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A collection of original essays,
Saints, Sinners and Sisters showcases the diverse questions and methodologies currently being asked by gender scholars dealing with French, German, and Netherlandish art from the medieval and early modern periods.
Saints, Sinners and Sisters begins by asking new questions of women who were positive exempla within their societies as well as those whose sexuality society sought to denounce and control. The book's second section moves beyond the reclamation of "lost" female artists and the customary good-bad dichotomy by which medieval and early modern women have been categorized. Here the definitions of women's responsibilities are expanded and realigned historically.
Saints, Sinners and Sisters argues that the nuances surrounding gender can only be understood when the social and cultural context is broadened, revealing how art responded to the full range of women's roles, be they spinner or sorceress, weaver or wife.
List of contents
Contents: Preface; Introduction; Saints and Sinners: Saints: Introduction; Virtuous model/voluptuous martyr: the suicide of Lucretia in northern renaissance art and her relationship to late medieval devotional imagery, Carol M. Schuler; Jörg Breu the Elder's Death of Lucretia: history, sexuality and the State, Pia F. Cuneo; Domesticity in the public sphere, Martha Moffitt Peacock; Sinners: Introduction; The gothic mirror and the female gaze, Susan L. Smith; Dürer's Four Witches reconsidered, Linda C. Hults; Distaffs and spindles. Virtue and sexuality in Sebald Beham's Spinning Bee, Alison G. Stewart; Sisters, Wives, Poets: Introduction; Richildis and her seal: Carolingian self-reference and the imagery of power, Genevra Kornbluth; Woven devotions. Reform and piety in tapestries by Dominican nuns, Jane L. Carroll; The many wives of Adam Kraft: renaissance artists' wives in legal documents, art-historical scholarship, and historical fiction, Corine Schleif; From shrew to poetess:two non-traditional female roles evoked by a curious painting by Gabriel Metsu, Linda Stone-Ferrier; Together in misery: medical meaning, and sexual politics in two paintings by Jan Steen, Laurinda S. Dixon; Index.
About the author
Jane L. Carroll, Alison G. Stewart
Summary
Taking issue with the centuries old depictions of women as good or bad, saintly or sinful, some of these essays examine women within the traditional dichotomies whilst others demonstrate the range of possibilities available to women in northern European society.
