Art history scholarship traditionally presumes medieval art and architecture to be masculine in its origin and intent, as being made by and for men, unless it can be unequivocally demonstrated to be otherwise. For example, scholars routinely refer to anonymous artists as “the Master of…,” recognizing his work, while women are identified as patrons or artists only if their names have been explicitly recorded on works or their related documentations. This occurs despite the great advancements in feminist scholarship in art history and its neighboring disciplines of history and literary studies over the past four decades. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves if and why we set the bar differently when evaluating the evidence for women’s and men’s engagement with art.

This course highlights and examines the wide range of roles that women played within medieval art and architecture. Women, both lay and religious, were involved in all the stages of medieval artistic production. They were part of the creative process, as artists or patrons, and were active consumers for whom specific iconographies were developed or certain works created. The course pays special attention to lay women, whose engagement with art and artistic production is less known than that of their religious counterparts. During the semester we will examine the host of ways in which women were depicted in medieval art, and analyze how different social, historical, and patronage contexts influenced these representations. We will also look at the codes of gender and identity that we can discern and question whether we can identify any meaningful patterns of gender differences in the art and architecture that men and women patronized.