This interdisciplinary collection addresses the location of women and their bequests within the single most important public and social space in pre-Reformation Europe: the Roman Catholic Church. This innovative focus brings attention to gender and space as experienced in the medieval parish as well as in monastic and cathedral space. Through provocative handling of historical content and theory, the contributors explore strategies of exclusion and of inclusion and note patterns of later writers who neglect or rewrite records of female presence.
Essays on the York religious cycle, the chronicle of the monastery at Ely, and The Book of Margery Kempe explore how medieval writers used texts as fictive spaces on which to graft responses to the gendered uses of real church buildings. These text-based essays are juxtaposed with tightly focused archival research in art history and history on Florentine patronage and English parish seating, as well as with more broadly synthetic studies on access of women to shrines and on gendered left-right placement in ritual art.
Tabella dei contenuti
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Sarah Stanbury and Virginia Chieffo Raguin
1. Signs of the Body: Gender, Sexuality, and Space in York and the York Cycle
Ruth Evans
2. Ely’s St. Æthelthryth: The Shrine’s Enclosure of the Female Body as Symbol for the Inviolability of Monastic Space
Virginia Blanton
3. Margery Kempe and the Arts of Self-Patronage
Sarah Stanbury
4. Real and Imaged Bodies in Architectural Space: The Setting for Margery Kempe’s Book
Virginia Chieffo Raguin
5. The Seat under Our Lady: Gender and Seating in Late Medieval English Parish Churches
Katherine L. French
6. Access to Salvation: The Place (and Space) of Women Patrons in Fourteenth-century Florence
Ena Giurescu Heller
7. Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
8. Men on the Right/Women on the Left: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places
Corine Schleif
List of Contributors
Index
Circa l’autore
Virginia Chieffo Raguin is Professor of Art History at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of many books, including
The History of Stained Glass: The Art of Light Medieval to Contemporary and
Stained Glass in Thirteenth-Century Burgundy.
Sarah Stanbury is Associate Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. Her previous books include
Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception and
Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (coedited with Katie Conboy and Nadia Medina).
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