comparison will be extended to the patronage and foundations of Elisenda (de Montcada, 1290?-1364) and Leonor (of Portugal, 1328-1348), queens of Aragón in the same period for whom there is the same kind of source material.

The formative role of women as “makers”—patrons, builders, and decorators of medieval churches—has not received the kind of attention it deserves. Over the years there has been an assumption by scholars that churchmen, kings, male aristocracy, and townsmen were responsible for most of the religious building activity in the Middle Ages. However, chronicles, saints’ lives and miracles, cartularies, correspondence, inscriptions, and other sources tell us something quite different: they underscore women’s major contributions to all aspects of the fabric of medieval churches. As sponsors and patrons they provided essential land, materials, money, and oversight for building projects. (In a few sources they were even said to have been involved in the actual construction process: they are described as transporting stones and sand to hurry the completion of their new buildings.) Moreover, these women dictated iconographic programs for wall paintings, sculpture, and embroideries; they decorated their churches with rich hangings, tapestries, and embroideries which they not infrequently made “with their own hands.” As avid collectors of relics, they also commissioned special reliquaries for their churches. Some of these art works contained portrayals of their female patrons along with their names.

This article explores the early involvement of laywomen, abbesses and nuns as “makers” of churches from ca. 500-1100. It discusses some of the patterns that emerge from a study of the following: the Merovingian wife of Namatius, bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, who was the donor and decorator of the church of Saint Stephen of Clermont-Ferrand; St. Rusticula, abbess and important builder of the monastery of St. Jean of Arles; the royal Anglo-Saxon St. Edith who built and decorated her monastic church at Wilton; the building activities of Edith, the wife of Edward the Confessor; and Sts. Cunegund, Adelheid, and Margaret of Scotland. This essay examines the function of gender, class, wealth, and religious profession in these artistic processes. It also looks at some of the strategies as well as subversive roles assumed by the female patrons and builders of these early churches.  

An excellent example of the active roles women played in church decoration in the Middle Ages is the Premonstratensian nunnery of Altenberg in Hesse, Germany. From this monastery five large illustrated linen embroideries (about 150 to 400 cm) survive. They were made between 1270 and 1330, two of them during the time of magistra Gertrud (1227-1297), daughter of Saint Elizabeth (1207-1231), when the newly constructed church of the fast-growing nunnery got its first decoration. The first is a tomb cloth or catafalque cover, singular in its elaborate figural program with royal nimbed couples and prophets, and the second an embroidery with nine scenes from the life of Saint Elizabeth.

One generation after Gertrud’s death, three altarcloths with different pictorial programs in high quality drawing were made about 1330, together with an altarpiece—one of the earliest surviving winged examples. Unlike the altarpiece, the textiles show figures of donors as well as initials and names of women who dedicated their work to Jesus, as the inscriptions indicate. These embroideries, together with written sources and other liturgical objects, tell us about the furnishing of the high altar as a project of several women from the leading families connected to Altenberg - the landgraves of Thuringia and Hesse, the earls of Nassau, and others. Women from both within and outside the convent were involved in conceiving, financing, drawing, and embroidering the textiles. 

Together, all five textiles were made for the public space of the church, not the cloistered areas. Central elements of the decoration on high feast days when the church received many visitors and pilgrims, they give witness to the active roles played by women in the iconographic program of church decoration, as well as representing their cloister and the memoria of their families.

This essay will examine the patronage practices of the first queens of Portugal, from the hereditary Queen Teresa (d. 1130) to the queens Mafalda and Dulce (wives of Afonso Enriques and Sancho I respectively). Their patronage followed the trajectory of other royal patronage in Iberia and the wider European Continent: the introduction of the Cistercian Order (especially women's houses), linked to a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary, and then patronage of the new Mendicant Orders in the early thirteenth century. The “queenship,” however, of royal daughters (acknowledged as heirs and queens by their fathers) played an even greater role in the integration of the church and state of the new realm of Portugal, as these women founded, patronized or joined a number of monasteries there.

This study addresses a serious lacuna in scholarship on the relationship of the “making” of art and architecture to the “making” of the state, examining the foundation of the kingdom of Portugal as the context for the production of material culture, primarily religious architecture. While the conclusions of this work in progress are not yet firm, it appears that the common goal of state formation and the establishment of a ruling lineage created an arena in which men and women – rulers, religious, artists and architects – collaborated in vision and practice. Nonetheless, the result was often “feminine,” with royal daughters as directors, reformers and members of new foundations, creating a religio-political space for royal women.

Although it bears important comparison to the cathedrals of Chartres, Soissons, and Reims, the collegiate church of Saint-Quentin has been a puzzle to architectural historians. Its date and thus its relationship to such major monuments of Gothic architecture have remained uncertain. One key to resolving this puzzle is recognizing the role played by several noblewomen, including Eleanor, Countess of Vermandois, in the initiation of construction of the church’s Gothic east end. Previous scholarship on Saint-Quentin has sought to identify the church’s design with Villard de Honnecourt and to see king Phillip Augustus providing the motivation and the resources for building. In formulating this still-popular but untenable thesis, scholars neglected both visual and documentary evidence that provide a date in the 1190s, coincident with the return of Eleanor, the last heir of the Vermandois’s leading family, to Saint-Quentin.

Like Eleanor, important noble families of the region regarded the collegiate church with a proprietary sense, as the chapter provided careers for many of their sons. Stained glass panels and previously unappreciated documents reveal the direct contributions of local noblewomen, including mothers of canons, to the building effort. This paper will ask whether there is a relationship between support of a traditional chapter of canons and female religious life, seeking to identify the choices and tensions that surrounded women’s participation in the rebuilding of Saint-Quentin. The terminal date for this study, 1214, marks not only Eleanor’s death and the political changes brought by the Battle of Bouvines, but also the reform of the chapter, civic riots, and most likely the beginning of a hiatus in construction

Questioning women’s roles in medieval art and architecture implies questioning individual and aristocratic self-awareness in the Middle Ages. Such Selbstbewußtsein will be addressed in this paper through the means of artistic commissions, documentary sources, and inscriptions. In the Realm of Sicily during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, women’s patronage was of great significance. The actions of noblewomen allowed them a place for display in the public arena—normally reserved for the men of their families—to express their personal power and the prestige of their own lineage. These women seem not to have questioned men’s rule; concerning especially their personal agency, their actions were not subversive. An examination of the works commissioned by these women demonstrates that their patronage reflected more their status within the aristocratic social structures than their gender. Women’s patronage was frequently connected to the question of aristocratic memoria, the individual defining herself with regards to a group formed by the dead and by the living, so that the remembrance of ancestors also contributed to the creation of an aristocratic kinship conveyed by the women. For Sicily, however, it cannot be asserted that women’s patronage differed radically from men’s; rather, patronage was above all one of the markers of aristocratic and familial consciousness.

This study concerns an artistic-religious project, devised and brought to completion between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, by Humbrina (ca. 1056 - 1124), abbess and founder of the Monastery of Santa Maria at Pontetetto near Lucca, describing how an authoritative order - established under the Benedictine rule - was transformed into a creative spiritual development. During Humbrina’s lifetime, the Pontetetto nuns-artists produced a series of illuminated manuscripts - a collective enterprise including a Missal, a Commentary on the Song of Songs, and two Antiphonaries (now respectively in Florence, Pistoia, and Lucca) - whose liturgical function could have hardly exhausted their textual meaning. They provide documentary evidence of a painfully-reached awareness of what a genuine uplift of the soul might be. Once she understood that in her community liturgical sacred words played too objective a role, Humbrina began to revise the entire project. She suggested at first the use of images destined to mediate between the reader and the written prayers and, afterwards, the abbess proposed to substitute monologues and dialogues of female martyrs for the traditional narratives that had been employed up to that point. It was only with the latter step that the soul, through the heightening of emotional involvement, was finally brought much closer to the body than authority would ever have allowed.