Encyclopedia of Women in Religious Art - Review

New York: Continuum, 1996, 442 pp.; 101 b/w ills. $44.50

As in other fields in art history, scholars concerned with the history of late medieval art have turned their attention in recent years to the role of women in the production and consumption of art. The four rifles under review here highlight three different strategies by which scholars have attempted to write women into the history of late medieval art: Jeryldene Wood considers women as patrons of and audiences for works of art; Jeffrey Hamburger investigates women as artists making images for other women; and Brigitte Buettner and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona examine the representation of the female figure to signify something beyond herself to a primarily male audience. All of these approaches will be familiar to colleagues working in other fields, even if the means by which these questions are addressed and the results are different.

The fact that two of the three major studies focus on nuns is indicative of the particular opportunity that religious women offer to study medieval women at all. Nuns of the Middle Ages have provided the modern scholar with some of the documentation and contextual material that is sorely lacking for secular women of the same rime period. As corporate bodies, nuns left archives of records of their dally lives; chronicles that provide not only glimpses into their houses, but records of their attitudes; obituaries that tell us more than when they died; and a body of literature that was developed both for and by them. As members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, nuns have left a mark on the history of a much larger institution that dominated cultural production during the Middle Ages. However, like their secular sisters, nuns were often ignored as the history of that institution was written, beginning in the 16th century. Only recently have scholars begun to fill this gap in our knowledge.(1) For art historians, convent culture has proved a rich new vein to mine for the history of architecture, painting, and manuscripts, as well as other art forms.(2)

Women, Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy is an important study by a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, a field that, in terms of women's relationship to art, has hitherto been concerned mainly with secular women.(3) Jeryldene Wood examines works of art and architecture commissioned by and for women of the Franciscan order, the Poor Clares, from the 13th through the 15th centuries. Rather than compiling a comprehensive, pan-Italian catalogue of Clarissan convents and their art, Wood focuses on a few central Italian houses, from Umbria, Tuscany, the Marches, and Emilia-Romagna; Mantua is the most northerly of the cities discussed. This book brings together the results of the author's research on these convents in a clear and cogent presentation of individual case studies that the author hopes will "offer a multifaceted view of Clarissan art and spirituality" (p. 9). While a few of the objects she discusses are made by the Clares, the book largely focuses on the patronage of the order.(4)

To reconstruct the histories of these convents she depends on local histories, archival accounts, and chronicles from the convents. She also consults the vitae of various Clarissan women, surviving letters written by and about the Clares, and makes good use of devotional texts written for and read by Franciscan women during this period, such as the pseudo-Bonaventure's Meditations on the Life of Christ and the Sette Armi Spirituali, a devotional tract written by Caterina Vigri. As Franciscans, the Clares faced an acute problem regarding their status. Their founder desired to follow the footsteps of St. Francis in a total embrace of poverty, but the ideology of gender roles forced them into the cloister, requiring them to receive endowments of property and to be confined to fixed enclosures. Wood addresses the ramifications of these requirements, manifested in the design of conventual buildings and in rules controlling the nuns' access to certain parts of their convents.

Wood offers readings of surviving works of art securely linked to the convents she studies and reproduces numerous obscure objects from these understudied institutions. She analyzes, for example, the late 13th-century Dossal of Saint Clare (still at Santa Chiara in Assisi) in light of Clare's own theory of female monasticism, as expressed in her Rule and several letters, in light of her official Vita, and in light of the historical relationship between the Clares and the Franciscans at the moment of the Dossal's manufacture. She concludes that it represents the nuns' own notions of the sanctity of their founder and proclaims their identity as Franciscans. Throughout the book, Wood is interested in the ways that the nuns' own interests are served by works of art. Despite the book's title, some of these concerns are not strictly spiritual. For example, Wood underscores the connections between the women in these Franciscan houses, their families, and their communities, and highlights the role of the Clares in ensuring the well-being of their social worlds. Evidence of the nuns' social function may be found in the architecture of the convents, which often resemble other structures in the region more than those in their orders. Regional traditions seem to have been more important to the Clares than any kind of institutional architectural identity.

One issue that pervades the book is the appropriateness of a community dedicated to poverty spending money for artistic enterprises. Wood explores the Poor Clares' complex and seemingly contradictory notions of the seemliness of such expenditures. On the one hand, the Clares opted to signify their renunciation of worldly things by keeping the architecture of their convents simple. Yet, as the book documents, nuns at houses like Monteluce in Perugia commissioned expensive works of art for the parts of their convents to which the public had access (in particular, the public church), while they were satisfied with more modest adornments for their own churches and chapels. Further, in a chapter dedicated to the works of art surrounding Saint Catherine of Bologna (Caterina Vigri), Wood argues a different attitude toward and function for the visual arts. Vigri was an artist as well as an abbess, and many of her works are preserved in her convent in Bologna. Examining the lives, writings, and reported visions of Vigri and her contemporaries, Wood argues that the making of these works of art - the process of writing or painting - served an important spiritual function for the artist, to "evoke the transcendence of God" (p. 124). Wood identifies a Clarissan "aesthetic attitude," which accepts the presence of fine objects in the convent because they reflect the "eternal bliss to which [the nuns] aspire" (p. 143). Working from a group of illuminated manuscripts, devotional panels, and icons that parallel the expensive items the aristocratic women of the convent were born to, Wood reads their paradisiacal imagery as "inversely proportionate to the amount of renunciation endured during life" (143). Thus, works of art mark the contrast between the nuns' dally realities of ascetic living and the heavenly rewards they desired.

Wood's analysis of Vigri's artistic activity concentrates on the subject matter and reception of her paintings and not on the formal aspects or style of her images. Because several of the objects are preserved today as relics of the saint, they are difficult to study as works of art. (One result of this difficulty is that the photographs of Vigri's Breviary had to be taken from illustrations in an early 20th-century historical study and not from the manuscript itself.) This highlights a problem that is shared by all scholars studying the history of nuns' spirituality and art: many communities still persevere in the missions of their founders, and live their lives in continuity with the past. As a result, access to objects or archival materials may be limited. (Hamburger cites similar difficulties with regard to the Benedictine convent at the center of his study.) An allied problem concerns the multiplicity of styles apparent in the objects that are all assigned to the saint. Wood is not interested in determining whether these works are by Vigri. That they are products of the same moment and sensibility suffices, and the interpretation focuses more on the audience for these images - the nuns - and their response to the images than on any evaluation of Vigri's successes or failures in formal terms.

One of the goals of Wood's book is to emphasize the role of the visual arts in the spirituality of medieval women. This is also the project for Jeffrey Hamburger in Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, although the rather blunt title might lead one to believe that this is a synthetic history of nuns' activities in all varieties of visual arts.(5) The subtitle is more descriptive of this book, which investigates the variety of influences, allusions, and attitudes that inform the making of art by nuns. Hamburger's focus is much narrower than Wood's, although his conclusions raise some very large questions. His book concerns not one order, nor even one house, but a group of twelve drawings that can be assigned to one particular moment in the history of a German Benedictine convent, Saint Walburga's in Eichstatt (Franconia). Where Wood addresses the social history and the social functions of art commissioned for the Poor Clares, Hamburger presents an exhaustive interpretation of the religious functions of the twelve drawings, which are executed in a style that might be described as naive. Such work has traditionally been labeled Nonnenarbeiten, a lumpish category for various images that are not of professional quality, usually in manuscript or painted forms. Hamburger attacks the attitudes that relegate this category of work to the margins of art history and demonstrates with careful scholarship that these modest objects can reveal a great deal about women's lives.

Eleven of the twelve drawings still belong to the convent of St. Walburga, and the origin of all of them in that house seems certain. Basically they are colored drawings on either paper or vellum, the largest of which appears to be only slightly larger than a 4[inches] x 6[inches] card. If some of them treat their religious subjects rather conventionally, others display a surprising inventiveness in their iconographies. Starting from the observation that the "awkward technique and idiosyncratic imagery indicate the relative isolation in which the nuns worshipped and worked" (p. 10), Hamburger argues that they were all executed by a single anonymous member of the community at Eichstatt. He then finds parallels between these drawings and works of art in other media - manuscripts, prints, and textiles and also the architecture and reliquaries owned by Saint Walburga's - that inform the style and compositions of these images. Hamburger treats these objects with the seriousness art historians usually reserve for great masterpieces. As a result, he is able to situate these images within a specific visual context that confirms their manufacture by a nun.

The body of his book is devoted to interpreting the more unusual of these drawings. Even describing these iconographies is difficult. One drawing depicts the Agony in the Garden enframed by a Rose, which Hamburger interprets as an examplar for the nuns of how to pray as Christ did at Gesthemene. There are two versions of the Crucifixion with symbolic elements added, including, most unusually, the Heart on the Cross. Decoding the many visual and textual allusions that surround these images, Hamburger writes that these images act "to initiate and transport the viewer; they do not diagram devotions but compel the onlooker to enact them with her eyes" (p. 128). He asserts that the visual - the senses - leads the viewer to spiritual vision; that sight leads to insight. Two more images with forms dominated by a heart, the Eucharistic Banquet and the Heart as a House, are read as stressing enclosure and interiority, monastic values directly of concern to cloistered women.

In establishing his interpretations, Hamburger explores not just the meaning of the image but the methods by which those meanings are achieved. He argues that these images are multilayered, just as the meditative process practiced by monastics is multilayered. Hamburger depends on texts to build an interpretive framework but rejects the notion that the images illustrate the texts or confirm practices described in the texts. Among the texts he cites are writings on the images themselves, scriptural and liturgical texts, and rubrics from prayer books. He also relies on vitae of women usually written by their male confessors, which describe the relationships between holy women, art and visions, and devotional treatises that are prescriptive rather than descriptive. Beyond texts, Hamburger interprets these images within the framework of the paraliturgical rituals and spiritual exercises that shaped women's spirituality.

For Hamburger, it is not the unusual iconographies of these images that make them so powerful, but rather that the process of seeing is integral to both their function and their meaning. He argues that these are self-reflective works of art that instruct the viewer on how to use religious images to achieve spiritual goals. Their very structure, he insists, takes the viewer through stages of complexity, association, and meaning. Clearly, such claims for the power of the visual among religious women might be examined equally for a male context, but the importance of the visual for the female religious seems greater than for the male monastic, for whom verbal instructions and didactic texts seem to have been the norm.(6) Hamburger claims that these drawings "champion the faculty of sight" (p. 215), and he calls on art historians more carefully to construct a history of sight - not the biological but the cultural act of perception. His final chapter critiques some contemporary approaches to the history of sight. Even as he convincingly demonstrates that "religious women did not see with 'innocent' or uninformed eyes" (p. 221), he urges a greater sensitivity to the practice of applying contextual art history. His book provides an excellent example of the fruits of such art-historical practice: he has thoroughly explored the pietistic context of these images and argued a convincing, if single-minded, interpretation of them.

Hamburger's book includes drawings that frequently depict nuns as exemplars for other nuns to follow; these representations of nuns by nuns are instructive tools for the religious women who viewed them. A very different case is presented in the images of women painted into the Paris manuscript of Boccaccio's "Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes" (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, ms. fr. 12420), the subject of Brigitte Buettner's book, Boccaccio's 'Des cleres et nobles femmes': Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript. The Paris manuscript is the source of images of legendary women artists Thamyris, Marcia, and Irene, long familiar to art historians and frequently illustrated as a substitute for our lack of knowledge about real women artists of the Middle Ages. The manuscript itself, however, was commissioned for the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, and one must presume that these representations of women were intended for male eyes.(7)

One of Buettner's primary aims for the book is to publish the entire sequence of illustrations of the Paris manuscript. Indeed, the reproductions of the 109 illuminations will be most welcome to scholars interested in the ways visual images construct gender roles, as well as those interested in Parisian painting around 1400. But Buettner's book is not a conventional study of a manuscript. It is not an exhaustive analysis of every aspect of the physical book, as codicological practice has made common in manuscript studies. Instead, as her subtitle suggests, Buettner presents a semiotic reading of certain aspects of the manuscript.

Buettner's agenda is to privilege the visual over the textual contents of the manuscript. She argues that "images create intelligible visibilities that are only partially dependent on words" (p. 2), and that the visual forms of the manuscript instruct the reader/viewer in ways that supplement and sometimes supplant the text. Buettner critiques the approach to manuscript studies that treats miniatures in manuscripts as small easel paintings, reminding us that these miniatures are "welded to a text, each frame . . . linked to those that precede and follow it" (p. 1). Buettner's book therefore focuses on the relationships among the 109 images and the relationship of the images to the texts that they illustrate.

Given an approach that seeks to understand the relationships among various visual elements of a manuscript and the author's critique of the practice of divorcing illuminations from their manuscript contexts, Buettner's book is disconcerting. Although this manuscript is quite famous, this is the first book devoted solely to it. Yet there is no complete description of the manuscript anywhere in this study, and the bibliography does not make clear where one should go to find one. In modern manuscript studies it has become the norm to provide at least a succinct description of the textual contents and a discussion of the collation of quires, if not a complete evaluation of the physical characteristics of the book. Here, even the minimal physical information about the size of the book, the justification of the text, and the size of the illuminations is buried in a footnote in the middle of chapter 2. Equally astonishing is the decision (whether by the author or the publisher) to reproduce the 109 miniatures divorced from the page, as if they were small easel paintings! (The black-and-white reproductions are slightly smaller than lifesize, while the color reproductions seem to be close to life size, based on measurements provided by the author.) Nowhere does the book provide a glimpse of an entire page of this manuscript, as most studies of manuscript illuminations have done over the past decade.(8) While this arrangement results in reproductions that are generally very legible (especially in the case of four-color reproductions), the opportunity to assess the physical relationship between one system of signs (the verbal) and the other (the visual) is lost. One cannot determine how the miniatures guide the reader from one biography to another in the Paris manuscript, or how the rubrics negotiate between the text and the miniatures.

What is most puzzling about these choices is that the book opens with a chapter entitled "The Manuscript as Object." This title, however, further challenges our expectations and demonstrates a certain semiotic slippage. It treats the book not as a physical object with specific characteristics, but as the object of social transactions between giver (Jacques Raponde) and recipient (Philip the Bold), or between client (Raponde) and illuminator (unknown, but generally referred to as the "Coronation Master," after a designation by Millard Meiss). These relationships are adroitly and convincingly argued, and this section of Buettner's book offers many insights into the reasons for and mechanisms by which aristocratic collectors surrounded themselves with books, as well as why this text might have appealed to Philip the Bold in particular.

The Paris manuscript is also the object of a linguistic and cultural transaction: this is the first translation into French of Boccaccio's original Latin. Buettner argues that Raponde, a Parisian merchant of Lucchese descent, was the moving force behind the decision to translate this text into French and that he advised the decorative program. She demonstrates several instances in which the illuminator was clearly working from the French translation and indicates moments when the images deviate from the text to make the stories conform to French rather than Italian custom. She also identifies insertions into the program that reflect Jacques Raponde's interest in silk production.

With this contextual material confined to the first chapter, the bulk of this book is devoted to readings of the images. Faced with the task of interpreting 109 separate images, the author prefers not to use conventional iconographic methods, that is, to trace a "diachronic chain of images that functioned as antecedents" (p. 25) for these illuminations. The author rightly explains that establishing such traditions of representation is difficult for secular images of the Middle Ages, as illuminators had no ready stock of models for newly translated secular texts. As a result, Buettner's book does not examine parallels, predecessors, or other iconographic comparisons to the miniatures; save one, all of the illustrations come from the Paris manuscript. One should not approach Buettner's book expecting to find discussion or illustration of medieval iconographic traditions for representing famous women, as individuals or as types.

Buettner sees the illuminations not as illustrations, but as interpreters of the text. In her reading, the images in the Paris manuscript filter Boccaccio's text through another medieval textual tradition: estate literature. She thus discusses the images of women according to their social status, rather than their order in the text. Queens, empresses, goddesses, priestesses, and warriors are interpreted as linked thematic groupings. A further thematic grouping concerns images of death, dismemberment, and torture, which are distressingly frequent in the stories of these famous women regardless of their estates. This organizational strategy gives the author room to make many insightful comments about the "rift . . . between representation and imagined reality" (p. 43) in the depiction of specific classes. For example, several images depict queens who rule alone even though, according to French custom, queens could not rule by themselves. Buettner concludes that these images represent male power: they are not exemplars for women. Interesting insights into the representations of women warriors, writers, and artists abound in this chapter. What might have made this chapter somewhat more useful to those who haven't memorized Boccaccio's text is a summary of the text and a more detailed discussion of the relationship between text and image. The reader would then be in a better position to accept the rather offhand comment made by the author that the three instances where more than one image illustrates a biography are a function of the layout, rather than a narrative tool or other imperative. Buettner argues that the presentation of women served on one level to reinforce contemporary gender and class expectations; yet because the manuscript placed before the eyes of the Duke of Burgundy numerous images of women in unexpected roles, it may have had some (feminist?) effect on the Duke and his court.

The third chapter explores how specific pictorial elements work to construct the "socio-professional taxonomy" that Buettner proposes for the text. She examines how modes of representing the body, gesture, and costume functioned both to generalize all the women discussed by Boccaccio into the norms of late medieval European womanhood, as well as to particularize the figures described only generically by Boccaccio into appropriate social categories. The author demonstrates that certain color configurations recur throughout the cycle to connect images with one another or characters within images to specific social groups. Buettner also examines the role of spatial elements to create a "bifocal pictorial universe" (p. 92) that endows the images with compositional structures serving symbolic purposes. Rejecting the Panofskian scheme that saw the Middle Ages as literally lacking the perspective that would allow them to depict the past correctly, Buettner argues that these images represent the past in the present tense, making their example immediately relevant to the Duke. Clearly, these visual elements are not embedded in the texts themselves, and are a product of artistic conventions rather than textual ones. Even as this chapter emphasizes formal relationships, the author uses the analysis to demonstrate how the visual characteristics support the social meanings she finds in the imagery.

There is much to admire about this book: clear writing, an interesting hypothesis, and a well-deployed methodology. Readers looking for treatments of the questions usually investigated in manuscript studies may be disgruntled at the short shrift those questions are given; but on the terms that she set for her book, the author succeeds at defining the systems of signification she highlights and their intersections with and divergences from the text. There are, however, so many unanswered questions raised by both this manuscript and Buettner's study that one is ultimately frustrated by the limits of the analysis. Buettner's book may serve as a methodological model of the use of a semiotic approach to manuscripts, as well as the starting point for investigations that ask different questions both of this manuscript and of the representation of late medieval women.

The gallery of famous women described and depicted in the Paris manuscript includes many women who are not all that familiar to us. Approximately a third of these famous women figure in the Encyclopedia of Women in Religious Art, compiled by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. This Encyclopedia (actually more a dictionary) provides identifications of female-gendered entities in religious systems practiced all over the world. Among the terms defined are: proper names of deities, saints, women cited in scriptures, manifestations of female divinities, female-gendered natural phenomena, allegorical personifications, and attributes and rituals associated with the feminine. Apostolos-Cappadona draws from such diverse traditions as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Nordic religions, as well as the faiths of ancient peoples of Greece, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and Japan. There are also entries on female figures of the less well-known religious traditions of the Druids, Tibetans, and Yoruba peoples, among others.

While the scope of this book is encyclopedic, the entries themselves are very brief and offered without any accompanying references. This makes the book very useful for a quick answer to a query; one can look up a particular symbol or attribute, such as the "dove," and discover the many ways it refers to female beings in different religious traditions. Or look up "breast" and find the most usual associations linked to this part of the female body among different faiths. While there is a brief bibliography that mostly points to other reference works, there are no signposts for further research. This encyclopedia will be invaluable, however, for scholars doing cross-cultural research, as the author intends for it to stimulate research into the cultural history of women. In addition to entries that discuss such unfamiliar female divinities as Inuit or Aztec goddesses, the book includes appendices that provide variant names of the female figures better known to us. There are also topical indices that allow one to identify the female figures associated with specific characteristics or ideas. For example, there is a long list of female deities associated with birth, death, fertility, and motherhood, as well as entries for topics like foster mothers, demons, nuns, and artists.

This last category points to one of the idiosyncracies of this encyclopedia. Certain terms require cross-listings of art-historical terms that aid in the definition; thus the entry for "Cleopatra," which discusses her depiction in art, sends the reader to separate entries on "baroque" and "romantic" art, although I was unable to find an entry for the latter. (Why Cleopatra is included at all is equally puzzling.) For a term like "baroque" there is only room for a brief definition and a short cross-referenced list of representative artists that is necessarily arbitrary. There are equally brief definitions of some of the basic tenets of the world's religious traditions. To be fair, such adumbrations are a product of the genre, and as this encyclopedia aspires to "serve as an introduction to a fascinating field of study" (p. xii), it meets its aims admirably.

These books all point to the changes in the study of late medieval art that have been stimulated by gender studies in recent years. Though Wood, Hamburger, and Buettner all treat objects that date from the 13th through the early 16th centuries, they avoid the term "Renaissance" as best they can. This avoidance does not seem to be an answer to Joan Kelly Gadol's important question about whether women had a Renaissance. Rather, these scholars prefer to situate the objects they discuss not in grand historical schemes but in more localized and carefully delineated contexts (social, pietistic, or visual). Hamburger claims that the drawings he studied challenge "the boundaries imposed by periodization" (p. xxi) and even the distinctions between Catholic and Protestant pietistic practices. Except perhaps for the altarpiece for the convent of Monteluce that Raphael never finished, the objects studied by Wood and Hamburger have been left out of more traditional schemes of art history. These books mark a redefinition of what we call "Art" as a product of including women in the writing of art history. And though they construct their arguments very differently, both Hamburger and Buettner urge art historians to privilege the visual over the verbal, to rethink how we interpret the objects we study. Hamburger wants to historicize the activity of seeing through careful contextual reconstruction of medieval attitudes toward art and vision, while Buettner wants art historians to analyze more closely late medieval "pictorial language, whose powers of signification tend to be somewhat forgotten in contextual studies" (p. 98). That these somewhat contradictory points of view have their origins in the study of women in the late Middle Ages indicates that, while there is no consensus about the best way to reshape medieval art history to account for women, attempts under way are exciting and full of promise.

ANN ROBERTS Department of Art Lake Forest College Lake Forest, Ill. 60045-2399

Notes

1. The first professionally written history of nuns has just appeared, Jo Ann Kay McNamara's Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996, but this book's broad coverage doesn't have room to address the issue of nuns' activity in the visual arts. More directly concerned with interpreting objects used by nuns is Roberta Gilchrist's Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, which focuses on medieval English convents.

2. See Gesta, 31, 1992, ed. Caroline Bruzelius and Constance Berman on the study of the architecture of convents. A number of specialized studies concerning nuns and other religious women as patrons or the audience of works of art have appeared in recent years; among them are Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pieta and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, Brussels and Rome: Brepols, 1992; and Judith Oliver," 'Gothic' Women and Merovingian Desert Mother," Gesta, 32, 1993, 12434. Among recent dissertations, one could cite Stephen Wolohojian, "Closed Encounters: Female Piety, Art, and Visual Experience in the Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina in Naples," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1994; Saundra Weddle, "Enclosing le Murate: The Ideology of Enclosure and the Architecture of a Florentine Convent," Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1997; Andrea Pearson, "Gender, Image and Ideals at the Cistercian Convent of Flines, 1500-1575," Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1995; and Elizabeth Dunn, "The Sanctity of Women as Portrayed in the Vita-Retable of Late Medieval Italy," Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1995.

3. One convenient measure of the greater interest in secular women than religious women in Italian Renaissance art history may be the selection of articles devoted to Renaissance art included in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Here there are six studies that consider the female figure as manipulated by artists or male patrons to enforce gender roles. None of the essays consider religious women.

4. Patronage by women in the late medieval and early modern periods has been addressed by Catherine King," Medieval and Renaissance Matrons, Italian-Style," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, 55, 1992, 372-93; Madeline Caviness, "Ancoress, Abbess, and Queen: Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons," in June Hall McCash, ed., The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996, 105-54; "Women Patrons of Renaissance Art," Renaissance Studies, 10, June 1996, ed. Jaynie Anderson; and Cynthia Lawrence, ed., Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Except for numerous interpretations of the fascinating Camera di San Paolo by Correggio, few studies of women's patronage of the Renaissance have stressed the patronage of nuns. A recent essay that does consider the patronage of the abbess is Regina Stefaniak, "Correggio's Cameria di San Paolo: an archaeology of the gaze," Art History, 16, 1993, 203-38. For 15th-century Italian Dominican women as patrons, see A. Roberts, "Chiara Gambacorta of Pisa as Patroness of the Arts," in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, 120-54. There have been similar studies for the 16th and 17th centuries, such as essays by Carolyn Valone, "Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560-1630," Art Bulletin 76, 1994, 129-46; and Marilyn Dunn, "Nuns as Art Patrons: The Decoration of S. Marta al Collegio Romano," Art Bulletin 70, 1988, 451-77.

5. The history of nuns' activities as artists is yet to be written; but then, the larger history of women as artists in the Middle Ages has hardly advanced since the important essays published in the 1970s by Dorothy Miner, Anastaise and Her Sisters, Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1974, and Annemarie Weyl Carr, "Women Artists in the Middle Ages," The Feminist Art Journal, 5, 1976, 5-9.

6. Hamburger has argued this point before, in "The Visual and the Visionary: The Changing Role of the Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotion," Viator, 20, 1989, 161-82, and elsewhere. A powerful demonstration of the power of the visual in late medieval and early modern convents can be found in the exhibition catalogue Le Jardin Clos de l'Ame: L'imaginaire des religiueses dans les Pays-Bas du Sud depuis le 13e siecle, Brussels, 1994.

7. This avenue of research has been addressed in several recent studies: Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995; H. Diane Russell and Bernadine Barnes, Eva Ave: Women in Renaissance and Baroque Prints, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990; and the exhibition catalogue Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the 15th and 16th Centuries, London: Rubicon, 1987. Chiara Frugoni consided the evidence of medieval images for what they might reveal about medieval ideology on women in "The Imagined Woman," A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. C. Klapisch-Zuber, Cambridge, Mass.: Harward University Press, 1992, 336-422. For a consideration of the ways in which a single female figure served to represent numerous ideas, see Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Pamela Sheingorn and Kathleeen Ashley, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. The literature on "images of" women grows all the time.

8. Even general studies of manuscripts have adopted the practice of depicting the entire page of a manuscript whenever possible. See, for example, Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, London: Phaidon, 1994.

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