Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350-1530 illuminates 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. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication 6 Table of Contents 8 List of Illustrations 10 Acknowledgements 18 Introduction: Performing Gender in the Burgundian Netherlands 22 Gendering Books and Diptychs 24 ‘Private’ Images as Agents in Social Transactions 29 Books, Diptychs, and Spectators: The Documentary Evidence 36 Devotional Portrait Diptychs in Gendered Relationships 42 Gender and Power 45 1 Authority and Community in Women’s Books of Hours 50 Holy Women and the Practice of the Hours 51 Laywomen and Incarnational Piety 56 Educating Girls at the Burgundian Court 62 Reading and Viewing Communities 66 Gendered Hierarchies in Religion 79 Conclusion 80 2 Regendering the Faith: Books of Hours, Devotional Portrait Diptychs, and the Affirmation of Men 82 The Chronology of Gender in Books of Hours 84 Incarnational Claims in Men’s Books 86 Transacting Gender: The Public Domain 91 Recalibrating Religion 99 Resisting Regendering: Women’s Diptychs 107 Conclusion 109 3 The Problem of Male Embodiment in Two Diptychs from Bruges 111 Men’s Bodies and the Quest for Holiness 115 An Alternative Masculinity 122 The Eroticized Body as a Site of Scandal 139 On the Fringes of Maturity: Early Manhood 146 The Chaste Husband 148 Generational and Gendered Spectators 152 Clerics and Laymen 154 4 Nuns and Clerics: Ambiguous Authority in a Devotional Portrait Diptych 157 Jean Bellegambe and the Flines Diptych 162 The Patriarchal Underpinnings of Reform 164 The Conceptual Boundaries of Enclosure 169 Hierarchical Gendered Piety 171 Gifting the Diptych 176 Through a Clerical Lens 181 Conclusion 182 5 Disrupting Gender at the Court of Margaret of Austria 183 Margaret’s Devotional Portrait Diptychs 184 The Burgundian Ducal Connection 190 Portraits and the Gender of Succession 194 Conformity and Resistance: A Male Model 203 Conclusion 212 Conclusion 213 Appendix: A Checklist of Devotional Portrait Diptychs 216 Bibliography 224 Index 250 "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."--Jacket Pearson (art history, Bloomsburg U.) finds something new in the early modern books of hours and devotional diptychs of the Netherlands: real people. As she observes a number of artifacts she finds an unexpected variety of expectations, experiences and practices of devotion along with frequent challenges to what we think we knew about how gender was constructed and presented. Pearson begins by examining how gender and its associated power are represented, the role of authority and community in women's books of hours, how the proper practice and devotion of men were (or were not) affirmed in books and other materials intended for their own use, and then explores the evidence in two diptychs from Bruges, the Flines diptych, and in materials from the court of Margaret of Austria. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR On June 22, 1478, Philip the Fair, the only son of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy and heir to the Valois Burgundian-Hapsburgian empire, was baptized in Bruges.