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 refection 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 infuence 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 defnitions 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 signifers 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. Carlee A. Bradbury Michelle Moseley-Christian
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