A celebration of the work of Rachel Dressler, this issue of Different Visions focuses on new research that engages with feminist art historical approaches within the fields of medieval art history and material culture studies. In keeping with Dressler’s commitment to demonstrating the breadth and flexibility of feminist critique, these essays expand the way we look at gender and sexuality in the study of medieval visual culture today. Though this issue is inspired by past accomplishments, it looks resolutely to the present and future of medieval art history.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.61302/OZEF8528

Contents

 

I. Introduction, Bibliography of Rachel Dressler, and Contributors’ Biographies

Virginia Blanton, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Jennifer Borland, Oklahoma State University, Karen Overbey, Tufts University, Nancy Thompson, St. Olaf College, and Benjamin C. Tilghman, Washington College. Introduction to Visualizing Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages.

Bibliography of works by Rachel Dressler.

Biographies of the Contributors to Visualizing Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages

II. Masculinities

Marian Bleeke, Cleveland State University. He was a Manly Man, to be an (Arch) Bishop Able: Transi tombs and Masculinity in Later Medieval England.

Virginia Blanton, University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Jack Walton, University of Missouri, Kansas City. St. Didier’s Flowering Verge and the Rhetoric of Chaste Virility in a Modern Devotional: Joseph Royer’s Homage to Medieval Langres.

Karl Whittington, The Ohio State University. The Cluny Adam: Queering a Sculptor’s Touch in the Shadow of Notre-Dame.

III. Gendered Expectations

Maeve K. Doyle, Eastern Connecticut State University. Looking Beyond the Binary: Gender and Owner Portraits in Later Medieval Devotional Manuscripts.

Debra Higgs Strickland, University of Glasgow. The Female Presence on the Hereford World Map.

Martha Easton, St. Joseph’s University. Saint Lucy, the Silent Woman, and Subversive Female Speech in the Middle Ages.

Diane Wolfthal, Rice University. Women Who Refuse to Mother: Complicating the Ideology of Motherhood in Northern European Art, 1400-1600.

IV. Subjects/Subjectivities

Elizabeth Pastan, Emory University. It Ought to be Mary: On Themes in the Western Rose Window of Notre-Dame of Paris.

Donna Sadler, Agnes Scott College. The Nun’s Cell as Mirror, Memoir, and Metaphor in Conventual Art.

Ellen Shortell, Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Blessed Oda’s (Un)severed Nose: Viewing Self-Disfigurement in Stained Glass from Park Abbey.

Linda Seidel, University of Chicago. Poor Little Rich Girl(?): Margaret of Austria and the Arnolfini Portrait.

V. Refractions

KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Senior Industry Analyst, RedMonk. Constructing Gender in Visual Medievalisms: What an Art Historian has Taught me about Digital Gaming.

Dénia Lara, Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Grave of the Rose: Seeing Charlotte Canda through Her Brooklyn Tomb.

L. Michael McCloud, Johnson County Community College. How We See Ourselves.

Zaina Siraj, Albany Medical College, Reclaiming a Lost Heritage Through the Intersectionality of Art, History, and Medicine

Karen Williams, The Crucifixion window in the Scrope Chapel of Yorkminster