Title
'Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man?': Transforming and Transcending Gender in the Lives of Female Saints
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2009
Journal Title
The Four Modes of Seeing : Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness
Pages
588
Publisher
Ashgate
City
Burlington, VT
Abstract
Borrowing its title from Madeline Harrison Caviness's influential work on the modes of seeing articulated by the twelfth-century cleric Richard of Saint Victor, this interdisciplinary collection brings together the work of thirty scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Each author has contributed an original article that engages with ideas formulated in Caviness's wide-ranging scholarship. The historiographic introduction discusses themes in Caviness's publications and their importance for art historical and medieval studies today. The book's thematic matrix groups together essays concerned with: The Material Object, Documentary Reconstruction, Post-Disciplinary Approaches, Multiple Readings, Gender and Reception, Performativity, Text and Image, Collecting and Consumption, and Politics and Ideology. The contributors include curators, art historians, historians, and literary scholars. Their subjects range from medieval stained glass to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, the Sachsenspiegel, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Many foreground issues of gender, reception, and textuality, which have permeated Caviness's scholarship. Some also present approaches to sites that have been the subject of important studies by Caviness, including Canterbury, Chartres, Reims, Saint-Denis, Sens, and Troyes. The volume offers a broad range of methodological approaches to key topics in the study of medieval imagery and thus highlights the vitality of the field today.
Recommended Citation
Martha Easton. "Transforming and Transcending Gender in the Lives of Female Saints" The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness. London: Ashgate Press, 2009. 333-347.
