Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350û1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance

by Pearson,Andrea

• ISBN13: 9780754651543
• ISBN10: 0754651541
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Illuminated here are the relationships between visual culture, faith, and gender in the courtly, monastic, and urban spheres of the early modern Burgundian Netherlands. By examining works by artists such as the Master of Mary of Burgundy, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Bernard van Orley, author Andrea Pearson identifies and explores pictorial constructions of masculinity and femininity in regard to the expectations, experiences, and practices of devotion. Specifically, she demonstrates that two of the most prominent visual genres of the period, books of hours and devotional portrait diptychs, were manipulated by patrons and spectators of both sexes to challenge and negotiate the boundaries and hierarchies of gender, and that marginalized individuals and groups appropriated the types to resist the authority of others and advance their own. Ultimately, the books and diptychs emerge as critical and often contentious sites for deliberating and transacting gender. By integrating books of hours and devotional portrait diptychs into current interdisciplinary theoretical discourse on gender, power and devotion, the author engages scholars in a range of disciplines: art history, history, religion and literature, as well as women's and men's studies.

Author Biography

Andrea Pearson is Associate Professor of Art History at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgements	xvii
Introduction: Performing Gender in the Burgundian Netherlands	1	(28)
Gendering Books and Diptychs
`Private' Images as Agents in Social Transactions
Books, Diptychs, and Spectators: The Documentary Evidence
Devotional Portrait Diptychs in Gendered Relationships
Gender and Power
Authority and Community in Women's Books of Hours	29	(32)
Holy Women and the Practice of the Hours
Laywomen and Incarnational Piety
Educating Girls at the Burgundian Court
Reading and Viewing Communities
Gendered Hierarchies in Religion
Conclusion
Regendering the Faith: Books of Hours, Devotional Portrait Diptychs, and the Affirmation of Men	61	(29)
The Chronology of Gender in Books of Hours
Incarnational Claims in Men's Books
Transacting Gender: The Public Domain
Recalibrating Religion
Resisting Regendering: Women's Diptychs
Conclusion
The Problem of Male Embodiment in Two Diptychs from Bruges	90	(46)
Men's Bodies and the Quest for Holiness
An Alternative Masculinity
The Eroticized Body as a Site of Scandal
On the Fringes of Maturity: Early Manhood
The Chaste Husband
Generational and Gendered Spectators
Clerics and Laymen
Nuns and Clerics: Ambiguous Authority in a Devotional Portrait Diptych	136	(26)
Jean Bellegambe and the Flines Diptych
The Patriarchal Underpinnings of Reform
The Conceptual Boundaries of Enclosure
Hierarchical Gendered Piety
Gifting the Diptych
Through a Clerical Lens
Conclusion
Disrupting Gender at the Court of Margaret of Austria	162	(30)
Margaret's Devotional Portrait Diptychs
The Burgundian Ducal Connection
Portraits and the Gender of Succession
Conformity and Resistance: A Male Model
Conclusion
Conclusion	192	(3)
Appendix: A Checklist of Devotional Portrait Diptychs	195	(8)
Bibliography	203	(26)
Index	229