Download PDF | (The New Middle Ages) Carlee A. Bradbury, Michelle Moseley-Christian (eds.) - Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art-Palgrave Macmillan (2017).
255 Pages
PREFACE
This project initially grew from a panel at the Southeastern College Art Association held in the fall of 2012 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The session was originally conceptualized as “Gender and Otherness in Medieval Art,” but following response to a call for papers, it quickly expanded to embrace a related early modern scope of inquiry. The range of studies we encountered both at the conference and from the authors who later joined the project as it developed, underscored to us how rich and varied the scholarly terrain remained in terms of examining gender as a state of “otherness.” Despite the continued scholarly interest in intersections of gender and otherness as fertile interpretive territory amongst the recent growth of other humanistic studies in this realm, there is a lacuna regarding gender and sex as a mode of difference using a materialfocused approach.
Thus, we bring together a range of contributing authors who focus on close readings of medieval and early modern material and visual culture, alongside historical textual counterparts, as ways to facilitate a greater understanding of the varied nature of premodern masculinities and femininities. The diverse methodologies used in this volume speak to how scholars might unpack the meanings of various media—reliquaries, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, prints, and sculpture—by questioning the semiotic language of iconography, form, theme, and display as elements that contributed to the construction of material markers of culture, tracking the entangled intersections between makers, objects and audience with works that were made for a varied constellation of patrons or viewers.
The struggle to conform to, or confound, culturally prescribed identities has been explored in a number of recent volumes. Most contributions that address a range of ways in which difference is culturally articulated focus on an historical or literary approach that primarily interprets texts as the point of entry into a richer understanding of medieval and early modern culture. For example, the Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe provides a series of critical structures that reveal how expansive, and necessary, gender has become as a framework for the study of premodern culture.
Recent publications that investigate various aspects of social and cultural difference from other disciplinary angles, notably Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells’ volume Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe, as well as Cordelia Beattie and Kristen Fenton’s volume Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages take up the question of how social place and faith guides the formation of gender identity in personal reflection and in the make up of religious community. Likewise, Marianna G. Muraveya and Raisa Maria Toivo’s collection Gender In Late Medieval And Early Modern Europe analyzes how social marginalization can exert a powerful influence on public expressions of gender.
Research in these areas has given a greater voice to the role of community acceptance and exclusion as critical forces in structuring various sacred and secular identities through the Middle Ages. By anchoring our study in the realm of the visual world, this volume aims to illuminate concepts of gender, difference, community, and self as indices of cultural ideology.
In considering the role of the individual within the community, we encounter the slippages between shifting definitions of premodern subjectivities that scholars continue to debate. Ronald Ganze’s “Medieval Sense of Self” adds a new dimension to the ongoing discussion of an early modern emergence of the “self,” and the conscious “self-fashioning” of individual identity proposed by Stephen Greenblatt presents obstacles to theorizing the role of the “other” within scholarly frameworks. In taking a cue from these key questions that articulate gender and sex difference as one path by which the “other” is manifested, the essays follow trajectories of continuity and change, and trace established visual traditions as they cede territory to new, experimental ways of visually communicating gender and difference as modalities of otherness. While each author explores a particular facet of medieval or early modern visual culture, they collectively coalesce around each object’s inherent materiality to contribute to a new way of envisioning, constructing, or reinforcing premodern gendered identity.
The variety of visual evidence that is considered in the essays here argues for a rethinking of objects as signifiers of gender difference that made an imprint on social inclusions and exclusions, national identity, physical appearance, religious ideology, legal authority, poverty, and piety. That is to say, our approach to visual culture is not a study of objects as passive receptacles for cultural context, rather, non-verbal works can, and should, be comprehended as full participants in the constant negotiation and renegotiation of gender constructs over centuries of historical change. This essay collection in its parts and as a whole seeks to give authority to the material artifact by exploring the multiplicity of cultural reference points that intersect in the visual world.
Radford, Virginia, USA Carlee A. Bradbury Blacksburg, Virginia, USA Michelle Moseley-Christian
Introduction to Gender and Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Art
Sherry C.M. Lindquist
According to the thirteenth-century theologian, Thomas Aquinas, the fact that there are different sexes is an issue of abnormality, of otherness, but otherness conceived by God. Since “male seed always tends toward the generation of male offspring, which is more perfect than the female,” the conception of females “would be wholly outside the design of nature, as is the case with what we call monstrous births.”! Irregular births, he contends, are influenced by celestial bodies, which are governed by divine providence.
This standard medieval explanation for sex difference has complicated consequences: the female body was accepted as inferior, unnatural, and “other,” but still as part of the divine order.’ As such, it provided medieval people with a useful and flexible device to think with, to discover one’s relationship to the other and to the divine, and to parse the connection between body and soul.* Such medieval ideas about gender and otherness persisted into the early modern period and beyond, generating new contradictions and inconsistencies as they interacted with competing intellectual paradigms and shifting social and geopolitical realities.5 European encounters with the other, including “other” social constructions of gender, accelerated in an age of increased travel, exploration, conquest and colonialism.® Constructing “otherness,” whether based on gender or another category of difference such as religion, class, or ethnicity, pivots around basic binaries: male/ female, self/other, us/them. Such simplistic, defining terms are at once so attractive and problematic in their reductiveness, that they must be constantly negotiated, reified, challenged and renegotiated. One powerful way to do so is through imagery and material culture.”
In the Middle Ages, rich, lasting visual traditions developed that reinforced conventional gender roles, but which also provided spaces for ambiguities and reversals. The feminist concerns that fueled groundbreaking work on the history of women and visual culture led to a greater and ongoing understanding of how the visual operates in integrative, nuanced dynamics that define the social experience for everyone.’ Since notions of gender, sex, and sexuality are intertwined, these visual traditions and experiments might also address sexual behaviors and desires.!° Certain arresting visualizations—such as an image of the wound of Christ that evokes breastfeeding and/or resembles a vagina— drew effectiveness out of their startling deviation from the expected male/female binary.!! In spite of the possibilities that such androgynous or hermaphroditic imagery might present, imagery most often worked to reinforce hegemonic structures.!?
Constructing women as “the other sex” lay the groundwork for the enduring subordination of women as the “other” or “second” sex, as eloquently described by Simon de Beauvoir centuries later‘? Laura Mulvey and other feminist theorists have examined the complex operation involved for women in viewing cultural products that cast them as “other.”!4 Related complications are addressed in the searching critiques of postcolonialist theory inaugurated by Edward Said’s foundational work on Orientalism.!5 Our gendered identities are always part of a bigger synchronic and diachronic picture, a kaleidoscopic palimpsest that we cannot understand without investigating the historical layers beneath our own attitudes about difference.
Because as human beings we situate ourselves in relationship to many kinds of social classifications, we juggle multiple binaries. This is not a simple operation, and it is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to theorize its intricacies in a systematic way through the lens of intersectionality.!© Originating in critical race theory formulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality addresses lacunae and inequities in contemporary feminism.!7 Intersectional approaches thus originally focused on the contemporary world, especially on globalization and the legacy of slavery and colonialism.
Art and media historians recognize that investigating the relationships between the concerns of intersectional analysis and our image-saturated culture is part of the larger theoretical endeavor.!? More and more, scholars of other eras are discovering that intersectionality promises new insights not only into the role that visual culture plays in constructing contemporary identities, but also in the historical formations on which our identities depend. In fact, the period in European history from around 1250 to 1650 is particularly rich in such visual experimentation and precedent—it was during this period that lay patrons and artists created an unprecedented volume of visual imagery.?? Until the Council of Trent (1545-63), they did so with very little official regulation by the Church.
This happened concurrently with the rise of the nation state, the expansion of an international economy, the invention of printing, and the Reformation, among other consequential developments that shifted ideas about individual and community with which notions of gender and otherness are inextricably bound. Postcolonialism and intersectionality offer heuristics that enable new questions about gendered identities, which prompt new insights into both the past and present.?! Accordingly scholars of the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period are also beginning to address aspects of the intersection of gender, visual culture, and other categories such as religious identity,?” race,?* and class.*+ In spite of a growing number of studies, the scholarship on these expansive questions is in its infancy. Many more studies are needed that wrestle with the complex material products that encode multiple identities before we can formulate more conclusive theoretical and historical overviews. The essays in this volume contribute to this goal by exploring the intersections of gender with “other” intellectual, social, and geopolitical factors that shape the later medieval and early modern eras.
In the first essay of this volume, Beth Fischer offers an instance in which the female body is endowed with symbolic power by being presented as both inferior and monstrous; paradoxically, it could both destabilize the viewer’s gender identity and reinforce gendered social inequalities. The subject of Fischer’s investigation is a thirteenth-century reliquary of David, which substituted an antique cameo of Medusa for the face of the ancient Jewish king whose lust for Bathsheba led to the need for his famous repentance and rehabilitation. The resulting object attracts through its precious materials and craftsmanship even as it repels the viewer with its discomfiting hybrid form. Viewers are asked to recognize themselves in David the sinner by confronting the terrifying consequences of the deadly sin of lust personified by Medusa’s monstrous countenance. The promise of redemption offered both by the small-scaled Virgin and Child floating like a vision beneath the head of Medusa/David and by the unquantifiable power of the unseen relic within, encourage the viewer to identify at some level with this transgressive male/female amalgam. Even though the form of the reliquary exceeds the limits of a single sex, lust is still gendered female in the memorable conflation of Medusa and Bathsheba, which asserts the notion that women’s bodies are the problem, the sinful “other” in antiquity, biblical times, and the historical present of the contemporary viewer.
Gender stereotypes activate presumptions about the religious “other” in medieval Christianity, as Carlee Bradbury demonstrates in her examination of English iconography of the anti-Semitic tale of the Jew of Bourges. In this story, a Jewish father, enraged after learning that his son attended a Christian Mass, throws the boy into a fiery oven. His wife’s piteous cries attract Christian witnesses to the boy’s miraculous rescue by the Virgin Mary. The grateful mother converts to Christianity, and the Christians throw the obdurate father into the flames. The submission expected of women in medieval Christian societies made the Jewess seem less threatening, more malleable and prone to conversion. Bradbury analyzes how artists used visual strategies to ally the boy and his mother with the Christians, and underscore their difference from the male Jew, who is emphasized as a menace to Christian values. The illuminations Bradbury studies, all made after the expulsion of the Jews from England, use the specter of the absent Jewish “other” to reinforce Christian authority to a Christian audience. As Bradbury points out, in personal books made for women, the Jewess is presented as an attractive figure for the female viewer to identify with, and she offers devout lessons for mothers. Books made for religious institutions, on the other hand, accentuate the roles of clerics and official witnesses. In both cases, the ideological power of the imagery rests in the contrast played up between sympathetic Christian figures and the caricatured male Jew, with the Jewess as a transitional figure. Both the Jew and the Jewess in the story personify Christian prejudices and fears in gendered ways: by constructing a monstrous male willing to murder his son, and women and children who need, and are prone to, conversion. These figments of the Christian imagination serve not only to buttress notions of Jewish otherness, but also reinforce expectations of the submissive role of women in patriarchal structures.
If gendered ideas about the Jew in later medieval England were often constructed in the absence of actual Jews, gendered representations of the economically disenfranchised emerged rather from daily interactions with the needy. Holly Flora parses how medieval Christians’ contradictory relationship to the poor intersects with gender in her study of representations of women and poverty in late medieval art. This subject is complicated by Christian notions of voluntary and involuntary poverty as well as deserving and undeserving recipients of charity. Wealthy noblewomen and high status women who voluntarily embraced poverty by taking orders are the protagonists who are normally represented distributing largesse. They are shown observing an implicit code of conduct that acknowledges how their sex and sexuality excludes them from institutions of power in medieval societies: they avoid direct contact with men and discharge their duties in institutional settings that give them the cover needed to approach the indigent of both sexes without suspicion. Aristocratic women are shown giving alms to the poor, particularly to women and children, in order to emphasize a female brand of pious virtue that helped to define women’s limited roles in the public sphere. Representations of recipients of charity also construct the impoverished other in gendered ways. Deserving male recipients of charity are presented as disabled or diseased, with body parts exposed, to show they cannot work. Conversely, deserving women are not shown sick, which would be interpreted as an index of sexual sin: they are modestly dressed or veiled to indicate that they are poor widows and not prostitutes. Flora’s study points us to the invisible other—in this case, poor single women, sick women, and sex workers who were considered outsiders to such a degree that they barely exist in the realms of visual depiction.
Another context in which women were relegated outside of the infrastructures of power was the law. Their exclusion from this realm of discourse and authority rests in gendered stereotypes: women were thought to be weak-minded and prone to error and deceit and therefore not reliable witnesses. The exclusion of half of the population from testifying in legal cases made it improbable, if not impossible, that official proceedings could result in justice. It is not surprising, therefore, that this uncomfortable reality would manifest itself in complex visual products such as Dieric Bouts’s diptych, The Justice of Otto LI (1470-75), commissioned for the city of Leuven’s town hall. Jessen Kelly shows how the choice of this unusual subject enabled Bouts both to justify the exclusion of women as witnesses by depicting the deceitful and lustful empress who causes the death of an innocent man, and to rectify the absence of female speech in medieval courts by permitting the virtuous widow to bear witness through her body via her miraculous endurance of an ordeal by fire. As Kelly points out, Bouts orchestrates the visual impact of the eloquently mute widow to draw attention to the artist’s own authority in visual truth-telling. Kelly also makes us aware of the irony that even the less-than-attractive ordeal option for women that Bouts foregrounds as a functional alternative to women speaking in court had been long out of use by this time. By making sin and virtue legible in representations of female bodies, the panels implicitly justify the suppression of women’s speech. The ostensible subject of justice served further offers a framework for addressing male anxieties and desires. Kelly demonstrates how visual elements of the painting convey complex messages about masculine identity: by delicately evading the fact that the emperor was (nearly) cuckolded; by highlighting the male artist’s prowess; and by flattering contemporary aldermen, whose portraits were imposed on the emperor’s wise advisors.
The role of painting for negotiating masculine identity in a civic context is also taken up in John Decker’s exploration of the meaning of Durer’s Feast of the Rose Garland (1506), made for German merchants living in Venice in the sixteenth century. Along with Jews, Turks and other foreigners living in the city, the Venetians segregated the expatriates and restricted their movements. Such constraints emphasized, by contrast, both the superior social position and the autonomy of male Venetian citizens. In fact, they were analogous to restrictions imposed on women in the republic, and the similarity had the potential to feminize the Germans. One way for the German men to stake out a place in the public sphere was to establish a confraternity, the Scuola dei Tedeschi, which allowed them to be visible in public processions on major feast days—an activity reserved to males. Durer’s altarpiece was commissioned to be the focal point of the confraternity’s communal worship. Decker considers how the particulars of the German community’s internal conflicts, contradictions and ambitions were bound up with gendered identities, and this helps to account for aspects of the Feast of the Rose Garland that have not been fully explained. One way German merchants living in Venice mitigated the limitations of their outsider status was by accentuating shared notions of ideal Christian masculinity and insisting on the repressive gender binary also endorsed by the Venetians. This allowed them to distinguish themselves not only from women, but also from non-Christian minorities in the city such as the Turks and Jews. Durer’s painting played a role in theGerman merchants’ attempts to claim a more equal footing with their Venetian trading partners. It also operated to reinforce the social divisions between them and other disenfranchised groups, implicitly denigrating the feminine and feminizing “other” foreigners in the city, with whom they competed.
The denigration of the feminine and the association of female with other is rationalized with the biblical story of Adam and Eve, a foundational tale of exile, in which the woman is to blame and punished with pain in childbirth. Genesis makes both female sexual desire and motherhood sites of otherness, even a monstrous otherness, considering the extent to which Eve is associated with the demonic snake. The monster often functions in societies to acknowledge and contain threats to dominant ideologies. We have seen that Beth Fischer’s essay in this volume on Medusa explores the social implications of figuring female sexual desire as monster, and Marion Bleeke does so for the maternal body in her study of a series of female transi tombs in Renaissance France. As Bleeke makes us see, the extraordinary transi from the tomb of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendome enhances the monstrous qualities of the corpse by merging signs of life and death in unsettling ways, even suggesting a macabre pregnancy. This figure enables an insight into how women in the late medieval and early modern period negotiated mixed social messages about pregnancy: as potential evidence of sin and female biological difference-interpreted-as-inferiority, and as a highly desired outcome at once perilous to women and necessary both to dynastic and human survival. When circumstances permitted high-status women to commission their own tombs, they could invest them with multiple purposes that ranged from self-expression to political maneuvering. Bleeke argues that one purpose of Catherine de Medici’s self-commissioned tomb, for example, was to allow her to justify wielding power on behalf of her royal children. These potent objects reinforce gender binaries even at the moment of death, when gender distinctions might seem least relevant. They embody both the temporal and eternal; they activated and activate notions of otherness in ways that both disenfranchise women and enable the interrogation and transformation of stereotypes to the advantage of a female patron.
This volume ends with a meditation on another way in which female embodiment was stereotyped to signify otherness: the particular association of female flesh, of fat, with gluttony and lust. Michelle MoseleyChristian argues that these meanings coalesce in Rembrandt’s Naked Woman Seated on a Mound (c. 1629-31). She teases out the reasons why this naked woman—more than other substantial feminine figures by Rembrandt, Rubens and their followers—has been the subject of particular criticism for her girth. They are embedded in the figure’s intervisual relationships with exemplars such as female personifications of the sin of gluttony, and images of the legendary race of subhuman wild women thought to have excessive sexual appetites. Rembrandt’s robust nude looks directly outward with an insinuating smile and frank gaze, challenging the viewer to look at her fleshy body without the guidance of any overt moralizing signifiers. Negative reactions from its audience are evidence that the association between fat and sin was strong enough to make explicit didactics unnecessary. For certain contemporaneous viewers, the image repels because female flesh and sin were synonymous. Modern viewers, too, have been repelled by the image, but their reasons are likely more related to divergent ideals of beauty than preoccupation with sexual sin. Representations of female flesh that are not sufficiently regulated in accordance with social expectations thus register as “other” for both premodern and modern viewers.
In the medieval and Early Modern eras, as in our own time, gendered representations of bodies encompass, potentially, a host of contradictory meanings; it is because they are unstable signifiers that they have the power to destabilize the viewer, even across miles and centuries. This volume identifies myriad ways in which premodern artists dealt with the intersection of gender and otherness—whether consciously or unconsciously—by creating unexpected and monstrous hybrids; by fashioning strategically sympathetic renderings of the religious other; by carefully modelling the gendered conditions under which benefactors could help the marginalized; by papering over injustice in a gendered legal system; by picturing the dual operation of denigrating the feminine and feminizing the other; by drawing on the symbolic power of female otherness in order to reinforce a patrons’ claim to political power; and by differentiating and moralizing the nature of female flesh. Interpretations of the works of art offered in this volume are not necessarily the primary or intended meanings for these works, nor are they the only possible gendered readings, but they reveal, nevertheless, much about how gender and otherness coalesced in the visual culture of these eras.
All of the essays in this volume probe the complexity of shifting gender roles, an enterprise that is necessary, even urgent, because the putative alterity of the female body that is foundational in Christianity—and in many other cultures as well—sets up persistent male/female, insider/ outsider, self/other binaries as default ideologies. It is because these binaries are inadequate to human experience that they require scaffolding: laws, liturgies, treatises, policies, proverbs, stories, and works of art. These cultural mechanisms, even though they typically reflect dominant ideologies, also inevitably betray contradictions. Sometimes these are constitutive contradictions: visible seams marking expected divisions, or necessary hinges painted over to disguise places of possible breach. If we examine closely such points of potential rupture, we can envisage cultural products from the perspective of diverse others, such as those subjected by dominant ideologies of gender.
As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and other postcolonialist thinkers have stressed, our scholarly attempts to recover the lost voices of repressed populations unavoidably result in echoes of our own utterances, and this only makes us complicit in further silencing the subaltern.2° We may not be able to recover the subaltern voices of those who have gone missing in our histories, but we should listen for them anyway. Doing so is a worthwhile endeavor, as long as we are self-conscious of its imaginative element, as long as we realize that what we are doing is not restoring, somehow, what has been irretrievably lost, but rather contemplating the plausible and the possible, of investigating how cultures work in creating and maintaining dominant categories. Attempting to understand the gendered implications of the cultural products of other eras is a daunting task. We must employ a measure of what Karma Lochrie calls “epistemological humility,” in order to avoid making unsupportable essentialist, transhistorical and universalizing presumptions about gender or the nature of the self.2° We must respect the otherness of the premodern past without dismissing it as so radically other that we make ourselves incapable of learning from our encounters with it.
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