GENDER Author(s): Sherry C. M. Lindquist Source: Studies in Iconography , 2012, Vol. 33, Special Issue Medieval Art History Today—Critical Terms (2012), pp. 113-130 Published by: Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University through its Medieval Institute Publications and Trustees of Princeton University Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23924277 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms and are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in Iconography This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms GENDER Sherry C. M. Lindquist Gender is a relatively new category of historical analysis, one th championed in an influential article in the American Historical Rev and which only began to appear in disciplinary encyclopedias an terms in the early 1990s.1 At the time when Scott wrote her wate general dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, restric the term to what the OED gives as its second definition, which foc term's grammatical meaning. This is no doubt related to the OED's first definition of "kind, sort, class." The term, which thus evokes n classifying and of feminine and masculine, was appropriated in scie about hermaphroditism in the 1950s by sexologist John Money and tors; it then began to figure in the writings of other medical practitione scientists as well as feminist theorists to describe socially determin istics attributed to biological sex.2 They drew on the third definitio provided by the OED, which recognized that the word "gender" could biological sex of persons and not just grammatical categories. Altho had historically presented this usage only as a "jocularity," in 1989 edged the new context for the word by adding definition 3b.3 The c definition, the one most relevant to our concern, remains unchanged this writing: 3. a. transf. Sex. Now only jocular. b. In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human be often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to t biological, distinctions between the sexes. The above definition betrays some unease with the serious implication "gender," since it refuses to recognize its jokiness to be obsolete, eve OED only offers examples of "jocularity" that are centuries old. In calls "gender" a euphemism for "sex," which suggests that the wor substitute word for (biological) sex, whose virtue is that it does no onymous associations with sex (acts) or sexuality. The implication o ability between sex and gender flattens out gender's theoretical com © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan Un This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 114 Sherry C. M. Lindquist furthermore, works to deny a more complicated interrelationship among sex, sexu ality, and gender. Gender is a term, Scott argues, that "emphasizes an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex, or directly determining of sexuality."4 The OED definitions of "gender" signal the perplexity, evasions, and precariousness that have been and still are attached to this term.5 It is a rare moment when one must turn from the Oxford English Diction ary to Judith Butler's notoriously complicated texts in search of clarity, but her enormously influential article of 1988, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitu tion: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," may shed some light on how to think about the intersection of gender and medieval art.6 Here Butler famously argues that gender identity is performative, that it is instituted through a "stylized repetition of acts."7 Butler also says, significantly for our purposes, that gender is instituted through a "stylization of the body . . . understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self."8 Much of medieval art can qualify as a "stylization of the body," at least in the reinforcing arena of rep resentation, and much recent scholarship drawing on reception theory shows that images serve as both models and instruments for constructing the gender of the self and of the other.9 Butler's theory means that we fashion our own gender identities through the fusion of individual inclinations and social pressures. Of course, this model may also apply to how we form other aspects of identity including sexuality, which is intertwined with gender. Although there are those who, following Michel Foucault, accept sexual identity as a modem construct and hold that premodern societies were concerned with sexual behavior rather than identities, more recent scholarship is challenging this precept.10 The sharp break that Foucault and others insist upon between medieval and modem people is just as troubling an anachro nistic distortion as the collapsing of the distance between them and us.1 ' Medieval stylizations of the body are gendered in ways that are both utterly foreign and strangely familiar—and studies that help us sort these ways out have much to teach us both about our medieval forebears and about ourselves.12 One thing that the modem world certainly has in common with the medi eval one is the function of gender as a structure of inequality.13 In the Middle Ages, notions of sexual difference determined where you could go; what you wore; whom you spoke to; what you could say; what profession you could pursue; how you were educated; to what organizations you could belong; the terms by which you could testify in court, inherit property, and earn wages; and countless other aspects of individual lives. And yet gender was not, of course, an exclu sive determinant of identity; other factors such as wealth, power, birth, ethnic ity, race, sexuality, profession and creed could inflect or disrupt expected gender This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gender 115 roles. When expectations based on these determinants were in even conflict, it threatened the norms of social order. Such con be publicly resolved or at least negotiated, retheorized, clarifi or, alternatively, safely obfuscated. Visual images could and o purposes, an operation that might call for them to be ambiguou with regard to gender. We should not necessarily assume, there images that seem to transgress or subvert normative conceptio transgressive or subversive. It is more likely that such images reinforce normative ideas about gender and power in quite nu cated ways. This was a dangerous game, however, since a failure creator and/or viewer in such cases, a misrepresentation or mis cues, might just undermine the very purpose of the image. The stances that allow for a "queer" reading, not necessarily (but ne a reading from a gay/lesbian perspective but a reading against d Karl Whittington describes in his contribution to this volume.1 could visualize the things in which the dominant powers who were invested, and gendered readings of them help us to figure out meant and how they functioned for viewers. A gendered reading of a medieval work of art investigates t sages of a patriarchal, heterosexist culture that inflected the im messages were conceived, produced, disseminated, internali mined by and for audiences in particular historical contexts. Suc can also expose the ways in which ideologies of gender are discourses of power and identity. Gendered readings help us t ings in medieval art and architecture that we would otherwise point is my own reading of a canonical monument—the Chartr a Carthusian charterhouse founded in 1385, which served as th leum of the Valois Burgundian dukes.15 Given the male monasti scholars took for granted that women had little or nothing to do w production, and reception of this monument and the art objec it. Neither had anyone considered how this monument constr models of masculinity. In fact, assumptions in the past about a inviolate male authority in the Middle Ages led scholars not to were supposed to be male preserves, even if evidence suggests importance (or even the importance of their absence). Thus th pretation of the Chartreuse de Champmol stages it as an asser and authority of the duke, Philip the Bold, (which it no doubt Carthusian inhabitants in a minor role—presuming their adhere rule. The duke's wife, Duchess Margaret of Flanders, was gran in spite of the facts that her inheritance was the source of the fabu This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 116 Sherry C. M. Lindquist made the new foundation possible; that she was in Dijon more than Philip at the time of its construction; and that she signed the foundation charter, laid the first stone, selected artisans, certified payments for work, and gave gratuities to work ers. Indeed, as I have demonstrated, Margaret's participation was reflected in a spectacular private oratory, an extraordinary life-sized portrait on the door of the church, and in the endless repetitions of her arms and symbols throughout the decorative program of the monastic complex (Fig. 1). Certainly the duchess's pres ence was one contradiction (among others) that posed problems for the monks—in the face of which they had to reassert their ideological purity, especially since their rule, more than that of other orders, emphasized their isolation, particularly from women. I have reconstructed the Carthusians' participation in the conceptualiza tion of the Chartreuse de Champmol, and I argue that these monks shored up their reputation partly through art and architecture that projected a heroic and implic itly masculine brand of devotionalism, expressed through an innovative pictorial program as well as through architectural mechanisms that claimed to isolate the Carthusians from their surprisingly large and diverse constituency. It was precisely because of the evident influence of their powerful female patron that the Carthu sians needed such strategies to help them maintain the inequalities of a gendered social structure that insisted on male superiority. This kind of gendered reading, though offering new insight into canonical works, can also be problematic. One of the interpretive tasks I set for myself in the Champmol project was to examine the role of art and architecture in negotiating the ideologically charged interactions between men and women at the monastery. In doing so I took for granted that we all understand what the categories of "male" and "female" are in the first place, and the conception of a clear distinction between these categories risks reinforcing the notion that a male/female binary is stable and inevitable. These sorts of shortcuts, stemming from difficulties in finding adequate language to describe more complex models of sex and sexuality, are common in the literature and may have led Joan Scott to worry as early as the 1990s that the term "gender" might have lost its critical edge. Madeline Caviness has observed that "feminist praxis is thwarted as long as activists have to use the terms (and concepts) invented within a system of oppression.'"6 And yet, as Judith Butler argued in revisit ing some of the "gender trouble" she had stirred up, we can emancipate the meanings of troubling terms by using them outside of their foundational modes.17 For example, Madeline Caviness's gendered reading of the Bayeux Embroidery not only makes us notice and ponder the significance of the scarcity of women in a famed work of art made by women, but it shows us that their absence enabled the embroidery to high light the illustration of multiple masculinities.18 She argues that the embroidery con structs the Anglo-Saxon men as a "third sex" through culturally determined signifiers such as hair, clothing, position, and posture. They are not being feminized so much This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gender 117 ik ill 4 fill It Fig. 1. Claus Stüter, Margaret of Flanders with St. Catherine of Alexandria. Stone, detail of the portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol. 1385-1401. (Photo: Author.) as shown as a different and inferior type of man whose deficiencies justify Norman domination. Caviness thus contributes to a much larger literature that reveals the inadequacy of a binary definition of sex in biological, cultural, and historical terms. Such scholarship interrogates and even redefines the current OED's definition of "sex" as "either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions" (l.a). Our gendered readings can both deconstruct and reshape our vocabulary, our concepts, our relationship to our history, and our lived realities. This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 118 Sherry C. M. Lindquist The utility of gender as a category of analysis is tied to its plasticity—and the most valuable gendered readings of medieval works of art are explorations that do not attempt to substitute one kind of universalizing orthodoxy for another. They instead offer persuasive new interpretations that acknowledge that meaning depends on the subject positions of particular audiences in specific historical cir cumstances. Since we are all limited by our own subject positions, not to mention our discipline-centric skills in an interdisciplinary endeavor, the most revealing results must therefore come from aggregated scholarly activity. Of the surprisingly few medieval objects that have received multiple gen dered readings, one is the tiny devotional book now in the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Rothschild Canticles (MS 404). A brief examination of the various gen dered readings offered for one bifolium (18v-19r; Fig. 2) can serve here as an instructive object lesson about the productive debates and rich accretive meanings that a chain of gendered readings produces. Jeffrey Hamburger's erudite, mag isterial study of the Rothschild Canticles (1990) begins the conversation. In his attempt to reconstruct the original viewing context of this manuscript, he makes the case that this book was likely made for a woman of Rhenish origin, probably a Dominican nun, while noting that the illuminations are in a northern French or Flemish style.19 This leads Hamburger to see the book as being tailored to a female devotional culture that was likely overseen by male church authorities as part of the cura monialium. According to Hamburger, a priestly advisor would school his female charge to use the image in question to help her envision herself in a passionate relationship with the Lord as evoked in the Song of Songs. She was to identify with the female figure pictured, whom we are to understand as the bride or sponsa from a verse (Song of Sg. 4:9) copied on a preceding folio (17v). The sponsa points to her eye to indicate that she is like the centurion Longinus, whose legend tells us that his blindness (both literal and spiritual) was cured when he was touched by the blood of Christ, which poured from the wound that he inflicted with the holy lance. Like Longinus, the nun is saved by the act of wound ing Christ, and the miniature thus emphasized Christ's Resurrection, evoked by his triumphant stance, his voluntary suffering (indicated by his free hands hold ing the whip and nails), and the representation of the cross as a budding tree of life. According to Hamburger, such images allow the female viewer to imagine herself as a protagonist working her way through stages of spiritual develop ment that culminate in an ecstatic mystical romance between herself as bride and Christ as bridegroom (sponsus).20 This romance is visualized in the scenes in the upper register in which the sponsa embraces the sponsus in a paradisal garden. For Hamburger, imagining the intended viewer of the Rothschild Canticles as a nun under the tutelage of a learned Dominican advisor best explains the images' complex relationships to monastic texts, which he expertly analyzes.21 This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gender 119 Fig.2.SponsawithChristinthegarden,andsponsawithalance.RothschildCanticles',YaleUniversity,BeineckeRareBookandManuscript LibraryMS404,fols.18r-19v.Ca.1300.(Photo:BeineckeRareBookandManuscriptLibrary.) This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 120 Sherry C. M. Lindquist In this and subsequent influential works, Hamburger argues that the use of visual images in mystical envisioning was at first the particular province of reli gious women, which was perceived by the male hierarchy as distinct from and infe rior to the imageless devotion prescribed for male mystics.22 Although Hamburger acknowledges aspects of subjugation and inequality as part of female monastic culture, he prefers to focus on "alternative ways of life, communication, prayer, and devotion." And he maintains that "[t]o recognize, or even to emphasize this aspect of female monasticism is not to romanticize the subject, let alone to make of medieval nuns proto-feminists; it is simply to give them their due."23 Indeed, the emphasis on this aspect of female monasticism has had a large impact and has stimulated much rich new scholarship.24 And yet it can have the result of construct ing a female cultural preserve that is unnaturally devoid of conflict or ideological negotiation, and this conception of medieval female agency can have misleading implications for how we generally understand the construction of gender in the Middle Ages. Michael Camille started to address the ideological operations that might have been involved when a medieval nun attempted to use this image to access the divine. He draws on film theory to suggest that in order for a female viewer in a patriarchal culture to achieve the empowered gaze that Hamburger's nun required to activate such a potent image—one that suggested she could merge body and soul with God—she needed to assume a subject position that was gendered male.25 She must take on "a masculine role as bearer of the phallus" and conceive of Christ's body as feminine, "elegantly elongated . . . unusually and audaciously totally naked, turning coquettishly to hide his sex but revealing large swelling thighs. Only by becoming a female body was it possible for God to become the focus of an eroticized gaze."26 Camille relies on the scholarship of Caroline Walker Bynum, which offers myriad textual examples in which both men and women feminize Christ's body as they explore their imagined relationship to Christ in his dual nature.27 According to Camille, the image allows the female viewer to try on another gender role and to be not quite female and not quite male, at least as these roles were defined by socially prescribed norms. We can see this operation as fostering a kind of resistance to or end run around the restrictions imposed by these socially prescribed roles, but also as forcing a potentially traumatic rejection or fragmentation of the socially acceptable gendered identity that such a viewer would have previously forged. Furthermore, the feminized body of Christ here and in countless other late medieval representations might have had the effect of asso ciating humility, submission, and suffering with femininity, which could therefore function to justify and enforce the patriarchal status quo, not to mention other hegemonic structures, as scholars like David Aers, Lynn Staley, and Sarah Beck with have shown.28 This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gender 121 But what happens to the gendered reading of this object i the Rothschild Canticles may have been intended for and/or us of viewers? Hamburger thinks it likely that the compiler was edged him as a potential first audience.29 Several scholars hav the manuscript that suggest male viewership, such as that the witnesses to the sacred scenes throughout the book outnumbe nesses.30 Another prospect for male viewership emerges if th owned by a devout female patrician who was not in orders, as others acknowledge was possible.31 In lay contexts, books w missioned with the awareness that they would likely circu munity of readers, both male and female, and that they were legacy that would be passed down to heirs who might be eithe Robert Mills and Sarah Bromberg have both explored the Rothschild Canticles from the perspective of a hypothetical ma Mills's analysis asks us to consider that the sponsa/sponsus bif script context may have enabled a male viewer to explore a ho experience. He objects to Camille's model of inversion requiring contending that the body of Christ on folio 19r "remains perp is hard to know which gender we are meant to associate with especially since agency, gendered male in the Middle Ages, is protagonists: the female soul who wields the lance, and the Chr his own whip and nails to indicate that he suffers of his own wi parallelism, first noted by Flora Lewis, between the bifolium in scene in which an ecstatic naked virgin (standing in for the spon the naked Christ) traps a unicorn, which is wounded with a lan the passionate and loving sacrifice of Christ) (fol. 5 lr; Fig. 3).34 ever, it is a male surrogate who wields the lance, creating a kind dynamic—that is, a male devotee could imagine himself penetra ized male unicorn/Christ.35 Mills concludes that "positions of p in Christian discourse are in a state of perpetual circulation, th which creates space for the excessive, transgressive and pervers Bromberg further examines the operations by which mal have related to the sponsa in order to unite mystically with Ch ing up on Pamela Sheingom's speculation that there existed a res of some men to identify with the anima (soul) as gendered fe image; images, Bromberg suspects, might have been too concre way for men to identify themselves with the negative associati submissiveness associated with the female body in the Middle she argues, the Rothschild Canticles offers other options for st nizably masculine, fraternal relationship with Christ (fol. 163r; This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 122 Sherry C. M. Lindquist Fig. 3. Capture and killing of the unicorn. Rothschild Canticles-, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS 404, fol. 163r. Ca. 1300. (Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gender 123 IP •■■■-> tjcinr nu fttCS i§i covucbntttS ftb lltalicdJfl fiudr oqu£ti0 q ciitvit tu unomttcttumowl mttuocamrtttlqie 4? Fig. 5. Monstrous races: man with giant feet, man with horse's hooves, and sciopod. Rothschild Canticles', Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS 404, fol. 51 r. Ca 1300. (Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 126 Sherry C. M. Lindquist Clearly there is work left to be done. None of the studies cited here offers a gendered reading that considers the complex program of the entire manuscript. Even Hamburger's substantive monograph neglects to tackle the riotous, perplex ing marginalia, so filled with gendered and sexualized imagery and other puzzles to decode. But even from this brief exercise we can see that gendered readings permit insight into why certain artistic choices were made in the creation of the Rothschild Canticles, as well as the range of interpretative options that they made possible to diverse viewers. In considering the usefulness of gender as a category of analysis for medieval art history, it is worth asking ourselves how we could understand an object like the Rothschild Canticles without it. The Rothschild Canticles is an unusual work that was made, like the Char treuse de Champmol and the Bayeux Embroidery, at a liminal moment of fissure, change and crisis. The ideology of gender in the Bayeux Embroidery was put into the service of explaining and justifying the Norman Conquest; at the Chartreuse de Champmol gender was a means of masking the contradictions resulting from the convergence of a powerful female patron, central to the formation of a con sequential new dynasty, and to the masculinist claims of the Carthusian monks. The complicated dialogue between concepts of gender and authority that seems to characterize the Rothschild Canticles may well have been a response to the crisis about female mysticism taking shape at the turn of the fourteenth century in France and Flanders.46 We learn much from these exceptional images because they throw into relief the conventional aspects of the images with which they are in conversa tion. Images convey ideas differently than words do. Figures can visualize notions that may not be possible to express in words, and often reach a different kind of audience as well. Without a sophisticated analysis of images, we are missing a whole category of evidence for understanding the history of gender. The lacunae and unresolved questions in the Rothschild Canticles, an object that has nonetheless received more gendered readings than most others, testifies to the fact that gender is still a fledgling concern in medieval art history. The question remains whether we will capitalize on its potential. The concept of gender only emerged in the last few decades as a tool that allows feminists to recognize that "woman" is not necessarily a biological category, that femininity and masculin ity are socially constructed corollaries, and that the male/female binary limits our ability to understand complex and unacknowledged realities. It is, however, pos sible to operate under the rubric of gender studies without accepting the premise that women, or gay or transgendered individuals should have social, political, and economic equality. As a result, gender studies is a discursive arena with an even greater potential for conflict and fragmentation than feminism. As so often hap pens in academic discourse, scholars will move to a different field of inquiry once they feel a question is exhausted or irresolvable. One summing up in the American This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gender 127 Historical Review's recent forum revisiting the impact of Joa "Gender as a Category of Historical Analysis" even takes the "Like all historiographie moments, this one, too, will no doubt does, what will we remember?"47 Mark Hansen and W. J. T. M an important theorist for art history, especially for having po in the humanities—do not include "gender" or "feminism" in Critical Terms for Media Studies, nor do these terms appear in emerged as a key concept across several disciplines, and it may late to medieval art history. If we interpret Media Studies as the ca it may be in danger of fading away before its time. But in spit worry at the current state of affairs, historian Dyan Elliot, in influence of Joan Scott's article, still sounds a positive note, in which our interrogation of gender will move beyond mere biological sex is not equal to historically constructed roles but against institutions, ideologies, and matters of high politics."49 In we must shape our scholarship to resist the prospect of a posthas not yet properly defined the goals or reaped the rewards of a genderist movement. NOTES I want to thank Nina Rowe for inviting me to write this essay, and also for her very insightful com and suggestions. Thanks are also due to an anonymous reader for useful remarks and interventi 1. Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Hist Review 91 (1986): 1053-75. For a recent forum on the legacy of this article, see "Revisiting 'G A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1344-14 particular interest to medievalists is Dyan Elliot, "The Three Ages of Joan Scott," American H cal Review 113 (2008): 1390-1403. 2. The first use of "gender" in this capacity may have appeared in John Money, "Hermap ism, Gender, and Precocity in Hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic Findings," Bulletin of the J Hopkins Hospital 96 (1955): 253-64. For the history of the term, see Joanne Meyerowitz, "A H of 'Gender,'" American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1344—1429. 3. As discussed in Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category," 1053. 4. Ibid., 1057. 5. Joan Scott demonstrates the continuing slipperiness of the politically charged word "gender" in her analysis of the way the term figured in the rhetoric surrounding the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995; see Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: Still a Use ful Category of Analysis?," Diogenes 57, no. 7 (2010): 7-14, esp. 8-9. 6. Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519-31; reprinted in Alison Bailey and Chris J. Cuomo, The Feminist Philosophy Reader (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 97-106. In the following year Butler expanded these ideas in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver sion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989). For a treatment of the historiography of gender and medieval art, see Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, "Gender and Medieval Art," in A Companion to Medi eval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, Blackwell Companions to Art History 2 (Oxford and Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 128-58. This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 128 Sherry C. M. Lindquist 7. Butler, "Performative Acts," 97. 8. Ibid. 9. For a useful summary of how reception theory has influenced medieval art history, see Mad eline H. Caviness, "Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers," in Rudolph, A Companion to Medi eval Art, 65-85. 10. Michel Foucault uses the Middle Ages simplistically as a foil for modernity in his History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1988-90); and elsewhere. For an analysis, see Karma Lochrie, "Desiring Foucault," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Stud ies 27 (1997): 3-15. As Christopher LeCluyse concludes in his summary of two recent references on medieval sexuality: "Since medieval people engaged in such acts with all the enthusiasm or social coercion that we do, the authors suggest, we can allow them to have sexual identities, too," in his review of Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz; and Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook, ed. April Harper and Caroline Proctor, H-German, H-Net Reviews, September, 2009, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25230. On this point, see also Robert Mills, "Ecce Homo," in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha Riches and Sarah Salih, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 152-73. 11. On how metanarratives about gender roles interfere with our understanding of the past, see Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker, "Gender, Change and Periodisation," Gender and History 20, no. 3 (2008): 453-62. 12. Madeline H. Caviness addresses this dilemma by suggesting a process of "triangulating" the past and present. On Caviness's methods and the impact of her work, see "Triangulating Our Vision: Madeline Caviness's Approach to Medieval Art," ed. Corine Schleif, special issue, Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2009), www.differentvisions.org; and my review of the issue for CAA Reviews, December 2, 2009, http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1358. 13. On the argument that gender is a social structure that creates "difference that is the very foundation on which inequality rests," see Barbara Risman, "Gender as a Social Structure: Theory Wrestling with Activism," Gender and Society 18 (2004): 429-50, at 430. 14. See Karl Wittington, "Queer," in this volume. 15. On this monument see Sherry C. M. Lindquist, Agency, Visuality and Society at the Char treuse de Champmol (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); and Renate Prochno, Die Kartause von Champmol: Grablege der Burgundischen Herzöge (1364-1477), Acta Humaniorum (Munich: Akademie Verlag, 2002). 16. See Scott, "Gender: Still a Useful Category," 10; Joan Scott, "Unanswered Questions," American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1422-29, at 1428; and Madeline H. Caviness, "Feminism, Gender Studies and Medieval Studies," Diogenes 57, no. 1 (2010): 30^15, at 32. 17. Judith Butler, "The End of Sexual Difference?," in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 414-34, esp. 419-22. 18. Madeline H. Caviness, "Anglo-Saxon Women, Norman Knights and a 'Third Sex' in the Bayeux Embroidery," in The Bay eux Tapestry: New Interpretations, ed. Martin K. Foys, Karen Eileen Overbey, and Dan Terkla (Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2009), 84-118. 19. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300, Yale Publications in the History of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. 155-62. Wybren Scheepsma discusses the problems of definitively localizing the book in "Filling the Blanks: A Middle Dutch Dionysius Quotation and the Origins of the Rothschild Can ticles," Medium Aevum 70 (2001): 278-303. Scheepsma notes that feminine forms of address in the Latin prayers indicate that the manuscript was at least made for a woman (281). 20. Summarized in Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 84. 21. Ibid., 161. This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gender 129 22. This is a leitmotif in Hamburger's work, a culmination of which is h very important exhibition of female monastic visual culture in Bonn and Es Schleier, Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (Munich: Hirmer, 2 tions of essays in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, eds., Crown and V from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Dietlinde Hamburger, with Walker Bynum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Bynum endors her forward (esp. xvi-xvii). 23. Jeffrey H. Hamburger, "Introduction: Histories of Female Monasticism 1-11, at 8. 24. For an interesting exchange about the impact of this scholarship on the field of medieval art history, see Willibald Sauerländer, "Images Behind the Wall," review of The Visual and the Vision ary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, by Jeffrey H. Hamburger, and Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, by Jeffrey H. Hamburger, New York Review of Books 49, no. 7 (April 25, 2002); and Jeffrey Hamburger's reply and Sauerländer's response in New York Review of Books 49, no. 11 (June 27, 2002). 25. Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Abrams, 1998), 38-39. Here Michael Camille is drawing on concepts introduced in the classic article on the gaze by Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18. For a discussion of the implications and impact of this interpretive framework, see Vicki Calla han, "Introduction: Reclaiming the Archive; Archaeological Explorations toward a Feminism 3.0," in Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History, ed. Vicki Callahan, Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 1-9; as well as the other contributions to the volume. 26. Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 38-39. 27. See especially Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poet ics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 28. E.g. David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); and Sarah Beckwith, Christ 's Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 29. Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 155-56. Flora Lewis endorsed the notion of Hamburger's compiler as a user of the manuscript in her "The Wound in Christ's Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response," in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor, The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture (London: British Library; and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 204-29, at 214. 30. Pamela Sheingorn suggested the possibility of a male reader in her review of The Rothschild Canticles, by Jeffrey Hamburger, Art Bulletin 74 ( 1992): 679-81, at 680; Corine Schleif echoed this suggestion in her own review, in the Medieval Feminist Newsletter 15 (1993): 30. 31. Hamburger does not think this likely when he considers alternatives in order to exclude them (Rothschild Canticles, 155-56); see also Scheepsma, "Filling the Banks," 281. 32. Sarah Bromberg, "Gendered and Ungendered Readings of the Rothschild Canticles," Differ ent Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008): 1-26, http://differentvisions. org/one.html; Mills, "Ecce Homo." 33. Mills, "Ecce Homo," 161. 34. Ibid., 162; Lewis, "Wound in Christ's Side," 213. 35. Lewis, "Wound in Christ's Side," 215; quoted in Mills, "Ecce Homo," 162. 36. Mills, "Ecce Homo," 162. This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 130 Sherry C. M. Lindquist 37. Bromberg, "Gendered and Ungendered Readings." 38. Ibid., 8; and Sheingorn, review of The Rothschild Canticles, 680. 39. Bromberg, "Gendered and Ungendered Readings," 7-8. 40. Bromberg, "Gendered and Ungendered Readings," 13-23. 41. Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 99-100. 42. Hamburger associates him with a calendar illustration from the month of May, which fre quently featured amorous themes; ibid., 100. 43. Ibid., 211-12. 44. Ibid., 212-13. 45. Cf. Madeline H. Caviness's reading of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, in "Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed," Speculum 68 (1993): 333-62. 46. This crisis is expertly chronicled by Dyan Elliott in Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 47. Meyerowitz, "History of'Gender.'" 48. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 49. Elliot, "Three Ages of Joan Scott," 1391-92. This content downloaded from 86.49.248.250 on Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:16:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms