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Medieval Women Artists and Modem Historians

Article  in  Medieval Feminist Forum · September 1991

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Rees, A. L. and Frances Borzello. The New Art History. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press International, 1988.
Sheridan, Susan, ed. Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism. London and New York:
Verso, 1988.
Tickner, Lisa. "Feminism and Art History." Genders 3 (1988): 92-128.
Tufts, Eleanor. Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists. New York
and London: Paddington Press, 1974.
Wolff, Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990.
Ziegler, J. E. "The Curtis Beguinages in the Southern Low Countries and Art Patronage:
Interpretation and Historiography." Bulletin de l'Institut historique beIge de Rome
57 (1987): 31-70.

MEDIEVAL WOMEN ARTISTS

AND MODERN HISTORIANS
t
WOMEN HA VB a lot in common with art. In the history of art, women have often
been portrayed as pretty pictures that excite men to brilliance or as statues whose
motionless grace arouses the male genius and compels it to create. Elizabeth Ellet asserts
in her Women Artists (1859) that "woman is the type of the ornamental part of our life,
and lends to existence the charm which inspires the artist."· Women, we infer, are
archetypes, rather than makers, of art. In the history of women, moreover, women's
status has frequently been treated as a fine gauge of cultural sophistication, a role
commonly assigned to painting and sculpture. As Eileen Power once observed, '"fhe
position of women has been called the test point by which the civilization of a country or
of an age may be judged."2 In much historical thought, women and art do indeed have a
lot in common: both are static sources of inspiration; both are luxuries cultivated by the
truly civilized.
How have medievalists responded, then, to women who produced art, to allegedly
passive, beautiful, nonessential objects that fashioned others and thus created the stuff of
civilization? In what ways, for example, have historians tried to determine the extent to
which medieval European women participated in artistic production? How have they
conceptualized the effects of gender on what (and how) female artists painted, sculpted,
or embroidered? How, furthermore, have they interpreted the relationships of women's
artistic activities to medieval economics, religion, politics, and other domains of power?
This essay considers these issues in relation to art produced by women in Western Europe
between the fifth and fifteenth centuries after Christ.
Rediscovering the names of medieval artists of either sex is a tricky business.
Among extant medieval works, signed pieces are rare, and biographical information
about their makers is even rarer. Europe in the Middle Ages seems to have had no
parallel for the cult of personality that surrounded image-makers from Michelangelo to
Mapplethorpe. The picture is further complicated by our imperfect knowledge of

10
 medieval artist-patron interactions. Even where documents of commission survive, we
cannot know exactly how free illuminators and stone-carvers were to paint and sculpt as
they liked, although whoever paid the bill is usually assumed to have had some say in the
visual outcome.
Historians of women's art have surmounted these obstacles by drawing on a broad
range of verbal and visual evidence. In Woman under Monasticism (1896), Lina
Eckenstein pioneered the use of medieval letters, histories, and saints' lives in the study
of monastic textile artists and illuminators. Later writers followed her lead. Mary
Heinrich's study of early medieval monastic education (1924), A. G. I. Christie's
monograph on English embroidery (1938), and Dorothy Miner's influential lecture
Anastaise and Her Sisters (1974) employ medieval literary sources to reconstruct
women's artistic activities and oeuvres. Demographic studies, such as Fran\ioise Baron's
research on Parisian tax rolls, have also yielded significant information. Works of art
signed by women or attributed to female monasteries form another important object of
study. Surveys of women's art by Munsterberg (1975), Carr (1976), Petersen and Wilson
(1976), and Slatkin (1985) discuss extant manuscripts and textiles known either to have
been made by medieval women or to have been produced in the Middle Ages under the
direction of female overseers and patrons. A few case studies-Bischoff's work on
Chelles,3 Moessner's article on Wienhausen-catalogue the output of specific women's
monasteries.
Most writers who have sought to recover the names and works of female artists have
also contextualized their finds. In their well-known catalogue for the exhibition Women
Artists: 1550-1950 (1976), Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin analyze the
relationship between gender, social class, and access to artistic training and materials.
Like Miner, Petersen and Wilson, and Germaine Greer (The Obstacle Race, 1979), Harris
and Nochlin also examine changes in women's artistic activities that accompanied the
professionalization of crafts in the thirteenth century. Art-historical demographers
(Baron, Lillich) have added marital status to the list of variables that encouraged or
limited artistic production by medieval women.
Some social historians have gone beyond simple recovery and contextualization to
study the effects of gender on both the careers of female artists and their collective fate at
the hands of art historians. While referring only in passing to the Middle Ages, Nochlin's
controversial essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971) disputes
the idea that women in any age have produced art freely and on a nearly equal basis with
men, a notion popular among medievalists since Eckenstein.4 Greer's The Obstacle Race
echoes Nochlin's polemic and gives specific reasons for its applicability to medieval
women. In Old Mistresses (1981), Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock take an opposite
tack. Convinced that medieval monastic and home workshops encouraged skilled
production by women, Parker and Pollock criticize modem art history for denigrating
miniature painting and embroidery, media admired in the Middle Ages but now
stereotyped as feminine, and therefore minor, arts.
Recovery, social history, and gender analysis are indispensable to our understanding
of medieval women artists, but these genres fail to consider one fundamentally important
issue: the social, cultural, and political implications of artistic production, especially that
of women. In a sense, painting and embroidery are (and were) crafts like all others-
production processes that serve the maker's needs either directly or through exchange.

11
 Yet making images differs from spinning or baking in its potential intellectual and
emotional impact on those who receive and interact with the objects produced. In the
Middle Ages, images played a vital role in educating children, in stimulating piety and
devotion to the Church, and in furthering secular political interests. Like television
programmers today, medieval artisans who painted altarpieces, sculpted church portals,
or embroidered wall-hangings frequently communicated with audiences that spanned the
social gamut from illiterate laborer to head of state. Their works were not merely
aesthetic show-pieces or passive mirrors of thought, as art history so often implies. To
those who studied them, imitated them, and interacted with them regularly, they were
powerful teachers, sources and shapers of thought.'
Lately, a few writers have begun to take stock of the power that some medieval
women, especially wealthy patrons, asserted through visual imagery. In "Medieval
Women Book Owners" (1982), Susan Bell shows that elite women who commissioned
and owned books encouraged the spread of new iconographic schemes that legitimized
female literacy. A recent article by Susan Caldwell implies, similarly, that the eleventh-
century infanta Urraca of Zamora justified her ruthless political actions through the
religious iconography of a church portal sculpted under her direction. 6 By the same
token, Brigitte Bedos Rezak's "Women, Seals and Power in Medieval France, 1150-
1350" replaces the old image-reflects-reality model with a more complex analysis of how
images interacted with legal practice, family relations, self-image, and the display of
wealth. These studies, however, are exceptions. The ways in which medieval women
may have effected political and cultural change through visual representation remain
virtually unexplored.
Historians of medieval women's art have proceeded through a predictable sequence
of questions: What did female artists produce? Under what circumstances did they
produce it? How did gender roles foster or undermine their work? These queries have
led to the recovery and analysis of much important information. However, they
circumvent an issue that is, I believe, fundamental: the formative effects of images,
including those made or commissioned by women, on the intellectual, religious, and
political history of the Middle Ages. Medieval women and medieval art have shared an
unfortunate fate. Both have been deprived by historians of the very real power that they
may have exerted over human thoughts and actions in their own era. As a field of
inquiry, the history of medieval women artists and their art invites us to redefine these
proverbial objects as dynamic forces in the medieval past.

Lila Yawn-Bonghi, Art History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

NOTES

*
Titles cited in the short form here are given in full in the annotated bibliography. Sources
referred to in the text but not listed in these notes may also be found in the bibliography.

12
 Ellet, 21-22. For an analysis of how pOlitical and economic historians have treated
women of the past as icons, see Diane Owen Hughes, "Invisible Madonnas? The Italian
Historiographical Tradition and the Women of
Medieval Italy," in Susan Mosher Stuard, ed.,
Women in Medieyal Historv and Historiographv,
1987,23-57.
2 Eileen Power, "The Position of Women," in C. G.
Crump and E. F. Jacob, eds., The Legacy of the
Middle Ages, 1926, 401.
3 Bernhard Bischoff, "Die Kainer
Nonnenhandschriften und das Skriptorium von
Chelles" in Karolingische und Ottonische Kunst
Werden Wesen Wirkung, Forschungen zur
Kunstgeschichte und Christlichen Archaologie,
111,1957,395-411. Bischoff's article was
unavailable for review. It is, however,
summarized in Carr, 5 and 9.
4 Eckenstein does acknowledge that nuns worked
less often than monks in certain media, such as
calligraphy. Like Eckenstein, Petersen and
Wilson (and, to a lesser extent, Parker and Pollock) paint a rosy picture of the
opportunities and rewards that medieval culture offered to women who produced art.
5 For a compelling account of the role of images in the lives of women in Renaissance
Florence, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women Family and Ritual in Renaissance
~, trans. Lydia Cochraine, 1985,310-329.
6 See especially Caldwell, 23.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

*
This bibliography includes studies that address the following issues: To what extent were
medieval women involved in the production of paintings, illuminated books, sculptures,
embroideries, stained glass, and the like? Were certain media or stages within production
processes their special province? In what settings did they work-monasteries, home
workshops, professional ateliers? In what ways did their training, opportunities, and
artistic output differ from those of men? How, finally, did these factors vary across time,
place, and social class?
I have avoided delving into the extensive literature on Hildegard of Bingen, Herrad
of Landsberg, and women's membership in the guilds, each of which deserves a
bibliography of its own. Since I am principally concerned with women as active makers,
I have also included only those articles on female patrons that show their direct,
formative influence on the works they commissioned.

Baron, Franl;oise, "Enlumineurs, peintres et sculpteurs parisiens des XIII" et XIV" siecles,
d'apres les roles de la taille," Bulletin archwlogique du cornite des travaux
historiques et scientifiques, n.s. IV, 1968,37-121.
Baron catalogues the painters, illuminators, and sculptors listed in Parisian tax
13
 records of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Although her work does
not focus primarily on women, Baron does discover at least twelve female painters,
illuminators, and "ymagieres" (a term of uncertain meaning), as well as three other
women involved in the stone-working industry. Because the artistic profession
seems to have been handed down within families, she concludes that many of these
women were either masters' wives working with their husbands or widows
maintaining family workshops until male heirs were able to take over.
- - - - , "Enlumineurs, peintres et sculpteurs parisi ens des XIVc et XVc siecles,
d'apres les archives de I'Hopital Saint-Jacques-aux-Pelerins," Bulletin archeolo
gigue du comite des travaux historigues et scientifigues, n.s. VI, 1970, 77-115.
This study continues the work that Baron began in her earlier article in the
Bulletin archeologigue. Looking this time at documents in the archives of the
Hopital Saint-Jacques-aux-Pelerins, she discovers the names of several fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century female artists, including Agnes "la paintresse" and Henriete
"l'ymagiere" (pp. 90, 101). Unlike the many male artists mentioned for rendering
professional services to the Parisian confraternity, these women seem to have been
named only as givers or recipients of charity.
Bell, Susan Groag, "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and
Ambassadors of Culture," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vll/4,
1982,742-68. Reprinted in Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Women and
Power in the Middle Ages, 1988, 149-87.
Bell shows that medieval laywomen who commissioned and owned books
played a vital role in the development of new literary and iconographic forms and
helped to disseminate those forms across Europe. Excluded from most public
religious life and usually literate only in the vernacular, female patrons stimulated
the growth of vernacular-language devotional literature, as well as visual imagery
that represented women, and especially the Virgin Mary, reading. Patrilocal
marriage also meant that women transported their books across Europe and therefore
contributed to an international exchange of visual and literary ideas. Bell supports
her thesis with statistical data from laws, wills, inventories, and account books; with
medieval manuscript illuminations; and with references to female book owners in
medieval literature.
Caldwell, Susan Havens, "Urraca of Zamora and San Isidoro in Le6n: Fulfillment of a
Legacy," Woman's Art Journal VII/I, 1986, 19-25.
This article summarizes the life, politics, and art patronage of the
eleventh-century Spanish infanta Urraca of Zamora. Caldwell tries to show that
Urraca dictated the unusual, politically-charged iconography of the Cordero Portal
of San Isidoro, Le6n. Caldwell's argument rests on three points: Urraca's
documented participation in the amplification of the church; apparent iconographic
references to Spain's recent reconquest of territory from the Moors; and the rare
pairing of Sarah and Hagar with the Sacrifice of Isaac - evidence, Caldwell
believes, of "a woman's special reading of the Abraham story" (p. 23).
Carr, Annemarie Weyl, "Women Artists in the Middle Ages," The Feminist Art Journal
VII, 1976,5-9,26.
In this frequently cited essay, Carr continues Dorothy Miner's work of
recovering the names and products of medieval women artists, principally
14
 illuminators. Carr treats frequently mentioned figures (Ende, Claricia,
Hildegard of Bingen), as well as topics less often discussed: the convent of Chelles;
late medieval Dominican scriptoria in Germany; Bourgot and Jean Ie Noir;
professional women painters in Paris and the Low Countries. Carr also outlines
the relationship between social milieu and medium. She associates early and high
medieval book art with nuns, needlework with noblewomen, and both arts with
secular artisans in the later Middle Ages. As art became increasingly professional
ized in the fifteenth century, the traditional settings of women's artistic productivity
were, Carr asserts, tragically "swept away" (p. 9).
Christie, A. G. I., Enl:lish Medieval Embroidery, 1938.
The introduction of this massive, heavily illustrated catalogue traces English
embroidery from the celebrated work of St. Etheldreda (died 679) to the secular
professionals of the fourteenth century. Christie emphasizes that in medieval
Europe, embroidery was at least as highly regarded as painting, and English
embroideries were particularly prized. Chronicles, saints'lives, and extant textiles
document women's work in the medium from the early Middle Ages onward,
though after 1250 male-controlled workshops seem to have taken over much of the
production. Christie outlines these developments, along with the visual
characteristics, materials, and techniques of Opus anl:!icanum; its secular and
ecclesiastical uses; and its distribution throughout England and continental Europe.
Eckenstein, Lina, Woman Under Monasticism, 1896,222-55.
Eckenstein's chapter on art industries in English and German convents
conforms to her thesis that monastic life allowed medieval women "the right to
self-development and social responsibility" (p. ix). Like monks, female monastics
practiced a variety of arts, including the copying of books, but they attained greatest
proficiency in weaving and embroidery, activities especially associated with women.
Eckenstein gives special attention to Herrad of Landsberg's pictorial encyclopedia,
the Hortus Deliciarum, which she regards both as an illustration of women's
monastic life and as an index of the excellent education and pedagogical methods of
its author. Based on extant works of art and on written documents (histories, saints'
lives,letters), Eckenstein's detailed discussion of monastic women artists has served
as a foundation for many later studies in the field.
Ellet, Elizabeth Fries, Women Artists in All Al:es and Countries, 1859,21-37.
This early history of women artists brims with Victorian platitudes about
"woman." Through sentimental anecdotes, Ellet traces the activities of female
artists from the ancient Near East to classical Greece and Rome, medieval Europe,
Renaissance Italy, and subsequent cultures. In Ellet's view, the formulaic, other
worldly art of the Middle Ages was particularly appropriate for creation by
"woman," whose domestic duties and mild temperament impeded her participation
in the more technically and intellectually demanding arts of the Renaissance. The
predominant medieval medium, manuscript illumination, was, likewise, especially
well-suited to the contemplative life and "feminine hands" of women religious
(p.29).
Greer, Germaine, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work,
1979,151-68,345-46.
Greer's chapter on convent workshops parallels other surveys that attempt to
15
 recover and contextualize the careers of medieval women illuminators. However,
Greer's agenda-to show the obstacles that female artists have had to contend with
over the ages-leads her to modify the picture presented by Miner and Carr. Greer
holds that nuns most often produced works of inferior quality, though not for
inherent lack of talent. Rather, like women in secular society, monastic women had
less access than their male counterparts to state-of-the-art training, fine materials,
and important commissions. Nuns nevertheless continued to illuminate books until
the end of the sixteenth century and were not, as Carr asserts, entirely displaced by
secular professionals.
Harris, Ann Sutherland, and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550-1950, 1976, 11-20.
In their introduction to this highly regarded exhibition catalogue, Harris and
Nochlin propose "to learn more about why and how women artists first emerged as
rare exceptions in the sixteenth century" (p. 11). Ironically, some of their
conclusions about medieval women contradict this thesis. The authors acknowledge
that female aristocrats and nuns in the Middle Ages produced high-quality
embroideries, tapestries, and manuscript illuminations. They also recognize that
non-aristocratic laywomen worked in these media after secular artisans began to
dominate artistic production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Yet the
exhibition's focus on post-medieval painting leads Harris and Nochlin to view these
artists as exceptions-a few shadowy precursors of better-known Renaissance
painters, such as Anguissola and Fontana. Their range of source material (guild
regulations, colophons, chronicles) is impressive, however, and makes this book
extremely valuable to medievalists.
Heinrich, Mary Pia, Sister, The Canonesses and Education in the Early Middle Ages,
1924, 148-55, 184-93.
Heinrich's sections on calligraphy, embroidery, and the teaching of these arts
in the convent parallel Eckenstein's earlier treatment of the same issues.
Heinrich presents information from histories, legal texts, letters, patristic writings,
and hagiography to show that monastic schools trained elite women to write,
illuminl!-te, and embroider, often with great skill. From the early Middle Ages
onward, girls educated in monasteries learned to copy books for liturgical use and
secular study. Young women were also taught to spin, weave, sew, and embroider,
skills that they used to produce impressive liturgical vestments, wall-hangings, and
clothing. Heinrich makes a special point of disputing the notion that women merely
executed, but did not design, the often complicated, erudite embroidered images that
have come down to us.
Lillich, Meredith Parsons, "Gothic Glaziers: Monks, Jews, Taxpayers, Bretons, Women,"
Journal of Glass Studies XXVII, 1985,72-92.
Lillich examines four Parisian tax rolls, circa 1300, as evidence of the work
habits of late thirteenth-century glaziers. She concludes that a few glass-workers,
some of them women, may have established permanent workshops in or near Paris
by the late thirteenth century. Most glass artisans moved from region to region,
however, practicing their craft wherever work was available. Lillich devotes one
section of the essay to women and favors the hypothesis that some of the women
listed in the tax rolls worked independently as glass painters and merchants, rather
than as artists' wives or daughters. Since her article is not primarily about women,

16
 she does not consider what the tax rolls might reveal about how financially success
ful female glass-workers were in comparison to their male competitors or to women
in other crafts.
McGuire, Therese B., "Monastic Artists and Educators of the Middle Ages," Woman's
Art Journal IX/2, 1988-89,3-9.
McGuire focuses on two twelfth-century abbesses, Hildegard of Bingen and
Herrad of Landsberg, whom she credits with creating extensive miniature cycles.
The author gives biographical information about the abbesses, reviews their literary
output, and then examines the relationship between text and image in early
manuscripts of their writings. McGuire assumes that Herrad herself executed the
miniatures of the Hortus Deliciarum, since the text supplements the pictures and not
vice versa. Hildegard, on the other hand, seems to have dictated her visions to
several illuminators, who painted under her "watchful eye" (p. 7).
Miner, Dorothy, "Anastaise and Her Sisters: Women Artists of the Middle Ages," 1974.
Delivered in 1972, Miner's brief lecture has served as a foundation for virtually
all subsequent studies of medieval women illuminators. Starting with Christine de
Pizan's oft-quoted celebration of Anastaise, Miner reviews available evidence for
female scribes and miniaturists from the tenth-century Spanish nun Ende to late
medieval secular artists such as Anastaise and Bourgot. Miner examines textual
references to female painters, signed illustrated manuscripts, and works attributed
for iconographic reasons to women monastics. She implies that medieval society
allowed women a considerable role in miniature painting, whether as nuns, artists'
wives and daughters, or widows carrying on the professions of their husbands.
Moessner, Victoria Joan, "The Medieval Embroideries of Convent Wienhausen," Studies
in Cistercian Art and Architecture III, 1987, 161-77.
Moessner examines the artistic production of a German Cistercian convent from
its founding in the thirteenth century to the 1500s, when it became a Lutheran
retirement home for women. The nuns of Wienhausen produced small devotional
paintings, pilgrim signs, and, above all, embroideries of sacred and secular subjects,
Moessner's focus. This thoughtful, understated study is unusual in that it considers
the economic and social needs that embroidery may have satisfied in the lives of
those who practiced it.
Munsterberg, Hugo, A History of Women Artists, 1975, 10-17.
In his chapter on antiquity and the Middle Ages, Munsterberg notes that the
latter era brought a marked expansion in women's artistic activity, particularly in
textiles and manuscript illumination. Munsterberg presents some information on
German monastic artists not included in other surveys, and his preface includes a
brief but indispensable survey of early historiographic material. His omission of
footnotes, however, along with his patronizing tone and obvious reliance on weak
nineteenth-century sources (e.g. Ellet), compromise the book's value as serious
scholarship.
Nochlin, Linda, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Art News LXIX/9,
1971,22-39,67-71.
Nochlin's feminist polemic is modern in orientation, but it has direct pertinence
to medieval women artists. In answer to the question posed by her title, Nochlin
asserts that women have historically failed to produce great art because they have

17
 been denied access to the necessary training and institutions. Nochlin refers in
passing to the Spanish miniaturist Ende and to Sabina von Steinbach, a fourteenth-
century sculptor who, like so many female artists, was able to achieve greatness
primarily because her father practiced the same craft.
Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women. Art. and Ideology. 1981,
chapters 1-3.
Parker and Pollock are convinced that Linda Nochlin was wrong. Women
have produced art worthy of study and admiration, but the ideologies that dominate
art-historical scholarship lead art historians to ignore or to belittle anything that
women produce. Parker and Pollock examine social and art-theoretical changes that
affected the conditions under which women's art was made and evaluated from the
Middle Ages onward. In their view, medieval women had relatively rich opportuni
ties to practice valued crafts, due both to the vitality of monastic and home work
shops and to the high value placed on embroidery, manuscript illumination, and
other arts now considered "minor." Beginning in the Renaissance, art was gradually
recast as an intellectual pursuit, professional training moved out of the convent or
family workshop, and particular media and genres were privileged over others
(painting over embroidery, history painting over portraiture). These changes both
limited women's participation in "high" visual culture and stereotyped those genres
and media still open to them as feminine and therefore trivial-a notion that still
dominates art-historical thought.
Pet~sen, Karen, and J. J. Wilson, Women Artists. Recognition and Reappraisal from the
Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, 1976, 1-21.
Written as supplementary reading for survey courses in art history, this book
portrays the Middle Ages as a golden era for women's artistic production. In
chapter two, Petersen and Wilson discuss images of women painted, sculpted, or
embroidered in the early and later Middle Ages by named female artists, especially
nuns. In their conclusion, they lament the decline in women's artistic output that
occurred around 1350, when male-dominated secular workshops superseded
monas~eries as the main loci of artistic production. Clear, plentiful reproductions
and a conversational style make this a good, if occasionally too optimistic,
introduction to the subject.
Rezak, Brigitte Bedos, "Women, Seals, and Power in Medieval France, 1150-1350," in
Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages,
1988, 61-82.
This article concentrates for the most part on issues only loosely related to
artistic production by women. Specifically, Rezak uses information about women's
seals (e.g. frequency of use, kinds of items sealed) to document variations in the
social prerogatives of elite women in five regions of medieval France. In her final
section, however, she examines the ways in which noblewomen chose to have
themselves represented on their seals, an issue that bears directly on the assertion of
personal power through visual imagery. Most women, she finds, emphasized their
genealogical importance, wealth, or physical beauty through stereotyped attributes
and symbols, such as fleurs-de-lis, hunting hawks, flowing hair, or prominent
breasts. A few, on the other hand, borrowed traditional male iconography
(equestrian portraits, thrones) to assert their personal importance as feudal land

18
 owners or daughters of royalty.
Slatkin, Wendy, Women Artists in History from Antiquity to the 20th Century, 1985,
20-33.
Like Petersen and Wilson, Slatkin intended this book to supplement standard
survey texts in art history. In her chapter on the Middle Ages, Slatkin situates
female artists in their social framework and discusses, in particular, the ways in
which social class hindered or facilitated their work. She identifies painting and
embroidery with monastic and secular noblewomen until at least the thirteenth
century, when urban professionals, many of them female, began to dominate the
market. Slatkin's chapter summarizes earlier studies (Miner, Carr) but adds little
new art-historical information.
WolfthaI, Diane, "Agnes van den Bossche: Early Netherlandish Painter," Woman's
Art Journal VI/I, 1985,8-11.
WolfthaI presents the rare case of a medieval painter who is documented by
both written texts and extant works of art. Agnes van den Bossche received several
commissions in late fifteenth-century Ghent, including a contract to paint a military
standard preserved today in Ghent's Musee de la Byloke. According to WolfthaI,
her professional situation typified that of female artists in the Middle Ages. As a
painter, van den Bossche carried on her natal family's business; she became a free
master of the painter's guild only after her husband's death; and she received
important commissions but none for the genres most respected by late medieval
Netherlanders (altarpieces, devotional paintings, and the like).

Lila Yawn-Bonghi, Art History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

BOOK REVIEWS
t
CORRECTION: In the review article, "Gender and Power: Feminism and Old English
Studies," by Helen Bennett, Clare A. Lees, and Gillian R. Overing, which appeared in
MFN 10 (Fall 1990): 15-23, a sentence was unfortunately omitted from the bottom of
page 18 and the top of page 19. The correction should read:
She sees inconsistencies and complexities of poetic representation as a reflective
function of cultural phenomena, a result of the "ambiguity and problematic status of the
Anglo-Saxon woman in a society undergoing rapid and complex cultural change" (829).
And while this ambiguity remains untheorized as yet, it does allow Eve in Genesis B to
be two things at once, to be Germanic and Christian, and to escape, however temporarily,
the above varieties of masculine critical definition.

Rouben C. Cholakian. The Troubadour Lyric: a Psychocritical Reading. Manchester and

New York: Manchester University Press, 1990. Pp. viii, 208.

Concentrating on five major troubadours, this Freudian study, embellished by

19

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