‘Medieval women are “good to think’ with”. Review of: Therese Martin, ed., Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, Visualising the Middle Ages, volume 7, 2 vols, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012 (original) (raw)

2013, The Journal of Art Historiography

In the Fall of 2010, I team-taught with Fiona Griffiths of New York University's Department of History a graduate colloquium titled 'Women and the Book: Scribes, Artists, and Readers from Late Antiquity through the Fourteenth Century'. The goal of the course as set out in the syllabus was to examine the cultural worlds of medieval women through particular attention to the books that they owned, commissioned, and created, and to consider the evidence for medieval women's book ownership, scribal and artistic activity, and patronage in relation to larger issues of women's authorship, education and literacy, reading patterns, devotional practices, and visual traditions and representation. During the first class meeting, Professor Griffiths and I posed a series of questions to the students enrolled: was there still a need to teach a course of this nature, one focused solely on women's engagement with books? Or, after four decades' worth of scholarship aimed at 'writing … women into' our respective fields, as historian Joan Scott put it, 1 had the moment arrived to consider medieval women's activities within the framework of a broader course on 'medieval people and the book'? Indeed, did making gender an organizing principle of the course contribute to the marginalization of medieval women and their artistic, intellectual, religious, and cultural activities and sustain their relegation the realm of the aberrant? Had we, through the very nature and structure of our course, foreclosed the possibility of viewing women's bibliophilic activities as a 'normative' aspect of medieval culture? 2 The thirteen women and one man enrolled in the colloquium were unanimous in the opinion that a course devoted to 'women and the book' was still the right forum for an investigation of our topic. They shared Therese Martin's