Women and Gender in Trecento Art & Architecture

This volume is the first to bring together a full range of current trecento art historical thought on the significance of gender in women’s patronage, reception of images, and representations of female characters and individuals. Emerging in the 1970s and 80s, the topics of women, their roles in personal, social, economic, and political life, and the significance of gender have become major issues throughout many fields of scholarship and, indeed, in many aspects of contemporary life. The earliest studies of late medieval Italian (trecento) women and the visual art and spaces commissioned by or for them primarily focused on women as patrons, with some but much less attention to audiences and to representations of women.

The richly varied array of topics presented in this volume greatly deepen and expand previous discourses and methods of inquiry, by authors ranging from advanced Ph.D. students to senior scholars, including new work by some of the those who were early pioneers in the field. Considering a plethora of specific subjects and materials and employing a variety of methods, the authors enrich our understanding of attitudes toward women as well as women’s complex relationships to images in religious, public, and domestic spaces, both within and beyond the restrictions placed on them by trecento society.

Introduction

Women Interacting with Images

Women re/act: Women and images in trecento art
Cordelia Warr

Exchanging Her Heart with Christ: The Ardor of Authorization in the Breast in Catherine of Siena
Meagan Khoury

Gendering Grief in Trecento Italy in Paintings and Sermons
Judith Steinhoff

Images of Women

Vetula, Vecchia, Prophetess, Saint: The Old Woman in the Florentine Trecento
Catherine Lawless

Women as Emotive Models in Giovanni Sercambi’s Chronicle
Peter Bokody

Women & Devotional Practice

Beyond the Book of Hours: Female Lay Readers and the Wounds of Saint Francis
Holly Flora

The Missing Mother: Mary’s absence from the Franciscan miracle at Greccio (1223) and its Later Representation
Patricia Simons

Women in Spaces – Religious and Domestic

In the Footsteps of Women: Gender Segregation or Inclusion in Mendicant Churches
Eric Gustafson

Female Actors and Gendered Spaces Inside the Florentine Home between Trecento and Quattrocento
Lorenzo Vigotti

Women as Patrons

A Christological cycle fit for a Queen in the Bible of Naples (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 9561)
Eilis Olivia Coughlin

Anna Buzzacarini, Abbess of San Benedetto Vecchio in Padua, Patroness of the Arts
Zulieka Murat

The Diptych of Delphine de Signe: Movement, Touch, and the Medium of Panel Painting in Women’s Patronage and Devotional Practice
Sarah K. Kozlowski

Nuns & Women Saints

Late Medieval Vita Panels and Mary Magdalen as a Gendered Model of Penitence
Sarah Wilkins

Holy Men and Artful Nuns: What Paintings Reveal about the Lived Experience of Trecento Women
Karen E McCluskey

Becoming a Poor Clare in Late Medieval Italy: Images of Monachation, Devotion, and Salvation in Paolo Veneziano’s Clarissan Altarpieces
Christopher Platts