Nowadays it seems completely obvious that we teach, lecture, and write about medieval womenâtheir commissions and gifts, the objects they used, and what those things meant to themâin the contexts of their lives as we know them from documents and chronicles. This was not always so. I am reminded of the footnote near the end of Madeline Cavinessâs 1993 Speculum article on the Hours of Jeanne dâÃvreux, in which Caviness cites a discussion at a faculty meeting in which one colleague asked if the canon of white male artists in the nineteenth century was not the ânormalâ way to teach the art of that period.1 Looking back now, this lack of academic interest in women strikes me as ironic for two reasons: first, most of us in my graduate school class were women, young women trying to figure out how to structure both our personal and our professional lives; and second, we were beginning our study at the height of the feminist movement. Betty Friedanâs Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, had influenced our thinking about the direction of our lives and opened up new possibilities for us even before we had read it ourselves.2 Feminist art history came more slowly and in medieval even more slowly still. I would credit two articles with a kind of break-through status. The first was Claire Richter Shermanâs work on the sequence of images of the queen in the so-called âCoronation Bookâ made for Charles V of France in 1364. Published first in Viator in 1977, this work came to wider attention in an excerpted form that appeared in Norma Broude and Mary Garrardâs Feminism and Art History in 1982.3 At the beginning of her essay Sherman calls for âan awareness that women have played much larger roles in history and art history than those traditionally assigned them by scholars of these subjects.â4 Earlier work on the Coronation Book had taken little notice of the fact that, in addition to the twenty-eight images of the coronation of the king, the manuscript also includes nine describing the coronation of the queen. Shermanâs achievement was not only to bring the scenes of the queenâs coronation to wider public knowledge; much more important was her ability to relate them to an issue crucial to Charles V (1338â1380) and his wife Jeanne of Bourbon (1338â1378) at the time of their coronation. In 1364, when Charlesâs father died, Charles and his wife had been married for fourteen years. They had not yet succeeded in producing the necessary and much desired living male heir, however, and it was starting to look like the relatively new Valois line might die out with Charles, only the third king of the new dynasty. In the years before his coronation, when his father was imprisoned in London and Charles served as regent, Charles had had a new coronation ordo (or order) written. While there were some changes in the vows and prayers spoken at the coronation and anointment of the king, the queenâs portion of the ceremony was modified more dramatically. Newly added prayers likened the queen to Old Testament women who bore children: âTogether with Sarah and Rebecca and Leah and Rachel, all blessed and revered women, may she be worthy of being made fruitful and rejoice in the fruit of her womb in order to rule and protect the glory of the whole kingdom and the state of the Holy Church.â5 The Coronation Book codifies and commemorates this newly written ceremony. In setting the manuscript and the ceremony it records into a contemporaneous context, Sherman has enabled us to see the manuscript as a whole and the ceremony as one in which the queen participated fully. She also illuminated the role that both books and ceremonies might play in critical situations and in doing so opened up avenues for the rest of us to study similar objects and processes.
In the same year as the publication of Feminism and Art History, Susan Groag Bell published a ground-breaking article entitled âMedieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture.â6 In the first part of her article, she establishes patterns of book ownership among women and proposes ways in which women acquired booksâthrough inheritance, as gifts, often from other women, and by commissioning books for their own use. In her second part, Bell proposes that women had a âspecial relationship to books.â Not only were laywomen more likely to be literate than laymen in the Middle Ages but women, excluded from scholarly and clerical life, needed what Bell calls the âmental and spiritual nourishment offered by booksâ more than men did. Women were also the primary teachers of their daughters and young sons and needed books in this function, and they were important in commissioning translations into the vernacular of the Latin texts they themselves could not read. Finally, in the third part of her article, Bell investigates womenâs relationship to books as an agent of cultural changeâin particular, the development of new iconographies and the introduction of artistic and other ideas through books carried abroad in dowries. Bellâs article elaborated womenâs active roles as teachers, readers, and patrons. Commissioning manuscripts appears as a form of patronage that had a special meaning for women; the books that they gave to other women helped to establish bonds of both friendship and family; and women were able to influence cultural interchange through the books they took with them when they married and moved to far-off courts. Bellâs article was considered so important that it was reprinted twice at the end of the 1980s in essay collections. The titles of these anthologiesâSisters and Workers in the Middle Ages and Women and Power in the Middle Ages7âneatly crystallize two of Bellâs points: that books were a means by which women built and cemented connections, especially connections with other women; and that books enabled women to establish some control over their environments.
It is amazing to me, thinking back on it, that it is possible to single out two articles on medieval women as having provided a foundation for so much stimulating, more recent work. This did not happen immediately, of course, but in the second half of the 1980s, a flurry of activity was directed toward medieval women, especially queens, for the reasons cited above. Where documents, contracts, and wills exist at all for medieval women, they are likely to be for women of elevated status. Where chronicles mention women, they are, again, likely to be noblewomen who played a role in politically motivated marriages and their accompanying territorial acquisitions, negotiating the marriages of their children, and other kinds of diplomacy.
It seems to me that what weâthe many of us who have been drawn to work on medieval womenâhave accomplished over the last three decades or so can be summed up quite simply. First, we have brought women into the canon; it is no longer considered radical, or even particularly noteworthy, to look at a medieval womenâs patronage or use of art. Even better, however, and certainly more important, we have become open to the idea that these women may have had different concerns than their husbands and that these concerns may have been equally eloquently expressed in artistic form, although often a form distinct from that of works commissioned by and for men. Furthermore, the nature of these womenâs statusâindeed the very fact that they were womenâmay, in some cases, have driven them to new and particularly creative solutions. All this sounds to me like a perfect definition of scholarly work worth pursuing. The simple existence of the three sessions on women and their objects organized by Tracy Chapman Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany at the meetings of the College Art Association and the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in the late winter and spring of 2015âand these were, of course, hardly the firstâis demonstration enough that women were patrons to be reckoned with and collectors of considerable importance, that their patterns of purchasing, commissioning, receiving, using, and giving what we now call works of art both paralleled and differed from those of men. Including these women in the canon need not take away from the achievements of men but instead can make the big picture subtler, more interesting, and more well-rounded.
The particular angle chosen by the organizers for these three sessions is that of movement, mobility, transfer of objects and ideas, inspired and enabled by such new technologies as GIS mapping. Every work of art moves, from the artistâs shop to the patron or the person receiving the patronâs gift, and every work of art moves at its ownerâs death to his or her descendants or legatees. And, as women were the âmobile unitsâ in a marriage, to use the felicitous phrase Hamilton coined in her MA thesis,8 they carried objectsâbooks, reliquaries, textiles, jewelry, and tablewareâwith them to newly formed households when they married and thus brought unknown object types and stylistic influences to their new homes. Artists and knowledge of techniques also traveled with women as they moved. But let us not forget that they also bore less tangible or at least less transportable things. Territory, of course, came into a marriage with a bride; it could leave with her too, as at the divorce of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122â1204) from Louis VII of France (1120â1180). And they also brought with them new ideas about ceremony, patronage and collecting practices, and gift giving.
In addition to considering these objects from such closely defined approaches, much other work remains to be done. The papers presented here all deal with elites. While their lives, finances, and possessions are typically better documented than those of women of lesser status, an attempt to access the interests of these others remains a desideratum nevertheless. One avenue through which to do this might be that of clothing. Both expensive and practical garments were gifts from women of the highest status to their courtiers and servants. Since sumptuary laws prevented some of these recipients from wearing these gifts, they were probably intended to be sold, another kind of movement. Pious donations of clothing to institutions such as the cathedral works in Strasbourg, as Charlotte Stanford has shown, might also be a fruitful avenue of inquiry.9 Cross-gender transfers are another area in which we need to do more work. The number of manuscripts in the library of Charles V that had earlier belonged to royal women, including their most personal books of hours in striking numbers, suggests either the loss of gender-specific messages in later generations or that family provenance or luxurious decoration outshone the original gendered message and object type, as Marguerite Keane explores in this volume. And there are still lots of these women, even queens, for whom the documents, both written texts and physical objects, have not been evaluated. Some of these women lurk in the shadows of their husbands, and older literature sometimes misleads us into believing that the men were responsible for the works created in their lifetimes. It is not just a matter of filling inâmore queens, more media, more countriesâhowever. It is important to think, at least as far as possible, about the bigger picture. I mean this in two ways. First is the position of any single object in the larger group of one womanâs commissions, collections, and gifts given and received. In thinking about the bigger picture, we should also consider how one womanâs patterns of collecting and donation were similar to or different from those of her contemporaries and near followers.
Why do we care about these elite women in the Middle Ages, their commission and use of art, and their attitudes toward their objects? Understanding their objects and interests provides a more complex and complete view of some of the same kinds of things that have always interested scholars of medieval art. Extravagant royal commissions can now be considered in relation to the whole courtâthe king and queen, their courtiers and ladies-in-waiting, the princes and the princesses. Traditional, masculinist art history now becomes more inclusive. These works commissioned for and by women are of interest in their own rights, and they inform us about womenâs concerns, womenâs tastes, and their patronage patterns that may have deviated from those of their fathers, brothers, and husbands but may also in some cases have coincided with theirs. This work on queens is also important for its ability to engage young women today. And for all of us women, working on our medieval counterparts keeps us continually aware of our own place in the scholarly world and the importance of making our own voices heard.
In some ways the study of medieval art is a contained field. By this I mean that the body of work is pretty much fixed. Only rarely does an important new object appear. But an openness to the activities of women has expanded the field enormously, allowing us to study some of the same old objects in interesting new waysâto become clearer about the patronage situations that brought them into being, the situations in which they functioned, and the viewersâof both sexesâwho might have used them and moved them. It has beenâand continues to beâtremendously exciting.
Madeline Caviness, âPatron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,â Speculum 68, no. 2 (1993): 333â62 at 362 n. 145.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).
Claire Richter Sherman, âThe Queen in Charles Vâs Coronation Book: Jeanne de Bourbon and the âOrdo Ad Reginam Benedicendam,ââ Viator 8 (1977): 255â97; Claire Richter Sherman, âTaking a Second Look: Observations on the Iconography of a French Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon (1338â1378),â in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 101â17.
Sherman, âTaking a Second Look,â 101.
Sherman, âTaking a Second Look,â 104, cites the text after E.S. Dewick, ed., The Coronation Book of Charles V of France (Cottonian MS Tiberius B. VIII), Henry Bradshaw Society, vol. 16 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1899), fol. 67, col. 45. The translation from the Latin is Shermanâs.
Susan Groag Bell, âMedieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,â Signs 7 (1982): 742â68. The direct quotes in the next lines appear on p. 743.
Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowalski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 149â87; Judith M. Bennett, ed., Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 135â61.
Tracy Chapman, âThe Female Audience for the Bible moralisée: Blanche of Castille and the Example of Vienna 2554â (Masterâs thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1995), 6.
Charlotte A. Stanford, âDonations from the Body for the Soul: Apparel, Devotion and Status in Late Medieval Strasbourg,â in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 6, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 173â205.