The twenty-four studies in this volume propose a new approach to framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women, moving beyond today's standard division of artist from patron.
In Material Culture and Queenship in 14th-century France: The Testament of Blanche of Navarre (1331-1398) Marguerite Keane considers the object collection of the long-lived fourteenth-century French queen Blanche of Navarre, the wife of Philip VI (d. 1350). This queen’s ownership of works of art (books, jewelry, reliquaries, and textiles, among others) and her perceptions of these objects is well -documented because she wrote detailed testaments in 1396 and 1398 in which she described her possessions and who she wished to receive them. Keane connects the patronage of Blanche of Navarre to her interest in her status and reputation as a dowager queen, as well as bringing to life the material, adornment, and devotional interests of a medieval queen and her household.
Late Medieval and Renaissance art was surprisingly pushy; its architecture demanded that people move through it in prescribed patterns, its sculptures played elaborate games alternating between concealment and revelation, while its paintings charged viewers with imaginatively moving through them. Viewers wanted to interact with artwork in emotional and/or performative ways. This inventive and personal interface between viewers and artists sometimes conflicted with the Church s prescribed devotional models, and in some cases it complemented them. Artists and patrons responded to the desire for both spontaneous and sanctioned interactions by creating original ways to amplify devotional experiences. The authors included here study the provocation and the reactions associated with medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. These essays trace the impetus towards interactivity from the points of view of their creators and those who used them.Contributors include: Mickey Abel, Alfred Acres, Kathleen Ashley, Viola Belghaus, Sarah Blick, Erika Boeckeler, Robert L.A. Clark, Lloyd DeWitt, Michelle Erhardt, Megan H. Foster-Campbell, Juan Luis González García, Laura D. Gelfand, Elina Gertsman, Walter S. Gibson, Margaret Goehring, Lex Hermans, Fredrika Jacobs, Annette LeZotte, Jane C. Long, Henry Luttikhuizen, Elizabeth Monroe, Scott B. Montgomery, Amy M. Morris, Vibeke Olson, Katherine Poole, Alexa Sand, Donna L. Sadler, Pamela Sheingorn, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Anne Rudloff Stanton, Janet Snyder, Rita Tekippe, Mark Trowbridge, Mark S. Tucker, Kristen Van Ausdall, Susan Ward.
1. The book is the first devoted to the topic of women artists across the courts of early modern Europe. 2. The essays consider women artists and their experiences in a variety of European courts, in Italy, Flanders, Spain, and England. 3. The essays included address a variety of forms of artistic production by women in the courts, including large and small-scale paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles.
These volumes propose a renewed way of framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women. Today's standard division of artist from patron is not seen in medieval inscriptions--on paintings, metalwork, embroideries, or buildings--where the most common verb is 'made' ( fecit ). At times this denotes the individual whose hands produced the work, but it can equally refer to the person whose donation made the undertaking possible. Here twenty-four scholars examine secular and religious art from across medieval Europe to demonstrate that a range of studies is of interest not just for a particular time and place but because, from this range, overall conclusions can be drawn for the question of medieval art history as a whole. Contributors are Mickey Abel, Glaire D. Anderson, Jane L. Carroll, Nicola Coldstream, María Elena Díez Jorge, Jaroslav Folda, Alexandra Gajewski, Loveday Lewes Gee, Melissa R. Katz, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Pierre Alain Mariaux, Therese Martin, Eileen McKiernan González, Rachel Moss, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh, Felipe Pereda, Annie Renoux, Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Stefanie Seeberg, Miriam Shadis, Ellen Shortell, Loretta Vandi, and Nancy L. Wicker.
Twelfth-century individuals negotiated personal relationships along a continuum connecting rather than polarizing immediacy and mediated representation. Their markers of individuation, signs of identity and media of communication thus evidence practical engagement with contemporary medieval sign theory and perceptions of reality. In this study, the relevance of modern theory for the interpretation of medieval artifacts is shown to depend upon the parallel existence of theoretical activity by the producers and users of such artifacts. In the cultural landscape of the central Middle Ages, the axes of iconicity, semantics and materiality traced by charters, seals, and by both concrete and metaphorical images of the imprint, dynamically shaped the boundaries within which a sense of self was formulated, modulated, experienced, and enacted.
Drawing on case studies from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, covering Europe and beyond, Collectors’ Knowledge: What is Kept, What is Discarded investigates how knowledge was acquired, organized and sometimes lost. It examines collections of texts and objects—libraries, textbooks, miscellanies, commonplace books, data collections pertaining to historical events, encyclopedias, royal and ducal treasures, curiosity cabinets, galleries and museums—to uncover the processes of accumulation, organization, selection and rejection that have shaped learning. The essays emphasize the complex relationship between the intentions of collectors and the limitations they encountered—issues of format, presentation, display and storage—as well as outside forces that disrupted their aims, including pillage and natural disasters. Contributors include: Stephen Bann, Laurence Brockliss, François de Capitani, Livia Cárdenas, Steven Conn, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Anthony T. Grafton, Janet Grau, Jürgen Leonhardt, Ulrich Marzolph, Paul Michel, Jürgen Oelkers, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Nicola Schneider, Gerald Schwedler, Iolanda Ventura, Monika Wicki, and Marc Winter. Achtzehn europäische und aussereuropäische Fallstudien vom dreizehnten bis zwanzigsten Jahrhundert fragen in “Collectors’ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded – Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen – wie Sammler entscheiden”, wie Wissen erworben und organisiert wurde und weshalb es verloren ging. Die Autoren untersuchen Sammlungen von Texten und Objekten – Bibliotheken, Lehrbücher, Sammelbände, Datensammlungen im Zusammenhang mit historischen Ereignissen, Enzyklopädien, herrschaftliche Schätze, Wunderkammern und Museen. Ihr Ziel ist es, Prozesse der Akkumulation, Organisation, Auswahl und Ablehnung aufzudecken, die unser Wissen über die Epochen geprägt haben. Die Aufsätze unterstreichen die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen den Absichten der Sammler und den Zwängen, mit denen sie konfrontiert waren – in Fragen des Formates, der Präsentation oder Speicherung –, sowie den Kräften, die Verluste bewirkten, beispielsweise Plünderung oder ideengeschichtliche Umwälzungen.