Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture: Representations from France, c. 1100-1500 1783272503, 9781783272501

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Marian Bleeke is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Cleveland State University. Cover image:Visitation column sculptures. Reims cathedral, west façade, right flank of the central

Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture

W

hat can medieval sculptural representations of women tell us about medieval women's experiences of motherhood? Presumably the work of male sculptors, working for clerical patrons, these sculptures are unlikely to have been shaped by women's maternal experiences during their production. Once produced, however, their beholders would have included women who were mothers and potential mothers, thus opening a space between the sculptures' intended meanings and other meanings liable to be produced by these women as they brought their own interests and concerns to these works of art. Building on theories of reception and response, this book focuses on interactions between women as beholders and a range of sculptures made in France in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, aiming to provide insight into women's experiences of motherhood; particular sculptures considered include the Annunciation and Visitation from Reims cathedral, the femme-aux-serpents from Moissac, the transi of Jeanne de BourbonVendôme, the Eve from Autun, and a number of French Gothic Virgin and Child sculptures.

portal. 1240. Photo: author.

 Bleeke

Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture Representations from France, c.1100 –1500 

Marian Bleeke

MOTHERHOOD AND MEANING IN MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE

BOYDELL STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE ISSN 2045–4902 Series Editors Dr Julian Luxford Professor Asa Simon Mittman This series aims to provide a forum for debate on the art and architecture of the Middle Ages. It will cover all media, from manuscript illuminations to maps, tapestries, carvings, wall-paintings and stained glass, and all periods and regions, including Byzantine art. Both traditional and more theoretical approaches to the subject are welcome. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below. Dr Julian Luxford, School of Art History, University of St Andrews, 79 North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, UK Professor Asa Simon Mittman, Department of Art and Art History, California State University at Chico, Chico, CA 95929-0820, USA Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume.

MOTHERHOOD AND MEANING IN MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE REPRESENTATIONS FROM FRANCE, c. 1100–1500

Marian Bleeke

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Marian Bleeke 2017 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Marian Bleeke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2017 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 978 1 78327 250 1

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture

1 2 3 4

1

Motherhood as Transformation: From Annunciation to Visitation at Reims

15

Motherhood as Monstrosity: The Moissac Femme-aux-serpents and the Transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme

52

Resurrecting Lazarus: The Eve from Saint-Lazare at Autun

87

Visualizing Parturition: Devotional Sculptures of the Virgin and Child

Afterword: Motherhood and Meaning: Medieval Sculpture and Contemporary Art

120 159

Bibliography 175 Index 193

ILLUSTRATIONS PLATES (BETWEEN PAGES 100 AND 101) I

II

III

IV

Virgin and Child. Ile-de-France, France. 1340–50. Limestone, paint, gilt, and glass. Height: 172.7cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1937 (37.159). Photo: www.metmuseum. org. Virgin and Child as Sedes Sapientiae. Auvergne, France. Late twelfth century. Walnut with paint, tin relief on a lead white ground, and linen. Height: 172.7cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan (16.32.194a,b). Photo: www. metmuseum.org. Virgin and Child, called Vierge de la Celle. Champagne, France. Second quarter of the fourteenth century. From the église de la Celle-sur-Seine (?). Polychrome limestone, glass, 157.8 x 59 x 31cm. RF1398. Photo: Stéphan Maréchalle. Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Virgin nursing the Christ-child. Picardy, France. 1400. Polychrome limestone, 113 x 45 x 32cm. RF2333. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi. Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

FIGURES 1

2 3

Virgin and Child. Ile-de-France, France. 1340–50. Limestone, paint, gilt, and glass, 172.7 x 58 x 28.5cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1937 (37.159). Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Mary Annunciate and Mary from the Visitation. Reims cathedral, west façade, right flank of the central portal. 1240. Photo: author. Annunciation and Visitation column sculptures. Reims cathedral, west façade, right flank of the central portal. 1240. Photo: author.

2

16 17

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illustrations

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19

Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation column sculptures. Amiens cathedral, west façade. 1230. Photo: author. Presentation column sculptures. Reims cathedral, west façade, left flank of the central portal. 1240. Photo: author. Annunciation column figures. Reims cathedral, west façade, right flank of the central portal. 1240. Photo: author. Visitation column sculptures. Reims cathedral, west façade, right flank of the central portal. 1240. Photo: author. Femme aux serpents and demon. Church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, west flank of the south portal. 1100–30. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY. South portal of the church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, 1100–30. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY. Portal relief. Church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, east flank of south portal. 1100–30. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY. Visitation. Church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, east flank of the south portal. 1100–30. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY. Entrance portal and belltower. Church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, 1100–30. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme, duchesse de Bourbon, later comtesse de Boulogne et d’Auverge. Auvergne, France. First quarter of the sixteenth century. From the église of the Cordeliers (Vic-le-Comte, Puy-de-Dome). Stone, 178 x 78.5 x 29cm. RF 1212. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda / Thierry Le Mage. Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Germain Pilon (fl. 1540–90). Tomb of Valentine Balbiani (1518–72). Marble. RF1333. Musée du Louvre. Photo: Eric Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Portal relief. Church of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, west flank of south portal. 1100–30. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY. Eve. Church of Saint-Lazare, Autun, 1130. Musée Rolin. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Eve, detail of face (detail of Fig. 16). Musée Rolin, Autun. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Reconstruction of the St. Lazarus shrine from Saint-Lazare, Autun, showing locations of the interior sculptures. Based on Gilles Rollier, “Nouvelles données sur le tombeau de saint Lazare à Autun.” Revue d’Auvergne 114/4 (2000): 126–38. Drawing: author. Plan of the church of Saint-Lazare, Autun, showing locations of the Eve sculpture, Lazarus shrine, and selected capitals: A. Adoration of the Magi, B. Magi before Herod, C. Dream of the Magi, D. Flight into Egypt. Adapted from Eugène Violletle-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1856), fig. 27. Shrine based on Rollier as in Fig. 18. Drawing: author.

18 19 27 28 53 54 64 65 69 71

74 84 87 88 92

93

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illustrations

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

30

31

32

St. Mary Magdalene from the Shrine to St. Lazarus. Church of Saint-Lazare, Autun, 1140. Musée Rolin. Photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY. St. Martha from the Shrine to St. Lazarus. Church of Saint- Lazare, Autun, 1140. Musée Rolin. Photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY. Miracle of the Resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus Christ. Fresco from the Basilica of Sant’Angelo in Formis. 1072. Photo: Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. Resurrection of Lazarus. Relief from Chichester cathedral, Sussex, England. 1000–1130. Edwin Rae © TRIARC (Trinity Irish Art Research Centre). Capital depicting the Flight into Egypt. Church of Saint- Lazare, Autun. 1130. Photo: Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY. Last Judgment tympanum. Church of Saint-Lazare, Autun. 1130. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Virgin and Child of Saint-Apollinaire. Burgundy, France. Second quarter of the fifteenth century. From the château de Saint-Apollinaire (Côte-d’Or). Limestone, 97 x 45cm. CL18926. Photo: Stéphan Maréchalle. Musée national de Moyen Âge – Thermes du Cluny. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Virgin and Child. Salzburg, Austria. 1420. Limewood, fir, and paint. Height: 92.71cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1965 (65.215.2). Photo: www. metmuseum.org. Lippo Memmi (c. 1285–1361). Madonna of the Misericordia. Duomo, Orvieto, Italy. Photo: Scala/Art Resource. Michael Erhart (1440/45–1522). Virgin of Mercy of Ravensburg. 1480. Limewood. H. 135cm. Inv 421. Skulpturensammlung und Museum fuer Byzantinische Kunst, Berlin. Photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY. Master of Erfurt, Joseph’s Doubt or the Virgin Mary with a Distaff. Fifteenth century. Oil on canvas on wood, 27 x 19cm. Germäldegalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, INV 1874. Photo: bpk, Berlin/Germäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY. Virgin and Child. Vexin (or Normandy), France. 1300–35. Limestone with traces of paint and gilding, 156.2 x 45.7 x 27.9cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of George Blumenthal, 1941 (41.190.279). Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Virgin and Child. Lorraine, France. Fourteenth century, 1310–20. Limestone with traces of polychromy and gilding, overall 75.90 x 28.00cm (29⅞ x 11in.). Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund, 1974.14. Photo: © Cleveland Museum of Art.

95 95 103 105 113 117 121

129

131 132

138

142

143

x

illustrations

33

34

35

36 37

38 39 40

41 42

43

School of Troyes (French), Virgin and Child. About 1500. 145 Limestone with traces of polychrome. Height: 149.9cm. Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio). Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1958.14. Virgin and Child. Burgundy, France. Second half of the 147 fifteenth century. Stone with traces of polychromy. RF1433. Photo: Pierre Philibert. Musée du Louvre. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Pierre Philibert/Art Resource, NY. Virgin and Child. Champagne, France. First third of the 149 sixteenth century. From the area of Rouvroy (?) (Haute-Marne). Polychrome limestone, 157.5 x 52 x 48cm. RF1386. Photo: Stéphan Maréchalle. Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY. Shrine Madonna. Misterhult, Sweden. 1430–50. Misterhults 150 kyrka, Sweden. Photo: Elina Gertsman. Virgin and Child. Champagne, France. Late fourteenth 152 century. Limestone, 78.5 x 32 x 17.5cm. RF 790. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi. Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY. Susan Hiller, Ten Months. 1979. Courtesy of Susan Hiller. 163 Susan Hiller, Month 10, detail from Ten Months. 1979. 163 Courtesy of Susan Hiller. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI, 165 Pre-Writing Alphabet, Exergue, and Diary. 1978. Perspex unit, white card, resin, slate. 18 units: 28cm H x 35.5cm W. Gallery inventory #MKE131.09. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Elaine Reichek, Laura’s Sweater. One of four components of 167 Laura’s Layette. 1979. Colored pencil on paper, knitted yarn. 52 x 62in. (132.1 x 157.5cm). Courtesy of Elaine Reichek. Andrea Bowers, Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from 168 the Past for a Future of Choice #18. 2006. Pencil on paper. 22¼ x 15in. paper size, 24¾ x 17½in. frame size. Gallery inventory #BOW135. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit: Gene Ogami. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation IV, 171 Transitional Objects, Diary, and Diagram. 1976. Perspex unit, white card, plaster cotton fabric, string. 8 units: 28cm H x 35.5cm W. Gallery inventory #MKE131.06. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky.

The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgment in subsequent editions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

he travel necessary for research for the book, in particular to gain first-hand knowledge of the sculptures on which it is based, was supported by a State of New York/United University Professions Joint Labor-Management Committees Individual Development Award and by faculty development funds from Cleveland State University. The Cleveland State University Graduate Faculty Research Support Program provided funds to support the images for the book and funds for the colour images were provided by the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. My thanks to Andrea Bowers, Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Elaine Reichek, and the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Gallery for permission to reproduce the works of art in the Conclusion (Figs. 38–43). Portions of Chapter 3, specifically of the sections focused on the transi sculpture of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme, will also be published as part of an essay “‘The Monster, Death, Becomes Pregnant’: Representations of Motherhood in Female Transi Tombs from Renaissance France,” in the volume Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art; my thanks to the volume’s editors, Carlee Bradbury and Michelle Moseley-Christian, for inviting me to contribute to that project and to Palgrave Macmillan for allowing me to publish the material here. Likewise, portions of Chapter 4, specifically on reconstructions of and connections between the eastern portal and Lazarus shrine from SaintLazare, Autun, have been published as part of “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage,” in the collection Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (2012). This material is reproduced here by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa, PLC; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. My thanks to the editor, Elina Gertsman, for inviting me to contribute to that volume, and for allowing me to reproduce her photograph of the Shrine Madonna from Misterhult, Sweden, in this book (Fig. 36). Other portions of this project have been presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, the New

xii

acknowledgments

College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Gender and Medieval Studies Group Conference on Gender and the Family, and the Southeastern Medieval Association. My thanks to the various session organizers and to the audience members for their interest in my work. Likewise, my thanks go to Caroline Palmer at Boydell and Brewer for her support of this project throughout its development, to the anonymous reader for their insights and suggestions, and to Asa Mittman for his encouragement and support.

INTRODUCTION: MOTHERHOOD AND MEANING IN MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE

S

he stands with her weight shifted slightly to her left and with that hip pressed outward and upward, in a version of the classical contrapossto pose (Fig. 1 and Plate I). She puts that pose to a different end, however, propping an infant up on her hip and securing him against her body with a strong grasping hand. The child reaches out with one hand to grasp her veil and pull it over her chest – and with that gesture he calls attention to the play of fabric folds that the contrapossto pose creates on her lower body. On her right, a series of curves at varying depths cross over her body from her extended hand to where the child’s body presses against hers. The topmost of these folds flips the garment inside out, revealing its white inner surface so that it rhymes visually with her white veil above. On her left, by contrast, the fabric gathers into tight folds along vertical lines that extend down from the pleats in the lower portion of the child’s garment. And the end of her veil gathers into similarly tight folds as it dangles from his hand. The placement of this flare of folds against her chest calls attention to her breasts, which are further emphasized by curving lines that extend upwards to them as drapery folds created by the tight cinch of her belt below. This book asks what this sculpture – an early fourteenth-century French Virgin and Child – along with a number of other medieval sculptural representations of women – including the Annunciation and Visitation pairs from Reims cathedral (Figs. 2–3), the femme aux serpents from the church of Saint-Pierre at Moissac (Fig. 8), the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme (Fig. 13), the Eve from the church of Saint-Lazare at Autun (Fig. 16), and multiple other Virgin and Childs (Figs. 26–37, Plates I–IV) – have to say about medieval women’s experiences of motherhood.

2

MOTHERHOOD AND MEANING IN MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE

FIG. 1. VIRGIN AND CHILD. ILE-DE-FRANCE, FRANCE. 1340–50.

introduction

The most obvious answer to that question is little to nothing: the work of anonymous but presumably male sculptors, often working for clerical and so (ideally) celibate male patrons, there is little to no chance that these artworks speak of motherhood on the level of their makers’ selfexpressions. Likewise, these sculptures were not made specifically for women as their primary beholders and so were not made to speak directly to women about their social roles as mothers. However, the sculptures were produced as public art, primarily for the exterior walls and interior spaces of church buildings, and so they had a wide range of beholders that would have included women who were mothers and potential mothers: of course, not all medieval women were mothers, but a majority would have been. The difference between the male makers of these sculptures and women as mothers as one group of their beholders opens a gap between the artworks’ intended meanings and the other meanings liable to be produced by these women as they came to the sculptures with their own interests, ideas, and concerns. Thus to consider these sculptures in relation to medieval women’s experiences of motherhood, we must first recognize that the interaction between a work of art and its beholders is a meaning-making activity. This Introduction develops this theoretical perspective in detail. Approached from this perspective, these sculptures become sites where medieval women could consider their own maternal experiences and the meanings those experiences held for them. Indeed, the reason this book focuses on sculpture as a medium is the opportunity this gap between producers and beholders, intended and potential meanings, creates to consider medieval women as active makers of the meanings of their own lives. In this way the book addresses a central concern in feminist art history, identifying potential examples of the exercise of female agency.1 As these sculptures continue to exist today, furthermore, they can serve as sources for reconstructing something of medieval women’s maternal experiences and some of the meanings they made from those experiences. The sculptures are particularly valuable sources on these topics because these aspects of women’s lives are not typically represented in texts from the medieval past (with some exceptions such as the Book of Margery Kempe discussed below). This work of reconstruction as it is enacted in this book shows motherhood to have been a complex experience for medieval women as it brought together empowerment and subordination, 1 See Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism (Berkeley, 2005); and for these issues as specific to medieval art see Marian Bleeke, “Considering Female Agency: Hildegard of Bingen and Francesca Woodman,” Woman’s Art Journal 31/2 (November 2010): 39–46; Marian Bleeke, “Feminist Approaches to Medieval Visual Culture: An Introduction,” Medieval Feminist Forum 44/2 (Winter 2008): 47–52; and Rachel Dressler, “Continuing the Discourse: Feminist Scholarship and the Study of Medieval Visual Culture,” Medieval Feminist Forum 43/1 (Summer 2007): 19–20.

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suffering and salvation, life and death, joy and grief, and intimacy and separation. To return to the Virgin and Child sculpture introduced above as an example, its visual forms suggest the tension between merger and division that marks the process of parturition, which is explored in detail through an examination of multiple such sculptures in Chapter 4. The mother and child are pressed together here within the narrow vertical format of the work of art, but they are also distinguished by two different types of drapery folds: her horizontal curves contrast with his vertical pleats. As those curving folds accumulate on her lower abdomen they suggest her former pregnancy in contrast to the child she now holds in her arms. And as these same folds lead across her body to that child, they suggest his movement out of her body, a suggestion that is reinforced by the inside-out twist of the topmost fold. Yet as her veil resembles the inside of that fold, so his reach for it becomes a reach back into her interior. Finally, as the veil transforms from a curve into a tight flare of folds placed in between her breasts, it suggests their ongoing intimate connection through breastfeeding. They are thus both joined and separated, split apart and tied together.

THE BEHOLDER AND THE WORK OF ART The relationship between the viewer or beholder (I explain my preference for the latter term below) and the work of art has been a major topic of interest in art history as a discipline for approximately the past forty years.2 Nevertheless, I find that the most useful conceptual tools for understanding this relationship come from the work of literary theorists writing about the relationship between the reader and the text, specifically Hans Robert Jauss’s work on “reception” in combination with Wolfgang Iser’s on “response.” Jauss focuses on the reader or beholder’s share in this relationship. He introduces the term “horizon of expectations” to refer to the store of experiences, ideas, and concerns that readers bring to texts or beholders to works of art. According to Jauss, this “horizon” forms the background to the text or artwork as foreground, the question to which the work is an answer – or to which it is made to answer as it is virtually remade in the minds of its readers/beholders in order to fit within their horizons, match their backgrounds, or respond to their concerns.3 Iser’s 2 See, for example, Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1972); Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, 1985); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1994); Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge, 1995); and David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989). 3 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982), 20–8, 73.

introduction

work focuses instead on the active role of the text or work of art: his interest is in the ways in which the form of the text or artwork shapes the reader or beholder’s experience of it or response to it.4 Both of these perspectives are of equal importance. For as much as the beholder comes to the work of art with specific experiences and interests, so the work of art presents her with specific forms and figures to consider in the light of those experiences and interests. Thus neither the beholder nor the work of art is a blank slate for the other’s inscription of meaning. Instead both are active agents in the process of meaning-making and its outcome is a creative synthesis of their contributions. Jauss and Iser’s perspectives also produce differing emphases as they enter into historical work. Jauss’s work on reception stakes out historical distance and difference, for the horizon of expectations for a text or work of art changes over time as later readers/beholders bring different sets of experiences and interests to surviving texts and artworks. Thus, for Jauss, the work of the historian of literature or art is, in part, the deliberate reconstruction of past horizons. By contrast, Iser’s work on response emphasizes instead the possibility of contact over time. According to Iser, the historian-as-reader or beholder’s response will be scripted by the text or work of art in much the same way as the historical reader/beholder’s was and that will allow the later reader/beholder to share in the original reader/beholder’s experience, at least to some degree.5 The combination of their two perspectives establishes what Carolyn Dinshaw refers to as a “contingent” relationship across time: Dinshaw calls attention to that word’s roots in ideas of touching and writes of contingent history as acting to make past and present touch. Contingent historical relationships, she writes, explode categories such as past and present, sameness and otherness, by establishing instead partial connections between now and then, us and them, as they are made to touch on one another.6 Images are highlighted in Dinshaw’s work as potential sites for creating such contingent connections across time as she references the work of Michael Camille on the artist he names Pierre Remiet and that of Roland Barthes on photography. In both cases, the image or work of art as something made and seen in the past that persists to be seen in the present creates the potential for a touch over time.7 Iser and Dinshaw’s work encourage me to take my own responses to medieval artworks seriously as avenues towards historical understanding. This book is shaped by my responses to medieval sculptures in two ways. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978). Iser, Act of Reading, x, 206. 6 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, 1999), 2–3, 12, 35, 39, 43. 7 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 36, 51–2. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981); and Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet Illuminator (New Haven, 1996). 4 5

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First, I chose the sculptures that I discuss here based primarily on my responses to them: these were the works of art that stood out to me as being potentially productive to consider in relation to medieval women’s experiences of motherhood. I can speculate, at least, that they would have likewise appealed to the women who were among their original beholders as productive sites for thinking about their own maternal experiences. These sculptures stood out to me in this way for a variety of different reasons: the Reims Annunciation and Visitation pairs because of the striking differences in their portrayals of the Virgin Mary as she becomes pregnant (Fig. 2); the Moissac femme aux serpents and the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme because of their disturbing depictions of female bodies under attack and in decay (Figs. 8 and 13); the Autun Eve because of its nudity and emotional expression (Fig. 16); and the Virgin and Child sculptures because of differences they depict in the relationship between mother and infant (Plates I–IV, Figs. 1, 26, 31–5, and 37). Secondly, like this Introduction, each chapter of the book begins with a passage of close looking, so that each takes my response to a work of art as the starting point for its argument. The bulk of each chapter is dedicated to the work of reconstructing something of a medieval laywoman’s “horizon of expectations” for the sculptures it discusses. According to Jauss, for all readers/beholders this horizon is variable and multi-layered. It begins with the reader/beholders’ prior experiences and expectations about texts or works of art themselves. My choice of “beholder” rather than “viewer” reflects work that has been done to reconstruct this aspect of a medieval horizon for medieval art, for it shows contemporary understandings of the process of sight to have been strikingly physical. For example, things that a mother saw during pregnancy were thought to be able to physically impress their forms upon the fetus in her womb.8 My use of “beholder” is intended to suggest this idea of seeing as a physical process, as a form of touching or “holding” the thing seen. Likewise, this medieval understanding of sight as a form of touch explains my use of Jauss’s “horizon of expectations” rather than art historian Michael Baxandall’s concept of the “period eye” as a way of thinking about reception: as Adrian Randolph has argued, Baxandall’s concept is limited by its role in his explanation of the development 8 In general see Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York, 2002); David C. Lindberg, “The Science of Optics” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago, 1978), 338–68; David C. Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics (London, 1983); Robert S. Nelson, “Descartes’s Cow and Other Domestications of the Visual” and Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge, 2000), 1–21 and 197–223. For sight and impression on the fetus see Katharine Park, “Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York, 1998), 262–3; and Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York, 2006), 66–73, 144–5.

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of Renaissance perspective systems and so by its implication in an understanding of sight as a distanced and disembodied process.9 According to Jauss, from this innermost horizon extends a much broader one formed from the reader/beholder’s life experiences. This horizon stretches in different directions for different readers and beholders, responding to the differences in their social roles and experiences.10 Thus medieval men and women, members of the clergy and laypeople, would have had differing horizons for the sculptures that are the focus of this book and would have remade them through reception in different ways. A central premise for this book is that motherhood would have formed an important part of medieval laywomen’s horizons of expectations for these sculptures; that is, that motherhood would have formed a background of experiences against which these women would have understood the works of art and that the meanings of their maternal experiences would have been a question that they looked to these sculptures to answer. This premise can be substantiated by an unusual early fifteenth-century textual source, Margery Kempe’s account of her life in her Book, in two ways.11 The first point to note is that Margery gave birth to fourteen children during her first twenty-four years of marriage, before she convinced her husband to agree to a celibate relationship.12 During these years she must have been almost continually either pregnant or newly delivered and nursing, so that motherhood must have been a nearly constant fact of her life. While Margery’s childbearing career was not typical of medieval women, her experience does demonstrate that motherhood had the potential to dominate women’s lives. It could have dominated their lives in other ways as well; for women who were unable to conceive or bear children, for example, pilgrimages and other practices meant to increase fertility could have become similarly constant facts of life. As a potentially 9 Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy; Adrian Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye: Deschi de Parto and Renaissance Visual Culture,” Art History 27/4 (September 2004): 543–4; Adrian Randolph, Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art (New Haven, 2014), 4, 99, 112–14, 199. 10 Susan Suleiman, “Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism” in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, 1980), 37. 11 The authorship of Margery’s Book is complicated by the fact that she was unable to write and so made use of two male scribes to produce the text: this raises the question of their role in shaping the text itself. However, scholars do regularly treat the text as Margery’s own production. On these issues see Wendy Harding, “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, 1993), 168–87. 12 The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B.A. Windeatt (New York, 1994), 58–60, 153. The detail of fourteen children appears in Margery’s testimony before the Mayor, Abbot, and Dean of Leicester, as a response to an unspecified accusation that seems to have included matters of faith and of sexual activity. Margery was married in approximately 1393 and this testimony is dated to 1417 so that her fourteen children would have been born over approximately twenty-four years and thus at a rate of just over one child every two years.

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dominating experience, motherhood would have formed an important part of women’s horizon of expectations for the works of art they encountered in the course of their lives. The second point to note is that Margery’s fourteen children scarcely appear in the account of her life that she presents in her Book. To understand this apparent omission, we must understand that story’s function as her self-presentation as a holy woman, not an ordinary laywoman, and recognize the fact that holy women were expected to be celibate virgins, not married mothers. The only children Margery describes herself as tending are the Virgin Mary, in a visionary experience in which she serves as midwife to Saint Anne, and Christ, in a devotional practice performed with other women using a kind of Jesus baby-doll.13 In this way Margery transformed her maternal experiences into a form of affective piety, using those experiences as the groundwork for her close identification with the Virgin. Margery’s Book thus shows her making her maternal experiences into meaningful experiences and it shows her doing so, at least in part, in her response to a work of art in her interaction with the Jesus doll.14 While this textual record of a medieval laywoman’s meaning-making activity is rare, I submit that the activity itself was not: medieval women in general should be understood as active makers of the meanings of their own lives.15 Of course medieval women would have brought experiences other than motherhood to the activity of meaning-making that they performed in their encounters with artworks and so each chapter in this book develops additional aspects of their horizons of expectations. These additional aspects are specific to the sculptures considered in each chapter, specific to the times and places of their production and their original reception by their beholders. As the sculptures range over time from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, and in location from southern to northern France and from small towns to major cities, so the additional issues considered in the chapters range widely: from women’s economic roles in northern textile towns in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to beguine spirituality (both in Chapter 1), to twelfth-century ideas about and attitudes towards lepers and leprosy (Chapter 2), to pilgrimage practices and healing miracles (Chapter 3), and to the role of textiles in the cult of the Virgin (Chapter 4). 13 Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 52–4, 113. On Jesus baby-dolls see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence of the Quattrocento” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), 310–30. 14 On the women’s use of the Jesus doll see Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth, The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern Women (New York, 2002), 55–6. On Margery’s use of art more broadly see Sarah Stanbury, “Margery Kempe and the Arts of SelfPatronage” in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany, 2006), 75–103. 15 Bleeke, “Considering Female Agency,” 45.

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MEDIEVAL MOTHERHOOD AND MEDIEVAL ART Scholarship on motherhood in general has been shaped by a split between motherhood understood as an “experience” and as an “institution” since the publication of Adrienne Rich’s foundational work in 1976. The experience that concerns Rich and those who have followed in her wake is that of the mother herself, as distinct from that of the child.16 Indeed another set of terms for this distinction is between “maternal subjectivity” – that is, the mother considered as a thinking and feeling subject in her own right – and the “ideology of motherhood.”17 Institution and ideology alike refer to cultural myths and stereotypes of mothers and motherhood, and to the prescriptions and demands placed on women as mothers by society at large, and so to motherhood as a culturally defined ideal and a socially constructed role. By contrast, Rich’s maternal experience is primarily physical or bodily, although she and others argue against it being dismissed as mere biology as it enters into the woman’s subjectivity and so becomes a meaningful part of her life.18 This distinction has shaped scholarship on medieval motherhood, beginning with Clarissa Atkinson’s The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (1991). Atkinson places emphasis on motherhood as institution or ideology, explaining that she is writing a history of ideas about motherhood as presented in various texts.19 Subsequent scholarship, in particular the essay collections Medieval Mothering (1996) and Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (2000), has likewise focused on motherhood as a socially constructed role, in particular that of caregiver or nurturer, while downplaying motherhood as a bodily experience as biological and so ahistorical.20 Similarly, the recent essay collection Medieval and Renaissance Lactations (2013) focuses on non-maternal breastfeeding, by Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 10th Anniversary Edition (New York, 1986), 12–13, 34–40. 17 Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, “Introduction,” and Marianne Hirsch, “Maternity and Rememory: Toni Morrison’s Beloved” in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven, 1994), 17–18, 93–4, 103. 18 Hirsch, “Maternity and Rememory,” 103, 108; Rich, Of Woman Born, 12, 31, 40, 157, 182–3; and Sara Ruddick, “Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth” in Representations of Motherhood, 35–43. 19 Clarissa Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1991), 4–8, 26–7. 20 John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, “Introduction,” John Carmi Parsons, “The Pregnant Queen as Counselor and the Medieval Construction of Motherhood,” Rosemary Drage Hale, “Joseph as Mother: Adaptation and Appropriation in the Construction of Male Virtue,” and Susanna Greer Fein, “Maternity in Aeldred of Rievaulx’s Letter to His Sister” all in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York, 1996), x–xv, 49–53, 106, 139, 146–7; Naomi J. Miller, “Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period” in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Burlington, 2000), 1–2, 4–8. 16

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both women and men, in order to examine the mutual constructions of gender and care-giving.21 However, other recent work, in literary studies in particular, has begun to focus on motherhood as a bodily experience that is also a meaningful experience. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth’s The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern England (2002) discusses the work of female writers, including Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, in order to “show the dynamics of the negotiation of women’s voices around the idea of the female reproductive body.”22 And Angela Florschuetz’s Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance (2014) discusses broader cultural attitudes towards the biological influence that the mother was understood to have over her child.23 Likewise, my interest in this book is in motherhood as a primarily bodily experience that is also a meaningful experience for women. I seek to historicize that experience by reconstructing some of the meanings that it held for women in the medieval past. This work shows motherhood to have been a much more complex, contradictory, and ambivalent experience than can be summarized in a single issue such as care-giving. Atkinson explains her emphasis on motherhood as an institution as a product of her sources, primarily male-authored texts that can provide only scarce clues as to women’s experiences as mothers.24 Hellwarth and Florschuetz circumvent that limitation by looking to other types of textual sources, works by female authors and Romance narratives. Several existing works on motherhood and medieval and Renaissance art and visual/ material culture have done likewise by focusing on visual and material rather than textual sources, and by highlighting the interactions of images and objects with their beholders and users rather than the intentions of their makers: this work sets the stage for my own in this book. Thus Anne McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación write that their intention for their edited volume on The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage was to look to material culture as the “grounds of lived experience” in order to move “beyond the reaches of textual evidence” and “expand the possibilities for the historical study of women’s lives.”25 A common focus of the essays in that collection is on the ability of material objects to hold multiple meanings for differing audiences.26 21 Jutta Gisela Sperling, “Introduction” in Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices, ed. Jutta Gisela Sperling (Burlington, 2013), 5. 22 Hellwarth, The Reproductive Unconscious, xi. 23 Angela Florschuetz, Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination (New York, 2014). 24 Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 8, 26–7. 25 Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación, “Introduction” in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, ed. Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación (New York, 2001), 2, 7, 9–10. 26 See, for example, Katharine Park, “Relics of a Fertile Heart: The ‘Autopsy’ of Clare of Montefalco” in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, 115–34.

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In her foundational work on motherhood and medieval and Renaissance art, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio focuses on painted wooden trays and elaborately glazed ceramic bowls that were made for women and associated specifically with childbirth: they were commonly given to pregnant or newly delivered women, were used as other women visited the mother during her lying-in period after childbirth, and frequently depicted childbirth scenes.27 In work focused on childbirth, Adrian Randolph has likewise discussed the wooden trays, known as deschi de parto, along with terracotta dovizia statuettes, images of a woman holding a cornucopia, balancing a basket of fruit on her head, and accompanied by a child. These are reproductions of a lost sculpture by Donatello for the Mercato Vecchio in Florence and brought its iconography into the home.28 Finally, in her work on “holy motherhood,” Elizabeth L’Estrange focuses on narrative images of childbirth, along with images of female saints, from Books of Hours, specifically manuscripts made for members of the houses of Anjou and Brittany in the fifteenth century.29 All three scholars thus focus on works of art made for private consumption by elite beholders: indeed, for L’Estrange the beholders’ class standing is key to understanding their reception of these images, as she argues that they would have spoken to the aristocratic interest in perpetuating a lineage.30 My work in this book differs in focusing instead on sculptures that appeared in public spaces and so to a broader range of beholders, in terms of social class: this allows me to attempt to understand the maternal experiences of more ordinary medieval women. Musacchio, Randolph, and L’Estrange each theorizes the relationship between the objects and images they discuss and their beholders, in particular their female beholders, in a different way. Musacchio argues, on the one hand, that although the objects she discusses were given to women, they actually belonged to men – the women’s husbands – and that they worked to encourage women to fulfill their social roles as wives and mothers. They did so by presenting idealized images of childbirth that did not reflect the real risks childbearing posed for women.31 However, she also suggests that the images on these objects offered women a potential way of controlling the processes of conception and gestation, as they frequently included images of naked boys that may have functioned as fertility figures and may have provided idealized images of children to 27 Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, 1999), 1–2. 28 Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye,” 542; Adrian W.B. Randolph, “Renaissance Household Goddesses: Fertility, Politics, and the Gendering of Spectatorship” in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, 163; Randolph, Touching Objects, 169–203. 29 Elizabeth L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty, and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester, 2008), 1–3, 8, 17–18. 30 L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 17, 26–30, 82–4, 114, 187. 31 Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 25–7, 33–5, 46, 71, 117–18, 125–6, 147–53.

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be imprinted upon those developing in their female beholders’ wombs.32 Randolph builds upon the latter portion of Musacchio’s argument in order to construct a female beholder that he can use as part of his critique of Baxandall’s “period eye.” Thus, according to Randolph, Musacchio describes as characteristic of women an “incorporative,” “intimate,” and “empathetic” mode of viewing that forms “useful complement” to Baxandall’s male spectator.33 While Randolph’s critique of Baxandall is valid and important, his linking of female spectatorship to that critique is problematic in that it tends to produce female beholders as characterized by a simple inversion of a pre-established model of male viewership: thus Randolph opposes female to male ways of interacting with artworks as multiple to singular, mobile to stable, haptic to optic, intimate to distanced, etc.34 While Randolph seems to be aware of this problem in his work, he nevertheless proceeds in this mode over multiple publications.35 Perhaps in response to this issue in Randolph’s work, L’Estrange downplays gender as determinative of beholders’ ways of understanding works of art and emphasizes social class instead: her concern is that an overemphasis on gender tends towards “essentialism.” Thus she argues that aristocratic men and women would have brought similar interests and similar experiences to understanding images of female saints and childbirth that appeared in their Books of Hours.36 L’Estrange is, however, interested in establishing for female beholders in particular a level of agency in their understandings of these images: similar to Musacchio, she resists seeing these images as simply didactic in conveying to women the expectation that they be good wives and mothers and argues for aristocratic women’s ability to use the images to actively “manage” those expectations to their own benefit.37 Unlike L’Estrange’s work, mine in this book does identify gender as a key difference between medieval beholders and does focus specifically on women as beholders. However, unlike Randolph, I do not produce female beholders through an inversion of a male norm: only in Chapter 2 do I oppose female to male beholders and there I am specifically differentiating between laywomen and male monastics in terms of the interests and experiences that would have shaped their horizons of expectations. In general, I treat laywomen as beholders as a subset of medieval beholders who would have shared much with their male contemporaries, but would Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 125–30. Randolph, “Renaissance Household Goddesses,” 173; Randolph, Touching Objects, 15, 84, 114. 34 Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye,” 548–50, 557; Randolph, Touching Objects, 176–7. 35 Randolph, “Renaissance Household Goddesses,” 175; Randolph, Touching Objects, 8, 114. 36 L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 16–18, 26–32, 45–6, 67, 113–14, 187. 37 L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 13–16, 18, 37–40, 62–3, 86, 113, 135, 150, 189, 227, 250. 32 33

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also have had certain defining common interests and experiences, including motherhood. Finally, like Musacchio and L’Estrange, I am interested in the possibilities available for women as beholders to exercise agency in relation to works of art, by using artworks to consider the meanings of their own maternal experiences. To attempt to capture the complexities of motherhood as experienced by medieval women, this book is structured as something of a narrative of that experience. The first two chapters focus on pregnancy and childbirth, and the third and fourth chapters on relationships between mothers and their children during the first few years of the child’s life. The organization of the book is thus not dictated by the dates of the sculptures themselves; indeed, the chapters move from the thirteenth century (the Reims sculptures in Chapter 1) back to the twelfth century (the Moissac and Autun sculptures in Chapters 2 and 3), with a gesture towards the sixteenth (the transi tomb of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme in Chapter 2), and then forward again to the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries (the Virgin and Child sculptures in Chapter 4). Likewise, I am not attempting to use the chronology of the sculptures to track changes in motherhood as an experience over time: my evidence does not support doing so. And I repeatedly cross over the boundary between the art-historical categories of Romanesque (the Moissac and Autun sculptures) and Gothic (the Reims sculptures, the transi, and the Virgin and Child sculptures), simply because those categories are not relevant to my work here. Chapter 1 takes as its topic the Annunciation and Visitation column sculptures from the west front of Reims cathedral. I focus on the differences between their representations of the Virgin Mary and argue for seeing these changes as the product of her impending motherhood – and so for seeing these sculptures as presenting motherhood to the women of medieval Reims as a transformative and potentially empowering experience. The women considered here include both ordinary laywomen and members of the city’s beguine community. Chapter 2 focuses on the femme-auxserpents sculpture from the church of Saint-Pierre at Moissac. I first challenge the standard interpretation of this artwork as a representation of sexual sin and argue for seeing it instead as a monstrous representation of motherhood. After establishing the possibility of laywomen becoming beholders of this sculpture, I pair it with the transi of Jeanne de BourbonVendôme and use Jeanne’s likely patronage of that sculpture to argue for the possibility of women in Moissac appropriating the snake-woman sculpture to consider the significance of their own experiences of pain and suffering in pregnancy and childbirth. Chapter 3 starts from the Eve sculpture from the church of Saint-Lazare at Autun and argues for understanding this artwork in combination with the shrine to Saint Lazarus that stood within that church and so as part of the narrative of the Resurrection of Lazarus that was told at the site. Women who came to Autun as pilgrims on behalf of their children may

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have been able to recognize their own experiences in this narrative, I argue, and so may have found their grief over the potential loss of a child remembered, relieved, and validated at this site. Chapter 4 discusses multiple sculpted versions of the Virgin and Child, all from France and dating to the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. I focus on the role of textiles in the medieval cult of the Virgin and on the role of the sculpted clothing in these artworks in structuring a wide variety of relationships between the mother and child. After establishing that medieval women would have been able to identify with the Virgin as represented in these sculptures through a shared experience of motherhood, I argue that they would have been able to use these sculptures to consider their own complex and changing relationships with their young children. As even this brief overview indicates, this book shows motherhood to have been a complex, contradictory, and ambivalent experience for medieval women. While it had the potential to be an empowering experience for women, it also had the potential to cause them pain, suffering, and even death. Likewise, while motherhood had the potential to bring intimacy and joy into women’s lives, it also had the potential to bring loss and grief, and the desire for intimacy in motherhood could stand in contrast to a desire for separation and for an independent identity. The Afterword looks to representations of motherhood in contemporary (late twentieth and early twenty-first century) art made by women and looks for both continuities and changes in this complex and contradictory experience. The most obvious difference in these two bodies of artistic material is that the medieval sculptures were presumably made by men, but I argue for identifying medieval women as beholders of these artworks with contemporary women as artists as being likewise the makers of the meanings of their own lives and experiences.

MOTHERHOOD AS TRANSFORMATION: FROM ANNUNCIATION TO VISITATION AT REIMS

T

he two female figures stand shoulder to shoulder but also back to back (Fig. 2). Their close spatial juxtaposition combined with their mutual lack of recognition calls attention to the striking differences in their forms. The woman on the left stands upright, aside from a slight forward movement of her head, whereas the woman on the right stands in a version of the classical contrapossto pose; her right knee bent, her left hip and abdomen extended out to the side, her upper torso shifted away from that hip – a shift accentuated by her extended right elbow – and her head tilted back to the left. The women’s draperies further accentuate these differences in their postures. The figure on the left has heavy draperies that fall down over her body in long vertical folds that have little interior detail: the only significant exception occurs on her chest and abdomen, where a few vertical lines extend between her breasts and a pair of V folds begins beneath her breasts and points downward between her thighs. By contrast, the draperies on the woman on the right wrap around her body while moving upward from her bent knee, downward from her head, and across her abdomen, and so form multiple diagonal and horizontal lines. Along these lines, furthermore, her draperies crinkle into tight and irregular folds that give her form additional visual interest. Despite their differences, these two sculptures both represent the same figure – the Virgin Mary. Stepping back to see them in situ on the south jamb of the central portal on the west façade of Reims cathedral allows both to be placed in narrative context (Fig. 3). The sculpture on the left represents Mary in the scene of the Annunciation, standing alongside the angel Gabriel and receiving the news that she is to bear a child. On the right, Mary appears in the Visitation, her encounter, while pregnant, with her cousin Elizabeth, who is likewise pregnant with John the Baptist. This combination of scenes also appears in doorway programs on other Gothic

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FIG. 2. MARY ANNUNCIATE AND MARY FROM THE VISITATION. REIMS CATHEDRAL, WEST FAÇADE, RIGHT FLANK OF THE CENTRAL PORTAL. 1240.

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FIG. 3. ANNUNCIATION AND VISITATION COLUMN SCULPTURES. REIMS CATHEDRAL, WEST FAÇADE, RIGHT FLANK OF THE CENTRAL PORTAL. 1240.

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FIG. 4. ANNUNCIATION, VISITATION, AND PRESENTATION COLUMN SCULPTURES. AMIENS CATHEDRAL, WEST FAÇADE. 1230.

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cathedrals; at Chartres the left doorway of the north transept portal is flanked by the Annunciation on the left and Visitation on the right, and at Amiens the two scenes appear together on the south jamb of the south portal on the building’s western façade (Fig. 4). Here the two scenes are joined by a third pair of figures, another Mary and Simeon, that represents the Presentation into the Temple; at Reims a more extended version of this scene occupies the jamb opposite the Annunciation and Visitation sculptures (Fig. 5). The Amiens Mary Annunciate and Mary in the Visitation again appear shoulder to shoulder and back to back as they turn away from one another to engage with Gabriel and Elizabeth respectively. However, in this case their close proximity emphasizes their striking similarities as near duplicates of one another. Like the Mary Annunciate at Reims, they both stand upright and their draperies fall straight down their bodies, aside from the V folds that develop between their thighs. They differ only in small details: the opposite turns of their heads, the extension of the Visitation Mary’s left arm, and the sideways twist at the bottom of the Mary Annunciate’s draperies. A comparison between the Amiens and Reims sculptures thus highlights the differences between Mary’s form in these two scenes at Reims and so the interest of these particular sculptures.

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The existing scholarship on the Reims portal sculptures has focused on explaining their differences in terms of their production, as the products of different workshops of sculptors that were active between the 1220s and the 1250s or later. The Visitation sculptures have been attributed to the earliest of these workshops, active between the 1220s and 1240s, which has been named the “Antique” workshop because of the sculptors’ apparent interest in ancient models. The Mary from the Annunciation, along with both Mary and Simeon from the Presentation, have been assigned to the later 1240s and to the “Amiens” workshop, the name based on the similarities between these sculptures and those at Amiens and suggesting a movement of workers between the two sites. Finally the angel from the Annunciation along with the figures of Joseph and a maidservant in the Presentation have been given to a local Reims workshop active in the 1250s or later.1 Despite their varied makers and dates of production, however, all of these sculptures must have been installed together when the cathedral’s western portals were completed in the 1270s.2 Beholders in Reims in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries would thus have encountered these sculptures together as a 1 Peter Kurmann, La façade de la cathédrale de Reims, architecture et sculpture des portails, étude archéologique et stylistique (Paris, 1987), 167–84; Willibald Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture in France 1140–1270, trans. Janet Sondheimer (London, 1972), 50–6, 477–87. 2 Kurmann, La façade de la cathédrale de Reims, 154–5.

FIG. 5. PRESENTATION COLUMN SCULPTURES. REIMS CATHEDRAL, WEST FAÇADE, LEFT FLANK OF THE CENTRAL PORTAL. 1240.

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single ensemble that contained within it these distinctly different forms. My work in this chapter focuses on understanding the meanings that these beholders may have made from the differences that appear in Mary’s form in particular. In terms of response, as defined previously in the Introduction, the forms of the Mary sculptures suggest that these meanings may have had to do with motherhood. The one similarity between the two is that both place emphasis on the woman’s midsection and so on the portion of her body that would carry a child, although they do so in different ways. On the Mary Annunciate that emphasis is created by the V folds as they project forward from the plane established by the vertical fall of her draperies and so carve out a space on her torso above and between them. That space is crossed by a number of vertical lines that give it slightly more detail than the rest of her form. The Mary from the Visitation creates that emphasis through her contrapossto pose as it extends her midsection outwards, the wrapping action of her draperies as they form lines that lead towards her extended abdomen, and the elaboration of her midsection in particular with multiple, irregular, and fragmented horizontal lines. Thus from the first sculpture to the second, Mary’s mid-body transforms from concave to convex and from an almost empty space to one that is richly detailed. The narrative context of the two sculptures identifies this change in Mary’s body with her pregnancy, as she shifts from hearing the news of her impending impregnation from the angel to sharing the news with her cousin of her established pregnancy. Thus the two Mary sculptures together would have represented motherhood to medieval beholders in Reims, including the women of Reims, as a process of transformation. Understanding the specific meanings this visualized transformation could have held for the women of medieval Reims requires shifting attention from response to reception, again as defined in the Introduction. I make that shift in the rest of this chapter as I consider the circumstances in which women would have become beholders of the Mary sculptures, along with the sculptures that surround them on the cathedral’s portal, and the experiences and ideas that these women would have brought to their encounters with these works of art. I focus here on two groups of women in medieval Reims: ordinary laywomen considered in their social roles as wives and widows as well as mothers, and beguines, laywomen who lived a religious life marked by their rejection of marriage and motherhood. I argue that, for both groups of women, motherhood as a transformative process, as it is visualized in the Annunciation and Visitation sculptures, had the potential to be an empowering experience. However, that potential empowerment was short-lived both within the life experiences of individual women as wives and mothers and, historically, for widows and beguines.

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WOMEN AND THE CATHEDRAL IN THE CITY OF REIMS The ordinary laywomen of medieval Reims would have encountered the cathedral portal’s sculptures as both they and the building participated in the life of the city of Reims and, in particular, in its active economy. Like that of many northern European towns in the later Middle Ages, Reims’s economy was built on textiles: both linen and wool were produced in the city and in the surrounding countryside and were traded in the city’s markets. Reims was also a center for finance, for the money-changing and money-lending that facilitated the textile trade and for a form of investment known as a “rent for life” that allowed one to purchase a fixed yearly income.3 The relationship between the cathedral and the city’s economy has been explored by Barbara Abou-El-Haj, who presents it in a negative light. According to Abou-El-Haj, Henry de Braisne, the archbishop of Reims at the time cathedral construction began in the early thirteenth century, who was also the city’s feudal lord, took aim at its financial sector – cancelling rents and loans, and treating money-lending as usury and so as heresy in order to subject those involved in it to his justice – in order to extract from the city’s burghers the funds he needed for his cathedral building project. In response, the burghers rose up first against the cathedral’s canons, forcing them to flee the city, and then against the archbishop and his men. The canons’ departure brought cathedral construction to a halt for two years in 1234–36, and in the spring of 1235 stones taken from the cathedral construction site were reportedly used in barricades the burghers built in the streets. The conflict ended when the king intervened to reassert the archbishop’s authority and the burghers were made to pay reparations, which may have been used to finance the cathedral, and to participate in penitential processions. This settlement did not last, however, for there was another uprising in 1238 that was only settled after Henry de Braisne’s death in 1240 with another set of reparations and penances.4 For Abou-El-Haj, these events provide the key to understanding certain aspects of the cathedral’s interior and exterior decoration, including the visual forms of the portal sculptures.5 She points to the high level of finish given to the Visitation figures and the angel Gabriel as demonstrating the archbishop’s lavish spending on the cathedral and so his ongoing funding of the project. And she too draws a contrast between these sculptures and 3 Pierre Desportes, Reims et les Rémois aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris, 1979), 93–9, 125–7, 342–4. 4 Barbara Abou-El-Haj, “The Urban Setting for Late Medieval Church Building: Reims and its Cathedral between 1210 and 1240,” Art History 11/1 (March 1988): 20–3; Barbara Abou-El-Haj, “Program and Power in the Glass of Reims” in Radical Art History: Internationale Anthologie, Subject: O.K. Werckmeister, ed. Wolfgang Kersten and Joan Weinstein (Zurich, 1997), 24–5. 5 Abou-El-Haj, “The Urban Setting for Late Medieval Church Building,” 23–30; AbouEl-Haj, “Program and Power in the Glass of Reims,” 26–30.

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those at Amiens, arguing that the later building’s comparatively simpler and more uniform sculptures demonstrate instead the financial short-cuts taken by its bishop, who was not the town’s lord and so was not able to command financing from it.6 However, Abou-El-Haj’s argument for connecting the cathedral to the unrest in Reims is problematic because that unrest both predated the beginnings of the building’s construction and continued after it was completed. Work on the cathedral began sometime after a fire in 1210 destroyed the previous church on the site, but conflict began already in 1139 when a movement to establish a commune in the city was suppressed by the king and a new archbishop, Samson de Mauvoisin. There were uprisings in the city in 1166–67, against Archbishop Henry de France, and again in 1211, against Archbishop Aubry de Humbert.7 In 1250 tensions once again arose between the people and Henry de Braisne’s successor as archbishop, Thomas de Beaumetz; however, instead of leading to street violence they were submitted to royal arbitration. Finally in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the royal courts and parliament became the battleground between the archbishops and the city’s echevins, who took on the role of defending the city’s rights.8 Thus the specific conflicts of the 1230s and 1240s that Abou-El-Haj places in direct relation to the cathedral’s construction are in fact only part of a long history of unrest in Reims. And as this unrest both pre- and postdates work on the cathedral, it was not primarily a response to the financial demands of the cathedral’s construction. It arose instead as the population asserted their traditional right to select the echevins and as the echevins asserted their right to represent the city’s interests against the archbishop.9 Abou-El-Haj’s larger point in connecting the cathedral to civic unrest in Reims was to contest an older and rather more romantic interpretation of the Gothic cathedral’s relationship to its urban environment.10 Otto von Simpson, in particular, presented Chartres cathedral as the product of collective action that brought the clergy and the townspeople together and so as a monument to social cohesion and consensus.11 If the cathedral at 6 Barbara Abou-El-Haj, “Building and Decorating at Reims and Amiens” in Studien zur Geschichte der europäischen Skulptur im 12./13. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck and Kerstin Hengevoss-Dürkop (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), vol. 1, 763–9, esp. 768. On the situation in Amiens see also Stephen Murray, Notre Dame Cathedral of Amiens: The Power of Change in Gothic (New York, 1996), 15–17, 22–7, 75–7. 7 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 78–83, 155. Abu-El-Haj briefly recognizes these earlier conflicts, see Abou-El-Haj, “The Urban Setting for Late Medieval Church Building,” 20. 8 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 168–9, 505–63. 9 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 84–8, 158–61, 505–15. 10 Abou-El-Haj, “The Urban Setting for Late Medieval Church Building,” 18–20; AbouEl-Haj, “Building and Decorating at Reims and Amiens,” 763–4. 11 Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (New York, 1956). For a counter to his argument about Chartres in particular see Jane Welch Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago, 1993).

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Reims was not the primary cause of conflict in the city, however, neither does it exemplify von Simpson’s ideas. The building was not a focus for donations from the local community; there were no trades windows nor guild or confraternity chapels. Individuals may have contributed to its construction, but the more common focus for local donors’ attentions were the Franciscan and Dominican houses that were established in Reims by the 1240s.12 Finally the cathedral was not used as a town meeting space, as was posited by the nineteenth-century restorer of Gothic monuments Viollet-le-Duc; meetings took place instead at the Temple church, the cemetery of the Abbey of Saint-Denis, or the Franciscan convent.13 Nevertheless, the cathedral and its sculptures would have been integrated into the city, and specifically its economy, because of the building’s location. On market days, typically Wednesdays and Saturdays, the ancient center of the city of Reims, where the cathedral was located, must have resembled a single vast marketplace.14 The major market was located in the old Roman forum to the north of the cathedral. By the thirteenth century, it had split into two separate, specialized markets: the Marché-des-Draps or textile market, which sold the wool and linen produced in the city and its surroundings, and the Marché-aux-Blé or grain market, which sold a wide variety of foodstuffs. This area of the city also hosted the money-changers who facilitated long-distance trade in textiles in particular.15 These markets were linked to the cathedral area by a street lined with epiciers or spice merchants and merciers, all-purpose merchants who sold textiles, spices, and other goods. The broader area between the main markets and the cathedral held more epiciers along with gold and silver workers and barbers.16 The cathedral’s eastern end hosted more merciers along with booksellers, who set up shops in between the building’s buttresses.17 At its western end, the city’s Vieux Marché or old market continued to function, despite being overtaken in importance by the markets to the north. It stretched from the old Roman city walls up to the parvis or square in front of the cathedral.18 Finally, within the parvis itself was a smaller market known as the Trisande that was overseen by the cathedral’s treasurer and filled primarily with merciers. This market extended up to the cathedral itself, even up its stairs and underneath its porches, and so brought the economic life of the city directly to the building and its sculptures.19 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 175–7, 322–3. Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 175–6; Jean-Michel Leniaud, Viollet-le-Duc ou les délires de système (Paris, 1994), 42–57; Jean-Paul Midant, Viollet-le-Duc: The French Gothic Revival (Paris, 2002), 16–17, 34–42. 14 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 375. 15 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 58, 371–3. 16 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 57, 363, 374. 17 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 375. 18 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 57, 374. 19 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 374. 12 13

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As the cathedral was thus embedded in the city’s markets, to the point of hosting a market on its parvis and under its portals, so the women of Reims would have become beholders of its façade sculptures as they participated in the city’s active mercantile economy. Women who bought and sold in the Trisande market, in particular, would have encountered these sculptures in the course of their economic activities. However, documenting women’s participation in the economy of Reims is difficult, for the majority of women, for the majority of their lives, disappear from view in the city’s records behind their husbands. In the tax rolls compiled in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, for example, the majority of households are listed under a single name, that of the husband. The primary exception to this rule is the appearance of widows in the tax rolls and elsewhere: widowed women appear in the records as the heads of households and many of them are identified as being quite wealthy.20 For example, Emmeline, the widow of Jehan le Boeuf, appears in the rolls for a tax levied in 1287 to pay for the coronation of Philip the Fair in 1286 as one of the richest property owners within the archbishop’s ban.21 The prosperity of these women was due to the options that were available to couples and to widows themselves for providing for the surviving spouse. The city’s customs gave a widow forty days to decide whether to reclaim her contribution to the marriage and walk away from the rest of her husband’s estate, or to stay in that estate and inherit half of the marital property – but also be held accountable for half of any debts her husband had incurred. Alternatively, the husband could settle specific property on the wife through his will. Or, while both were alive, the two could give each other everything in a mutual gift that would make the surviving spouse the heir to the full estate.22 This last option, sometimes known as ravestissement, was available in other contemporary and comparable cities; it was a possibility in fourteenthcentury Douai, for example, which was another center of textile production and trade. As is shown in Martha Howell’s work on Douai, ravestissement as an option placed emphasis on the conjugal pair over the lineage in terms of inheritance rights, and this emphasis corresponded to a situation in which women were valued as economic contributors.23 The household was the basic economic unit and both men and women made important contributions to that unit. Women in Douai and elsewhere worked, sometimes alongside their husbands and sometimes independently in support of their households; Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 186–92. Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 140–1. 22 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 266–7. 23 Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in the Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago, 1998), 29–31, 100–4. On inheritance rights see also Robert Jacob, Les époux, le seigneur et la cité: coutume et pratiques matrimoniales des bourgeois et paysans de France du Nord au moyen âge (Brussels, 1990), 47, 87–97. 20

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they participated in textile production and in the markets, in buying and selling, often textiles and foodstuffs.24 The availability of ravestissement as an option for widows in Reims suggests that this situation held there as well. The available records for women’s economic activities in Reims reinforce this suggestion in several ways. The city’s customs allowed for a woman to undertake her own economic activities, albeit with the knowledge and consent of her husband who was bound by any contracts she made.25 Widows who appear in the tax rolls are sometimes identified by their professions, indicating that some women did exercise professions within the city.26 Similarly, other widows are identified by feminine forms of their former husbands’ names, suggesting that they acted as their husbands’ heirs. The widow Sabille La Large, for example, is recorded in the 1287 tax rolls as owning a moneychanging table and so as carrying on her husband’s business after his death:27 the fact that she was capable of doing so suggests that she may have been involved in the business already while he was alive. Thus it seems likely that women did participate in the markets in Reims and so would have encountered the cathedral and its sculptures while engaged in economic activities. As women in Reims would have encountered the two Mary sculptures while participating in the city’s markets, furthermore, their experiences as economic actors would have formed part of the horizon of expectations that they brought to these works of art. Women seem to have had important economic roles in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Reims: they produced goods and bought and sold them, whether working alongside their husbands or independently as wives or widows. They could also inherit, own, and pass on property. A woman could make a will. Yet, as a wife, under the customs of the city, a woman was under her husband’s guardianship: he had control over their joint property; only if he wanted to sell certain types of real estate did he need her permission.28 And, again, a wife needed her husband’s consent to engage in business activities of her own. Thus women as wives were simultaneously important economic actors and subject to their husbands’ legal guardianship and control. Until the husband died, that is, for then the woman as a widow became fully able to carry on in her husband’s name both in business and as head of the household.29 24 Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 100–4; Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986), 9–11, 72–85; David Nichols, The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth Century Ghent (Lincoln, 1985), 84, 95–6, 102–3. 25 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 266–7. 26 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 192–3. 27 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 285. 28 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 262–3, 266–7. 29 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 266–7.

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Women’s lives and experiences were thus marked by tensions and contradictions: first between economic opportunity and legal incapacity as wives, and then between that split position as wives and full responsibility as widows. While scholars today identify these issues from their position as outsider observers, women in Reims in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries would have experienced them directly as part of their daily lives in various ways depending on their specific circumstances. Widows, for example, faced the choice of whether to remarry or to carry on independently. An individual woman’s choice would have been influenced by a variety of factors: whether or not she already had children, her desire to have children if she did not, and the age of any children she did have; whether or not she had been independently engaged in a trade or business while her husband was alive; and whether or not she felt capable of carrying on her husband’s trade or business after his death.30 Some widows in Reims likely did choose to remarry: the wealth that many carried from their first marriages would have made them attractive as marriage partners. However, these women would have disappeared behind their new husbands in the city’s tax rolls. The appearance of a considerable number of widows as heads of households in the rolls indicates that some women did make the choice to remain unmarried and so to take advantage of the opportunity for independence that widowhood offered them. The Annunciation and Visitation sculptures may have provided the women of Reims with an opportunity to reflect on these choices and opportunities. For they may have been able to see in Mary’s transformation from the first scene to the second the change in a woman’s status that came with her shift from wife to widow. In the Annunciation, and in the Presentation, where Mary appears alongside a male figure or figures, the angel in the Annunciation and both Simeon and Joseph in the Presentation, she takes on the more simplified form of the “Amiens” style (Figs. 5 and 6). This combination of subject matter and style allows the latter to suggest her incapacity in the face of male authority. The women among their beholders may thus have been able to recognize in these two Mary sculptures the wife’s position under her husband’s guardianship and control. By contrast, in the Visitation, where Mary appears without a male figure and with a female companion instead, she appears in the more 30 Caroline M. Barron, “Introduction: The Widow’s World in Later Medieval London,” and Derek Keene, “Tanners’ Widows, 1300–1350” in Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London, 1994), xiii, xiv, xxxvii–xxxviii, 3–7, 19, 25–6; Barbara Hanawalt, “The Widow’s Mite: Provisions for Medieval London Widows” in Upon my Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literatures and Histories of Medieval Europe, ed. Louise Mirrer (Ann Arbor, 1992), 38–9; Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London (Oxford, 2007), 10–11, 104–7, 122–33, 174–6; and Sue Sheridan Walker, “Introduction,” and Barbara Hanawalt, “Remarriage as an Option for Urban and Rural Widows in Late Medieval England” in Wife and Widow in Medieval England, ed. Sue Sheridan Walker (Ann Arbor, 1993) 1–5, 141–2, 153, 159.

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FIG. 6. ANNUNCIATION COLUMN FIGURES. REIMS CATHEDRAL, WEST FAÇADE, RIGHT FLANK OF THE CENTRAL PORTAL. 1240.

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FIG. 7. VISITATION COLUMN SCULPTURES. REIMS CATHEDRAL, WEST FAÇADE, RIGHT FLANK OF THE CENTRAL PORTAL. 1240.

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complex “Antique” style (Fig. 7). Her body is activated by the contrapossto pose and her form is enriched by the intricate folds in her draperies. For women in Reims this shift in both subject matter and style may have suggested the ending of male guardianship and the new possibilities for independent action that came with the transition into widowhood. This understanding of Mary’s trans­formation, as that from subordinated wife to independent and even empowered widow, is reinforced by the forms of the surrounding sculptures in each scene. The angel in the Annunciation shifts his weight, wraps his draperies, and twists his upper body and head, all towards Mary. And his one remaining wing reaches out to cross the space between them. His activity contrasts with her apparent stillness and passivity, created by the long vertical lines that dominate her form, and again suggests his power over her. In the Presentation, Mary appears between Simeon and Joseph and both move inwards towards her, Simeon reaching out to take the child from her and Joseph shifting and twisting much like the angel across the way. The maidservant in the Presentation shares this shifting and twisting form, as a common attribute of this workshop’s productions, but her lowered arms and more loosely wrapped draperies take away much of its energy and power. Mary in this scene again stands straight and still and so is again dominated by the more active forms of the male figures who surround her. In the Visitation, by contrast, Mary and Elizabeth both have active bodies and elaborate draperies. Both stand with their right knees bent and their weight shifted towards the left, but Elizabeth’s upper body and head turn back to the right to bring her and Mary together. And Elizabeth’s draperies too run on diagonals up from her right knee and down from her head before meeting in the middle to wrap around her midsection. Elizabeth’s form here thus recalls and so reinforces Mary’s new-found energy and visual interest. At the same time, based on their facial features, Elizabeth appears to be significantly older than Mary here. In combination with the similarities in their bodies and draperies, this difference could have served to associate Mary’s transformation with increasing maturity as from Annunciation to Visitation she becomes more like the more mature, active, and visually interesting Elizabeth. This understanding of Mary’s transformation may, again, have helped women to identify it with the change that came with widowhood, for women in Reims had to be at least twenty-five years old to gain full rights as widows and so the empowerment that came with widowhood was likewise tied to a level of maturity.31 Finally, Mary’s transformation from the Annunciation to the Visitation sculptures is directly related to her motherhood as the almost empty concave space on the Mary Annunciate’s torso becomes the expansive and elaborated abdomen of the Mary in the Visitation. Elizabeth’s form

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Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 265–7.

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reinforces this change in Mary’s body too, as her draperies likewise wrap and crinkle around her midsection, emphasizing her established pregnancy and so her identity as a mother. The women who became beholders of these sculptures may thus have been encouraged by them to connect widowhood with motherhood as potentially empowering experiences. Widows in later thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Reims were also empowered in their roles as mothers. Widows appear in the city’s tax rolls alongside their children. This was likely done for tax purposes, because the children owed taxes on any inheritances they had from their fathers; however, it also served to make women as widows become visible in the city records specifically in their role as mothers. These widows, furthermore, appear in the rolls as the heads of their households and so as the guardians of their children, rather than under guardianship themselves as they had been while their husbands were alive.32 Finally, motherhood itself appears as a potentially empowering experience for women when approached through the ritual known as the Churching of Women after Childbirth, which is my focus in the next section of this chapter. This ritual would have shaped women’s understandings of motherhood itself and so would have formed an important part of their horizon of expectations for the Annunciation and Visitation sculptures.

THE CHURCHING OF WOMEN AFTER CHILDBIRTH Scholars who have studied the Churching ritual – including David Cressy, Becky Lee, Gail McMurray Gibson, and Paula Rieder – have emphasized its multivalence, that is, its capacity to carry multiple and even contradictory meanings. The ritual was also identified as the Purification of Women after Childbirth, a term that suggested that before the ritual took place the new mother was in some way impure, perhaps because of the sexual act that had produced her pregnancy, or because of the flow of blood that occurred during childbirth. Understood in this way, the ritual represented a strongly negative attitude towards reproductive processes and the women engaged in them.33 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, furthermore, Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 190–2. Walter von Arx, “The Churching of Women after Childbirth: History and Significance” in Liturgy and Human Passage, ed. David Power and Luis Maldonado (New York, 1979), 64; David Cressy, “Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women in PostReformation England,” Past and Present 141 (November 1993): 106–46; Florschuetz, Marking Maternity, 20–2; Gail McMurray Gibson, “Blessing from Sun and Moon: Churching as Women’s Theatre” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis, 1996), 139–54; Cheryl Kristolaitis, “From Purification to Celebration: The History of the Service for Women after Childbirth,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 28/2 (October 1986): 54–6; Paula M. Rieder, On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 (New York, 2006), 24, 62–79. 32 33

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the ritual became integral to the Church’s regulation of marital sexuality as its performance marked the moment when a married couple could legitimately resume sexual activity. The date of the Churching, typically set at between one month and six weeks after childbirth, could even be advanced to allow for the resumption of sexual activity if that was necessary for the couple to avoid falling into sin. In this way, participation in the ritual marked the couple’s subordination to the authority of the Church in their willingness to accept its regulation of their intimate lives.34 At the same time, the Church increasingly restricted access to Churching to married women and specifically to women whose marriages met the Church’s definition of an appropriate union. Certain types of women were excluded from the ritual, including those in relationships with members of the clergy, those whose partners fell within the Church’s prohibited degrees of consanguinity and affinity, and those who bore children outside of recognized relationships. To be Churched these women would have had to apply for special licenses and accept discipline for their behavior. In this way too, Churching helped to establish the power of the Church as an institution to regulate the lives of the lay majority.35 However, despite the negative view of reproductive processes implied by Churching as a purification rite, and despite the ritual’s role in subordinating laywomen and men to the authority of the Church, there is evidence that medieval women found positive meanings in this ritual, meanings that made it valuable to them. Women sought out Churching: it was not imposed on them by a hostile church or society. Indeed, women even sought it out in defiance of the Church’s restrictions on the availability of the ritual to women in irregular situations: a woman in such a situation might have looked to be Churched in a parish other than her own where her situation was unknown.36 Likewise, women in England continued to seek out Churching during and after the Reformation, when reforming churchmen would have been happy to eliminate it as overly Jewish and/or overly popish.37 As a ritual that was thus positively attractive to women, Churching must have held some positive meanings for them. To understand what those meanings may have been, it is necessary to look at the ritual itself as an experience that medieval women apparently embraced. Paula Rieder’s reconstruction of the Churching ritual as performed in medieval France, which I follow here, is based on a group of eight texts 34 Becky R. Lee, “The Purification of Women after Childbirth: A Window onto Medieval Perceptions of Women,” Florilegium 14 (1995–96): 44–5; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 43–55. 35 Paula Rieder, “The Implications of Exclusion: The Regulation of Churching in Medieval Northern France,” Essays in Medieval Studies 15 (1999): 71–80; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 40–3, 56–8, 135–49. 36 Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 139–44. 37 Cressy, “Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women,” 108–10, 118–19, 122–7, 131, 144–6; Gibson, “Blessing from Sun and Moon,” 145–6.

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that date from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries and includes a printed version from Reims that dates to before 1505.38 Churching typically came at the end of the period of lying-in that followed childbirth for most medieval women. During that period, usually between a month and six weeks’ worth of time, the new mother was relieved of most household responsibilities and allowed to rest in bed. She was fed special foods and drinks. And she was attended by other women including a midwife and female family members, friends, and neighbors. The Churching ritual marked the climax of this period. The community of women that had formed around the new mother would accompany her to church and so would appear in the public space of the town or city and be recognized as a group formed around motherhood. The mother was often met at the church door by the priest and then led by him to a special seat at the front of the church. Thus she was recognized by the priest and set apart from the rest of the congregation. At the end of the mass, she would approach the altar to receive a special blessing from the priest. Being in such close proximity to the altar was a rare experience for a medieval lay person, for it was normally off-limits to the laity. Being able to approach it so closely during this ritual again set the mother apart for special attention and gave her distinction religious significance as she was allowed access to this most sacred spot. While at the altar, finally, she would typically – and would in Reims, in particular, according to Rieder’s source – receive the first piece of pain bénit from the hand of the priest. This was a substitute for the Eucharist that was made available as access to the sacrament was increasingly restricted; however, Rieder provides evidence that suggests that some women misunderstood this part of the ritual and thought they were receiving the host itself. This misunderstanding suggests the women’s own perceptions of their elevated status during their Churchings. The ritual thus gave the woman being Churched a level of recognition that she would otherwise rarely receive and recognized her specifically for her experience of childbirth.39 Churchings typically took place in parish churches, although there is evidence that women in Chartres were Churched at the cathedral there.40 Women in Reims would have brought their experiences of the Churching ritual, both of their own Churchings and those of other women in their families and communities, from their parish churches to the city’s cathedral when they came to the building to celebrate the major feast of the Purification of the Virgin, also known as Candlemas or la Chandeleur. Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 82–3. Cressy, “Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women,” 110–17; Becky R. Lee, “Men’s Recollections of a Woman’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth,” Gender and History 14/2 (August 2002): 227–8; Lee, “The Purification of Women after Childbirth,” 48–9; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 85–97, 101–2. 40 Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money, 58. 38

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This feast celebrated a conflation of two events, Mary’s Purification at the Temple after the birth of her son, as required by Jewish law, and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, also following Jewish tradition for the recognition of a first-born son. The first of these events has an obvious relationship to the Churchings of ordinary medieval women as likewise rituals of purification, a relationship that may have encouraged women to remember their own experiences of Churchings while participating in the Candlemas celebrations. Similarly, both Rieder and Elizabeth L’Estrange demonstrate that Mary’s Purification as represented in Book of Hours images resembled the Churching ritual in many ways and argue that these images may have recalled for women who were the owners and users of these books their own rituals in the guise of Mary’s.41 Several surviving sermons written for the Candlemas feast develop its meaning by way of a contrast with ordinary women’s Churchings, emphasizing that Mary did not need to be purified since her pregnancy and childbirth had been accomplished without sex, sin, pain, or bloodshed. The sermons present Mary’s participation in the Purification ritual instead as a mark of her humility, in obeying Jewish law, and of her interest in being like other women, by doing voluntarily what they were required to do.42 While the sermons’ authors’ intent was thus to differentiate Mary from ordinary women because of the extraordinary nature of her motherhood, the content of the sermons may have encouraged any women in the audience when they were delivered to remember their own Churchings, as well as those they had attended and participated in, and to connect these rituals to the major Marian feast. None of these recorded sermons comes from Reims, but it is possible that sermons with similar content were delivered at the cathedral there during Candlemas and that they would have encouraged the women of Reims to make those connections while at the cathedral. Furthermore, the Candlemas feast and the Churchings of ordinary women had similar elements that would have encouraged women to connect the two and so encouraged women in Reims to bring their experiences with Churchings with them to the cathedral for this feast. Candlemas began with a procession of the people, similar to the small-scale procession of women that began a Churching. In both, the participants in the procession carried candles, thus the term “Candlemas.” Likewise, Candlemas was often a time when pain bénit was distributed to the people and it was frequently distributed at Churchings, including Churchings in Reims, as well.43 The Candlemas procession in Reims may

L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 98–9; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 123–7, 130. Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 61–3, 127–8. 43 Gibson, “Blessing from Sun and Moon,” 143, 149; Lee, “Men’s Recollections of a Woman’s Rite,” 227; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 29, 94–6, 125–6; Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money, 58. 41

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well have entered the cathedral through the central portal that is the location of the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures. The emphasis on the Virgin in this group of sculptures would have made it an appropriate doorway to use during this major Marian feast. Indeed, the inclusion of the Presentation on the north side of the portal would have made it especially appropriate, given that Candlemas incorporated a celebration of this event. According to Margot Fassler, the Candlemas procession at Chartres entered that cathedral through the south door on its western façade, which likewise includes the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation scenes in its sculptures.44 For women in Reims, entering the building through this doorway as they participated in the Candlemas procession would have created the opportunity to connect their own Churchings through this major feast to the sculptures, thus allowing their own experiences of Churching to become part of their horizon of expectations for these works of art. Women in Reims could have brought Churching as an experience to bear on their encounters with the sculptures both during the Candlemas procession itself and at other times, when participating in the Trisande market, for example, through remembering both the major feast and their own rituals as related to it. For women who approached these artworks with their own experiences of Churchings in mind, the Visitation pair would likely have stood out as the most relevant to those experiences (Fig. 7). As a Churching began when the community of women that had formed around the new mother appeared together in public and made their way to the church door, so the Visitation brings two women together and places them just outside the cathedral’s entrance. The pairing of Mary and Elizabeth in the Visitation could even have been seen as a miniature version of the community of women that was brought together for a lying-in and given public recognition in a Churching. That community of women, furthermore, was formed around motherhood, around the new mother’s need for assistance and support during childbirth and in the weeks after, and the figures in the Visitation are likewise drawn together visually by the marks of their pregnancies: by their expanded abdomens as they project towards one another and by their draperies as these wrap around their midsections. Finally, the distinctive style of these sculptures, their active postures, and their heightened level of detail and visual interest, could have visualized for women in Reims the level of recognition given to women during their Churchings and so on account of their motherhood. Finally, the reading of the Churching ritual given above emphasized its positive valence for women through the pride of place it gave to women, but did not speculate as to what the women understood themselves to be being honored for: childbirth and so motherhood, yes, but what about 44 Margot E. Fassler, The Virgin at Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven, 2010), 226–30.

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childbirth made it deserving of such an honor? Rieder argues that her printed source from Reims suggests some of the deeper significance that the Churching ritual held for medieval women from its placement in the book in relation to other rituals. Churching here appears between the ordo for bringing communion to the sick and the rite for the separation of lepers.45 The association of the ritual with the bringing of communion to the sick associates Churching and so childbirth with issues of life and death: communion could be brought to the sick as part of the proper preparation for death or as a rite of healing, as a way of imparting new strength to the body to bring it back from the verge of death. Likewise, the Reims source also provides the option for a woman who is too sick to be Churched at the parish church to do so at home. This version of the ritual identifies it too as potentially a rite of healing for a mother who is struggling after childbirth, a way of bringing her back from death to life.46 The association with leprosy similarly identifies pregnancy and childbirth as experiences of suffering and potential death (this association between motherhood and leprosy is further explored in the next chapter). Angela Florschuetz likewise emphasizes the liminal status of a new mother during the lying-in period as between life and death, both her own and her child’s.47 The woman who was Churched at the parish church was a woman who had survived such an experience, who had come close to death and returned to life, and who may have brought new life with her, if her child survived.48 The Churching celebrated her for this accomplishment. This final meaning for the Churching ritual may have further informed women’s understandings of the Visitation sculptures. Women who saw these sculptures in relation to their own Churchings may have been able to see that celebration in Mary and Elizabeth’s activity and high level of visual interest. Both Adrian Randolph and Elizabeth L’Estrange likewise point to birth-related imagery that offered women celebratory scenes of their own success in childbirth, whether as Triumph of Love and Triumph of Chastity images on deschi de parto, or representations of the Purification of the Virgin in Books of Hours that women could have related to their own Churching rituals.49 The Churching ritual marked the climax of the lying-in period as the new mother and the community of women that had gathered around her appeared in public to be recognized. However, it also marked the end of that period and the disbanding of that community, at least until it was reassembled for another woman’s lying-in. That ending was marked by a 45 46 47 48

101.

Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 83–4, 114–15. Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 84, 105, 114–17. Florschuetz, Marking Maternity, 9. Gibson, “Blessing from Sun and Moon,” 146; Rieder, On the Purification of Women,

L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 89–98, 138, 149; Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye,” 552–6.

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feast that followed the Churching ceremony. If the Churching gave pride of place to the new mother, then the major player at the feast was the woman’s husband and the father of her child. This feast was an important opportunity for the display of the wealth and status of the family and so of the husband/father as the head of the family unit.50 Jacqueline Marie Musacchio likewise argues that the display of birth-related objects during the lying-in period acted as a show of the husband’s wealth and status.51 As the Churching gave way to the feast, therefore, the woman’s place shifted from being the focus of attention to being a member of the family and being subordinated to her husband as its head.52 By marking the end of the lying-in period, the Churching also marked the end of the woman/mother’s release from her ordinary duties within the family. In particular, as mentioned above, it marked the end of a period of sexual abstinence for the couple, for according to church regulations the Churching had to be performed before the couple could have licit sex and its date could be advanced if need be in order to allow the woman to return to her husband’s bed and pay her “conjugal debt” to him. In addition to subordinating lay people to clerical control, this rule also worked to subordinate the woman to her husband, by compelling her to meet his sexual needs.53 In Rieder’s words, a new mother began the day of her Churching “as a woman among women” – and I would add as a mother among mothers – “and ended it as a wife beneath her husband.”54 The empowerment offered by motherhood and expressed through the Churching ritual was thus limited in time by the feast and its assertion of the rights of the husband. Both Randolph and L’Estrange emphasize the multivalence of birthrelated imagery as limiting any sense of empowerment offered to women by these works of art, relating these images to the trope of the “womanon-top” that offered a temporary inversion of gendered power relations and that finally reinforced the norm of male dominance.55 Likewise, women in Reims who had experienced the transformation from celebrated mother to subordinated wife through the process of their own Churchings may have been able to recognize these different roles in the different forms given to Mary in the Annuunication, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures. If the 50 Florschuetz, Marking Maternity, 22–4; Lee, “Men’s Recollections of a Woman’s Rite,” 229–35; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 1–2, 147, 161. 51 Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 36, 43, 153. 52 Florschuetz, Marking Maternity, 22–4; Lee, “Men’s Recollections of a Woman’s Rite,” 229–38; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 1–2, 147, 161–3, 169. 53 John W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago, 1994), 192–3, 232–3; Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, 1993), 142–50, 298–300; Lee, “Men’s Recollections of a Woman’s Rite,” 236; Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 45–8, 162. 54 Rieder, On the Purification of Women, 162. 55 L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 94–5; Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye,” 552–6; Randolph, “Renaissance Household Goddesses,” 172–3.

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complex visual forms of the Visitation sculptures could have embodied for these beholders the recognition given to women in the Churching ritual for their experiences as mothers, then the very simple forms given to Mary in the Annunciation and Presentation may have visualized instead the woman’s role as a wife subordinated both to her husband and to the authority of the Church (Figs. 5, 6, and 7). As discussed in the previous section, Mary in the latter scenes appears in this simplified form and in combination with male figures who can be identified as proxy figures for the husband and for the priest – the angel in the Annunciation as the agent of Mary’s impregnation, Joseph in the Presentation as her husband, and Simeon in this scene as the priest. Again as noted above, both the angel and Joseph have active, twisting, bodies and draperies that contrast with Mary’s passivity and simplicity and so suggest her subordination and submission to them. And so Mary in these scenes appears as the subordinated wife in contrast to the figures in the Visitation as images of both empowered widows and celebrated mothers. The overall visual simplicity of the Mary Annunciate and the Mary in the Presentation is broken, however, by the V folds that occupy the center of both figures’ torsos. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the V folds on the Mary Annunciate work to suggest her pending pregnancy as they carve out an almost empty space on her torso. These folds likewise relate to Mary’s motherhood in the Presentation, as she holds the child in the space they create on her body. But the Vs on these sculptures also form arrows that point downward and inward to between the woman’s thighs and so develop a point of special interest there. These forms thus work to give the two sculptures a slight sexual suggestion and this despite their iconographic identification as the Virgin Mary. It is as if, in handing the child to Simeon in the Presentation, Mary transforms back into the submissive and sexually available figure she was in the Annunciation, rather than the powerful figure she is in the Visitation. For women as beholders of these sculptures, for whom the Presentation in particular may have recalled their own Churchings through its incorporation in the Candlemas feast, this change in Mary’s form may have recalled the aftereffects of their own rituals in changing them into subordinated and sexually available wives, rather than celebrated mothers. The similarities between the Mary Annunciate sculpture and that of the Mary in the Presentation, finally, gives the narrative presented by Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures a circular form. First, from Annunciation to Visitation, Mary transforms as she becomes a mother and with Elizabeth becomes part of a community of women as mothers. Then, following the narrative onto the opposite jamb for the Presentation, Mary passes her child over to Simeon and changes back into the form she had before her pregnancy. The similarity between this sculpture of Mary and the Mary Annunciate next brings beholders back to the beginning of the narrative, to where this process of transformation and

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re-transformation begins once again. Women who were beholders of these sculptures may have been able to recognize in this circular and repeating narrative the ways in which their own identities fluctuated with their own pregnancies and Churchings. For Churching was a repeated ritual, done for a woman after each lying-in, and so a woman’s identity could shift from subordinated wife to celebrated mother, and back again, over and over again – depending upon the number of pregnancies she sustained: Margery Kempe would have been Churched fourteen times. One way for that cycle to end was with death, either the woman’s or that of her husband. The latter possibility could land the woman, finally, in the position of the independent and empowered widow, the position potentially visualized by the Visitation sculptures and as similar to that of the celebrated mother. The possibility of seeing the Visitation sculptures as either empowered widows or celebrated mothers may even have allowed women to recognize in their experiences as mothers a foretaste of what was possible for them as widows and so may have given them a way of preparing for that eventuality. Thus Mary’s changing form in the Annunciation, Presentation, and Visitation sculptures may have given the women of Reims the opportunity to contemplate their own shifting identities and possible futures.

BEGUINES AS BEHOLDERS As well as widows, wives, and mothers, the female population of Reims in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries included a substantial, if incalculable, number of beguines. These women’s complex combination of likeness to and difference from other laywomen, which created controversy around them in the Middle Ages and drives much of scholarship on them today, allows me to extend my argument about the meanings that Mary’s maternal transformation from the Annunciation to the Visitation sculptures may have held for women in medieval Reims.56 Beguines were laywomen who nevertheless led a religious lifestyle marked by a vow of chastity that meant a rejection of marriage and motherhood. As laywomen rather than nuns, however, beguines were not cloistered but moved about in the city, and so the beguines in Reims would have had many of the same opportunities 56 On beguines see Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture with Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New York, 1954); Tanya Stabler Miller, “What’s in a Name? Clerical Representations of Parisian Beguines (1200–1328),” Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007): 60–86; Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (Philadelphia, 2014); Carol Neel, “The Origins of the Beguines,” Signs 14/2 (Winter 1989): 321–41; Dayton Phillips, Beguines in Medieval Strasburg: A Study of the Social Aspect of Beguine Life (Stanford, 1941); Jean-Claude Schmitt, Mort d’une hérésie. L’Eglise et les clercs face aux béguines et aux béghards du Rhin supérieur du XIVe au XVe siècle (Paris, 1978); Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame 1995); Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia, 2001).

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as other laywomen to become beholders of the cathedral’s sculptures (at least until changes in beguine lifestyle in the later fourteenth century limited their movements, as discussed in the next section of this chapter). In the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Reims had two formally established communities for beguines, known as the Grand and the Petit Cantimpré. The Grand was located in the parish of Saint-Denis, just west of the cathedral and beyond the old city walls, where it was near the Dominican house with which it had a close relationship. The Petit Cantimpré was located in the Saint-Timothy parish in the SaintRemi area, well to the south of the cathedral and the city center.57 Both of these beguinages were the focus for settlements of independent beguines: women who lived in their own houses, often in pairs or small groups. For example, the beguine Wilde lived in a house that she owned in the parish of Saint-Jacques, which is just to the north of Saint-Denis, along with a second beguine named Rose.58 Another grouping of these independent beguines was established in the parishes of Saint-Etienne and SaintSymphorien, to the east and the south of the cathedral and within the old city walls: the beguine Hélote de Saint-Pierre, for example, lived in a house in Saint-Symphorien.59 The pattern of beguine settlement at this period in Reims, its combination of formal beguinages with clusters of independent beguines, also appears elsewhere; Dayton Phillips found a similar pattern in medieval Strasburg and so did Tanya Miller in medieval Paris. To paraphrase the title of Phillips’s study, attending to this pattern calls attention to the “social” rather than the religious “aspect of beguine life” and so to the ways in which beguines were like other medieval laywomen.60 Miller points to the relationship between beguines’ residences and the work that they performed: thus beguines were like other laywomen in being economic actors within their cities of residence. In Paris, Miller writes, the formal beguinage was located in a wool-producing part of the city and the women who lived there were likely involved in carding, spinning, and weaving.61 Likewise, in Reims, the parishes of Saint-Denis, where the Grand Cantimpé was located, and of Saint-Etienne, where additional independent beguines gathered, were centers for textile production, and the women in these communities likely joined in that work.62 Independent beguines in Paris were often involved in that city’s luxury silk industry; some worked as spinners and weavers of silk and others as merciers buying and selling raw materials and finished products.63 In Reims, independent beguines may likewise have both worked 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 328–30; McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 231. Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 328. Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 329–30. Phillips, Beguines in Medieval Strasburg, 6–8. Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris, 48–9. Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 66–9, 343–4. Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris, 48–9, 59–61.

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and traded in wool and linen: the city was known for the quality of its linens and, in 1349, the Reims beguine Havide de Saint-Ladre provided fine linens to the queen.64 Economic activity may thus have drawn the beguines of Reims, like other laywomen in the city, to the cathedral by drawing them to the city’s markets, including of course the Trisande marketplace that was sited within the cathedral’s parvis and underneath its porches. Beguines may have come to buy and sell with the merciers who populated the Trisande market and some may even have worked there as merciers themselves. In so doing, the beguines, like other laywomen in Reims, would have become beholders of the cathedral’s sculptures, including the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation scenes. Furthermore, as the beguines too would have become beholders of these sculptures while engaged in economic activities, they may have brought similar experiences of women’s economic and social roles in the city to their understandings of these works of art. Indeed, at least some of the beguines in Reims were likely widows who had taken advantage of the opportunities offered by widowhood to choose to make this religious commitment. Widowed beguines, like other widows in Reims, may have been able to see in the active and visually complex forms of the Visitation sculptures the empowerment offered to them by widowhood, as discussed previously. Furthermore, beguines had the choice to renounce that identity in order to marry and so potentially bear children: the vows that they took, including their vow of chastity, were only temporary and so could be revoked.65 For any beguines who were considering making this change in status, the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures may have become sites where they could consider the potential consequences of that choice: what would it mean to become a wife and so at least potentially a mother? Likewise, a woman’s choice to become a beguine must have raised questions for her female family members, friends, and neighbors about their own choices, questions that they too could have brought to these sculptures. For all of these women, such questions may have motivated their understandings of these artworks along the lines explored above. At the same time, however, the beguines in Reims would have brought a different set of interests, ideas, and concerns to their encounters with these artworks, as they would have brought with them a horizon of expectations that was shaped by their religious commitment.66 And as Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 331. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 120–3, 130–1; Miller, “What’s in a Name?,” 69; Simons, Cities of Ladies, ix, 118–19. 66 In treating the beguines as a distinct group with a distinctive horizon of expectations I am departing from the major existing work on beguines as beholders, Joanna E. Ziegler’s Sculpture of Compassion. Ziegler instead presents the beguines as “a model society of ordinary people” and emphasizes “universal” rather than “period” meanings of later medieval pieta sculptures. See Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pieta and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, c. 1300–1600 (Brussels, 1992), 55, 142. 64

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that commitment was marked by their vows of chastity, considering the beguines as beholders of these sculptures raises the question of what Mary’s maternal transformation as visualized in these artworks may have meant to women who had rejected motherhood for themselves.67 To address this question I will be making use of two types of sources: texts by writers close to the beguine movement and the visual forms of the Reims sculptures themselves. These texts can offer some insight into the meanings that motherhood may have held for beguines in Reims by demonstrating the meanings that it held within beguine spirituality in general. These texts recount visionary experiences that were not necessarily typical of all beguines, but were at least a possibility for these women. The texts thus allow me to reconstruct more of a specifically beguine horizon of expectations for approaching the sculptures.68 However, none of these texts comes from Reims and so they do not offer direct evidence for Reims beguines’ experiences or ideas; it is the sculptures themselves, therefore, that allow me to localize such ideas in Reims and to attribute them to the city’s beguines. Art historians have come to recognize close correspondences between the visionary experiences reported for and by medieval women and contemporary works of art and have posited a range of explanations for those correspondences: works of art may have provided a basis or springboard for the visions themselves, a framework in which visionary experiences could be understood and a language through which they could be communicated to others, and even a means of clerical control over those experiences.69 Most of these studies have focused on works of art that belonged to individual women or to their communities; however, there are no records of works of art that belonged to Reims beguines or beguinages. Nevertheless, given the beguines’ ability to move about in the city, the cathedral’s Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures may have played some of these roles for their beguine beholders, in particular prompting visionary experiences that included motherhood and/ 67 Jacqueline Jung similarly asks what a metalwork of the Visitation could have meant to its original beholders, the Dominican nuns of St. Katherinthal, in “Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts: The Exuberant Bodies of the Katharinthal Visitation Group” in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (New York, 2007), 223–37. 68 Here again I depart from Ziegler, for her presentation of the beguines as prototypical “ordinary” beholders requires that she argue against a close connection between the beguines and “extraordinary” visionary or mystical experiences. See Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion, 112–13, 146, 170. 69 On artworks and visionary experiences in general see Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, 1997); Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998). On the role of art in beguine communities see Joanna E. Ziegler, “Reality as Imitation: The Role of Religious Imagery among Beguines of the Low Countries” in Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse, 1993), 112–25; and Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion, 146–9.

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or presenting motherhood as a way of understanding and communicating those experiences. Two textual passages in particular stand out as relevant to understanding the Reims sculptures from within a beguine horizon of expectations.70 The first comes from Jacques de Vitry’s Life of Marie d’Oignies, the early thirteenth-century lay holy woman who is sometimes identified as the first beguine or else as a model for the beguines. According to Jacques, Marie had a series of visions over one year in which Jesus manifested himself to her in different forms, appropriate to different major feast days; thus in the days surrounding Christmas, Sometimes it seemed to her that she held him tightly between her breasts like a clinging baby for three or more days and she would hide him there lest he be seen by others and at other times she would kiss him as if he were an infant … When, at the Nativity, he appeared as a baby suckling at the breasts of the Virgin Mary or crying in his cradle, she was drawn to him in love just as if he had been her own baby.71

Subsequently, at Candlemas, she had a vision of the Presentation into the Temple, with the Virgin offering her son and Simeon receiving him, and: In this vision she exulted no less from joy than if she had been present herself when this happened at the temple. It sometimes happened during this same feast that after she had been walking in procession for a long time with her candle snuffed out, it suddenly burned with a most brilliant light which no one except God had kindled.72

As a result of these experiences, finally, Jacques reports that “she was transformed throughout the course of the year in different ways and was wondrously filled with love.”73 The second passage comes from Gertrude of Helfta’s Herald of Divine Love. Gertrude was a Cistercian nun, not a beguine. However, the community in which she lived had close ties to the beguines; they took in the aging beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, for example. Although Gertrude had entered this community as a child, as an adult she underwent a conversion experience marked by direct encounters with the divine that were, like Marie’s, tied to different feast days. The second book of the Herald serves as her account of this experience. It began on the 70 On these passages see Carolyne Larrington, “The Candlemas Vision and Marie d’Oignies’ Role in its Dissemination” in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn WoganBrowne (Turnhout, 1999), 195–214. 71 The Life of Marie d’Oignies by Jacques de Vitry, trans. Margot H. King (Toronto, 1993), 112. 72 Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, 112. 73 Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, 113.

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Monday before Candlemas when she encountered Christ in her dormitory in the form of a beautiful youth. Later that year, at the Nativity, she Received, as it were, into the heart of my soul: a tender newborn babe. In him was hidden the supreme gift of perfection, truly the very best of gifts. And while I held him within my soul, suddenly I saw myself entirely transformed into the color of the heavenly babe – if it is possible to describe as color that which cannot be compared with any visible form.74

At the following Candlemas, Gertrude was too ill to participate in the celebration and had to remain in her bed. There she “saw my soul, like wax melting in the heat of the fire (Ps. 21:14) , being placed close to the Lord’s most sacred breast, as though to take the imprint of a seal (Song 8:6; Wisd. 9:10).”75 Then at the Nativity, she took the child from his crib and pressed him to her heart, and a year later she received him directly from Mary’s womb and held him at her breast. However, at Candlemas that year, during the procession, while the Cum induceret was sung, Mary took the child back, because Gertrude had not showed sufficient ardor in her devotions. A year later, Mary returned the child to Gertrude during the reading of the Gospel, at the words “She brought forth her first born son (Lk. 2:7),” and he clasped her around her neck.76 In both of these texts, motherhood, in the form of a mother-like relationship to the Christ-child, seems to function as a metaphor for an intimate experience of the divine presence. Jacques describes Marie as feeling as if she held the child between her breasts, so closely that he was hidden from others, for days at a time. Gertrude reports receiving him into “the heart of her soul,” lifting him from the crib to press her to her heart, and receiving him directly from Mary’s womb to her own breast. Likewise, the Mary sculpture in the Visitation places emphasis on the interior presence of the child within her body, as her contrapossto pose extends this portion of her body outwards and as her draperies run to and crinkle and flash over it (Fig. 7). Furthermore, bringing these texts to this sculpture brings one additional detail into focus: the book in Mary’s hand. She holds it just beyond her extended abdomen so that it forms the final end point of the lines created by her draperies as they run over her body. The presence of the book specifies that the child whose interior presence is made visible in this sculpture is the Christ-child: the word made flesh. This representation of Mary’s pregnancy may thus have visualized for beguine beholders in Reims the possibility of experiencing the inner presence of

74 Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, ed. and trans. Margaret Winkworth (New York, 1993), 104. 75 Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, 105. 76 Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, 115–17.

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the Christ-child, similar to the intimate experiences described for Marie and by Gertrude in these texts. Both text passages, furthermore, describe the visionary’s experience of Christ’s inner presence as transformative for her. Jacques de Vitry simply states that Marie d’Oignies was “transformed throughout the course of the year in different ways,” while Gertrude’s series of visions form part of a conversion experience that transformed her from a professed nun with intellectual ambitions into a dedicated holy woman and visionary. More specifically, when Gertrude receives the Child into the “heart of [her] soul” she sees herself “entirely transformed into the color of the heavenly babe.” Although motherhood does not function as a metaphor for this transformation in these texts, bringing the texts to the Reims sculptures suggests that the change in Mary’s form from the Annunciation to the Visitation could have visualized such a transformation for the sculptures’ beguine beholders. As she becomes pregnant and so comes to have a direct interior experience of the divine presence, Mary’s form changes from empty to full, from concave to convex, and from simple to complex (Fig. 2). Mary’s visual transformation in these sculptures, finally, could have visualized for the beguines a potentially empowering transformation in their own identities, from ordinary women to visionary women who were filled with and enriched by the interior presence of the divine. This understanding of the Mary sculptures’ meanings for their beguine beholders rests upon those beholders’ ability to identify with the Virgin and her experiences. The texts, however, suggest a more complex relationship between the visionaries and the Virgin. At times, as the visionary feels the child’s presence at her breasts, it seems as if she is taking Mary’s place as the child’s mother and so is identifying with Mary herself. Yet Mary is also present in her own right; Marie d’Oignies both holds the Child to her own breasts and sees him nursing at the Virgin’s, and after Gertrude receives the Child from the Virgin’s womb, she returns him to Mary, and then finally receives him back from her. Thus the visionary in both texts is Mary, as she identifies with her, and is with Mary, as she sees and interacts with her. Bringing this aspect of these texts to the sculptures focuses attention on the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth in the Visitation scene (Fig.  7). Like the visionary, Elizabeth is with Mary and registers an experience similar to Mary’s within her own form: a thick wrap of cloth moves around Elizabeth’s waist as if in response to the movement of draperies over Mary’s body and in so doing it registers Elizabeth’s own pregnancy with John the Baptist. Based on the visionary texts, beguine beholders of the Visitation sculptures may have been able to relate to, or even identify with, both Mary and Elizabeth. Identifying with Mary would have placed emphasis on the sense of the divine presence within the woman herself, as described above. While identifying instead with Elizabeth would have allowed such beholders to encounter both Mary and Christ by sharing with Mary that sense of presence.

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A final shared aspect of these two texts is the importance that both place on the Candlemas feast in the visionary’s experience. On that day Marie has a vision of the Presentation into the Temple and she participates in the procession, during which her candle bursts miraculously into flame as a witness to God’s presence. Gertrude’s series of experiences begins on the Monday before Candlemas. At this feast on the following year she sees her soul as melting wax – like the candles used in the procession – and in subsequent years Candlemas becomes the day on which she and the Virgin pass the child between them. These texts suggest that Candlemas was an important feast for the beguines and so suggests that beguines in Reims may have participated in the procession along with the other laywomen and men of the city. Participating in the Candlemas procession would have provided the beguines, like the rest of the lay population, with a second opportunity to become beholders of the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures. For most laywomen, encountering these artworks during the Candlemas procession would have served to connect them to their own Churching rituals; however, given the beguines’ rejection of marriage and motherhood and their heightened religious commitment, they may have been more inclined to relate these sculptures to the religious significance of the feast itself as articulated through its liturgy. The liturgy for the feast as performed at Reims cathedral focuses attention on the Presentation into the Temple, as does Marie’s Candlemas vision. Many of the antiphons and psalms sung during the feast focus attention on Simeon’s experience of accepting the child and so encountering God: seeing him, holding him, and experiencing joy in his presence.77 Marie likewise is described as experiencing joy at her vision of this event. And in Gertrude’s Candlemas visions, she seems to take Simeon’s place as she passes the child back and forth with the Virgin. Indeed, the liturgical texts with which these moments were timed according to her text, the antiphon Cum induceret – which was also sung at Reims – and the Gospel reading, both concern Simeon’s reception of the child. These texts suggest that beguine beholders of the Reims sculptures may likewise have been able to project themselves into the Presentation as represented there, by taking up Simeon’s role in accepting the child from Mary and so experiencing the divine presence (Fig. 5). Such an encounter with the Presentation sculptures would follow on easily from an encounter with the Visitation in which the beholder identified with Elizabeth as encountering both Mary and Christ and as sharing with Mary the experience of His presence. Beguine beholders may thus have understood the Annunciation 77 Ulysse Chevalier, ed., Sacramentaire et martyrologe de l’abbaye de Saint-Remy. Martyrologe, calendrier, ordinaires et prosaire de la métropole de Reims (VIIIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1900), 111–12, 173–4, 272–3. Simeon focused texts include Nunc dimittis, Quem accipiens, Responsum accepit, Cum induceret, Letatus sum, Ad te lavari, and Rubum quem.

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and Visitation sculptures as using Mary and Elizabeth’s motherhood to represent the possibility of experiencing direct inner contact with the divine, much as motherhood functions in the texts cited above. And such an experience had the potential to be empowering for a beguine, much as motherhood itself was potentially empowering for other laywomen. For both groups of women, the Visitation sculptures in particular could have portrayed their respective experiences as empowering through the figures’ activity and visual richness. However, the potential for beguine beholders to identify with Simeon in the Presentation scene as a similar recipient of the divine presence points to differences between beguines and other laywomen in their understandings of these sculptures and in their relationships to male clerical authority. For ordinary laywomen, Simeon may have stood as a figure for the authority of the Church as expressed through the Churching ritual, and Mary’s simplified form in this set of sculptures may have suggested her subordination to that authority. By contrast, the beguines’ ability to identify with Simeon further suggests the potential for direct contact with the divine to be empowering for religious women in transforming their relationships to the clergy. De Vitry’s Life of Marie and Gertrude’s Herald of Divine Love are also informative as to religious women’s relationships with male members of the clergy. Note that neither of the passages cited above involves a member of the clergy as a character. During the Candlemas procession, for example, Marie’s candle bursts spontaneously into flame, rather than it needing to be lit by a priest, and this suggests her direct experience of God’s presence with no need for a clerical intermediary, the experience that motherhood also figures in this text. Likewise Gertrude becomes something like the candle when, missing the Candlemas procession because of an illness, she feels her soul melt like wax to take God’s seal, so that she experiences his presence directly within herself, again similar to the motherhood experiences in her text. This melting follows on communion being brought to her in bed so that it is linked to her reception of the Eucharist, which would have required the intervention of a priest, but it is her direct experience that is highlighted in the text: the priest receives no notice in it.78 Nevertheless, there is a consistent clerical presence throughout Marie’s Life, that of its author Jacques de Vitry. Where Gertrude as a nun wrote Book II of the Herald of Divine Love herself, Marie as a laywoman would not have been able to write her own text, and so her life and experiences are known today only because of her involvement with members of the clergy and with Jacques in particular. Although Jacques does not appear as a character in the passage I cited above, he does so frequently through the Life: indeed John Coakley describes this text as being, at least in part, Jacques’s memoir of his relationship 78 Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, 105. On Gertrude see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), 186–7.

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with Marie.79 According to Coakley, Jacques in this text shows himself as fascinated by Marie, specifically by her difference from him, which stems from her direct personal experiences of God’s presence –including her mother-like experiences with the Christ-child – experiences that Jacques does not share. Marie garners authority from those experiences, as people begin to come to her for advice and assistance. However, Jacques does not seem to have regarded those experiences nor that authority as a threat to his own priestly role; instead he finds that her experiences work to support his own role, as when she told him of a vision she had that helped him to improve his preaching.80 Coakley is careful to make clear that he is writing about Jacques’s relationship with Marie as it appears in his text and so not necessarily as it was in life nor as Marie herself understood it.81 However, the text does make clear that an influential cleric (de Vitry became a popular preacher and later bishop of Acre) could conceive of himself as in a mutually supportive relationship with a lay holy woman. The available evidence suggests that some beguines in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Reims had similarly close and supportive relationships with members of the local Dominican and Franciscan communities. For example, in her will of 1275, the beguine Wilde named the Dominican prior Eudes de Vandiers and friar Adam of Laon as her executors and asked to be buried in the Dominican cemetery. Likewise, in her will of 1308, the beguine Hélote de Saint-Pierre named the Franciscan friar Thierri de Cheillenoi as her executor, requested burial in the Franciscan cemetery, and named the Franciscans as her primary beneficiaries.82 These close relationships with male members of the clergy may have helped beguines in Reims to be able to identify with the figure of Simeon in the Candlemas liturgy and the Presentation sculptures as similarly empowered receivers of the divine presence. 79 John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006), 70. On Jacques de Vitry and Marie d’Oignies see also Dyan Elliott, Proving Women: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2004), 50–71; Miller, “What’s in a Name?,” 65–8; Walter Simons, “Holy Women of the Low Countries: A Survey” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c.1100 – c.1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout, 2010), 625–62; Ulrike Wiethaus, “The Death Song of Marie d’Oignies: Mystical Sound and Hagiographic Politics in Medieval Lorraine” in The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, ed. Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam (New York, 2004), 158–67. 80 Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 2–3, 12–14, 22, 69–87; and John Coakley, “Women’s Textual Authority and the Collaboration of Clerics” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c.1100 – c.1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout, 2010), 83–9. 81 Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 5. For attempts to distinguish women’s own perceptions from those of their clerical collaborators see Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 89–107; and Amy Hollywood, “Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer (1200–1268),” and John Coakley, “A Marriage and its Observer: Christine of Stommeln, the Heavenly Bridegroom, and Friar Peter of Dacia,” both in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia, 1999), 80–98, 101–11. 82 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 328–30.

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TRANSFORMATIONS IN TIME Jacques de Vitry’s support for beguines went beyond his direct personal relationship with Marie d’Oignies as, in 1216, he requested and then received approval from the Pope for women living this lay-yet-religious lifestyle. Indeed, Jacques’s Life of Marie may well have been written in support of this request and so it may have shaped his portrayal of her as consistently supportive of the priesthood.83 Jacques’s support was vital because his good opinion of Marie’s lifestyle was not shared by all members of the clergy. The beguines were criticized on several fronts. For some critics, these women’s close relationships with individual Dominicans and Franciscans put their claims to chastity into doubt. For others, the beguines’ tendency to discuss religious matters amongst themselves and with other members of the laity constituted a challenge to the priestly monopoly on preaching and was a potential source of heresy. The latter concerns came to a head almost a century after Jacques wrote his Life of Marie, when, in 1310, the beguine Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris as a relapsed heretic for continuing to distribute her book The Mirror of Simple Souls. A year later a church council in Vienne promulgated two anti-beguine decrees: one focused on doctrinal errors and the other prohibiting women from adopting the beguine life.84 These events changed the lives and experiences of beguines in Reims in the later fourteenth century and so changed the horizon of expectations that they would have brought to the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures. After an official inquiry in 1325, the beguines in Reims were allowed to go forwards as long as they lived honest lives, attended church regularly, took instruction from members of the clergy, did not participate in theological discussions, and did not preach. Despite this permission, the number of beguines in the city declined throughout the later fourteenth century, with independent beguines disappearing first from Saint-Denis and SaintRemi and then disappearing altogether by the end of the century.85 These stipulations also more clearly subordinated the remaining beguines in Reims to clerical authority. Likewise, in 1364 a new set of regulations was established for the beguines in the Grande Cantimpré: the community’s chapel of St. Agnes was to be used for prayer only, not for discussion; the members of the community were able to go out into the city, but had to be back by evening prayer or have permission to stay out later and had to wear a distinctive identifying head-covering; and only women who

83 Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 69–70; McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 22–3. 84 Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, 177–85; Miller, “What’s in a Name?,” 61–4, 79–83; McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 412, 464, 500–1; Phillips, Beguines in Medieval Strasburg, 68–9; Schmitt, Mort d’une hérésie, 56–9, 96–7, 105; and Simons, Cities of Ladies, 20–3. 85 Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 330–1; McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 546–7.

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did not need to work to support themselves would be admitted into the community.86 While the first of these restrictions seem to relate to concerns about heresy, the latter two restricted the beguines’ movement in the city, both directly and by discouraging them from working. In this way, these restrictions would have reduced the opportunities for remaining beguines to see the cathedral’s sculptures and so reduced their opportunities to see in the Visitation and Presentation sculptures, in particular, potentially authorizing images of women with direct experience of the divine. Indeed, as the beguine lifestyle was increasingly restricted and restrictive so women’s claims to visionary experiences came under increasing scrutiny and suspicion. Clerical critics of visionary women doubted their claims to direct experience of the divine and advanced alternative explanations for those experiences – illness and even demonic possession. In response, the texts that presented these women’s claims to sanctity placed increasing emphasis on spectacular bodily phenomena that could stand as visible proof of these claims.87 This changed the way in which motherhood as a form of direct contact with the divine was represented in these texts. In Jacques’s Life of Marie, it “seemed” to her that she held and hid the child at her breasts for days at a time; the child’s presence here is a subjective, highly personal, and unverifiable experience. Gertrude likewise describes receiving the child internally, “in the heart of my soul.” By contrast, the Revelations of fourteenth-century mystic Birgitta of Sweden, who like the beguines was a lay holy woman, recounts that she felt in her heart sensible and wonderful movement, as if in her heart were a living boy turning himself around and around. While this motion continued, she showed it her spiritual father and her other spiritual friends, lest perhaps it was an illusion. Who, testing with sight and touch were amazed.88

Birgitta’s experience is physical, something “sensible” that she feels in her heart, rather than a “seeming” or a purely internal experience. Furthermore, the physicality of her experience is explicitly linked to issues of doubt and verification; she doubts it herself as she is concerned that it is only an illusion, but since it is something that others too can see and feel, so it is confirmed both for them and for her. The Virgin then appears to her to further resolve her doubts and confirm the reality of her experience, saying “Daughter, you wonder at this motion you feel in your heart. You ought to know that it is not an illusion, but a manifestation of Desportes, Reims et les Rémois, 331. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 5, 100–1, 212–13; Elliott, Proving Women, 297–9; Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, 1995), 34–8. 88 As quoted and translated in Laura Saetveit Miles, “Looking in the Past for a Discourse of Motherhood: Birgitta of Sweden and Julia Kristeva,” Medieval Feminist Forum 47/1 (2011): 59. 86 87

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something similar to the sweetness and compassion given to me.”89 Thus Christ is physically present in Birgitta’s heart in a way that resembles his physical presence in Mary’s body during her pregnancy. This text is suggestive of a potential change in beguine ways of understanding the Reims Annunciation and Visitation sculptures in the later 1300s, for any remaining beguines in the city who still became beholders of these sculptures. Rather than standing as visualizations and validations of inner experiences similar to Marie and Gertrude’s, these sculptures too may have acted to physicalize the presence of the divine both in the changes that come over Mary’s body from the Annunciation to the Visitation and in the pure physicality of the sculptural medium itself. Thus rather than presenting inner experience as empowering, these sculptures may have reminded women who could not demonstrate these physical changes in their own bodies that they had no secure claim to direct experience of the divine. Finally, for later beguines, Simeon may have appeared as a figure of male clerical authority to whom Mary hands the Christ-child as physical proof of her encounter with God, as something similar to Birgitta’s seeking confirmation of her experience from her confessor. This potential change in beguine perspectives finds support in the text that documents the one known visionary laywoman from Reims, Ermine de Reims, which was written by her confessor Jean Le Graveur shortly after her death in 1396.90 His text describes visions and other experiences that she had during the last ten months of her life. During this time, Ermine was largely self-enclosed; she rarely left the small room in which she lived, which was next to Jean’s priory and overlooked its churchyard. She did not work but depended on Jean for support.91 Thus she would not have frequented the cathedral for its markets nor for its feasts and so would not have been a beholder of its sculptures. She would not have had a chance to see the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures as empowering images of women in direct inner contact with the divine, nor even as representations of the now-necessary physical proof of such inner experiences. Ermine’s visionary experiences included various sorts of demonic molestations as well as divine visitations, and a primary concern in the text is with her ability to distinguish between the two. One clear sign for her that a vision was demonic in inspiration, according to the text, was if it encouraged her to break with her confessor.92 Thus these experiences 89 As quoted and translated in Miles, “Looking in the Past for a Discourse of Motherhood,” 59; on Birgitta’s “mystical pregnancy” see Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy (Woodbridge, 2001), 1–2, 83–107. 90 On Ermine see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims (c. 1347–1396): A Medieval Woman between Demons and Saints,” Speculum 85 (2010): 321–56; and Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine of Reims (Philadelphia, 2015). 91 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine of Reims, 17–18, 27–9. 92 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine of Reims, 48–9, 94, 141–5.

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did not empower her in his eyes as someone in direct contact with the divine, but instead served to heighten her reliance on him and reinforce his authority over her. Ermine did not have visionary or physical experiences of motherhood similar to Marie, Gertrude, and Birgitta’s. She did see the host transform into a child on a number of occasions, but Jean advised her not to believe these experiences and not to accept these hosts.93 Thus Jean’s text doubts and discounts any claims Ermine had to direct experience of divine presence. Jean Le Graveur, finally, wrote this text and submitted it to the influential Jean Gerson for his judgment on Ermine’s experiences in an apparent bid to become someone similar to Jacques de Vitry in his relationship to Marie d’Oignies. However, Gerson initially gave the text only cautious approval and finally rejected it altogether.94 The time for empowered visionary women and their influential male collaborators had passed by the end of the fourteenth century. Likewise motherhood as visualized through the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures at Reims cathedral was potentially empowering for the laywomen who were among the sculptures’ beholders, both ordinary women and beguines, but only for a limited period of time, whether within the individual woman’s life or historically. Ordinary laywomen may have been able to see Mary’s change in form from the Annunciation to the Visitation in terms of the celebration of new motherhood that occurred in their Churching rituals, but that would have been followed by their return to the role of submissive and sexually available wife as suggested by Mary’s form and Simeon and Joseph’s presence in the Presentation and as enacted in the post-Churching feast. Only widowhood had the potential to break this cycle but that possibility was also relatively short-lived, as changes in inheritance laws and the increasing power of the guilds in the later Middle Ages eventually limited women’s options and opportunities as widows.95 Finally, from the completion of the cathedral’s western façade in the 1270s through the mid-1300s, beguine beholders could have seen these sculptures as visualizing the empowering effects of direct inner experience of the divine, understood as a mothering relationship to the Christ-child, that changed their relationships with male clerical authorities. By the late 1300s, however, that possibility would have largely disappeared as the remaining beguines’ lives were increasingly restricted and as women’s visionary experiences were increasingly doubted and disregarded.

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine of Reims, 74–7. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine of Reims, 29–34, 149. 95 On these changes see Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 138–49, 192–3, 228–33; Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 21, 43, 72–89, 115–46, 161–81; and Jacob, Les époux, le seigneur et la cité, 7–8, 188, 205, 237–53. 93

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MOTHERHOOD AS MONSTROSITY: THE MOISSAC FEMME-AUXSERPENTS AND THE TRANSI OF JEANNE DE BOURBON-VENDÔME

T

he woman stands with her head bent down and turned slightly to her right (Fig. 8). Her thick locks of hair continue this movement as they snake down and out over her chest and shoulders. One lock on her left side stands out as it extends straight down, crosses over the prominent horizontal bars of her ribs, and leads to her breast. Here the shape of the tip of that lock of hair is repeated, reversed, magnified, and multiplied as the heads of two snakes that are attached to the woman’s breasts. The snakes’ bodies loop up and over her bent-up arms and then trail down around her legs. The loops in their bodies form a line with the woman’s bent elbows and this line draws attention to her navel, positioned just below on the otherwise empty space of her abdomen. Its prominent mark is further emphasized as it is framed by the angled shapes of the snakes’ bodies above and by angled lines in her groin below. These lines extend the downward movement initiated by her head and hair as they lead down between her thighs to where another creature, currently little more than a blob but conventionally identified as a toad, attaches itself to her genitalia. The line formed by the woman’s elbows and the snakes’ bent bodies is extended, and their rounded forms are repeated and inflated, by the bloated belly of a demon that stands to the woman’s right side. Its big belly extends towards her and the prominent mark of its navel associates its swelling body with her form. It reaches out to grasp her right wrist, and the locks of her hair extend the line of its gesture up into her face. This line also suggests her line of sight, staring down first at the demon’s hand on her arm and then at its distended abdomen. Above this line, the shape

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of its belly is repeated by another rounded form, another toad, that extends from its face and points back to hers. Most medieval art historians would immediately identify this sculpture, from the west wall of the richly sculpted porch of the twelfth-century church of Saint-Pierre at Moissac (Fig. 9), as a representation of luxuria or the sin of lust, shown as a woman suffering torments in Hell for her sexual sins. That interpretation of this sculpture was established by Emile Mâle in his foundational work on twelfth-century or Romanesque iconography and has since been applied to other images of women with snakes, or femme-aux-serpents, that appear elsewhere within the corpus of Romanesque sculpture.1 I will be diverging from that interpretation in this chapter, however, for my interest in this sculpture lies instead in its under-considered representation of motherhood. The snakes attach themselves to the woman’s breasts like infants nursing from a mother; indeed, Mâle and others have recognized a source for this and similar sculptures in antique images of Earth as a mother suckling snakes.2 Likewise, as one toad emerges from the demon’s mouth and the other attaches to the woman’s genitals, they suggest a movement out of its body and into hers and so suggest her impregnation. As Amanda Luyster has written, this scene resembles an Annunciation, with the toad emerging from the demon’s mouth replacing the angel’s words to Mary, and the second toad at the woman’s genitalia representing the impact of those words on her body.3 However, it is the demon who appears to be pregnant, as its belly swells outward towards the woman. And yet its swelling belly is

FIG. 8. FEMME AUX SERPENTS AND DEMON. CHURCH OF SAINT-PIERRE, MOISSAC, WEST FLANK OF THE SOUTH PORTAL. 1100–30.

1 Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century: A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography, ed. Harry Bober, trans. Marthiel Mathews (Princeton, 1978), 372–6. For other such sculptures see Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London, 1986), 58–79. 2 Jacqueline Leclercq-Kadaner, “De la Terre-Mere à la Luxure: À propos de ‘La migration des symboles,’” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 18/1 (January–March 1975): 37–43; Mâle, Religious Art in France, 374–5. 3 Amanda Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac: Luxuria (Lust) or a Bad Mother?” in Between Religion and Magic: Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Society, ed. Sulochana R. Asirvatham, Corinne Ondine Pache, and John Watrous (Lanham, 2001), 188–9.

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FIG. 9. SOUTH PORTAL OF THE CHURCH OF SAINT-PIERRE, MOISSAC. 1100–30.

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associated with her body by similarities in shape and by their pronounced navels, as described above: it is almost as if her pregnancy has somehow been displaced onto the demon’s body. Finally, the turn and bend of her head that suggests the line of her sight also suggests her awareness of its hold over her in the form of this pregnancy. Motherhood in this sculpture appears as a form of monstrosity, in the way in which monstrosity as a feature of medieval culture has come to be understood by scholars including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Sarah Alison Miller, and Asa Simon Mittman.4 In their analyses, the monstrous is formed from the collapse of categories, the violation of distinctions, and 4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis, 1996), 6–7; Sarah Alison Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (New York, 2010); Asa Simon Mittman, “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Burlington, 2012), 8.

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the breakdown of boundaries: processes that are visible in this sculpture. First, as the creatures infest the woman’s flesh, they violate the distinctions between the human and the non-human, the self and the other, and they simultaneously break down the boundaries of her body by both suckling from her and eating their way into her flesh. Secondly, the assimilation between her body and the demon’s again violates the human/ non-human and self/other distinctions, while also breaking down her body’s boundaries by seeming to relocate her pregnancy in its form. These violations and breakdowns, furthermore, are integral to the sculpture’s representation of motherhood as it is the toads, demon, and snakes that suggest impregnation, pregnancy, and breastfeeding. Identifying this sculpture as a monstrous representation of motherhood does not in itself define its meaning, however; for the medieval monster was a sign that pointed to a meaning or meanings located elsewhere, an understanding of the monstrous that medieval theorists explained via etymological links between the word “monster” and monstrare, or to show, and demonstrare, or to demonstrate.5 Defining the meanings that the snake-woman’s monstrous form would have carried for its medieval beholders requires shifting from response to reception, as defined in the Introduction to this book, in order to reconstruct the horizons of expectations that different beholders would have brought to their encounters with this work of art. The first section of this chapter explores some of the potential meanings for monstrous motherhood in medieval culture through a variety of textual examples, including the texts used by Mâle and others to support the interpretation of the femme-auxserpents sculpture as an image of sexual sin. After agreeing with Mâle and subsequent scholars that the monks of the community at Moissac likely would have seen the sculpture from within a moralizing framework as a woman undergoing punishment for some sort of sin, I turn my attention to establishing the possibility of laywomen becoming beholders of this sculpture and to the meanings that its monstrous maternal form may have held for them. Thus my argument does not seek to supplant Mâle’s, but instead aims to reposition his interpretation of the femme-auxserpents as only one potential way of understanding this work of art and to supplement that interpretation with another based on the interests of laywomen as beholders of this sculpture. Inspired by the femme-aux-serpents sculpture’s apparent awareness of her own predicament, suggested by her line of sight towards the demon and in particular towards its swelling belly, I argue that the women of Moissac may have been able to see the monstrous maternal form of this sculpture as representing some of the more difficult or distressing aspects of their own maternal experiences. If women in Reims could have

5

Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 4.

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seen the Visitation sculptures as like the Churching ritual in celebrating successful childbearing, women in Moissac may have been able to use the femme-aux-serpents to instead contemplate the risks and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. I make this argument by turning my attention to a second sculpture that presents a strikingly similar representation of monstrous motherhood, the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme (d. 1511), a sculpture of her dead body that was made for her tomb (Fig. 13). Jeanne’s relatively prominent social position allows us some access to her experiences as a mother, and the likelihood that she was the patron of her tomb and transi serves to demonstrate a woman’s ability to apply these monstrous forms to herself as a form of self-representation. Finally, I argue that the women of Moissac may have been able to use the snake-woman sculpture’s monstrous representation of motherhood to make their own experiences of maternal pain and suffering become positively meaningful, as potentially salvific, through the intermediary of other monstrous bodies present in the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, those of lepers who came to the monastery in search of a cure.

MOTHERHOOD AS MONSTROSITY IN MEDIEVAL TEXTS The interpretation of the Moissac femme-aux-serpents sculpture as a representation of luxuria has come to be taken for granted among medieval art historians, so much so that it has essentially ceased to function as an interpretation. Instead, luxuria in some form (luxure, unchastity) has come to act as the identifying name or title for this work of art, and its meaning as a personification of sexual sin has come to be simply assumed.6 However, returning to the texts that Mâle and others have used to establish and support this understanding of the sculpture’s significance works to problematize this pattern of interpretation for it reveals that these texts too present images of monstrous mothers. Mâle’s primary textual support for his interpretation of the Moissac sculpture is the Vision of Saint Paul, a fourth-century Greek text that survived in the West in both Latin and vernacular translations. The text presents a visionary account of Heaven and Hell that is attributed to the Apostle Paul. In the account of Hell, a group of women appear undergoing punishment in the form of snakes and vipers that either hang around 6 For example, Meyer Schapiro identifies the Moissac sculpture as “Unchastity” and Thomas Lyman identifies it as “Luxure.” See Meyer Schapiro, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac II” in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (New York, 1977), 235–6; and Thomas Lyman, “Motif et narrative: Vers une typologie des thèmes profanes dans la sculpture monumentale de los romerias,” Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 10 (1979): 72. For two dissenting interpretations see Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 176–7; and Daniel Smartt, “Cruising Twelfth-Century Pilgrims,” Journal of Homosexuality 27/1–2 (1994): 35–55.

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their necks (in the Latin version) or from their breasts (in an Old French translation). The Latin translates as, “and he saw another place in which almost all were. And there were black girls there who had black clothing, dressed in pitch and in sulfur and with dragons and fire and serpents and vipers around their necks.”7 The text identifies these women as “those who did not preserve their chastity until their nuptials” and so includes a sexual sin among their offenses. However, the text focuses on the women’s misdeeds as mothers, stating that they “disgustingly killed their infants and gave them as food to pigs or dogs and threw them in rivers and other places of loss, and afterwards did not do penance.”8 Thus the ultimate offense for which they receive this punishment is their unrepented acts of infanticide. In an article that repeats and reinforces Mâle’s interpretation of the Moissac sculpture as a representation of sexual sin, Jacqueline LeclercqKadaner cites a second visionary account of Hell, the early twelfth-century Vision of Alberic. She uses this text, however, to acknowledge the possibility of other meanings for the women with snakes.9 As in the Vision of Saint Paul, in the Alberic text women appear in Hell undergoing punishment by having snakes attached to their breasts, and here that punishment is attached specifically to the women’s behavior as maternal figures. The relevant passage reads: I saw women … and two serpents were suckling at the breasts of each of them. Saint Peter spoke about these women. He said that they were those who were unwilling to give their breasts for drinking to orphans and to those not having mothers, or they were only pretending to give and did not give. Many times truly it happens that some infant destitute of a mother remains in the hands of whichever parent who, desiring to save him, gave him to be fed to neighbors or to other women. And other women, even, unmoved by pity refuse to offer milk to him. Others, as I said before, promise they will give, yet by their deceit they destroy the infant through starvation … of which the women are hoping themselves to have no guilt. Nor do they deign to confess this to the priest.10

In this case, the women’s offenses have no sexual component, for the children at stake are not their own but are orphaned or otherwise motherless. The women’s ultimate crime is the same as in the Saint Paul text: they are guilty of infanticide, for the children these women refuse to nurse die of starvation. 7 For this passage in translation see Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 176–7. 8 Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 177. 9 Leclercq-Kadaner, “De la Terre-Mere à la Luxure,” 41, note 46. 10 Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 178–9.

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Thus neither text identifies the women with serpents as undergoing punishment exclusively for sexual sins and both relate the women’s punishment to their actions as mothers or maternal substitutes. The women in both texts, furthermore, present monstrous images of motherhood, in the sense introduced above in relation to the femme-aux-serpents sculpture; indeed the similarity between these textual representations and the sculpture lies in their monstrous maternal forms. Like the sculpture, these textual forms break down bodily boundaries as well as the distinctions between the human and the non-human, the self and the other, as the serpents inhabit the women’s bodies and suckle from their breasts. The serpents’ acts of suckling are key here. As Angela Florschuetz argues, medieval texts frequently identify breast milk as the mother’s transformed menstrual blood and so as creating a blood tie between the woman and the suckling: thus the passage of milk/blood between the women and the snakes works to break down the boundaries between their bodies and between their species.11 In the texts, furthermore, the monstrosity of these women’s physical punishment serves to mark the monstrousness of their acts of infanticide, which violate the distinction between life and death, as each is punished for causing the death of a new life. Monstrous images of motherhood appear with some frequency in medieval texts; Sarah Alison Miller has written of a number of examples in slightly later texts, from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Miller’s work, furthermore, highlights the various meanings these monstrous forms carry in differing texts, as products of the processes of reading and writing that gave shape to them. She writes, for example, of the pseudo-Ovidian text “The Old Woman” in which the character named Ovid expects to have sexual intercourse with a young virgin, only to have her replaced by an old hag. The Ovid character understands this change not as the replacement of one woman with another, but instead as the sudden metamorphosis of the virgin into the hag. In this way, he experiences life and fertile potential as combined with, rather than opposed to, bodily decay and imminent death. The text suggests that the old hag existed inside the young virgin all along, so that her apparent transformation into the hag is a violation of the boundary between interior and exterior. Finally, the text identifies repeated pregnancies and births as the cause of the hag’s ruined body, thus identifying motherhood with this monstrous change in the woman’s form.12 Miller further points out that the Ovid character’s misreading of this 11 Florschuetz, Marking Maternity, 36–50 and 188–90. See also Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 58–9; Naomi Yavneh, “To Bare or not Too Bare: Sofonisba Anguissola’s Nursing Madonna and the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding,” and Rachel Trubowitz, “‘But Blood Whitened’: Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain,” both in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Burlington, 2000), 65–81 and 82–101; and the essays in Sperling, ed., Medieval and Renaissance Lactations. 12 Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body, 19–23, 33–43.

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situation as a transformation is based on the popularity of Ovidian reading material in the Middle Ages, in particular the poet’s Metamorphoses, for it produced an expectation of transformability for the body. And she points to the way in which Ovid’s work was read in medieval schools, as first eliciting and then curing lust, as a key for understanding this text: the virgin’s apparent transformation in “The Old Woman” allows it to serve a similar function.13 Here the monstrous maternal body is presented as a warning to the text’s male clerical readers against sexual involvement with women. Miller also writes of Christ in Julian of Norwich’s Showings as a monstrous maternal figure. In this text, Christ’s side wound is characterized both as the cause and mark of his death and as a vagina through which he both gives birth and welcomes his children back into his body. He thus joins life to death, similar to the juxtaposition of the young virgin with the old hag in “The Old Woman,” and the boundary of his body is repeatedly breached, as was the boundary of the virgin’s body in her transformation into the hag, and as was the hag’s in her repeated childbirths.14 Christ as a monstrous mother, however, clearly carries a different meaning within Julian’s Showings than the warning against sexual contact with women contained in the pseudo-Ovidian text; Miller writes that the Showings “exploits the inherent ambivalence of the monstrous” in using it instead to develop a Christology.15 For Julian, she writes, Christ’s monstrous maternal body is an open body that makes possible a reunion between child and mother, self and other, as the human and the divine. That reunion presents an image of salvation as the child being drawn back into the mother’s body; thus here the monstrous mother is salvific, rather than didactic or moralizing. Finally, Miller characterizes this version of the monstrous maternal figure as a product of Julian’s acts of both reading and writing, as her reading of her own visions of Christ formed the genesis for her written text. In the hands of this female reader/writer, Miller argues, reading and then writing the monstrous maternal body was a means of participating in or identifying with it and so another means by which Julian strove to achieve her desired union with Christ.16 As Miller accounts for the varying meanings given to monstrous maternal forms in medieval texts as the products of their differing readers and writers, so the following sections of this chapter consider the meanings that the Moissac femme-aux-serpents sculpture would have held for different groups of beholders along with its potential patron(s). First, I focus on the monks of the community of Moissac as beholders of Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body, 18–21, 30–5. Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body, 119–22. On Christ as a monstrous mother see also Robert Mills, “Jesus as Monster,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto, 2003), 32–47. 15 Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body, 94–5. 16 Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body, 94–103. 13

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the sculpture, and on their abbot(s) as its likely patron(s), and consider the moralizing meanings its monstrous form may have carried for these men. In doing so, I follow the majority of the existing scholarship on this sculpture, which has located it within a monastic context: indeed, Mâle’s interpretation of the snake-woman as an image of luxuria appears in his section on the “monastic imprint” on twelfth-century sculpture. Next, however, I argue for the existence of a broader audience for the Moissac sculpture, an audience that would have included laywomen. Women who became beholders of this work of art would have brought a different horizon of expectations to their encounter with it and so would have come to understand it in a different way.

THE MONKS OF MOISSAC AND MORALIZING MEANINGS Saint-Pierre at Moissac was an important monastic foundation. It was established in the early seventh century and grew quickly as a result of donations, until it was sacked by Muslim forces in the early ninth century. Once restored after this attack, the monastery began to grow again and was placed under the protection of a lay abbot, usually the reigning Count of Toulouse. However, in the early eleventh century, Count Guillaume III Taillefer sold the lay abbacy to his vassal Gausbert de Gourdon, who dominated the community for his own gain and soon brought it into crisis. By mid-century, the vaults of the church had collapsed and many of the other buildings had been destroyed by fire. When the monastery was restored once again, in the late eleventh century, it was simultaneously reformed through submission to the powerful abbey at Cluny. It then began to grow again in power and prestige in the twelfth century as a member of the Cluniac federation of monasteries.17 This last restoration and reformation formed the context for the production of the sculptures that line the walls of the monastery church’s entrance porch, including the femme-aux-serpents. The abbot or abbots of the monastery likely served as the patron(s) for this work. Abbot Ansquitil (1085–1115) is generally credited with rebuilding the monastery’s cloister, the site of an impressive array of sculpted capitals, and he may also have been responsible for the 17 On this portion of the history of Moissac see Daniel Borzeix, René Pautel, and Jacques Serbat, Histoire de Moissac (Marsolan, 1976), 19–31; Bernard Loncan, La ville de Moissac, Tarn-et-Garonne (Toulouse, 1986), 4–6; Jules Marion, “L’abbaye de Moissac. Notes d’un voyage archéologique dans le sud-ouest de la France,” Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartres ser. 3, 1 (1849): 89–147, esp. 97–112; Ernest Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac (Paris, 1897), 47–9; and Marguerite Vidal, Moissac et les Moissagais (Toulouse, 1955), 14–16. And on Moissac and Cluny see Joachim Wollasch, “Qu’a signifié Cluny pour l’abbaye de Moissac?” and Jacques Hourlier, “L’Entrée de Moissac dans l’ordre de Cluny” in Moissac et l’Occident au XIe siècle. Actes de colloque international de Moissac (Toulouse, 1964), 13–24 and 24–33.

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porch and its sculptures. Alternatively, the patron for the porch may have been Ansquitil’s successor, Abbot Roger (1115–30), or the porch may have been initiated by Ansquitil and then completed by Roger.18 The sculptures of the Moissac porch may well have been intended to carry specifically monastic meanings from the abbot(s) as their patron(s) to the monks as their intended beholders. The Vision texts discussed above can provide insights into the abbot(s)’ likely intentions for these images as well as the horizon of expectations that the monks would have brought to understanding them. Monasteries were the main producers and collectors of texts in the twelfth century. Textual accounts of otherworld environments were popular in monastic environments and the Vision of Alberic in particular was produced in a monastery. Jacques Le Goff has described the production of this text as an example of the interactions between popular and learned elements of medieval society that were possible inside a monastery. Alberic apparently experienced his vision during an illness that he suffered as a child; however, it was not recorded until later in his life when he entered the monastery at Monte Cassino and related it to a monk who wrote it down. As that account was passed along both orally and in written form, it became altered and so, later in life, Alberic dictated it again, to another monk, and it is this second retelling that forms the basis for surviving texts of the Vision. Thus the surviving account of Alberic’s childhood experience would have been reshaped by his own later life in the monastery, by the literate monk he relied upon to write it down, and, as with the first version, by ongoing recopying by other monks over time.19 According to both Le Goff and Aron Gurevich, the otherworld vision itself was a more popular or folk tradition, for it shows an ambivalence that is characteristic of such traditions in its joining of opposites. These texts join life and death, as the visionary passes back and forth between the realm of the living and that of the dead, and join soul and body, as souls are described as tormented in remarkably physical or bodily ways.20 The femme-aux-serpents fits easily into this visionary landscape due to her own monstrous joinings of opposed terms, as described above. Le Goff 18 Ilene Forsyth identifies Ansquitil as the most likely patron of the porch sculpture, see “Narrative at Moissac: Schapiro’s Legacy,” Gesta 41/1 (2002): 86–8. For scholarship that dates the porch at least in part to Roger’s abbacy see Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 33; Jean Chagnolleau, Moissac (Paris, 1951), 17; M.F. Hearn, Romanesque Sculpture: The Revival of Monumental Stone Sculpture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Ithaca, 1981), 170; Marguerite Vidal, Moissac (La Pierre-qui-Vire, 1976), 4; and Marguerite Vidal, Jean Maury, and John Porcher, Quercy Roman (La Pierre-qui-Vire, 1959), 47. 19 Jacques Le Goff, “Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Age” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin, 1984), 23–9. 20 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. János M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge, 1988), xvi, 106–7, 113, 124–7, 141–3, 191–209; Le Goff, “Learned and Popular Dimensions,” 25–7.

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emphasizes, however, that the written Vision texts show the reformulation of this popular tradition by their monastic authors in their imposition of Christian values and clear moralizing distinctions, between good and evil in particular.21 In the Vision of Saint Paul and the Vision of Alberic, that reformulation includes the text’s presentation of the women with snakes as monstrous maternal figures. As Miller writes, as discussed above, such figures are highly ambivalent, and as her examples demonstrate, they can therefore be made to carry a wide range of meanings, from a misogynistic warning to a vision of union with Christ. In the Vision texts, the monstrous mothers are made into clearly negative moralizing figures as they are presented as women suffering horrifying punishments for their sins. Monks coming as beholders to the Moissac snake-woman sculpture may have been primed to understand her in similar terms, as a woman undergoing otherworldly punishment for her sins. Indeed, the abbot(s) who acted as the patron(s) of the porch sculptures may have intended for the femme-aux-serpents to carry such a meaning for the monks. The abbot(s) and the monks may have been familiar with the Vision texts themselves and so these texts may have informed their commission for and understanding of this sculpture. Or they may simply have shared in the moralizing mindset that produced the texts’ emphasis on sin and punishment and so shared the texts’ understanding of the monstrous maternal figure on those terms. But what sin would the abbot and monks have attributed to the snake-woman as the reason for her punishment? For Mâle, again, that sin was luxuria or lust, and he cites reform monasticism’s interest in promoting celibacy within the cloister as providing an explanation for the sculpture’s appearance at Moissac.22 However, based on her reading of the Vision texts, Amanda Luyster argues that medieval beholders would have seen the femme-aux-serpents sculpture as representing a “bad mother,” rather than as an image of sexual sin. According to Luyster, the sculpture would have represented a woman who refused to breastfeed an infant, or only pretended to do so, leading to that infant’s death, as in the Alberic text, or a woman who became pregnant outside marriage and then killed her own child, as in the Vision of Saint Paul.23 Furthermore, Luyster uses the Vision texts to argue that medieval readers and beholders would have taken a broader view 21 Jacques Le Goff, “Ecclesiastical Culture and Folklore: Saint Marcellus of Paris and the Dragon” in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), 160–85; Le Goff, “Learned and Popular Dimensions,” 28–31. 22 Mâle, Religious Art in France, 372–6. 23 Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 173. In identifying the Moissac snakewoman as a “bad mother,” Luyster is reviving an idea common in the literature prior to Mâle’s work. See Bouet, “Symbolisme de la Luxure,” Bulletin Monumental 13 (1847): 208–9, in which the “bad mothers” hypothesis is attributed to M. Godard-Faultrier, relying on the Vision of Alberic; Jos. Berthele, “L’Eglise de Saint-Jouin-les-Marnes (Deux-Sevres),” Bulletin Monumental (1885): 398, where the sexual sin hypothesis is attributed to M. Ledain but contested with the bad mothers interpretation; and Rupin, L’abbaye et les

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of these women’s sins. In the Vision of Saint Paul, she writes, the women who committed infanticide are adjacent to usurious money-lenders and those who harmed orphans, widows, and single women. These sinners all lack “mercy,” she argues, and the women in the Alberic text who refuse to breastfeed are similarly “hard-hearted” and “selfish.”24 She sees these faults as represented at Moissac in the contrast between the snakewoman sculpture and sculptures of Mary and Elizabeth in a scene of the Visitation that is located on the opposite wall of the porch, in particular in the differences between their breasts (Figs. 8 and 11). Where the snakewoman’s breasts are tormented by the hanging serpents, the Mary and Elizabeth proffer their breasts to one another; the figure on the left lifts her garment to expose the breast underneath and the figure on the right grasps and extends her breast. According to Luyster, this difference would have established a contrast for medieval beholders between “bad” and “good” mothers that was also a contrast between “bad” and “good” Christians: between selfishness, greediness, and pitilessness, as represented by the femme-aux-serpents, on the one hand; and generosity, charity, and mercy, as represented by Mary and Elizabeth, on the other.25 Luyster intends for her argument about the Moissac sculptures to hold for medieval beholders in general: however, because of her reliance on the Vision texts, her argument is more convincing if it is attached specifically to the sculptures’ monastic beholders. Ilene Forsyth has argued for seeing similar meanings for these artworks from within a specifically monastic horizon of expectations.26 Forsyth too focuses on relationships between the sculptures on the porch’s opposing walls, including between the snake-woman and the women in the Visitation, along with a sculpture of Mary in a neighboring Annunciation scene.27 She relates the patterns of both resemblance and dissonance that she identifies between these sculptures to the “chiasmic” and “dialectical” forms that appear in contemporary monastic writing. Building from such textual forms, she suggests verbalizing the opposition between the femme-aux-serpents, whom she sees as an image of sexual sin, and Mary and Elizabeth, as between “unchaste-sterility” and “chaste-fertility.”28 Again like Luyster, Forsyth generalizes from this opposition between the female figures and so comes to see in the porch sculptures as a whole an argument about cloîtres de Moissac, 335, where both possibilities are presented and the Vision of Alberic sited in support of the bad mothers interpretation. 24 Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 177–9. 25 Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 188, 190–1. 26 Forsyth, “Narrative at Moissac,” 81. 27 The Annunciation scene was replaced in the nineteenth century by a new sculpture created by Auguste Perrin, during restoration work at Moissac overseen by Viollet-le-Duc, and so is not discussed in detail here. See Mathieu Méras, “Découverte d’un fragment de sculpture du porche de Moissac,” Opéra de Versailles: Les Monuments Historiques de la France (January–March 1957): 152–4. 28 Forsyth, “Narrative at Moissac,” 75–6, 86.

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FIG. 10. PORTAL RELIEF. CHURCH OF SAINT-PIERRE, MOISSAC, EAST FLANK OF SOUTH PORTAL. 1100–30.

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the value of giving to the monastic community. Within her argument, the opposition between the snakewoman’s tormented breasts and Mary and Elizabeth’s extended breasts would again represent the punishment meted out for stinginess in contrast to the holiness of generosity.29 Finally, Forsyth suggests that Abbot Ansquitil, her preferred patron for the porch, may have intended for the emphasis on the virtue of generosity within its sculptural program to encourage members of the secular nobility to make donations to the community and that this may have helped him justify the expense of the program to his monks.30 Together, Luyster and Forsyth make a compelling argument for a specifically monastic understanding of the snake-woman and its surrounding sculptures. Understood from within a monastic horizon of expectations as a woman undergoing punishment for one sin or another, the sculpture may have served as a counter-example to promote Christian virtues represented by Mary and Elizabeth across the way. However, as the next section of this chapter will demonstrate, the Moissac porch sculptures also had non-monastic beholders who would have understood them from within other horizons of expectations. In particular, they also had laywomen beholders who would have been capable of relating the femme-aux-serpents sculpture to their own experiences of motherhood.

FIG. 11. VISITATION. CHURCH OF SAINT-PIERRE, MOISSAC, EAST FLANK OF THE SOUTH PORTAL. 1100–30.

OTHER BEHOLDERS: LEPERS AND LAYPEOPLE People other than the monks were drawn into the monastery at Moissac primarily in order to have access to water sources that were located inside 29 30

Forsyth, “Narrative at Moissac,” 75–9. Forsyth, “Narrative at Moissac,” 79–80, 86–8.

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the monastic enclosure. There were at least two such sources inside the monastery: one, a fountain that was reputed to have healing qualities, for leprosy in particular; and the second, a source of domestic water. The first of these would have drawn lepers inside the monastery, and the second would have drawn in laymen and women from the town of Moissac, which was adjacent to the monastery. The interests of the lepers and lay townspeople in these water sources are documented because access to them was a repeated point of conflict between the abbots of the monastery and the townspeople. This history of conflict is also important when considering the horizon of expectations that the lay population of Moissac would have brought to their encounters with the porch sculptures. The water sources inside the monastery first appear in the historical sources when Abbot Ansquitil, as part of his work on the cloister, had a fountain in its north-western corner recovered with marble.31 This was, most likely, the domestic water source and his action was uncontroversial. Trouble began when Ansquitil’s successor, Abbot Roger, acted to end the lepers’ access to the healing waters: he is reported to have both walled up the source itself and prohibited the lepers’ pilgrimage to it. His actions reportedly caused considerable upset among the townspeople.32 This reaction suggests the people’s strong support of the local leper population: Moissac in the twelfth century supported three communities of lepers, who likely lived off charity from both the monastery and the townspeople.33 And it suggests that the townspeople may have been concerned that the abbot would also try to put an end to their access to the domestic water source. This became a real concern during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The town was hard hit first during the Albigensian Crusade and again during the Hundred Years War and its own wells were destroyed. The townspeople therefore demanded access to the fountain in the cloister, to which they claimed longstanding rights, and they complained that they frequently found the door closed to them. The abbots, for their part, reportedly resisted allowing the townspeople into the cloister for water because it brought women inside monastic space.34 Likewise, when the monastery was secularized in the 1600s, one of the reasons given was the presence of laypeople of both sexes within the cloister, both visiting chapels located there and collecting water.35 Access to the domestic water 31 Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 33; A. Lagrèze-Fossat, Études historiques sur Moissac (Paris, 1870) vol. 2, 35–7, 479–80; Marion, “L’abbaye de Moissac,” 119; Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac, 65–6; Vidal, Moissac et les Moissagais, 21, 41. 32 Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 33; Lagrèze-Fossat, Études historiques sur Moissac, vol. 2, 479–80; Marion, “L’abbaye de Moissac,” 121; Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac, 70–1; Vidal, Moissac, 4; Vidal et al., Quercy Roman, 47, 107. 33 Nicole de Pẽna, Les moines de l’abbaye de Moissac de 1295 à 1334 entre coutumes clunisiennes et nécessités économiques (Turnhout, 2001), 46–9. 34 Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 35–6; Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac, 140–57; Vidal, Moissac et les Moissagais, 41. 35 Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 63–4; Lagrèze-Fossat, Études historiques sur Moissac,

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source may have drawn laywomen inside the monastery from early on in its history and this produces the potential for these women to have become beholders of the porch sculptures. Abbot Roger responded to the turmoil that his closing of the lepers’ access to the healing fountain had caused among the local lay population by acquiring new relics and having new reliquaries made for them. These included relics of St. Ferreol, St. Cyprian, St. Ferrat, and, most importantly, St. Julien, the saint to whom the healing source was dedicated.36 This sequence of events, combined with the presence of the St. Julien relics, suggests that Roger intended for access to these relics to replace the lepers’ access to the healing waters. The disturbance over Roger’s initial actions had extended beyond the lepers themselves to the broader lay population of Moissac, however, and so Roger’s recuperative action in providing the relics may have been intended to appeal to this larger group as well. His provision of the relics may have been intended to change their perception of the monastery, from restricting access to the sacred by closing off the healing fountain to providing that access in this new form. It may also have been meant to shift their interest away from the local lepers and towards the monastery itself. The relics would have made the monastery even more attractive to the local laypeople, who now had two reasons to enter its enclosure, to view the relics as well as to collect water. The relics were presumably made available for viewing somewhere within the monastery church and individuals may have combined a visit to the church with a trip to the water source. Given that the historical sources point to laywomen gathering water in the monastery, the addition of the relics may have drawn these women to the church. In gaining access to the relics in the church, lay visitors would have passed through its porch and so would have become beholders of its sculptures. In this way, finally, laywomen would have had the opportunity to become beholders of the snake-woman sculpture. In addition to the provision of the relics and their reliquaries, the construction of the porch and the production of its sculptures may also have formed part of Abbot Roger’s potential campaign for drawing the lepers and other lay visitors inside the church. If, that is, the porch can be dated to Roger’s abbacy. Although Forsyth prefers to identify Ansquitil as the patron for the porch, there are other scholars who prefer a later date for its production, placing it within Roger’s reign.37 And a statue vol. 2, 432–9; Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac, 164. 36 Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 33; Lagrèze-Fossat, Études historiques sur Moissac, vol. 2, 479–80; Marion, “L’abbaye de Moissac,” 121; Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac, 70–1; Vidal, Moissac, 4; Vidal et al., Quercy Roman, 47, 107. 37 For scholarship that dates the porch to Roger’s abbacy see Auguste Anglès, L’abbaye de Moissac (Paris, 1926), 10–11; Chagnolleau, Moissac, 17; Hearn, Romanesque Sculpture, 170; Vidal et al., Quercy Roman, 47. For later dates see Lagrèze-Fossat, Études historiques sur Moissac, vol. 2, 120, 125; and Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac 350–2.

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on the upper reaches of the porch is labeled “Rogerus Beatu,” which at least suggests an association between the porch and Roger’s abbacy. Understanding the porch as part of this campaign would help to explain its unusual orientation: rather then extending to the west, in line with the axis of the church itself, the porch projects from the south side of the church’s western tower narthex (Fig. 12). The porch’s turn to the south means that instead of projecting into the monastic enclosure, it extends towards the edge of that enclosure, towards its enclosing wall, and so towards openings in that wall to the town beyond, and finally towards visitors entering the monastery from the town. The imposing porch structure and its rich sculptural program may thus have been directed towards the lepers and lay townspeople who entered the monastery from the outside and may have been intended to attract their attention in order to draw them towards the church. If the porch and its sculptures were meant to draw lay visitors to the monastery to its church, and if those lay visitors were thus among the intended beholders of these sculptures, then their monastic patron(s) may have meant for these artworks to convey specific messages to these beholders. These messages may not have differed significantly from those that the sculptures were intended to deliver to their monastic beholders. Much as Mâle argued that the snake-woman as luxuria was intended to promote celibacy among the monks, so Meyer Schapiro writes of images of “Unchastity,” a category in which he includes the Moissac snakewoman, as appearing on the exteriors of churches in order to deliver a moralizing message from the church to the laypeople.38 However, based on Luyster’s work with the Vision texts, as discussed above, the snakewoman in contrast to Mary and Elizabeth on the opposite wall of the porch may been intended instead to warn the lay visitors against stinginess and promote generosity, in particular generosity towards the monastic community itself. Forsyth, again, argues that the sculptures were intended to elicit support for the monastery from the local nobility and that this may have served as a justification for their production.39 However, in considering the Moissac sculptures from the standpoint of reception, we must also imagine an equal movement in the opposite direction: laypeople coming to the porch and becoming beholders of its sculptures while bringing to their acts of beholding their own horizons of expectations. The historical evidence from Moissac documents the lay population’s independence from and even resistance to the monastery and this suggests that the intended messages of the sculptures’ monastic patron(s) may not have met with a particularly receptive audience. At approximately the same time as the porch was constructed, the lay 38 Meyer Schapiro, “From Mozarabic to Romanesque at Silos,” in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (New York, 1977), 36–7. 39 Forsyth, “Narrative at Moissac,” 79–80, 86–8.

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abbot of Moissac, Gausbert de Fumel, confirmed a set of customs for the town that were subsequently reconfirmed by the counts of Toulouse. These clarified that the lay abbot, not the monastic abbot, was the lord of the town and so established its independence from the monastery. Interestingly, these customs included regulations on sexual offenses, rape and adultery in particular, and so defined these offenses as a secular rather than a religious matter.40 The conflict over the water sources, discussed above, demonstrates the ongoing tension between the local laypeople and 40 Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 50–2; Rupin, L’abbaye et les cloîtres de Moissac, 71–2, 81–2.

FIG. 12. ENTRANCE PORTAL AND BELLTOWER. CHURCH OF SAINT-PIERRE, MOISSAC. 1100–30.

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the monastery in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. This tension is demonstrated again in the townspeople’s interest in the thirteenth century in establishing a Franciscan community in the town, for the monks vigorously resisted this initiative.41 Thus understanding the meanings that the snake-woman sculpture would have held for lay beholders, particularly laywomen, requires a separate reconstruction of the interests, ideas, and concerns they would have brought to this work of art: I attempt such a reconstruction in the following sections of this chapter.

THE TRANSI OF JEANNE DE BOURBONVENDÔME Like the Moissac snake-woman, Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme in her transi sculpture stands upright – the sculpture was originally attached to the wall above her tomb chest – with her head bent downward and turned slightly to her right (Fig. 13).42 And on her right side too, long locks of hair snake downward across her chest as well as outwards over her bent arm. As the locks cross her chest, they veil her right breast, while her left breast is circled and framed by repeated rings of peeling flesh. Below her breasts, the curving lines of the locks are repeated in miniature in the forms of squiggling worms that emerge from gaps in the flesh of her abdomen. Her right arm leads farther down, to where her hand presses her shroud against her lower abdomen. Here, just above the broad curve of her shroud, sits a pile of her entrails that have burst out of her body. Jeanne’s peeling flesh, the squirming worms, and her extruded entrails, along with her skeletal face, all mark her body in this sculpture as clearly dead and in the process of decay. And yet her upright stance and the inward gesture of her right arm, along with the reaching gesture made by her left arm and the separation of her feet as if to walk forward out of the niche that surrounds her, render this dead body strikingly lively. Jeanne’s body in this transi thus brings together marks of death with signs of life as well as combining the human with the non-human, as the worms infest her flesh, and the inside with the outside, as the flesh peels back from her chest and her entrails burst from her body. Like the Moissac femmeaux-serpents, Jeanne’s transi thus embodies the collapse of categories and breakdown of boundaries that scholars have come to recognize as characteristic of monstrosity. Finally, Jeanne’s transi too is a monstrous maternal form, for when seen from a point of view that highlights its Borzeix et al., Histoire de Moissac, 34–5, 55. On Jeanne’s transi and tomb see Musée du Louvre, Département des sculptures, Sculpture française, vol. 2: Renaissance et temps modernes (Paris, 1996), 527. I also discuss this sculpture in a forthcoming essay, “‘The Monster, Death, Becomes Pregnant’: Representations of Motherhood in Female Transi Tombs from Renaissance France,” to be published in Gender, Culture, and Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Art. 41

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FIG. 13. TRANSI OF JEANNE DE BOURBON-VENDÔME, DUCHESSE DE BOURBON, LATER COMTESSE DE BOULOGNE ET D’AUVERGE. FIRST QUARTER OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

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three-dimensionality – from below, for example, as it would have been seen when mounted on the wall above the rest of her tomb – the gathered folds of the shroud on her lower abdomen, topped off by the swirl of her entrails above, creates a protruding form suggestive of a pregnant female body. Likewise, when seen from this angle, the inward gesture of her right arm and hand becomes one of support for this potential pregnancy. It is because of the visual and conceptual similarities between the Moissac snake-woman sculpture and Jeanne’s transi, as similarly monstrous representations of motherhood, that I introduce the second sculpture here. To my knowledge, scholars have not previously considered these two works of art together as a pair. In her work on transi tombs, Kathleen Cohen does relate other such sculptures, German examples that include snakes and frogs on the dead and decaying body, to femmeaux-serpents sculptures in general, identifying the creatures on both as similarly symbolic of sin.43 In making this argument, she clearly relies on the interpretation of the snake-woman as an image of luxuria that was established by Mâle and has since come to be taken for granted by art historians. As this is an interpretation of the snake-woman sculpture that I already have departed from in this chapter, so I do not follow Cohen’s argument about the transis here. Instead, my interest is in using Jeanne’s transi as a means towards understanding what the Moissac femme-auxserpents sculpture as a monstrous representation of motherhood might have meant to the laywomen among its beholders. Jeanne’s transi is useful in this regard because it was, most likely, the product of her own patronage and so it documents a laywoman making use of these monstrous maternal forms. Indeed, it documents her using them as a form of self-representation in creating the monument through which she was to be commemorated by others. Patronage, however, is a complex topic in medieval art history, for it is frequently unclear how much influence or control the patron had over the work of art that was created for him or her. The patron could be little more than a donor, contributing the funds necessary for a project while others determined its content and form. Or the patron could be the determining force behind the project, shaping its content and form as well as providing the funds. Women’s patronage, furthermore, is a particularly complex topic. On the one hand, identifying women as the patrons of works of art opens the possibility of identifying women’s agency in relation to artworks and seeing women’s interests and concerns in the surviving artworks themselves. However, this is only the case if the woman involved was the determining force behind the work of art, not simply a financial donor, and also not the recipient

43 Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1973), 80–1, footnote 112.

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of the work of art as a gift made for her by others and so shaped by their interests and concerns rather than her own.44 There is no surviving contemporary documentation for the production of Jeanne’s transi and tomb. However, Étienne Baluze’s early eighteenthcentury Histoire généalogique de la maison d’Auvergne asserts that Jeanne was its patron, stating that “elle y fit bastir” or “she had it made.”45 Pamela King has identified two female transi tombs from fifteenth-century England that were the products of the dead women’s own patronage, those of Alice Chaucer and Isabel Despenser. Alice Chaucer outlived three husbands, surviving the third by twenty-five years, and despite provisions made by both her second and her third husbands for her to be buried by their sides, she apparently chose to buried with her father’s family instead. The tomb she had made for herself included both an effigy figure and a transi sculpture. Isabel Despenser also outlived two husbands and chose to be buried alone at Tewkesbury abbey.46 Demonstrating the power of her patronage, Despenser described the transi sculpture she desired for her tomb in her will in some detail, specifying “my Image to be made all naked, and no thing on my hede but myn here cast backwards.”47 The surviving contract for another, similar, sixteenth-century French tomb, that of Valentine Balbiani, likewise demonstrates the influence that patrons had over funerary monuments (Fig. 14). In this case, the patron of the tomb was Balbiani’s surviving husband, René de Birague. His contract with the sculptor for the tomb, Germain Pilon, specifies the inclusion of two images of Valentine: one identified in the contract as the “annothomie,” which is a transi sculpture, and the second identified as the “accoudée,” a figure leaning on its elbow.48 Like Despenser, Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme outlived two husbands; the first, John II, Duke of Bourbon, died in 1488, only one year after their marriage, and the second, John III, Count of Auvergne, died in 1501, six years after their marriage. Jeanne survived John III by ten years, dying 44 See Jill Caskey, “Whodunnit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford, 2006), 193–212; Madeline Caviness, “Anchoress, Abbess, and Queen: Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens, 1996), 105–54; Holly Flora, “Patronage” in Medieval Art History Today: Critical Terms, ed. Nina Rowe, special issue of Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): 207–18. 45 Étienne Baluze, Histoire généalogique de la maison d’Auvergne: justifiée par chartres, titres, histoires anciennes et autres preuves authentiques (Paris, 1708), vol. 1, 351. This is a problematic source, as Baluze apparently accepted some forged documents as authentic. However, that does not impact his account of Jeanne’s tomb. This argument for Jeanne’s patronage overlaps with my argument in “The Monster, Death, Becomes Pregnant.” 46 Pamela King, “‘My Image to be Made All Naked’: Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women in Fifteenth-Century England,” The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 13 (2003): 304–13. 47 King, “My Image to be Made All Naked,” 309. 48 Musée du Louvre, Sculpture française, vol. 2, 527. And on Valentine’s tomb see also Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism (Paris, 2003), 385–8.

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FIG. 14. GERMAIN PILON (FL. 1540–90). TOMB OF VALENTINE BALBIANI (1518–72).

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in 1511, and her tomb has been dated to 1520. Thus, unlike Valentine Balbiani, neither of her husbands could have acted as patron for her tomb. Instead, like Anne Chaucer and Isabel Despenser, in her widowhood she likely gained the ability to control the circumstances of her own burial and the form of her own monument. She may have begun planning the monument while she was still alive, in preparation for her death, or, again like Despenser, she may have made provision for it in a will – although none has survived. Jeanne’s likely ability to act as patron for her own tomb and transi, and so to use monstrous maternal forms in her own self-representation, was conditioned first by her widowhood, which would have allowed her to act independently, and secondly by her elevated social status, which would have given her the wealth she needed to sponsor the production of an elaborate monument for her own commemoration. Ordinary lay townswomen in twelfth-century Moissac would not have had access to the same resources and so would not have been able to similarly produce elaborate self-representations. However, their acts of reception of the similarly monstrous maternal form of the snake-woman sculpture from the monastery church’s porch can be thought of as analogous to Jeanne’s probable act of patronage for her transi sculpture. Both Jauss and Iser

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write of reception as including an act of “concretization” or “realization” that consists of a virtual remaking of the text or the work of art by the reader or beholder so that it fits within his or her horizon of expectations, forms an answer to his or her question, or otherwise responds to his or her concerns.49 This internalized act of recreation breaks down, to some degree, the distinction between reception and production as between beholders on the one hand, and patrons and artists on the other. It allows the reception of the snake-woman sculpture performed by the laywomen of Moissac to be understood as acts of virtual production that are similar to Jeanne’s likely act of patronage, with the exception of the fact that these virtual and internal acts did not produce lasting visual forms that can stand as documentation for them. Jeanne’s probable patronage of her own transi sculpture can serve to fill that gap, to some degree, by at least suggesting that these women could have appropriated the snake-woman’s monstrous maternal forms as a form of self-representation, seeing in the sculpture an image of themselves, their lives and experiences. If Jeanne’s probable patronage of her transi sculpture identifies it as her self-representation, that raises the question of why she would have chosen for herself the monstrous maternal forms that it embodies. The sculpture itself, in its suggestion of a pregnancy for this clearly dead and decaying body, points towards a connection between its forms and Jeanne’s experiences as a mother. Jeanne had two surviving daughters, Anne and Madeleine, both from her second marriage to John III of Auvergne. However, her first experiences with pregnancy and childbirth occurred during her brief marriage to John II of Bourbon. They were married when she was twenty-two and he was in his sixties: she was his third wife. When they married, his second wife, Catherine of Armagnac, had only recently died after giving birth to his first child, a son, who had died soon after birth. Jeanne herself was soon pregnant: she too gave birth to a son, who likewise died soon after, and then John II died as well. It seems likely that Jeanne’s pregnancy would have been shadowed by the recent deaths of her husband’s previous wife and her child: Jeanne may have wondered if she and her child would share the same fate. Women were well aware of other women’s maternal experiences and that shaped how they thought about their own: Jacqueline Marie Musacchio quotes a letter to Lorenzo de Medici from Agnolo Poliziano in which Poliziano describes Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice Orsini, remembering during her own pregnancy both Francesca Pitti’s death in childbirth and Pitti’s stillborn son, a memory prompted by the visit of Pitti’s husband Giovanni Tornabuoni.50 And Elizabeth L’Estrange argues that women’s reception of birth-related imagery in their Books of Hours would have been informed 49 Iser, Act of Reading, 21, 38; Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 73; Suleiman, “Introduction,” 22. 50 Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 29.

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by knowledge of their female family members’ difficulties with conception and childbirth.51 Jeanne survived this first childbirth, but lost first her child and then her husband. Thus in her first, likely formative experience with motherhood, the attempt to bring new life into the world instead brought death to everyone involved, except herself. Her transi as part of her tomb may have commemorated that first experience of pregnancy and childbirth as an experience of death. The fifteenth-century tomb of Maria Pereira, which she also commissioned for herself in her widowhood, likewise recognized her own experience of maternal loss by including a figure of her daughter, Beatrice Camponeschi, who had died at only fifteen months old.52 In her transi sculpture, Jeanne too finally succumbs, as this last pregnancy is formed from her own extruded entrails and so she gives birth to her own death. If Jeanne could thus have brought her experience of a rather traumatic first pregnancy to the creation of her transi sculpture, resulting in its monstrous maternal forms, then the laywomen of Moissac may likewise have brought similar experiences of difficult and even fatal pregnancies and births, their own along with those of their friends, neighbors, and family members, to their reception of the monstrous maternal forms of the snake-woman sculpture. Unfortunately, we cannot know the details of their experiences: Jeanne’s is recorded because her elevated social position produced an interest in her progeny as her husbands’ potential heirs. Likewise, Jeanne’s specific experience in her first pregnancy was shaped by her social status: John II of Bourbon was in need of an heir to continue his lineage, and his advanced age meant that time was running short for him, and so he married Jeanne shortly after the deaths of his second wife and her child. L’Estrange emphasizes the importance of offspring to aristocratic men as well as women.53 The ordinary townspeople of Moissac may not have faced the same level of pressure to reproduce in order to perpetuate a lineage. Nevertheless, the general outline of Jeanne’s experience in that first pregnancy, the way in which it brought life together with death, both her own potential death in the memory of the death of her husband’s previous wife, and the death of that woman’s child as well as her own, could have been familiar to the women of Moissac as well. Furthermore, by shifting attention from reception to response, the snake-woman sculpture itself can suggest some more details about the kinds of experiences that the laywomen of Moissac may have brought to their encounters with it. The woman in this sculpture is attacked, tortured, and consumed by the toads, the demon, and the snakes, and it is their torture of her body that creates the impression of impregnation, 51 52 53

L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 200–18. Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 31. L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 16–18, 26–30, 67, 113, 187.

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pregnancy, and breastfeeding. Thus the sculpture itself suggests that experiences of motherhood characterized by intense physical pain and suffering would have been particularly relevant for its beholders. Musacchio and L’Estrange both recognize the difficulties and dangers that childbirth posed for medieval and early modern women; however, these aspects of women’s experiences are not recognized in the images and objects they discuss. Indeed, Musacchio argues that the imagery on objects deliberately made for women as mothers worked to deny the risks and dangers of pregnancy and birth in order to promote childbearing.54 By contrast, women in Moissac may have been able to appropriate the femme-aux-serpents through reception in order to consider the significance of these troubling aspects of their maternal experiences.

MATERNITY AND LEPROSY: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SUFFERING Even as the laywomen of Moissac may have recognized the snake-woman sculpture as representing their own experiences of maternal pain and suffering in its image of a tormented maternal body, these women would have encountered other, actual, tormented bodies within the space of the church’s porch – those of lepers. As stated above, twelfth-century Moissac supported three separate houses for lepers. The lepers were originally drawn to the monastery in order to access the healing spring located within its walls. However, once Abbot Roger replaced access to that water source with the new relics, presumably made available in the church, the lepers along with other lay visitors were likely drawn to that building, in through its porch. As the lepers relied on charity, some may have lingered in the porch in order to beg from other visitors. This would have made the sick a lasting presence in that space and so a presence that other visitors would have encountered, even if only briefly, as they moved through it and into the church. Thus ideas about leprosy and attitudes towards those suffering from the disease may have formed an immediate part of the horizon of expectations that non-leprous beholders brought to understanding the porch’s sculptures. I argue that beholders could have linked leprosy to the femme-aux-serpents specifically through the creatures that torment her body, the snakes and toads, which were also associated with the disease. The roles that these creatures were understood to play in both causing and curing leprosy could have informed how they were understood in their appearance on the woman’s body. In this way, finally, attitudes towards lepers and leprosy may have informed how laywomen beholders understood the L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 93, 199–200, 216–18; Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 25–7, 33, 117–18, 125–6, 147, 150, 153.

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snake-woman sculpture’s representation of maternal pain and suffering and so their own maternal experiences. A wide variety of reputed causes for leprosy circulated during the Middle Ages. Many were sexual, including intercourse with a leprous woman (who did not show the disease), intercourse with a woman (often a prostitute) who had previously had intercourse with a leper, and either intercourse or conception during menstruation: in the latter case it was the child who would be afflicted with leprosy.55 Others, however, involved snakes and toads. A legend about the Emperor Constantine identified him as suffering from leprosy caused by a snakebite, an infection that was cured by his baptism.56 And in the fourteenth century, lepers along with Jews and Muslims were accused of poisoning wells using a powder made from dried snakes and toads in order to afflict the population at large with the disease.57 A wide variety of potential cures for leprosy also circulated in medieval culture. The miraculous healing spring at Moissac and Constantine’s legendary cure through baptism both point towards religious cures as well as water-based cures.58 Snake-based cures for leprosy were also common and had a long history, stretching back to antiquity. Galen, for example, recommended either drinking a potion made of boiled snake meat or applying it directly to the skin in order to cure the disease.59 Toad-based cures were not as common, but they did exist. One, documented in the fifteenth century, recommended that the toads be cooked with barley and the resulting mixture be either baked into bread or fed to chickens that would then be fed to the person afflicted with the disease.60 The identification of snakes as a cause of leprosy is commonly attributed to the scaly texture of the creature’s skin being likened to the skin changes that accompany the disease.61 However, that does not also account for the identification of toads as likewise a potential cause. The identification of both creatures as potential causes may instead stem from their association with the body’s dissolution after death, for lepers were frequently identified with the dead or seen as quasi-dead themselves. Timothy Miller and John Nesbitt argue that lepers were perceived as “walking corpses” in early 55 Françoise Beriac, Histoire des lépreux au Moyen Âge. Une socété d’exclu (Paris, 1988), 22–3, 68–76; Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, 1974), 54–5; François-Olivier Touati, Maladie et société au Moyen Âge: La lèpre, les lépreux et les léproseries dans la province ecclésiastique de Sens jusqu’au milieu de XIVe siècle (Paris, 1998), 109–10. 56 Beriac, Histoire des lépreux, 112–13; Timothy S. Miller and John W. Nesbitt, Walking Corpses: Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West (Ithaca, 2014), 101. 57 Beriac, Histoire des lépreux, 140–1; R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (New York, 1987), 64. 58 On water and leprosy see Touati, Maladie et société, 122–3, 444–5, 722–33. 59 Beriac, Histoire des lépreux, 261–2; Miller and Nesbitt, Walking Corpses, 13. 60 Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 72–3. 61 Touati, Maladie et société, 132; Miller and Nesbitt, Walking Corpses, 13–17.

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Christian Byzantium and that this perception of lepers, along with the disease itself, spread from east to west during the Middle Ages.62 By the thirteenth century, rituals for the exclusion of lepers had developed in the West that were modeled on the rites for the dead. Lepers were treated as “effectively dead,” in R.I. Moore’s terms, and so lost control over their property and possessions.63 Textual sources that identify snakes and toads with the dissolution of the dead body, as eaters of corpses in their graves, come from the same monastic milieu as the Vision texts discussed previously and so are likewise shaped by their writers’ moralizing agendas. Setting that agenda aside reveals striking images of the creatures as devourers of the dead. For example, another twelfth-century otherworld vision, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, transfers the creatures to Hell in order to use the image of bodily dissolution to picture the fate of condemned souls: Flaming dragons were sitting on some of them, lacerating them with their burning teeth in a pitiful way as if they were eating them. Fiery snakes encircled other people’s necks, arms, or entire bodies and, pressing their heads against the chests of the poor wretches, they sank the burning fangs of their mouths into their hearts. One could also see toads of wonderful size … sitting on the chests of some and burying their hideous muzzles there as if trying to pull out their hearts.64

Stripped of the association with hellfire and damnation, this passage gives snakes and toads starring roles as eaters of the dead. Likewise, a passage in a fourteenth-century sermon by Richard Rolle warns: Think, thou wretched catiff [coward], how it shall be for thee when thou shalt be cast into a pit under the earth, when toads, worms, snakes, and other venomous beasts shall eat thy eyes, thy nose, thy mouth, thy lips, thy tongue, thy head, thy hands, thy feet, and all thy body.65

In the context of the sermon, this passage forms part of a warning against the sins of pride and vanity. Taken on its own, however, it highlights the role of snakes and toads as devourers of the dead and so dissolvers of the body, which is torn apart already in the text by its listing of individual body parts. Applied to the leprosy, this understanding of snakes and toads as devourers and dissolvers could have helped to explain the frequent loss of the sufferers’ extremities, their noses, fingers, Miller and Nesbitt, Walking Corpses, xi. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 11, 58–63. 64 Quoted in Mary E. Robbins, “The Truculant Toad in the Middle Ages,” in Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York, 1996), 32. 65 Modernized version quoted in Robbins, “The Truculant Toad,” 35. For the original fourteenth-century text see Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, ed. S.J. Ogilvie-Thomson (Oxford, 1988), 68. 62 63

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and toes: understood as already at least partially dead, they may have been perceived as already being eaten by the creatures that were the cause of their disease. Snake-based cures for leprosy are likewise commonly explained as the creature’s ability to shed its skin standing as an image of healing from the disease;66 again, however, that does not account for the occasional toad-based cure. Both snake- and toad-based cures could be understood instead as operating through the principle of homeopathy: the cause of the illness reapplied to the body and serving as its cure. And both sets of cures could also be understood as drawing upon a second set of associations for these creatures, with fertility, birth, and life. The association of snakes and toads with both death and life, dissolution and fertility, appears to have been grounded in notions of spontaneous generation that pictured these creatures as born from the dead bodies that they devoured.67 These ideas too appear in afterlife visions, as in the twelfth-century Visions of Tondal, which described unchaste priests and nuns in Hell as eaten by a monster and then defecated out pregnant with vipers, which would then eat their way out of and finally finally back into the sinner’s bodies or souls.68 This text presents another striking image of the dead body as devoured by creatures, now combined with the birth of those creatures from that very body. Snakes or serpents were associated more directly with fertility and reproduction in the stories that coalesced as the Melusina legend in western France: here a hybrid serpent-woman becomes famous as a fertile mother who bore her human husband many children and who is said to have returned to suckle the last of her brood.69 Toads likewise were associated with fertility and reproduction in pilgrimage practices that used images of the creatures as ex-votos that were left at shrines where women sought aid for fertility and for difficulties with pregnancy and childbirth (the next chapter argues for identifying SaintBeriac, Histoire des lépreux, 261–2; Miller and Nesbitt, Walking Corpses, 13. On toads in particular as spontaneously generated see Luyster, “The Femme-auxSerpents at Moissac,” 184–5; on spontaneous generation in the context of medieval ideas about matter see Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011), 25, 34, 233. 68 Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), 293–4; Thomas Kren and Roger S. Wieck, The Visions of Tondal from the Library of Margaret of York (Malibu, 1990), 49. 69 On Melusina see E. Jane Burns, “A Snake-Tailed Woman: Hybridity and Dynasty in the Roman de Mélusine” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, 2013), 185–220; Françoise ClierColombani, Le fée Mélusine au moyen âge: Images, mythes, et symboles (Paris, 1991); Tania Colwell, “Mélusine: Ideal Mother or Inimitable Monster?” in Love, Marriage and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Miriam Müller, Isabel Davis, and Sarah Rees-Jones (Turnhout, 2003), 180–203; Miranda Griffin, Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature (Oxford, 2015), 137–75; and Florschuetz, Marking Maternity, 155–85; Jacques Le Goff, “Melusina: Mother and Pioneer” in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), 209–19. 66 67

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Lazare at Autun as one such shrine): the toad in this context may have represented either the female genitalia or the uterus. While the surviving examples of these ex-votos are of recent date, the practice of leaving such gifts at healing shrines is consistent with medieval pilgrimage practices.70 Applied to understanding snake- and toad-based cures for leprosy, these associations for the creatures may have pictured healing as a return to life after the quasi-death of the illness, a return accomplished because of the creature’s fertile force. The identification of snakes and toads as both causes and cures for leprosy, and as both devourers of the dead and bringers of life, may have formed part of the horizon of expectations that beholders brought to the Moissac snake-woman sculpture, particularly when they encountered that work of art together with members of the local leper communities within the space of the church porch. The creatures’ associations with fertility and fecundity would have reinforced reading the sculpted woman’s body as a maternal body, as these life-giving creatures attach themselves specifically to her breasts and genitalia. At the same time, however, the same creatures’ identification as devourers of the dead would have emphasized their consumptive attack on the woman’s body, and the combination of these two sets of associations could have worked to identify motherhood itself as just such an attack, as an eating away of the maternal body. This is, again, a monstrous representation of motherhood as it brings the human and the non-human together in intimate ways, through breastfeeding and vaginal penetration, and in so doing brings together fertility and destruction, life and death. Leprosy was monstrous in similar ways: its snake- and toad-based causes and cures likewise blurred the line between the human and the non-human, by likening human skin to snake skin and suggesting the ingestion of toads, and the slow progress of the disease and the social stigma that was increasingly attached to it similarly blurred the boundary between life and death. Thus the presence of the lepers in the porch at Moissac may have given the beholders of the snake-woman sculpture a local context for understanding its monstrosity, by allowing them to liken its monstrous representation of motherhood to the impact of the disease. The previous section of this chapter used Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme’s transi sculpture to argue that laywomen beholders of the snake-woman sculpture would have been able to relate it to their own experiences of motherhood similarly as joining life with death and as bringing pain and suffering. The additional associations between the sculpture’s monstrous form and leprosy may have allowed those women to further relate their 70 Jacques Gélis, A History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Boston, 1991), 60; Inger Lovkrona, “The Pregnant Frog and the Farmer’s Wife: Childbirth in the Middle Ages as Shown through a Legend,” Arv 45 (1989): 117; Luyster, “The Femme-aux-Serpents at Moissac,” 185.

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own experiences of motherhood to the experiences of those suffering from the disease. And this would have made attitudes towards those suffering from leprosy become relevant to these women’s understanding of their experiences. The ritual exclusion of lepers from society that developed in the thirteenth century, and the fourteenth-century well-poisoning accusations against lepers, along with Jews and Muslims, together point towards a hardening of attitudes towards those suffering from the disease that took place in the later Middle Ages. Abbot Roger’s move to close off the healing spring in the monastery at Moissac may have been an early (twelfth-century) sign of this increasingly negative attitude towards lepers. However, the indications that Roger’s move was contested by the townspeople of Moissac suggests that such a hardened attitude was not uniformly shared in the town at this time and that other positions towards those suffering from the disease were possible. In the twelfth century in particular, Françoise Beriac and François-Olivier Touati argue, leprosy was understood as a visible mark of the sufferer’s sins and further as a visible mark of God’s choice of that person to suffer for his or her sins while still alive, to be purified of those sins through that suffering, and so to achieve salvation upon death.71 Lepers, according to this set of ideas, were those who were chosen by God to suffer and so to be saved. This understanding of leprosy, furthermore, could also be tied in to the identification of snakes and toads as causes of the disease: if the creatures’ devouring of the dead body in the grave could be imaginatively transferred into the afterlife to picture the suffering of the sinner in Hell, then that same eating-away could also be transferred into this life in the form of the disease. Despite Abbot Roger’s closure of the healing spring, the evidence suggests that the lepers in Moissac were understood as those chosen by God to suffer for the sake of salvation. Typically, this attitude towards lepers led to them being identified as privileged objects for charitable assistance, frequently from Benedictine monasteries as the monks focused their obligation to care for the sick onto those suffering from the disease. This support drew lepers together in the orbit of monastic communities and provided a first step towards the establishment of institutions specifically for lepers.72 Early leper houses, those established in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, tended to be small communities located just outside towns and along major highways, so that the lepers had easy access to townspeople and travelers whom they would approach for charity.73 And

Beriac, Histoire des lépreux, 122–5; Touati, Maladie et société, 190–1, 202–3, 379. Beriac, Histoire des lépreux, 65; Touati, Maladie et société, 208–9, 252–3. 73 Beriac, Histoire des lépreux, 154–5; Catherine Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein and Sharon Farmer (Ithaca, 2000), 174–5; Touati, Maladie et société, 278–81. 71

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these houses were a focus for lay charitable support as well as monastic assistance, for their inhabitants could be understood as among the paupers Christi, Christ’s poor, at a time when both church reform movements and heretical movements increasingly identified poverty and powerlessness with holiness.74 This general pattern is a good fit for the history of the lepers of Moissac. They may well have been initially drawn to Moissac by the monastery in order to receive charitable support from the monks, as well as to have access to the healing spring. Growing numbers of lepers at the monastery may have led to the creation of the three leper houses. These houses fit the pattern of early institutions of this type in being located just outside town and along major routes. The existence of three such houses in this relatively small town suggests that they were the objects of generous charitable support from both the monks and the townspeople. Finally, the townspeople’s later interest in establishing a Franciscan community, mentioned above in the context of their ongoing conflicts with the monastery, suggests their interest in poverty and powerlessness as marks of the holy. The sculptures of the Moissac porch, furthermore, would potentially have reinforced beholders’ perceptions of the local leper population as those suffering for the sake of salvation through the narrative sequence of the parable of Dives and Lazarus that appears on its western wall, above the snake-woman sculpture; for Lazarus was often understood to have been a leper (Fig. 15). In the upper register of sculptures on this wall, Lazarus lies before the rich man Dives’s table: Lazarus dies there, with a dog licking at his open sores, while Dives and his companions feast. Lazarus’s soul is then taken up by an angel and lodged in Abraham’s bosom, an interestingly maternal image of salvation.75 On the next register down, in an image that has sustained considerable damage over time, Dives lies dying in bed and is surrounded and attacked by demons. Thus Dives has prospered and lived well in this life, but suffers for his sins in the hereafter, whereas Lazarus has already suffered while alive, has been purified of his sins through that suffering, and so has gone straight to paradise. This narrative of sin, suffering, and salvation appears directly above the femme-aux-serpents sculpture and so forms an immediate visual context for understanding it. For the sculpture’s monastic patron(s) and beholders, this may have reinforced a moralizing interpretation of the sculpture: they may have seen her as sharing Dives’s fate in suffering in the afterlife for her sins on earth. However, for other medieval beholders, who saw her as a monstrous maternal figure, who focused on role of the snakes and toads in creating that monstrous image, and who made the connection through those Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 103–4; Touati, Maladie et société, 242–3. On Abraham’s breast as an image of paradise see Jérôme Baschet, Le sein du père: Abraham et la paternité dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 2000). 74 75

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FIG. 15. WEST FLANK OF THE SOUTH PORTAL OF THE CHURCH OF SAINT-PIERRE, MOISSAC. 1100–30.

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creatures to leprosy, her suffering could instead have been understood to be similar to Lazarus’s or to those of the real-life lepers, as the suffering of motherhood endured in this life that leads to salvation in the hereafter. Thus, for laywomen beholders in particular, the potential connection between the snake-woman sculpture and leprosy may have provided an opportunity to make their own experiences of maternal suffering become meaningful as likewise potentially salvific. Of course, no direct evidence of such a possibility exists, but there is evidence of some medieval women’s ability to make similar meanings. Julian of Norwich provides one example: Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth argues that, in addition to her vision of a monstrous maternal Christ, Julian identified herself as a mother suffering in labor and giving spiritual birth to her revelations.76 Another example is Margery Kempe’s account of herself in her Book, as discussed in the Introduction. Margery’s Book begins with the birth of her first child, which she describes in terms of sickness, pain, and despair: “And after she had conceived, she was troubled with severe attacks of sickness until the child was born. And then, what with the labour-pains she had in childbirth, and the sickness that had gone before, she despaired of her life, believing she might not live.”77 She sent for her confessor at this point, but was unable to fully confess to him because of his sharp manner with her. This was followed by a period of several months, approximately the length of another pregnancy, in which she was tormented by demons, a period that ended with her first encounter with Christ. In the Book, this is all recounted quickly, within the first two pages of a popular modern edition, so that Margery’s suffering in childbirth is closely related to her first interaction with Christ and the two together mark the beginning of the transformation that her Book describes.78 Later in the Book, Margery begins to experience frequent fits of crying, which are identified in her text with Mary’s compassionate suffering at the base of the cross, suffering that was often understood to be the Virgin’s own delayed birth pains.79 Thus Margery seems to have been able to convert her own experience of maternal suffering into a Hellwarth, The Reproductive Unconscious, 32–4. Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 41. 78 Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 41–2. On this passage see Nancy Partner, “Reading the Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 3/1 (March 1991): 38–9; and Hope Phyllis Weissman, “Margery Kempe in Jerusalem: Hysterica Compassio in the Late Middle Ages” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts, 700–1600, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, 1982), 204–6. 79 For Margery’s crying fits see Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 104–7, 148, 178–9, 186–7, 203–4, 213, 223, 232–5. On these fits as Mary’s birth pains see Sarah Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers (Brighton, 1986), 51–2; Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia, 1991), 178–81, 192–3; Weissman, “Margery Kempe in Jerusalem,” 209–15. 76

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basis for identification with Mary and so as a means to draw herself close to Christ. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, Margery’s identification with Mary depends upon a later medieval devotional paradigm that stressed identification with the holy figures as a means for imaginative entry into the Christian story. However, the presence of the lepers at Moissac in the twelfth century, and the prevailing attitude towards their suffering at that time as salvific, may have provided contemporary laywomen beholders of the snake-woman sculpture with a significantly different route to a surprisingly similar end. Relating the sculpture’s monstrous maternal form to both their own experiences of motherhood and the lepers they encountered within the space of the porch may have allowed them, like Margery, to transform their experiences of pain and suffering from a cause for despair into a means for their eventual salvation.

RESURRECTING LAZARUS: THE EVE FROM SAINT-LAZARE AT AUTUN

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erched on both knees and her right elbow, the woman rests amidst thick fronds of fruiting foliage that relate closely to the forms of her body (Fig. 16). A first frond begins in front of her elbow, grows upwards and inwards towards her arm, bends back along with the angle of her hand, arcs around her face, and then bursts open into leaves and fruits just above her head. A second stem arcs upward behind her upper body before likewise bursting into bloom just above her outstretched left arm. A third twists its way upward in front of her lower torso: unlike the others, this frond expands outward into leaves and fruits that grow along its whole curving length. Two large leaves topped with seeded fruits extend onto the woman’s abdomen and intersect there with its defining lines. Two

FIG. 16. EVE. CHURCH OF SAINT-LAZARE, AUTUN. 1130.

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FIG. 17. EVE, DETAIL OF FACE (DETAIL OF FIG. 16).

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others curl backward in space around her buttocks and thighs, even as this part of her body twists sharply downwards towards the ground. A fourth frond enters the sculpture from beyond a break in its block and is bent into a horizontal direction by a disembodied clawed hand; this bend in the frond echoes that in the woman’s knees below. By bending the frond, furthermore, the clawed hand directs one of its fruits directly into the woman’s outstretched hand, an intersection that is emphasized as the third frond passes behind her wrist. Following the line of her left arm forward connects the rounded form of the fruit in her hand to the similarly rounded forms of her breasts, suggesting that they likewise be seen as the fruits of the second frond, as it passes behind her body in line with them. Finally, the curves of the first frond, along with the gesture of the woman’s bent right arm, call attention to her remarkably detailed and expressive face, which turns away from her extended arm and body (Fig. 17). She has a small, tight mouth, a damaged nose, and huge eyes. Her eyes are deep set with heavy eyelids, bulging eyeballs, deeply drilled pupils, and sharp lower ridges. A faint mark appears in the inner corner of her left eye and suggests the possibility of a tear forming there. This sculpture of Eve, the only remaining fragment of a lintel from a now-destroyed doorway into the church of Saint-Lazare at Autun, is one of the most familiar figures in the corpus of Romanesque sculpture. She has been celebrated as one of the few reclining nudes in medieval art and so as a demonstration of her creator’s originality: this emphasis in the scholarship on the sculpture dates back to its rediscovery in the nineteenth century and came to a climax in Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki’s celebration of “Gislebertus” as a proto-modern artist.1 She has

1 Denise Jalabert, “L’Ève de la cathédrale d’Autun: Sa place dans l’histoire de la sculpture romane,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (April 1949): 254–5, 261–4, 271–2; Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki, Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun (New York, 1961), 8–12, 149, 177. For a critique of Grivot and Zarnecki’s work see Linda Seidel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (Chicago, 1999), 1–32.

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also been identified as an allegory of sin and repentence – or the lack thereof: this reading of the sculpture originated in an article by Karl Werckmeister and has been further refined by Linda Seidel. Werckmeister argued for identifying Eve’s gesture of bending her right arm to touch her hand to her cheek as a conventional sign for grief and so identified a tension within the sculpture as a whole; with her extended left arm, Eve sins by plucking the apple from the tree, but with her right arm, she simultaneously repents of her action.2 Or does she? In order to unify the figure, and to make it conform to the texts he takes to be its source, Werckmeister ultimately discounts Eve’s apparent grief, writing that her gesture “cannot be taken to express more than an aimless consciousness of its [sin’s] disgrace, a lament in reaction to the punishment which merges with the sin itself.”3 Thus the tension Werckmeister identifies in the sculpture becomes a contradiction in his own argument, as he first argues for identifying her gesture as representing grief, but then argues against giving that grief any real value in understanding the sculpture. Seidel reintroduces the tension into the sculpture’s form by allowing its different aspects to point in different directions: her nudity and reach for the apple towards Eve as an unrepentant sinner; and her horizontal posture, flowing hair, and apparent tears, towards St. Mary Magdalene as an example of repentance and redemption.4 My response to the Eve sculpture as recounted above resembles Seidel’s interpretation in likewise focusing on a tension within its form, between the close relationship between Eve’s body and the surrounding foliage, on the one hand, and the emotions suggested by her face and gesture on the other. Werckmeister again reconciled these different aspects of the sculpture by identifying them as separate incidents in a highly compressed Genesis narrative: this narrative begins with the Fall, represented by the plucking of the apple; continues with Adam and Eve hiding in shame, represented by Eve’s immersion in the foliage; and ends with the Expulsion, represented by the grief gesture that Werckmeister goes on to discount.5 Yet in looking at the sculpture, it becomes clear that Eve has not yet sinned here – she has not yet even removed the apple from the tree – thus she has no reason to hide or to feel shame or grief: so why is she immersed in foliage? And why does she appear to be crying? Her body’s close relationship to the growing and fruiting foliage seems to speak to its own fertile potential and so to Eve’s 2 O.K. Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from Saint-Lazare, Autun,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 4–9. 3 Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 14. Likewise, Werckmeister states that the Eve sculpture’s “incessant vacillation between one state and the other limits the aimless consciousness of the disgrace of sin, which is not transcended by deliberate repentance,” 25. 4 Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 103–7. 5 Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 4–9.

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potential motherhood. Her breasts, in particular, in their relation to the still unplucked apple are not yet a means to tempt Adam through her sexuality, but instead identify her body as too fruiting and so potentially fruitful. Likewise, the leaves and fruits of the third frond that extend out onto her abdomen identify it as a place of growth and life. But what connection could Eve’s potential motherhood have to her apparent grief? More specifically, what meaning or meanings could the connection that the Eve sculpture appears to create between motherhood and grief have carried for the sculpture’s medieval beholders? To answer these questions, I first turn to the church of Saint-Lazare at Autun, to the shrine to St. Lazarus that once occupied its apse, and to the sculpted tableau of the Raising of Lazarus that appeared within that shrine. Connecting the Eve sculpture to the shrine and its sculptures establishes a different narrative context for her grief in the Gospel story of the Resurrection of Lazarus instead of the Genesis narrative of the Fall. Thus, again like Seidel, I identify the Eve sculpture as a figure for St. Mary Magdalene, although I focus on Mary’s role in the story of her brother’s death and return to life rather than on her repentance for her own sins or her relationship to Christ. After establishing the connection between the Eve sculpture and the Lazarus shrine, this chapter explores the different meanings that the story of Lazarus’s resurrection was given in various medieval texts, and uses these texts to understand the way in which the story was told at Autun, as well as the meanings the story may have held for medieval visitors to the church there. These visitors would have included laywomen who came to Saint-Lazare as pilgrims to this site and specifically to its Lazarus shrine. Women would likely have come to the church and shrine as pilgrims on behalf of their children: children who were sick, injured, or deceased and for whom they were in search of a miracle, or children who were understood to have already been cured or resurrected, miracles for which the women came to give thanks. Thus unlike the previous two chapters which focused on women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, this chapter focuses on relationships between women as mothers and their children, a focus that continues into Chapter 4. In coming as pilgrims to SaintLazare, these women became beholders of the Eve sculpture, and the motivations for their pilgrimages would have formed part of the horizon of expectations they brought to this work of art. I argue that the Eve sculpture’s combination of a fertile body with a sorrowful face would have become meaningful for these women in relation to experiences that combined motherhood with grief and to practices that validated the expression of grief specifically in relation to the loss or potential loss of a child.

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RECONSTRUCTING AUTUN: THE EVE SCULPTURE AND THE LAZARUS SHRINE 6 Both the doorway of which the Eve sculpture formed part and the shrine to St. Lazarus that stood in the interior of the church of Saint-Lazare were destroyed in 1766 when the cathedral chapter renovated the building to conform to current tastes. The resulting fragments were used as construction filler until they were recovered in the 1860s.7 Today both the Eve sculpture and what remains of the shrine form part of the collection of the Musée Rolin in Autun. Seeing the Eve as part of the original doorway, and seeing the shrine, thus both require acts of reconstruction. In the case of the doorway, reconstruction is aided by a textual account of the church made during an inquiry into the authenticity of the Lazarus relics held in Autun that took place in 1482. This text identifies the iconography of the sculptures that occupied various portions of the portal: the Resurrection of Lazarus in the tympanum over the door, Adam and Eve on the lintel below the tympanum, and St. Lazarus dressed as a bishop on the trumeau in the center of the doorway.8 However, the text gives no indication of the appearance of any of these sculptures. In general, scholars have argued that Adam occupied the left portion of the lintel, in a horizontal position similar to Eve’s, so that their heads came together at its center. The clawed hand that appears at the right edge of the Eve fragment suggests that a demon once appeared behind her and may have been balanced by a similar figure behind Adam.9 Reconstructions of the interior shrine to St. Lazarus have been based on textual accounts, on the surviving fragments of the shine itself, and on archaeological work done within the church. The shrine took the form of a miniature church with a truncated nave, a transept, and an elongated apse (Fig. 18). It was located in the church’s main apse so that its nave façade 6 I have made a similar argument for connecting the Eve sculpture to the Lazarus shrine in “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage” in Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, ed. Elina Gertsman (New York, 2012), 17–24. 7 M. Janot, “La cathédrale d’Autun et l’art roman,” Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne 64 (1933): 100; Denis Grivot, “Les restaurations de la cathédrale d’Autun au dix-neuvième siècle,” Histoire et Archéologie 53 (May 1981): 54; Grivot and Zarnecki, Gislebertus, 149; Jalabert, “L’Ève de la cathédrale d’Autun,” 247–51; Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 1–2, 26–7, 49–51; Victor Terret, “La cathédrale Saint-Lazare d’Autun,” Société Éduenne des Lettres, Sciences, et Arts 43 (1919): 274, 288; Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 1. 8 Jalabert, “L’Ève de la cathédrale d’Autun,” 247–9; Grivot and Zarnecki, Gislebertus, 146; Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 1–2, 26–7, 49–51; Terret, “La cathédrale Saint-Lazare d’Autun,” 288; Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 1. 9 Jalabert, “L’Ève de la cathédrale d’Autun,” 252; Grivot and Zarnecki, Gislebertus, 149 and Plan IX; Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 2. Dissenting voices are Janot and Terret, who locate Eve on the left side of the lintel, Adam on the right, and the demonic figure bending the tree into Eve’s hand in the center: see Janot, “La cathédrale d’Autun de l’art roman,” 115; and Victor Terret, La sculpture bourguignonne aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles: Autun, vol. II (Paris, 1925), 45–7.

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FIG. 18. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ST. LAZARUS SHRINE FROM SAINTLAZARE, AUTUN, SHOWING LOCATIONS OF THE INTERIOR SCULPTURES.

formed the retable behind the high altar. Its exterior was richly decorated with fluted pilasters that were further enriched with zig-zag, criss-cross, and curling motifs, along with carved cornices and capitals, and plaques with figurative sculptures, all made from multicolored marbles. The figurative plaques included a crucifixion on the retable façade and images of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Martha on the two transept façades.10 These two façades also had doorways that led into the shrine’s interior, which was occupied by a sculpted tableau of the Resurrection of Lazarus. According to textual sources, Lazarus lay in a sarcophagus, the lid of which was raised by figures that stood at its corners. Christ stood at Lazarus’s feet with his right arm extended in order to call the dead man out of the tomb. St. Peter stood to Christ’s right, holding the keys to Heaven in his hand, and St. Andrew stood to Christ’s left. Opposite them, near Lazarus’s head, stood his sisters, St. Mary Magdalene opposite St. Peter and St. Martha opposite St. Andrew. Finally, somewhere within the shrine (the exact location is

10 Gilles Rollier, “Nouvelles données sur le tombeau de saint Lazare à Autun,” Revue d’Auvergne 114/4 (2000): 128–31; Neil Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” Roland Recht, “‘Le tombeau de saint Lazare à Autun’: synthèse du travail de Richard Hamann,” Gilles Rollier, “Essai de reconstitution du tombeau: résultats et limites” all in Le tombeau de saint Lazare et la sculpture romane à Autun après Gislebertus (Autun, 1985), 15–16, 39, 42–5, 91–8.

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FIG. 19. PLAN OF THE CHURCH OF SAINT-LAZARE, AUTUN, SHOWING LOCATIONS OF THE EVE SCULPTURE, LAZARUS SHRINE, AND SELECTED CAPITALS: A. ADORATION OF THE MAGI, B. MAGI BEFORE HEROD, C. DREAM OF THE MAGI, D. FLIGHT INTO

not clear) was a descending passageway that gave access to Lazarus’s relics, which were located in a cavity, sealed behind a red marble slab.11 The doorway, and so the Eve sculpture, and the Lazarus shrine were closely related to one another, first of all, in space (Fig. 19). The doorway, the building’s eastern transept portal, was the church’s main entrance: it gave access into the building from an open space within the otherwise heavily built-up castrum of Autun. The building’s atypical orientation, with its transept running east–west, its apse extending to the south, and its nave to the north, allowed this entrance to be aligned with the main western portals of the town’s pre-existing cathedral church of Saint-Nazare, which was located across the open square from Saint-Lazare. This allowed for easy movement between the two structures.12 Entering Saint-Lazare through this doorway would have brought visitors to the church into its 11 Recht, “Le tombeau de saint Lazare à Autun,” 39; Rollier, “Essai de reconstitution du tombeau,” 42–5, 100–1; Rollier, “Nouvelles données sur le tombeau,” 131–7; Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 17–18. 12 Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 3, 35–6, 49; Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 13; Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 22. Scholars have tended to regularize the orientation of Saint-Lazare and so to refer to this doorway as the north transept portal.

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transept and crossing, and so into the area immediately adjacent to the Lazarus shrine in its main apse. Visitors to the shrine would most likely have moved first into the building’s south-eastern chapel, which is now dedicated to the Virgin but was originally dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene, and then entered the shrine through the doorway in its eastern transept façade.13 Thus the act of entering the shrine would have repeated that of entering the church itself, a doubling that would have encouraged visitors to associate these two entrances, and so to associate the Eve sculpture from the church doorway with the shrine and its sculptures. Secondly, the eastern transept doorway and the interior shrine were related through shared iconographic motifs and visual forms. Each featured a scene of the Resurrection of Lazarus, on the tympanum over the door and in the interior space of the shrine. Each also associated a female figure or figures with this scene: Eve on the doorway and St. Mary Magdalene and St. Martha on the shrine. Mary and Martha both appeared twice on the shrine, once in the sculpted plaques on its exterior and a second time in its interior tableaux. Mary Magdalene likely appeared on the shrine’s eastern transept façade, facing towards the chapel that was dedicated to her, and Martha on the western façade, likewise facing a chapel dedicated to her.14 If beholders identified the Eve sculpture as another Mary Magdalene figure, as Seidel has argued, then her appearance on the eastern façades of both the church and the shrine would have further associated the entrances into the two structures. Both the doorway and the shrine also featured thick foliage forms: the fronds that surround and relate to Eve’s body as described above, and others that grew up the shrine’s exterior pilasters and sprouted on its capitals and two major cornices.15 Both also included demonic motifs that appeared in close combination with these foliage forms; the claw that bends the fruit into Eve’s hand suggests the presence of a demonic figure behind her on the lintel, one surviving pilaster from the shrine shows foliage moving in and out of demonic masks, and multiple surviving capitals from the shrine are carved with similar masks that may have topped foliate pilasters and that appeared in combination with foliate capitals.16 Finally, the Eve sculpture and the St. Mary Madgalene and St. Martha sculptures from the interior of the shrine are tied together by their expressive facial features and their dramatic arm gestures (Figs. 20–1). Both of the female saints share the 13 Brigitte Maurice-Charbard, “Le culte de saint Lazare à Autun: Le cheminement des pèlerins,” Revue d’Auverge 114/4 (2000): 139–43; Rollier, “Nouvelles données sur le tombeau,” 133–4. 14 Rollier, “Nouvelles données sur le tombeau,” 133–4. 15 Rollier, “Essai de reconstitution du tombeau,” pilasters catalog numbers 42–4, 94, and 97 (which includes a figure in the foliage); capitals catalog numbers 4–6, 33, 41, 43 (which includes two animals eating from a tree), 66–9, 74–5, 115, 118; and cornice catalog numbers 173–206 and 230–58. 16 Rollier, “Essai de reconstitution du tombeau,” pilaster catalog number 21 and capitals catalog numbers 11, 53, 79, 102, 116, 126, 129, and 149.

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FIG. 20. ST. MARY MAGDALENE FROM THE SHRINE TO ST. LAZARUS. CHURCH OF SAINTLAZARE, AUTUN. 1140.

FIG. 21. ST. MARTHA FROM THE SHRINE TO ST. LAZARUS. CHURCH OF SAINT-LAZARE, AUTUN. 1140.

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Eve’s heavy-lidded and sharply underlined eyes with their deeply drilled pupils. Mary Magdalene holds both of her hands at shoulder height, with her palms turned out, while Martha similarly holds one hand at shoulder height, but uses her other hand to press her garment against her nose and mouth.

THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS IN MEDIEVAL TEXTS The close relationship established at Autun between the Eve sculpture and the St. Lazarus shrine points to the story of the Raising of Lazarus as a narrative context for understanding that sculpture. The story’s biblical source is in John’s Gospel (John 11:1–44), where it begins by identifying Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha, as the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair: this is rather confusing because that anointing has not yet happened within John’s text. The text next states that Lazarus became ill, and so his sisters sent word to Jesus, who responded by stating that his illness was not unto death and was a means for the glorification of God. The story continues when, two days later, Jesus decides to go to their home in Bethany, but his disciples resist this decision. Jesus first explains that Lazarus is asleep and he is going to wake him, and then, after further resistance, he clarifies that Lazarus is dead. As Jesus approaches Bethany, Martha comes out to him. She tells Jesus that if he had been there, Lazarus would not have died, and that she knows God will grant whatever he asks; Jesus responds by stating that Lazarus will rise again; and she affirms her belief that he will rise on the last day along with her belief in Christ. Martha next goes to Mary to tell her that Jesus is calling for her. Mary goes to him, followed by a number of Jews who believe she is going to weep at Lazarus’s tomb. When she comes to Jesus, she falls at his feet, and, like her sister, claims that if he had been there, her brother would not have died. She weeps, as do the Jews, and Jesus, moved and troubled, asks to be taken to Lazarus’s tomb. At the tomb, he asks that the stone that covers its entrance be moved away, Martha warns of the smell likely to come from his dead body, and Jesus reminds those present to believe. The stone is removed, Jesus calls Lazarus to come forth, and he emerges, wrapped up in his shroud. Finally, some time later, Jesus comes back to Bethany and there is a supper at which Martha serves and Lazarus sits at the table. During the meal, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with nard and wipes them with her hair – thus bringing John’s story full circle (John 12:1–4). This story was retold in the Middle Ages in a variety of different textual genres and with a variety of different emphases. These medieval versions can help with understanding both the way in which the story was told at Saint-Lazare and the meanings that it may have held for visitors to

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the church. One of the textual genres in which the Raising of Lazarus appeared was hagiography, as it was incorporated into lives of St. Mary Magdalene. Her life story was a composite narrative assembled in the Middle Ages from various biblical references, including the Raising of Lazarus, along with other legendary material. One of the more extensive of these narratives is a joint Life of St. Mary Magdalene and of her Sister St. Martha that is attributed to the ninth-century scholar Rabanus Maurus, but was likely written in the twelfth century and in a Cistercian milieu.17 The composite nature of this account allows it to resolve the confusion that marks the beginning of John’s account of the Raising of Lazarus by incorporating an episode from Luke’s Gospel in which an unnamed woman washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair, in repentance for her sins, during a feast at the house of a Pharisee: here that action is attributed to Mary Magdalene and precedes the account of Lazarus’s death and return to life.18 Pseudo-Rabanus Maurus’s account also expands on the biblical text by placing more emphasis on Mary and Martha’s mourning for Lazarus prior to Jesus’ arrival: the text states that they tore their clothes and were blinded by their tears.19 The text likewise expands on the emotional exchange between Jesus and Mary: he is troubled by her tears and when he is invited to the tomb he weeps.20 Finally, the text expands on the meaning of Lazarus’s resurrection as the forgiveness of sin.21 A second life of St. Mary Magdalene, that contained in Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century Golden Legend, covers this ground much more quickly in order to emphasize instead Mary’s later life, after the Crucifixion, which brought her, Martha, and Lazarus all to France. Like the pseudo-Rabanus account, this one first identifies Mary as the repentant sinner at Jesus’ feet, washing them with her tears and wiping them with her hair. Then it identifies Lazarus’s resurrection as one of several miracles that Jesus performed for Mary, out of his love for her. And it too emphasizes the emotions that ran between them in the form of tears, stating that “if he saw Mary in tears, he could not hold back his own. Out of love for her he raised her brother to life again.”22 17 David Mycoff, “Introduction,” in Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, trans. David Mycoff (Kalamazoo, 1989), 8–10. 18 Étienne-Michel Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine en Provence, et sur les autres apostres de cette contrée, Saint Lazare, Saint Maximin, Saint Marthe, et les saintes Maries Jacobé et Salomeé, etc. (Paris, 1865), 155–9; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 32–9. 19 Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine, 186; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 46. 20 Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine, 195–7; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 50–1. 21 Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine, 202–5; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 52–3. 22 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Selections, trans. Christopher Stace (New York, 1998), 165–6.

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A second textual genre in which the story of Lazarus’s resurrection was told and retold by medieval writers and for medieval audiences was drama. Plays based on the story survive from France and England and from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. One of the earliest of these texts is the twelfth-century Raising of Lazarus in the Fleury playbook.23 It begins with Mary washing Christ’s feet with her tears and so like the saints’ lives it incorporates the event from Luke’s Gospel in order to clarify the beginning of John’s account. Kathleen Ashley emphasizes that all that Mary does in this scene is cry: she does not also offer a verbal confession of her sins, nor a verbal plea for their forgiveness.24 This results in an emphasis on emotion in the Fleury play that continues into Mary’s encounter with Christ after Lazarus’s death wherein, according to the stage directions, her grief moves him to tremble and to cry inwardly.25 The fact that Jesus’ tears are inward suggests some hesitation in the play over the open expression of emotion and perhaps a gendering of that expression: Mary weeps openly, but Jesus holds in his answering tears. Ashley argues that this emphasis on emotion in the Fleury text is ultimately balanced by its elaboration of the meaning of the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection as a demonstration of divine power.26 That balance disappears in later, fifteenth-century French Lazarus plays that focus on the emotional interaction between Lazarus and his sisters and the emotional consequences of his resurrection. A version from Arras, attributed to Eustache Mercadé, casts Lazarus as an older brother who comforts his two young sisters from his deathbed. After his death, the sisters are inconsolable, until Christ uses his power to ease their grief. By contrast, Arnoul Gréban’s play has Lazarus dying in pain and despair as his sisters attempt to comfort him. However, his resurrection is again the occasion for an emotional transformation for all involved, from fear and sorrow to “parfaicte joye.”27 Likewise, multiple fifteenth-century English plays of the Resurrection of Lazarus shift attention to the emotional consequences of his death and rebirth for his sisters. The English plays differ, however, in the way in which they present the sisters’ grief and so the significance they ascribe to it. Katharine Goodland argues for understanding these texts in relation to longstanding practices of female mourning for the dead and an ongoing conflict between those practices and the Christian belief in eternal life, a belief that should make mourning 23 The Latin text of the Fleury Lazarus play is available in Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford, 1933), 199–208. 24 This scene occupies lines 1–50 of the play, Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 199–201; Kathleen M. Ashley, “The Fleury Raising of Lazarus and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought,” Comparative Drama 15 (1981): 142. 25 These stage directions appear between lines 268–9 in the play, Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 207; Ashley, “The Fleury Raising of Lazarus,” 141–3. 26 Ashley, “The Fleury Raising of Lazarus,” 144–5. 27 Kathleen M. Ashley, “The Resurrection of Lazarus in Late Medieval English and French Cycle Drama,” Papers on Language and Literature 22 (1986): 236–40.

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inappropriate and even offensive: she sees each of these plays as offering a different solution to that conflict.28 According to Goodland, the N-Town, Towneley, and York Lazarus plays, along with the Digby play of the Life of St. Mary Magdalene, take a negative attitude towards female acts of mourning, while the Chester play alone presents the sisters’ mourning in a positive light. In the latter play, she writes, the sisters’ tears are presented not as grief over their brother’s death, but as prayers directed towards Christ, which allows the sisters to be presented as exemplary Christians. As in the Gréban play, the outcome of Lazarus’s resurrection in this version is a transformation of the sisters’ emotions, from woe to joy: Martha exclaims to Jesus “A, lord, honored be thou oo that hast saved us from mych woe,” and Mary, “now my harte is glad and light to see my brother ryse in my sight … The, lord, I honour with all my might kneeling upon my knees.”29 In the N-Town play, by contrast, the sisters’ grief is presented as excessive and offensive: similar to pseudoRabanus’s Life, they tear their hair and throw themselves on the ground, but in the play they are rebuked for their actions by male “consolers.” Like the Fleury play’s contrast between Mary’s open and Christ’s inward tears, this contrast between the sisters and the consolers suggests a gendering of emotion, with emotional display attributed to women and here presented in a strongly negative light. The N-Town text further likens Mary’s grief to Lazarus’s death, Goodland argues, and so identifies it as a form of sin: in this play, she must first leave her state of grief in order for her brother to be then brought back to life, rather than that emotional transformation coming as a consequence of his resurrection as in the Mercadé, Gréban, and Chester plays.30 Finally, the raising of Lazarus also appeared in prayers or charms that were used in cases of difficult childbirth. One of the most popular of these prayers was the so-called peperit charm that survives in multiple versions from across Europe and throughout the Middle Ages.31 Its core is the repeated “peperit formula” that is used for multiple examples of miraculous births: “Sancta Maria peperit Christum, Sancta Anna peperit Mariam, Sancta Elizabeth peperit Johannem, Sancta Cecelia peperit Remigium” or 28 Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Burlington, 2005), 20–2, 33–8; Katharine Goodland, “‘Us for to wepe no man may lett’: Resistant Female Grief in the Medieval Female Lazarus Plays” in The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Lisa Perfetti (Gainesville, 2005), 91–7. 29 Robert M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle (London, 1974), 250, lines 459–60, 467–8, and 473; Goodland, Female Mourning, 22, 38, 47–8; Goodland, “Us for to wepe no man may lett,” 95, 105–8. 30 Goodland, Female Mourning, 11, 22, 37, 42–3; Goodland, “Us for to wepe no man may lett,” 91–102. 31 Marianne Elsakkers, “In Pain You Shall Bear Children (Gen 3:16): Medieval Prayers for Safe Delivery” in Women and Miracle Stories: A Multidisciplinary Exploration, ed. Anne-Marie Korte (Leiden, 2001), 180–1.

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“Mary brought forth Christ, St. Anne brought forth Mary, St. Elizabeth brought forth John, St. Cecelia brought forth Remegius.”32 The prayer thus focuses on the child coming forth out its mother’s body, and the recitation of these biblical and other saintly models serves to plead for the child to come forth from the mother currently in distress. Different versions of the peperit charm add other materials to this core text and a reference to the Raising of Lazarus can appear in that additional material. That reference can be very brief, as in a fifteenthcentury Anglo-Norman version where it consists solely of “Christi dixit, Lazarus veni foras,” or “Christ said, Lazarus come out.”33 Or it can be a longer version that tells more of the story, as in an eleventh-century version from England, which states (in translation): “The Lord, seeing the sisters of Lazarus weeping at the tomb, wept in the presence of the Jews and cried out: Lazarus come forth. And he came forth with hands and feet bound who had been dead four days.”34 This version, like several of the lives and plays discussed above, puts emphasis on the emotional interaction between the sisters and Jesus as leading to the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection. In the context of a difficult childbirth, this could have served to cast the female birth attendants as the sisters, pleading to God for a miracle with their tears, similar to the sisters in the Chester play. In both versions, it is the idea of coming forth that links the Lazarus story to the peperit formula and this explains the story’s place in the charm: the child is called forth from his mother’s body as Lazarus was called out of his tomb. Depending on who spoke these words, the prayer may have cast one of the female birth attendants as Christ in calling for the child to come forth. By contrast, the mother’s body is cast as the tomb from which he is to emerge.35

THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS AT AUTUN The medieval retellings of the Raising of Lazarus in hagiography, plays, and childbirth prayers provide a framework for understanding the way in which this story was told in the sculptures at Autun as well as the meanings it may have carried for the sculptures’ medieval beholders. First, these texts can assist with reconstructing the role that medieval beholders may have seen the Eve sculpture as a figure for Mary Magdalene playing in relation to the Lazarus story. Secondly, the texts can help to clarify

Elsakkers, “In Pain You Shall Bear Children,” 190. Elsakkers, “In Pain You Shall Bear Children,” 190. 34 From Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85. Quoted and translated in Lisa M.C. Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic: The Old English Metrical Childbirth Charms,” Modern Philology 92/3 (February 1995): 292. 35 Elsakkers, “In Pain You Shall Bear Children,” 188; L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 58–9, 67; Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” 292. 32 33

PLATE I. VIRGIN AND CHILD. ILE-DE-FRANCE, FRANCE. 1340–50.

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PLATE II. VIRGIN AND CHILD AS SEDES SAPIENTIAE. AUVERGNE, FRANCE. LATE TWELFTH CENTURY.

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PLATE III. VIRGIN AND CHILD, CALLED VIERGE DE LA CELLE. CHAMPAGNE, FRANCE. SECOND QUARTER OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

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PLATE IV. VIRGIN NURSING THE CHRIST-CHILD. PICARDY, FRANCE. 1400.

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how medieval beholders would have understood the emotions that are expressed in the Eve, Mary Magdalene, and Martha sculptures’ facial features and gestures. Finally, the childbirth prayers in particular can point to the meanings that the connection between the Eve sculpture, as an image of a fertile and fruiting body, and the Lazarus shrine, as a tomb, may have held for medieval visitors to the church and shrine. Linda Seidel identifies the Eve sculpture as also a Mary Magdalene figure because of her horizontal position, her long loose hair, and the apparent tear on her cheek.36 If, as Seidel argues, these attributes of the sculpture allow it to also be seen as Mary Magdalene weeping at Christ’s feet, then when is she doing so and why? Or when might medieval beholders have understood her to be doing this and what motivations might they have ascribed to her action? The medieval saints’ lives and plays locate Mary, crying, at Christ’s feet on multiple different occasions and for a variety of reasons. First, in the saints’ lives and the Fleury play, she appears at his feet crying in repentance for her sins: this is the event that was incorporated from Luke’s Gospel into the composite life of the Magdalene.37 Secondly, John’s Gospel, the pseudo-Rabanus Life, and the Fleury play all locate her at Jesus’ feet when she comes out to greet him on his return after Lazarus’s death. The Fleury play amplifies this moment by first having Martha fall at Christ’s feet and then having Mary do so multiple times.38 In that play, Mary’s actions at this point in the story express her grief over her brother’s death and they trouble and move Christ: they lead him to ask to be taken to the tomb and so lead directly to the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection. The Golden Legend life and some versions of the peperit prayer likewise emphasize the sisters’ tears at this moment as leading to their brother’s return from the dead.39 In the Chester play, Goodland argues, Mary’s tears at this point should be identified as prayers to Christ, and the same could be said of the tears of birth attendants who spoke the peperit prayers.40 Finally, John’s Gospel and the pseudo-Rabanus Life locate Mary at Christ’s feet a third time, at the meal at Bethany where she anoints his feet with ointments and wipes them with her hair. In both, Christ suggests that she is doing so in order to begin preparing his body for burial.41 Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 103–7. Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine, 155–9; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 32–9; de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 165; Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 199–201; Ashley, “The Fleury Raising of Lazarus,” 142. 38 John 11:32–4; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 50; Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine, 193–4; and the Fleury play’s stage directions between lines 213–14 for Martha, and lines 256–7 for Mary, in Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 206–7. 39 de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 166; Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” 292. 40 Goodland, Female Mourning, 22, 38, 47–8; Goodland, “Us for to wepe no man may lett,” 95, 105–8. 41 John 12:3–7; Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine, 36 37

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While the medieval texts thus provide multiple different moments and motivations for Mary to appear crying at Christ’s feet, a majority of the texts emphasize her place there after her brother’s death and the role of her tears in leading to his resurrection. Medieval visitors to Autun may thus have expected to find Mary performing this action somewhere in relation to the Lazarus story as told there and so may have identified the Eve sculpture as playing this role, specifically in relation to the scene of the Raising of Lazarus that appeared in the tympanum above it. The tympanum has not survived and the textual account of the doorway program gives no indication of how exactly the scene of Lazarus’s resurrection was represented there. However, surviving contemporary representations of this scene can suggest what it might have looked like. The Raising of Lazarus does not appear to have been a common subject matter in French Romanesque sculpture and so it is necessary to look further afield geographically and to other media to find contemporary examples of this scene. Several such images, including a late eleventhcentury fresco from Sant’Angelo in Formis and twelfth-century mosaics from Monreale and the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, show one of the two sisters as prostrate at Christ’s feet even as Lazarus appears upright at the entrance to his tomb; the second sister kneels and may turn her attention from Christ to her brother (Fig. 22). The Autun tympanum may likewise have shown Lazarus upright, emerging from his tomb, alongside a figure of Christ, and the Eve sculpture below may have taken Mary’s place at Christ’s feet. In that case, Eve as Mary would have appeared as mourning for her brother and supplicating Christ with her tears. Multiple medieval textual versions of the Lazarus story emphasized its emotional content: the sisters’ grief at Lazarus’s death, Mary’s emotional appeal to Christ, his emotional response, and the transformation of the sisters’ emotions as related to Lazarus’s resurrection. This emotional emphasis may have informed medieval beholders’ expectations for the Lazarus story as told in the sculptures at Autun. The Eve sculpture from the doorway into Saint-Lazare, and the St. Mary Magdalene and St. Martha sculptures from the interior of the Lazarus shrine would have met those expectations as they convey various emotions through their gestures and facial features. However, these aspects of medieval artworks are particularly difficult to interpret. For example, prior to Werckmeister’s work on Autun, Eve’s gesture to her cheek was identified as representing her whispering tempting words to Adam.42 Werckmeister argued for identifying it instead as a gesture symbolizing grief based on its appearance in early medieval manuscript images of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.43 His 210–16; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 54–7. 42 Jalabert, “L’Ève de la cathédrale d’Autun,” 252. 43 Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 4–8.

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argument about this specific gesture’s significance points to the larger fact that the meanings of gestures are cultural conventions that change over time and so must be reconstructed through historical research, not assumed based on current norms. In his work on gesture in medieval and Renaissance art, Moshe Barasch likewise argues for identifying the hand-to-cheek gesture as a longstanding conventional sign for grief or despair. And he identifies the gesture of holding one veiled hand to the face that is enacted by the St. Martha sculpture from the Lazarus shrine as sharing that conventional significance.44 Contemporary examples of the second gesture used as a sign of grief include the scene of the death of Edward the Confessor in the Bayeux Tapestry, where a woman presses her garment to her face, and the Crucifixion scene from the Klosterneuberg altarpiece, where St. John does the same. As a gesture performed by Martha at the moment of Lazarus’s resurrection, the veiled hand held to the face could also be identified with the moment in textual accounts of the Lazarus story in which she warns against the smell likely to come from her brother’s dead body.45 However, in other twelfth-century representations of the Raising of Lazarus that detail 44 Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1976), 10–13, 20–3, 31–2, 67–71. 45 I make a similar point in “The Eve Fragment from Autun,” 24.

FIG. 22. MIRACLE OF THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS BY JESUS CHRIST. FRESCO FROM THE BASILICA OF SANT’ANGELO IN FORMIS. 1072.

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is typically transferred to male figures who flank Lazarus as he emerges from the tomb and either pinch their noses shut, as in the Sant’Angelo in Formis fresco (Fig. 22), or like the St. Martha sculpture, raise a veiled hand to their face, as in the Monreale and Palermo mosaics. In these images, this transfer of concern over the smell to other figures allows Martha to join her sister in expressing grief over her brother’s death and supplicating Christ. This shift may follow from the strong association between women and mourning for the dead that is the focus of Goodland’s work on the English Lazarus plays as discussed above. A twelfth-century relief sculpture of the Raising of Lazarus from Chichester cathedral similarly shows both sisters standing together with their hands held to their cheeks in order to represent their grief (Fig. 23). Beholders at Autun may thus have seen both sisters as expressing grief through their differing gestures. However, such beholders would have encountered the two expressing their grief separately and in different locations: first in the Eve sculpture as a figure for St. Mary Magdalene on the exterior of the building, and then in the St. Martha sculpture within the interior shrine. The St. Mary Magdalene sculpture from the interior of the Lazarus shrine holds both her hands at shoulder height, with her palms turned outwards. Unlike Eve and Martha’s gestures, this action is not a longstanding gesture for the expression of grief: in fact, it does not seem to have had a fixed conventional meaning. According to Jean-Claude Schmitt’s work on gesture in medieval culture, one potential association for this hand position was that of a priest celebrating the mass, but it is difficult to see that as an appropriate meaning for the gesture as performed by Mary.46 Schmitt also describes this gesture as it appears in a twelfth-century manuscript of the Book of Prayers of Hildegard of Bingen as a general gesture that stands in contrast to more specific gestures with conventional meanings, such as the hand held to the cheek in grief.47 Following from this point in Schmitt’s work, it seems best to approach the potential meaning of Mary’s gesture by way of its contrast to those of Eve and Martha. Where the first two sculptures both make inward gestures, in bringing their hands to their faces, Mary makes an opening gesture as she places both of her hands in front of her shoulders and turns her palms forwards. Likewise, where both Eve and Martha’s gestures tend downwards, Eve’s as part of her overall horizontal posture and Martha’s by bringing her head forwards and down, Mary’s gesture tends upwards as her bent arms held at her shoulders at least suggests the possibility of her extending them up. Likewise, Martha’s downward and inward gesture is accompanied by a furrowing of her brows that contracts her face, whereas Mary’s raised hands call attention to the raised corners of her mouth and so to her slight smile. The Mercadé, Gréban, Chester, and N-Town plays 46 Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1990), 311, 345, plates XXVII and XXVIII. 47 Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 156–61, figures 1–8.

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FIG. 23. RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS. RELIEF FROM CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL. 1125–50.

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all describe a transformation in the sisters’ emotions, the release of their grief and even its transformation into joy, as either following from or preceding (N-Town) Lazarus’s resurrection.48 Medieval beholders of the Autun sculptures may have been able to recognize a similar emotional transformation in the visual differences between Eve and Martha’s and Mary’s gestures and expressions. Barasch, furthermore, identifies Eve and Martha’s gestures not simply as expressing grief, but more specifically as representing that emotion as restrained, contained, or controlled. He places these gestures in opposition to more extreme expressions of grief, such as the tearing of skin, hair, or clothing.49 The significance of overt emotional display seems to have been at stake in certain of the medieval textual versions of the Lazarus story and so may have been a concern that medieval beholders brought to the Autun sculptures as well. As stated above, the Fleury play suggests a gendering of emotional display as it has Martha and then Mary, repeatedly, throw herself, crying, at Christ’s feet, while he holds in his answering tears. And again as mentioned previously, Goodland likewise argues that tensions surrounding women’s overt acts of mourning motivated the differences between the English Lazarus plays.50 Medieval culture generally recommended the restraint of the emotions overall and did so for women in particular, even as women were understood to be less able to exercise that kind of selfcontrol. Thus extreme emotional displays were expected from women, even as women were stigmatized for these sorts of displays.51 The Autun Eve and Martha sculptures would seem to defy this gendered expectation as each figure restrains her grief and so they could have been understood by medieval beholders as positive images of female emotional self-control. The Digby play of the Life of St. Mary Magdalene likewise casts her and Martha as stoically self-controlled in response to their brother’s death.52 The Eve sculpture’s emotional self-control is problematized, however, by the tear that seems to appear in the corner of her eye. Tears could be highly valued in medieval culture as the visible marks of deep emotional experience, but women’s tears were not necessarily valued in this way, as women were understood to be more prone to tears and as able to produce

48 Ashley, “The Resurrection of Lazarus,” 236–40; Goodland, Female Mourning, 22, 38, 47–8; Goodland, “Us for to wepe no man may lett,” 91, 94–5, 105–8. 49 Barasch, Gestures of Despair, 10–13, 20–3, 31–2, 67–71. 50 The Fleury play’s stage directions between lines 213–14 for Martha and lines 256–7 for Mary, in Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 206–7; Goodland, “Us for to wepe no man may lett,” 91–7; and Goodland, Female Mourning, 20–2, 33–8. 51 Barbara Rosenwein identifies this pattern as developing in the 600s in the context of a war between the Neustrians and Austrasians, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006), 150–3, 161; more generally see Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 23, 37–41, 140, 227–31, 212–23. 52 Goodland, Female Mourning, 22, 52; Goodland, “Us for to wepe no man may lett,” 95, 111–12.

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insincere and deceptive tears.53 Eve’s combination of the hand-to-cheek gesture of restrained grief with her apparent tear suggests seeing that tear as a genuine sign of her inner emotional state that has escaped her efforts at self-control. In the textual sources, Mary’s tears at Christ’s feet move him to ask to be taken to Lazarus’s tomb, and a visitor to Autun likewise would have progressed from the doorway with the Eve sculpture and the Raising of Lazarus scene on the tympanum first to, and then into, the shrine that served as Lazarus’s tomb. Here a visitor would have encountered a second sculpted version of his resurrection. Discussing the relationship between these two versions of the Raising of Lazarus is difficult because of the loss of the tympanum. However, if the tympanum’s resurrection scene resembled other contemporary versions in presenting Lazarus as emerging from his tomb then it would have had an interesting relationship to the scene inside the shrine, for here Lazarus still lay within a sarcophagus. In this case, as a visitor moved from the doorway to the shrine, the story would have moved forward, from Eve as St. Mary Magdalene crying at Christ’s feet to the tomb as the site of the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection; but at the same time, the story would have moved backwards, from Lazarus emerging from his tomb to him still lying within it. Likewise, if the tympanum resembled the other contemporary versions, then the doorway program would have represented moments both before and after the resurrection itself, as Mary in the form of Eve cried at Christ’s feet and Lazarus emerged from the tomb; whereas the shrine focused on the moment of the resurrection itself by representing Christ calling for Lazarus to come forth. The Christ sculpture that stood at Lazarus’s feet in the shrine is described in the sources as having one arm extended to call Lazarus out of his tomb. That arm, and Christ’s face, were both made of white marble, in contrast to the stone used for the remainder of the shrine’s sculptures, a contrast in materials that would have called attention to his gesture of command.54 This would have produced an emphasis in the Lazarus story as told at Autun on the moment of Christ’s call, an emphasis that recalls the use of the Lazarus story in the peperit childbirth prayers specifically in order to call the child to come forth from the womb. This suggests that for medieval beholders, and in particular for medieval women who may have been familiar with these prayers from their use during childbirth, the Lazarus story as told at Autun may have recalled 53 See Elina Gertsman, “Introduction: ‘Going they went and wept’: Tears in Medieval Discourse,” Lyn A. Blanchfield, “Prolegomenon: Considerations of Weeping and Sincerity in the Middle Ages,” Judith Steinhoff, “Weeping Women: Social Roles and Images in Fourteenth-Century Tuscany,” Christopher Swift, “A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and Tears,” and Katherine K. O’Sullivan, “Tears and Trial: Weeping as Forensic Evidence in Piers Plowman” all in Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, ed. Elina Gertsman (New York, 2012), xii–xvi, xxii–xxvi, 35–7, 80–5, 197–9. 54 Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 17.

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these prayers and the circumstances of their use. Elizabeth L’Estrange likewise argues that images of the Raising of Lazarus in Books of Hours would have recalled these prayers and their use for their female owners and users.55 Finally, as visitors moved from the doorway to the shrine, they would have been in a position to recognize the connection between the Eve sculpture and the shrine that was created by the foliage forms that grow up around and even onto her body and those that likewise grew up and around the exterior of the shrine. For medieval beholders who were familiar with the peperit charm, including medieval women, it may also have suggested a way of understanding that connection, as between womb and tomb. The prayer creates that connection by using Christ’s words to call the child out of its mother’s body in the same way that he called Lazarus out of his grave.56 At Autun, the foliage creates a similar link between Eve’s potentially maternal body, with her breasts appearing as fruits on a vine and her abdomen marked by leaves and fruits, and the shrine as a burial place. This connection identifies the mother’s body as potentially a place of death rather than of new life, but it also identifies the tomb as potentially a place of life, of resurrection or rebirth, rather than of death. The latter interpretation of the womb–tomb connection is emphasized at Autun as that link is forged by the lively forms of the growing and fruiting foliage.

AUTUN AS A PILGRIMAGE DESTINATION AND WOMEN AS PILGRIMS Medieval visitors to Saint-Lazare at Autun would thus have encountered the Eve sculpture in relation to the Lazarus story as told there, as focusing on the moment of Lazarus’s resurrection and on his sisters’ emotional transformation, and as joining womb to tomb, birth to death to rebirth. I next turn my attention to establishing who these visitors would have been, what would have brought them to the church, and so what horizon of expectations they would have brought to understanding these sculptures, the shrine, and the story or stories they told. Very little documentation survives for Saint-Lazare as it functioned in the Middle Ages: indeed, the sources give no clear reason for the construction of this church. It was not built to replace the existing cathedral of Saint-Nazare, for that church continued to function as Autun’s cathedral after the construction of the new church and the two shared cathedral status beginning in 1195.57 SaintL’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 144. Elsakkers, “In Pain You Shall Bear Children,” 188; Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” 292. 57 Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 35–9; Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 13. 55

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Lazare’s alignment with this existing structure, so that its main doorway faced Saint-Nazare’s western portals, suggests that it was built instead as a monumental annex to the cathedral church. But why build such an annex? Werckmeister argues that Saint-Lazare, and specifically its transept doorway, was used for the performance of public penance, basing this argument on his reading of the doorway’s iconography and his (mis) identification of this doorway as its north, rather than east, portal. However, he admits that public penance may not have been performed with any frequency in twelfth-century France and that there is no definitive evidence for the existence of penitential portals in medieval churches.58 Werckmeister does not mention the interior shrine to St. Lazarus in his discussion of the church and so he may not have been aware of it. Scholars who have taken the shrine into account have identified it with the main purpose or function of the church, arguing that it was built to contain the shrine, which was itself built to contain the relics of St. Lazarus. Neil Stratford and Linda Seidel both identify Saint-Lazare as a pilgrimage destination, built to give pilgrims access to Lazarus’s relics and, together with the shrine, built to shape their encounter with the relics in a specific way.59 Stratford argues that the shrine was meant to replicate the form of Lazarus’s original tomb in the Holy Land and so to allow pilgrims something like direct access to one of Christ’s miracles. Seidel expands on his work to argue that the church as a whole was meant to replicate sites in the Holy Land and so to serve pilgrims as a substitute for that ultimate destination.60 Finally, Stratford suggests that the clergy at Autun may have built this new monumental setting for the Lazarus relics in order to compete for pilgrimage traffic with the nearby shrine to St. Mary Magdalene at Vezelay.61 Although there is little surviving evidence for Saint-Lazare as a pilgrimage destination, what evidence is available suggests that it functioned as a healing shrine and so identifies pilgrimage to Autun as part of the process for seeking a miraculous cure for an illness or injury. By the time of the church’s construction in the twelfth century, the town had long been a pilgrimage destination and a site of cures, for the tombs of two local saints, Symphorien and Cassien, had been the locations for miraculous healings since the early Christian period.62 According to the account of the translation of the relics of St. Lazarus into the new church, the relics began to perform healing miracles during the translation ceremony itself 58 59

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Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 15–23. Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 7, 40–2; Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,”

60 Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 43–6, 154–8; Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 13, 31–2. 61 Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 13. 62 Émile Thevenot, Autun: Cité romaine et chrétienne: Histoire-monuments-sites (Autun, 1932), 142–8.

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and continued to do so thereafter.63 Beginning in the thirteenth century, the church in Autun collected accounts of these miracles. In the fifteenth century, certain of these accounts were used as evidence in support of the authenticity of Autun’s Lazarus relics in a dispute with the church in nearby Avallon: this dispute also generated the account of the eastern transept doorway into Saint-Lazare that was utilized above to reconstruct its sculptural program. The miracles recorded in these accounts include the healing of an archdeacon of Reims, Ursus, from leprosy, and the cure of a possessed deaf-mute.64 Because evidence for Saint-Lazare as a healing shrine is slight, it must be supplemented by information on medieval healing shrines in general. Unlike Archdeacon Ursus, most pilgrims to such shrines were local people and people of lower social standing: indeed, it may have been the distance that Ursus had traveled to reach Autun, combined with his elevated status as archdeacon, that led to his miracle being chosen for inclusion in the dossier in support of Autun’s Lazarus relics. Pilgrims at healing shrines often included local and lower-class women and so they can be assumed to have been present at Saint-Lazare, although their presence there is not documented.65 Women who made pilgrimages to these shrines frequently did so in their role as mothers. Some were seeking cures for themselves, specifically for problems with conceiving, carrying, or giving birth to a child.66 Richard Finucane’s work on children in medieval miracle accounts provides several examples of women in this situation: Riccucia, Marguerita, and Pina each, after several years of childlessness, made a vow to a saint, either St. Nicholas or St. Louis of Toulouse, that if she became pregnant she would visit the saint’s shrine and leave an offering there, either the child’s weight in wax or a wax image of the child or the child’s clothing. All three became pregnant, gave birth, and then completed the promised pilgrimage.67 These women’s cures differ from Ursus’s in that they took place at home, rather than at the shrine, and then were followed by a thanksgiving pilgrimage: Finucane’s statistical work with medieval miracle accounts shows an even split between these two types of miraculous cures.68 Other women made pilgrimages on behalf of their children. Finucane’s 63 The account of the translation is included in Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine, document 50, 722. 64 Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 14. 65 Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, 1977), 126–7, 139–42, 166–7, 184–6. 66 Leigh Ann Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden, 2009), 94–105; Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 106; Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London, 2000), 2–3, 16. 67 Ronald C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York, 2000), 19–20. 68 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 69, 88.

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work also includes examples of the apparent resurrections of both stillborn infants and older children who had died due to accidents or illnesses.69 For example, after the eighteen-month-old Gilbert wandered off and drowned in a barrel, his mother vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas Cantilupe (or to send someone in her place), and the child recovered.70 Likewise, five-year-old Joanna drowned while her parents were at a public house; when they were notified, her mother collapsed in grief, while her father led the crowd that had gathered in prayers to St. Thomas. When the girl recovered the next day, her parents brought her first to their local parish church and then to Cantilupe’s tomb.71 While both the mother and the father were involved in this case, Finucane’s statistical research shows that it was more often mothers who made the vows to the saints that were followed up by thanksgiving pilgrimages on behalf of their children.72 The importance of healing shrines to medieval women in their roles as mothers is also demonstrated by an unofficial pilgrimage site, a wood near Dombes in eastern France that was dedicated to St. Guinefort, a greyhound regarded as a saint, and was frequented primarily by local women in search of cures for their children. This site and the ritual that was performed there appear to have been the products of the women themselves and so expressed their concern for the health of their children and their desire for a way to intervene on their children’s behalf.73 Both Kathleen Nolan and Laura Spitzer have brought local women’s concerns as mothers to bear on understanding the capital frieze that appears as part of the western doorways or Royal Portals at Chartres cathedral.74 Nolan and Spitzer each identify the cathedral as a local pilgrimage destination visited by peasant women in search of healings, and frequently of resurrections, for their children. They do so by turning to miracles collected at the site and recorded in a thirteenth-century text by Jean le Marchant: this text includes multiple examples of mothers appealing to the Virgin at Chartres for aid and bringing their children to the cathedral to be cured or revived.75 Nolan and Spitzer relate these miracles to the capital frieze’s expanded version of the Massacre of the Innocents, which focuses attention on the mothers’ grief over their children, and its depiction of the story of Joachim and Anne, which emphasizes their sadness over their

Craig, Wandering Women, 79–80, 116–26; Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, 22–9. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, 104–5. 71 Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, 117–21. 72 Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, figure 3.4, p. 100, and figure 4.6, p. 148. 73 Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge, 1983). 74 Kathleen Nolan, “‘Ploratus et Ululatus’: The Mothers in the Massacre of the Innocents at Chartres Cathedral,” Studies in Iconography 17 (1996): 95–100, 119–28; Laura Spitzer, “The Cult of the Virgin and Gothic Sculpture: Evaluating Opposition in the Chartres West Façade Capital Frieze,” Gesta 33/2 (1994): 132, 135–40. 75 Nolan, “Ploratus et Ululatus,” 122–8; Spitzer, “The Cult of the Virgin,” 140–5. 69 70

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childlessness followed by their joy at the birth of the Virgin.76 Nolan and Spitzer disagree in their interpretations of the cathedral’s clerical patrons’ intentions in including these images. Nolan argues that the images show the clergy’s willingness to accommodate the interests of local laywomen and so are evidence of the “potency” of women’s traditions; by contrast, Spitzer contends that these images were included only in order to be marginalized within the cathedral’s overall sculptural program and so the women’s interests were incorporated only in order to be suppressed in favor of the cathedral’s official cult.77 In the following sections, I likewise consider women as pilgrims on behalf of their children as potential beholders of the Eve sculpture and the Lazarus shrine and its sculptures; however, my interest is not in understanding the intentions of the patrons or producers of these works, but instead in understanding these women’s experiences at Autun as part of their experiences of motherhood.

BIRTH, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION The different scenarios that Finucane describes for women making pilgrimages to healing shrines, whether for the sake of their own fertility or for the sake of their existing children, and whether in thanksgiving for or in expectation of a miracle, provide different sets of interests and expectations that women may have brought to Saint-Lazare at Autun, to both the Eve sculpture and the Lazarus shrine and its sculptures. Some women may have come as pilgrims to Autun in search of assistance in conceiving, carrying, or giving birth to a child, or to give thanks for assistance already received. For these women, the relationship described above between the Lazarus story as told in the sculptures at Autun and the use of that story in the peperit childbirth prayer may have had particular relevance: they may even have heard this prayer recited while in labor, whether those attempts were successful in bringing forth a live child or not, and whether the woman was in search of a miracle or was giving thanks for one. These women may have focused on the foliage that marks both Eve’s body and the shrine as sites of growth and life, rather than death, and either prayed for or gave thanks for their own bodies becoming similarly fertile and fruitful. And they may have focused on the emotional transformation visible in the Eve, Martha, and Mary Magdalene sculptures’ gestures and faces, from grief over death to joy at a life regained. They may have recognized or looked forward to a similar transformation in their own emotions as they finally gave birth to a living child. Other women may have come to Saint-Lazare in search of or to give thanks for miraculous cures or resurrections for their children. Unlike 76 77

Nolan, “Ploratus et Ululatus,” 119, 124; Spitzer, “The Cult of the Virgin,” 137–40. Nolan, “Ploratus et Ululatus,” 100, 126–8; Spitzer, “The Cult of the Virgin,” 145–7.

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Chartres cathedral, there is no direct documentation for Saint-Lazare functioning specifically as a pilgrimage destination for women in this situation. However, certain aspects of the building’s sculptural program may have marked it as an appropriate destination for such women. William Travis has identified pilgrimage or travel as a theme for multiple sculpted capitals that appear in the church’s choir, including the Journey to Emmaus, the Adoration of the Magi, the Magi before Herod, and the Flight into Egypt (Fig. 24).78 The last three of these capitals also form part of a narrative of the infancy of Christ and so this is travel undertaken on behalf of a child. These capitals are clustered just inside the eastern transept doorway and on the piers that separate the south-eastern chapel 78 William J. Travis, “The Journey to Emmaus Capital at Saint-Lazare at Autun” in The Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden, 2004), 205.

FIG. 24. CAPITAL DEPICTING THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. CHURCH OF SAINTLAZARE, AUTUN. 1130.

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from the main apse, and so this narrative of travel on behalf of a child would have accompanied a visitor who entered through the doorway and moved to the shrine (Fig. 19).79 Thus a women who came to Autun as a pilgrim on behalf of her own child may have been able to see her actions mirrored in the building’s imagery. As she made her way from the doorway to the shrine, furthermore, such a pilgrim would also have had the opportunity to see the combination of foliage forms and demonic figures that appear on both the Eve sculpture and the shrine’s exterior. While the foliage, as discussed above, may have marked both Eve’s body and Lazarus’s tomb as sites of life rather than death, the combination of foliage with demonic figures may have had other associations for women making pilgrimages. For this combination recalls aspects of the Dombes pilgrimage site and the ritual performed there, a site and a ritual that women in that area had created for themselves and that presumably expressed their own ideas about the process of a miraculous cure. Autun is not far from Dombes (approximately 150 kilometers) and so women may have brought similar ideas to Saint-Lazare and may have seen them reflected in its sculptures. The Dombes site was a wood and the ritual included interactions with the shrubs and trees: hanging the sickly child’s clothing on a bush, driving nails into trees, affixing candles to them, and finally passing the child back-and-forth repeatedly between two trees before leaving the child at the base of a tree. The women would then call for the “fauns,” demonic creatures, to come forth from the surrounding wood, take away the sickly child, and leave a fat healthy child in its place: the implication is that this second child was the woman’s real child who had been taken by the fauns and that the sickly child was one the fauns had put in its place.80 In his study of the Dombes pilgrimage practice, Jean-Claude Schmitt explains that the wooded nature of this site identified it as a liminal place where interaction with the fauns and so rescue of the children was possible.81 The foliage and the demonic figures that lurked within it in the sculptures at Autun may have marked this church as a similar place for women making pilgrimages on behalf of their children. While no miracle accounts concerning mothers and children survive from Autun, the stories that Finucane recounts in his work on children in medieval miracle accounts resemble the Lazarus story as told at Autun in a number of ways. These tales begin with a death, that of Lazarus, or of a stillborn child, or of a child who dies from an accident or illness. Mary Magdalene or the child’s mother responds with grief and with a petition to Christ or to a saint that this death be reversed. Mary Magdalene’s tears at Christ’s feet both express her grief and move Christ into action. In Finucane’s miracle accounts, mothers – and sometimes fathers – both 79 80 81

Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 119–20; Travis, “The Journey to Emmaus Capital,” 205–7. Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, 4–6, 71–5. Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, 69, 86.

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express grief and take ritual action to move a saint to bring the child back to life: mothers – and sometimes fathers – make vows to the saints, bend coins over their children’s bodies, and/or take ritual measurements of them, as a way of asking for the saints’ aid.82 At Autun, the Eve sculpture’s conflation of the figure of Mary Magdalene crying at Christ’s feet with a fruitful and so potentially maternal body may have allowed women pilgrims to identify her tearful petition with their own actions as mothers. From this point forward, the Lazarus story as told at Autun is complicated by its temporal structure, as discussed above: first by the doorway’s potential conflation of this moment of tearful intercession with the accomplishment of the miracle, if Lazarus appeared in the tympanum emerging from his tomb as he does in surviving contemporary versions of this scene, and secondly by the potential movement of the story backwards in time to the moment of the miracle itself inside the shrine. This temporal structure would better fit the miracles that Finucane discusses that occurred away from the shrine and were followed up by thanksgiving pilgrimages: some women who came to Autun as pilgrims may have likewise already experienced the miraculous healings or resurrections of their children at home and may have come to the shrine to give thanks. They may have recognized both the beginnings and the ends of their stories in the Eve sculpture and the tympanum’s Lazarus scene, and moving from there into the shrine may have allowed them to remember in the Martha and Mary Magdalene sculptures the different emotions they experienced at the time of the miracle itself: grief at the child’s injury or death followed by joy at its healing or resurrection. For women who came to the shrine in search of a miracle, rather than in thanksgiving for one that had already occurred, the tympanum over the doorway may have held out the promise of miracles to be accomplished at the shrine within, and the emotional transformation visible in the Martha and Mary Magdalene sculptures may have suggested a similar resolution for their grief. But what if that miracle did not happen? If the woman brought her child to the shrine, but the child was not healed or resurrected? The miracle accounts that Finucane uses as evidence do not recognize this possibility: these stories were collected after the miracle had already occurred, sometimes long after, and were frequently collected in order to be used to support the saint’s canonization.83 This gives all of these accounts a retrospective quality that resembles the way in which the Lazarus story was likely told at Autun, again if Lazarus appeared as resurrected on the tympanum: the happy ending to the story was already known and that made the story worth telling, whether to the clergy at the shrine who were interested in collecting miracle accounts, or in the sculptures at the shrine as a model for hoped-for future miracles. 82 83

Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, 11–15, 42, 89–91, 99, 151–8. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, 1–2, 19, 136–9.

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The account of the Dombes pilgrimage practice, by contrast, does acknowledge the possibility that children might die, specifically as a result of the ritual performed there. Sometimes, when a child was left for the fauns, wolves would instead come out of the woods and take the child away. Children who survived this portion of the ritual would be immersed repeatedly in a nearby river and some died as a result.84 This information appears in the account of the Dombes ritual because it was a hostile account, written by the inquisitor Stephen of Bourbon who also destroyed the wood in which it was performed and forbade its further performance. By including the possibility of children dying as a result of the ritual, Bourbon contested its use by local women as a healing practice for their children and recast these women as infanticides.85 In his work on the Dombes pilgrimage practice, Schmitt interprets this ritual as providing an explanation for children’s illnesses and even their deaths in the form of the faun’s malicious interventions in human affairs.86 For women who came to Autun in hopes of miracles that did not happen, the presence of the demonic figures lurking in the foliage – behind Eve on the doorway lintel and on the exterior of the shrine – may have suggested the influence of malicious forces here as well in preventing the hoped-for miracles. Finally, for women in this situation, the temporal structure of the Lazarus story as likely told at Autun may have offered some consolation. In moving from the tympanum to the scene inside the shrine, the story may have moved backwards in terms of narrative time, from Lazarus as resurrected and standing at the entrance to his tomb to Lazarus in his tomb at the moment when Christ called for him. The story may also have moved backwards in terms of historical time if, as Stratford and Seidel argue, the shrine was meant to replicate aspects of Lazarus’s tomb in the Holy Land and so transport pilgrims back to this moment in Christ’s life.87 However, the Lazarus story as told at Autun may also have worked to transport pilgrims forward in time, to the moment of Lazarus’s second resurrection, as part of the general resurrection of the dead, which was to happen at the Last Judgment. Lazarus had died once, in the Holy Land, and had been revived there by Christ. After Christ’s death, according to medieval accounts including the lives of St. Mary Magdalene discussed above, Lazarus and his sisters left the Holy Land to escape persecution and may have traveled as far as France and evangelized there: thus according to the fifteenth-century description, the trumeau of the eastern doorway into Saint-Lazare showed Lazarus as a bishop.88 This was one explanation for how St. Mary Magdalene’s relics came to be at Vezelay and how Lazarus’s Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, 6, 69–72. Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, 5–6, 9–35. 86 Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, 69–71, 82. 87 Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 43–6, 154–8; Stratford, “Le mausolée de saint Lazare à Autun,” 13, 31–2. 88 de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 166–72; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary 84 85

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came to be at Autun.89 As Seidel notes, it was from the tomb at Autun that Lazarus was to be resurrected for the second time at the end of time, a moment that was represented on Saint-Lazare’s northern nave doorway, with the Resurrection of the Dead on its lintel and the Last Judgment on its tympanum (Fig. 25).90 Thus if the tympanum of the eastern doorway showed Lazarus as already resurrected, like the surviving contemporary versions, moving from the doorway into the shrine where he lay in his sarcophagus may have shifted pilgrims forwards to the story’s ultimate end in that final resurrection. Multiple textual versions of the Lazarus story link his resurrection to the general resurrection of the dead at the end of time, as Martha in her encounter with Christ proclaims her faith that her brother will rise again at that time.91 For women who came to Autun in search of miraculous Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 90–115; Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 53–6; Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve,” 1. 89 On the histories of these two cults see Bernard de Vregille, “Saint Lazare d’Autun ou la Madeleine de Vézelay? Un problème d’antériorité,” Annales de Bourgogne: Revue Historique 21 (1949): 34–44; Monique Greffier, “L’introduction du culte de Saint Lazare à Autun,” Mémoires de la Société Éduenne 50 (1964–65): 328–50; and Victor Saxer, “La culte de la Madeleine à Vézelay et de Lazare à Autun: Un problème d’antériorité et d’origine,” Bulletin de la Société des Fouilles Archéologiques et des Monuments Historiques de l’Yonne 3 (1986): 1–18. 90 Seidel, Legends in Limestone, 50. 91 John 11:20–7; Faillon, Monuments inédits sur l’apostolat de Saint Marie-Madeleine,

FIG. 25. LAST JUDGMENT TYMPANUM. CHURCH OF SAINT-LAZARE, AUTUN. 1130.

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cures or resurrections for their children, but did not experience those miracles, this temporal shift forwards to the last days may have offered the consolation of their children’s ultimate resurrection at that time. And so these women too may have been able to participate to some degree in the emotional transformation represented in the Eve, Martha, and Mary Magdalene sculptures’ gestures and expression.

MEDIEVAL MOTHERHOOD AND THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS In his work on miracle accounts involving children, Finucane emphasizes the emotions of the parents involved, their fear, anxiety, and stress over their children’s accidents and illnesses, and above all their grief over their children’s deaths. He does so in order to counter a commonplace idea, found in the work of Philippe Ariès among others, that the high rates of infant and child mortality in the Middle Ages meant that medieval parents did not form emotional attachments to their children.92 Ariès’s work has come to be repudiated in work on medieval parents and children, for it is clear that he was not in fact interested in the Middle Ages. Instead he constructed a medieval past that could serve as a foil for the present and so presented medieval parents as disconnected from their children in order to write a history of modernity as a celebration of maternal love.93 Finucane’s counter-Ariès argument is problematic, however, in that it does not go far enough. Finucane treats the miracle accounts that he uses as sources as if they were transparent to the events themselves, as if their descriptions of parental emotions at a child’s illness, injury, or death simply document those emotions as real. He largely ignores the fact that the miracle accounts are stories of these events, often told several years after the events themselves, and told to members of the clergy at the saints’ shrines, who were collecting such accounts in order to bolster their saints’ claims to sanctity – as accounts of Lazarus’s miracles were used in the dispute between Autun and Avallon as discussed above. Thus the emotions that 189–90; Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha, 49; Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 206, lines 232–7; Lumiansky and Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, 246; Martial Rose, ed., The Wakefield Mystery Plays (New York, 1961), 325. 92 Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, 42–4, 89–92, 99, 152–3. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962), 38–9. 93 Finucane states that it is no longer necessary to argue against Ariès, although his work does so: Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents, x–xi. See also Danièle AlexandreBidon and Didier Lett, Children in the Middle Ages: Fifth–Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Jody Gladding (Notre Dame, 1999), 1–2, 55–6; Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107/3 (June 2002): 828–30; Pauline Stafford, “Parents and Children in the Early Middle Ages,” Early Medieval Europe 10/2 (2001): 258.

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the parents are described as experiencing in these accounts are emotions that were remembered, represented through storytelling, and recorded by people in positions of authority, who had their own agendas for recording them. This is not to say that the parents did not also experience these emotions at the time of the events themselves, but that what the miracle accounts give us access to most immediately is these emotions as produced in this context of storytelling and documentation, a context in which these emotions were judged to be worthy of remembering, representing, and recording. Scholars of the history of emotions have come to recognize that emotions are socially produced or constructed, but that does not mean that they are not also genuine or real. And they have come to recognize that the sources that make historical emotions available for us to study also participated in the production of these emotions in their original contexts.94 Thus it is not simply that medieval parents did experience grief and related emotions over their children at the time of their potential loss, but that these emotions were elicited and validated socially as responses to the potential loss of a child. And so Ariès was not simply wrong, he had it backwards: the likelihood of losing a child did not keep medieval parents from forming emotional attachments to that child; instead those attachments were called for, acknowledged, and valued specifically in the situation of the potential loss of a child. The Autun Eve and the Lazarus shrine and its sculptures may have done work similar to the practice of storytelling that generated the miracle accounts. For women as mothers who came to the site as pilgrims, again particularly on thanksgiving pilgrimages, the Lazarus story as told in the sculptures and the shrine may have prompted memories of the potential loss of their children. Likewise, the gestures and expressions of the Eve, Martha, and Mary Magdalene sculptures may have served to represent to these women their emotional reactions to that potential loss. Finally, the sheer grandeur of the church and the shrine may have served to grant value to those emotions.

94 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotion (Cambridge, 2001); Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” 837–45.

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ike the fourteenth-century sculpture featured in the Introduction (Fig. 1, Plate I), this fifteenth-century Virgin stands with her weight shifted to the left, to where she holds the child on her hip with her hand (Fig. 26). A comparison of the two sculptures, however, points to the latter’s accentuation of the twists and sways in the mother’s body. Here, the draperies on Mary’s lower body form thick folds that move on curves and angles over to the child, and the top of her body repeats that action as her head bends over and down towards him. These curves extend this Virgin’s body out sideways, creating a breadth to her form. That breadth is further extended as she holds her right hand out and away from her body and uses it to hold her draperies likewise out and away. These draperies fall from her hand to fill the space that would otherwise be emptied by her shift to the side and form broad folds that zig-zag from side to side, further emphasizing the horizontal expanse of her form. As discussed in the Introduction, the fourteenth-century sculpture simultaneously presses the mother and child together within its narrow vertical format, links them through the child’s reach for Mary’s veil, and splits them apart by contrasting her looping drapery folds to his tight vertical pleats. The fifteenth-century sculpture introduced here uses some similar drapery forms, but to different ends. Here, too, curving folds cross over the Virgin’s body; however, the folds on this sculpture become lines that lead into the child’s body and so work to integrate him into her ample form. One particularly prominent line runs from her extended arm in a deep fold across her body, into the scroll he holds in his hand, and then into his legs and her supporting hand. Below this major line, two additional folds cross over her body and lead into his legs, and above it, a fold crosses her chest to run into his lower arm. Thus these two sculptures

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FIG. 26. VIRGIN AND CHILD OF SAINTAPOLLINAIRE. BURGUNDY, FRANCE. SECOND QUARTER OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

differ in the relationship they establish, through the drapery forms, between the mother and child: the first establishes a complex combination of connection and separation between the two figures through different forms and folds, while the second uses the drapery to amplify the Virgin’s form and absorb the child into it. These are just two of hundreds of large-scale (between approximately three and six feet in height) sculptural representations of the Virgin and Child that survive from the fourteenth through early sixteenth century. The existing scholarship on these sculptures has focused on differences in

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their drapery folds, facial types, other stylistic features, and iconographic attributes. For the fourteenth-century sculptures, these differences have been used to identify patterns of change over time and variation over space. In work on French examples, scholars have identified regional groupings, considered the relationship between Parisian and provincial sculptural production, and sought to identify individual workshops and hands.1 The fourteenth-century sculpture from the Introduction, for example, has been dated to mid-century and localized to the Ile-de-France based on its resemblance to a sculpture that Jeanne d’Evreux ordered in 1340 for her chapel at Saint-Denis and that is now in the church at Magny-en-Vexin.2 Likewise, scholarship on the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century German sculptures known as the “Schöne” or Beautiful Madonnas has sought to identify regional groupings and patterns of interaction between them.3 For the fifteenth-century sculptures, the dominating issue in the scholarship is their relationship to the work of the Burgundian sculptor Claus de Werve: can individual sculptures be identified as his own work, that of his followers, or of other sculptors influenced by him?4 The fifteenthcentury example discussed above likely falls into the last category.5 The existing scholarship on these sculptures has thus focused on their production, on understanding who made what, when, and where. As in the rest of this book, my interest lies instead in their reception by medieval beholders and in particular by medieval women. The vast majority of these sculptures are now in museums, after having passed through the hands of private collectors, and so the original viewing situations and specific 1 William H. Forsyth, “A Group of Fourteenth-Century Mosan Sculptures,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 1 (1968): 41–59; William H. Forsyth, “Madonnas of the Rhone-Meuse Valleys,” The Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 1940): 252–61; William H. Forsyth, “The Virgin and Child in French Fourteenth Century Sculpture: A Method of Classification,” Art Bulletin 39/3 (September 1957): 171–82; Louise Lefrançois-Pillion, “Les statues de la Vierge à l’enfant dans la sculpture française au XIVe siècle,” Gazette des Beaux-arts (1935): 129–49, 204–26; Claude Schaefer, La sculpture en ronde-bosse au XIVe siècle dans le duché de Bourgogne (Paris, 1954). 2 William D. Wixom, Medieval Sculpture at the Cloisters (New York, 2001), 50. On the sculpture made for Jeanne d’Evreux see Forsyth, “A Group of Fourteenth-Century Mosan Sculptures,” 57; and Forsyth, “Madonnas of the Rhone-Meuse Valleys,” 254. 3 Timothy B. Husband, “A Beautiful Madonna in the Cloisters Collection,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin n.s. 28/6 (February 1970): 278–90; Wilhelm Pinder, “Zum Problem der ‘Schönen Madonnen’ um 1400,” Jahrbuch der Preuzischen Kunstsammlungen 44 (1923): 147–71. For an alternative approach to these sculpture see Robert Suckale, “Die Sternberger Schöne Madonna,” in Stil und Funktion: Ausgewählte Schriften zur Kunst des Mittelalters, ed. Peter Schmidt and Gregor Wedekind (Berlin, 2008), 87–101. 4 Véronique Boucherat, “A New Approach to the Sculpture of Claus de Werve” in Art from the Court of Burgundy: The Patronage of Phillip the Bold and John the Fearless, 1364–1419, ed. Stephen N. Fliegel (Cleveland, 2004), 317–27, esp. 321–5; Patrick de Winter, “Art from the Duchy of Burgundy,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74/10 (December 1987): 407–43, esp. 426–35; William H. Forsyth, “A Fifteenth-Century Virgin Attributed to Claux de Werve,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 21 (1986): 41–63. 5 Dany Sandron, “Sculpture” in Musée national du Moyen Âge Thermes de Cluny: Guide to the Collections (Paris, 1993), 148, no. 182.

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audiences of most examples are unknown. However, such sculptures had a wide variety of original locations, from church interiors and exteriors, to the interiors of private chapels and domestic spaces, to the exteriors of other structures, and to crossroads and other outdoor locations, and so these artworks in general would have had a broad range of beholders that would have included laywomen.6 Like the previous scholars who have written about these sculptures, I too am interested in differences in the forms of their draperies, as is demonstrated by the comparison made above. Instead of using these differences to determine the sculptures’ dates, locations, or makers, however, I treat them as meaningful aspects of the sculptures for their medieval beholders. Garments similar to those represented on these sculptures played important roles in the medieval cult of the Virgin, as relics of the Virgin herself, and as a means through which worshippers interacted with her: those roles for these garments would have shaped the horizon of expectations that medieval beholders brought to understanding them as they appeared in these works of art. After establishing this aspect of a medieval horizon for these sculptures, and informed by that work, I shift from reception to response and focus on the different relationships that the sculpted draperies establish between the Virgin as a mother and her child. As is suggested by the comparison given above, these relationships range from a strong separation between the mother and child, to the integration of the child back into the mother’s body, and include complex combinations of those two possibilities within one work of art. Given the large number of the Virgin and Child sculptures that have survived into the present day, there must originally have been many more of them, giving medieval women as beholders the opportunity to see several such sculptures during their lifetimes and so to recognize the differences in their depictions of the mother–child relationship. I argue that this would have allowed medieval laywomen who were mothers themselves to use these sculptures to consider the complex and everchanging relationships they had with their own children. To do so, I introduce some psychoanalytic ideas, specifically Theresa Krier’s concept of “parturition,” as useful for understanding the mother–child relationship as represented in these sculptures and its significance for the mothers among their original beholders.7

MARY IN THE MIDDLE AGES The large number of surviving Virgin and Child sculptures points to the importance of the Virgin in medieval Christianity. The medieval cult Wixom, Medieval Sculpture at the Cloisters, 50. Theresa M. Krier, Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ithaca, 2001). 6 7

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of the Virgin, the particular ways in which Mary was understood and approached by worshippers during this time period, would have formed part of the horizon of expectation that medieval beholders brought to these sculptures. Indeed, the sculptures’ beholders would often have been Mary’s worshippers, as these artworks frequently served as devotional images. While much art-historical attention has been given in recent years to images that supported private devotion on the part of medieval elites, Richard Marks argues that public images such as the Virgin sculptures that appeared in church interiors and in exterior locations also served devotional functions for their broader audiences.8 The husband in the late fourteenth-century Ménagier de Paris, for example, advises his young wife to use either an altar or a sculpture in their local church as a focus for her prayers.9 Coming to one of these sculptures as a worshipper, a medieval beholder’s interests in and expectations about the artwork would have been directly informed by his or her beliefs about Mary. Worship of or devotion to the Virgin in the Middle Ages was shaped by a tension in Mary’s perceived identity. On the one hand, she could be treated as a goddess in all but name, approached as the embodiment of Wisdom and so as eternally pre-existent and perfectly knowledgeable, or as the Queen of Heaven and so as a remote, impassive, and powerful personage. Alternatively, she could be perceived as a model human being, most often as a compassionate and grieving mother. These two devotional identities created two similarly distinct activities for Mary’s worshippers, who either supplicated a queen for favors, or modeled their emotional lives on Mary’s and used her as a point of identification and empathetic entry into the Christian story. The general trend across the course of the Middle Ages was from the first of these positions to the second: in Rachel Fulton’s terms, there was a shift from “judgment” and so from Mary as the Queen of Heaven able to intervene with Christ the judge on her worshippers’ behalf, to “passion” and so to Mary as avenue for her worshippers to experience for themselves the emotional pain of Christ’s death.10 8 Richard Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Phoenix Mills, 2004), 1–17. 9 Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, eds. and trans., The Good Wife’s Guide: Le Ménagier de Paris, a Medieval Household Book (Ithaca, 2009), 59. 10 Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002). For a similar account of Mary’s transformation see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2003), 190–290. For the different historical trajectory taken by the Virgin in Byzantium see Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park, 2006); and Niki Tsironis, “From Poetry to Liturgy: The Cult of the Virgin in the Middle Byzantine Era,” and Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The ‘Activated’ Icon: The Hodegetria Procession and Mary’s Eisodos,” both in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Burlington, 2005), 91–3, 198. For broader histories of the cult of the Virgin see Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, 3 vols. (New York, 1963); Jarosalv Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, 1996); Miri Rubin, Mother of

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This transition in Mary’s devotional identity appears in a comparison of the sculptures with which I began this chapter and an example of a common earlier form of Marian imagery, a type of seated Virgin and Child known as a Sedes Sapientiae or Throne of Wisdom (Plate II).11 In this image type, as in the first form of devotion outlined above, the Virgin is closely associated with Wisdom, although it is Christ who appears as its embodiment here while Mary takes on the role of his throne. She is stiff and still, as she holds a rigidly upright posture, and so she appears to be remote and impassive. She stares out at her worshippers, engaging them with her gaze and so receiving their petitions on behalf of her son. She is the Queen of Heaven, although she may or may not wear a crown.12 Mary wears a crown in the fourteenth-century example from the Introduction, even as she becomes more of a human mother through her body’s slight sway and her smile. This combination of signs for the Virgin’s different devotional identities suggests a mid-point in the process of change between the two. The crown disappears in the fifteenth-century example introduced above, finally, and Mary’s maternal identity is emphasized by her absorption with her child. However, Fulton dates this transformation in Mary’s devotional identity to the ninth through thirteenth centuries and this series of sculptures dates to the twelfth through fifteenth.13 This disjunction in dates suggests that devotion led the way in this transformation in Mary’s identity and so beholders of the earlier sculptures may already have been looking to these artworks as representing the human mother Mary. Looking again at the Throne of Wisdom with the later devotional paradigm in mind brings other aspects of it to the fore. Ilene Forsyth emphasizes the power of the sculpture’s three-dimensional form in making the figures appear tangible and so physically real.14 The wood material used for these objects has a softness that convincingly suggests the surfaces of flesh and fabric. And these sculptures were typically painted with the details of these soft surfaces, including red lips, rosy cheeks, and colored draperies, as is shown in surviving traces on the example reproduced here (Plate II). Thus such sculptures could also have been seen as representing the human mother and child. Likewise, a beholder approaching the fourteenthcentury example from the Introduction might not have noticed its crown and may have focused instead on the relationship it depicts between the God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, 2009); Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1976). 11 For another example of this kind of comparison see Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago, 1985), 46–68, 72. 12 On Sedes Sapientiae sculptures see Ilene H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, 1972). 13 Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 4–5. 14 Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom, 7–8, 12, 45, 60.

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mother and child. Finally, beholders’ interests in Mary’s motherhood may have led sculptors to continually elaborate on that aspect of her identity: as will be demonstrated later in this chapter, the fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury examples discussed above stand as just two in a wide variety of Virgin sculptures that construct the mother–child relationship in multiple different ways. The Virgin’s devotional and visual transformations have raised questions for scholars concerning medieval women’s relationships to her, questions that are important for an understanding of women’s reception of these sculptures. These questions are again shaped by a tension in the Virgin’s perceived identity, in this case between likeness and difference. Did Mary’s visual and devotional humanization over the course of the Middle Ages mean that, for medieval people, she became a woman like other women, a mother like other mothers, and so a point of identification for medieval women, and finally a figure whom they could use to consider the meanings of their own lives and experiences? Or despite that process of humanization, did she remain different enough from other women – different in her virtues and in the details of her motherhood (conceived without sex or sin and concluded without pain and without violating her physical integrity) – that medieval women were never able to fully identify with her, such that she remained “alone of all her sex”? In her now-classic study of that title, Marina Warner presents Mary’s combination of likeness to and difference from other women as a paradox and a trap. Mary, in Warner’s analysis, is like enough to other women for women to fall for everything she represents – purity, humility, docility, submissiveness, and so on – as being ideally or even naturally feminine. At the same time, however, Mary is different enough from real women for her to be an impossible ideal for them to emulate, and a prime example of that impossibility is her combination of virginity and motherhood. In Warner’s words, Mary presents a “typical Christian conundrum” as her cult appears to celebrate the perfect human woman but in fact denigrates humanity and women in particular.15 Subsequent scholars have resisted such blanket denunciations of Marian devotion: Fulton, for example, describes them as “reductive” and “monolithic.”16 Perhaps in response to Warner, Fulton minimizes the relationship between the Virgin and medieval women by de-emphasizing gendered difference among her worshippers. She argues that devotion to Mary was not developed for or directed to women in particular and did not depend on Mary’s relationship to actual women. She writes that it depended instead on Mary’s own compassionate identification with Christ and that identification with her as a route to encountering him was open to all worshippers on the basis of a shared

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Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, xxi, 77, 183–5, 191, 288–9. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 217, 242.

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humanity.17 In Fulton’s words, Mary’s pain at the crucifixion “provided the model for compassionate response to Christ’s pain … Hers was the appropriately human response to Christ’s sacrifice.”18 Barbara Newman likewise argues that identification with the Virgin was open to both medieval men and women. She writes of Mary’s close and yet changing relationship to the Trinity as providing a wide variety of avenues for identification with her and so for intimate association with the divine.19 However, Newman also recognizes the worshipper’s gender as an important factor in medieval Marian devotion. She writes of devotion to the Virgin as having a special appeal for women as worshippers and argues that for women the closer congruence between themselves and Mary had the potential to make identification with her less metaphorical and more intense.20 Margery Kempe’s account of herself in her Book can demonstrate the intensity with which certain medieval women, at least, identified with the Virgin, and did so specifically around a shared experience of motherhood. While in Rome, when Margery saw women carrying their children in their arms, especially boys, she would “roar, cry, and weep as if she had seen Christ in his childhood,” and her impulse was “to have taken the children out of their mothers’ arms and kissed them instead of Christ.”21 Identifying these children with Christ, Margery wants to become Mary in order to relate to him as a mother, and she experiences overwhelming emotions that cause her to break down in tears. In the episode with the Jesus baby-doll (mentioned in the Introduction), Margery watches other women as they dress it up and “kiss it as though it had been God himself,” thus re-enacting Mary’s maternal relationship with Christ in front of Margery’s eyes. More specifically, they re-enact in front of her “bodily eye” events that she had already witnessed with her “inward eye,” in devotional exercises in which she imagined herself as present at the birth of Christ, and so their acts give physical form to her inner experiences and desires. She again reacts to this sight by breaking down “with great sobbing and loud crying.”22 Jennifer Hellwarth argues that, for Margery, the devotional exercises that the baby-doll episode recall served as a way of rewriting her own experiences of childbirth, in particular the traumatic birth of her first child (described in the conclusion to Chapter 2). Hellwarth further suggests that, for the women who interacted with the doll, the practice likewise served as a way of working through their own maternal experiences, of which we have no record.23 Thus Margery’s text is 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 227–8, 242–3, 397, 465. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 199. Newman, God and the Goddesses, 43, 49, 253, 270–1, 289. Newman, God and the Goddesses, 253, 271–3. Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 123. Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 52–4, 113. Hellwarth, The Reproductive Unconscious, 55.

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valuable as an exceptional record of experiences and practices that may not have been especially exceptional in themselves, but that typically remained unrecorded. Based on the evidence of her text, it seems that some medieval women, at least, found the Virgin to be like enough to themselves for them to be able to identify with her and use her as a way of thinking about their own lives and experiences, in particular their experiences of motherhood. These women may have reacted to some of the Virgin sculptures in ways similar to Margery’s reactions to the women she saw with their children or to the women with the Jesus baby-doll, identifying with them and using them to work through issues raised by their own experiences as mothers. To shift from reception to response, some women may have reacted to some of the Virgin sculptures in this way because the visual forms of certain of these works of art would have provided more encouragement and more support for such acts of identification. For there are notable visual or stylistic differences between the Virgin sculptures: some are more naturalistic, while others, including the German Beautiful Madonnas, exaggerate certain features to the point of becoming highly stylized. This difference can be seen in the S curve that is used to shape the overall form of the Virgin’s body: the fourteenth-century example from the Introduction has a slight curve (Fig. 1, Plate I), the fifteenth-century example introduced above accentuates it more (Fig. 26), and an additional early fifteenthcentury sculpture, one of the Beautiful Madonnas, emphasizes it still further – to the point where it begins to be difficult to see the Virgin’s body as an integrated and continuous whole (Fig. 27). Her upper body almost splits apart from the lower because of the sharpness of the curve at her hip. It seems likely that the more naturalistic sculptures, as visually more like their female beholders, would have done more to promote these beholders’ understanding of the Virgin as like themselves and so would have done more to encourage their identification with her. By contrast, the more highly stylized Beautiful sculptures may have promoted perceiving the Virgin as different from ordinary women and so may have discouraged women’s identification with her. Because my interest in this chapter lies in using the Virgin sculptures to understand something of medieval women’s experiences with motherhood, I have chosen to focus on examples that are more naturalistic in style. As a consequence of this choice, the sculptures I discuss here come from France and Burgundy, where this more naturalistic style seems to have dominated sculptural production.

FABRICATED FLESH The Virgin sculptures would also have shaped medieval beholders’ responses to them through their emphasis on the forms and folds of cloth and clothing, for the majority of what one sees in looking at any one of

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FIG. 27. VIRGIN AND CHILD. SALZBURG, AUSTRIA. 1420.

these sculptures is the Virgin’s draperies. Her flesh appears in only a few areas: her face and neck, her hands, and possibly her forearms. Certain sculptures show her nursing the child and in that case one breast may emerge from her draperies. Otherwise, to look at a sculpture of the Virgin is to see her clothing. Furthermore, the forms and folds of her clothing create much of the visual interest in these sculptures, as is shown by the analysis of the fourteenth-century sculpture in the Introduction. And, as is shown by the comparison of that sculpture with the fifteenth-century

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example that begins this chapter, differences in those forms and folds construct different relationships between the mother and child. Thus the draperies on these sculptures may have spoken directly to those of their medieval beholders who were interested in using them to consider their own experiences as mothers. To return to reconstructing reception, medieval beholders’ under­ standings of the sculptures’ clothing forms would have been informed by additional aspects of their horizon of expectations. One important part of that horizon for these sculptures would have been the use of textiles as relics within the medieval cult of the Virgin. As Mary was understood to have been bodily assumed into heaven, her relics were not body parts, but items of clothing that she was said to have worn at different moments in her life. These textile relics replaced her body for her worshippers, a substitution of cloth for flesh that is clearly expressed in a legend about the early Byzantine empress Pulcheria and a textile relic that was held at the Blachernae shrine in Constantinople. Pulcheria is said to have asked Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem for Mary’s body, but he explained that it had disappeared from her tomb, leaving behind only her burial clothes, and so those clothes were transferred to Constantinople instead.24 The Blachernae relic came to be identified as Mary’s maphorion or mantle, an enveloping cloak that would have draped around her body, similar to the outer garments seen on the Virgin sculptures under discussion here. While this relic eventually lost its place in Byzantine culture in favor of an icon of the Virgin, interest in Mary’s mantle continued in the medieval West. The Madonna of Mercy as represented in thirteenth-century and later medieval paintings and sculptures shows a group of the faithful gathered within Mary’s expansive cloak (Figs. 28–9).25 Other important relics of the Virgin likewise correspond to clothing items seen on the Virgin sculptures. A relic held at Chartres cathedral was identified as Mary’s chemise, a common type of linen undergarment, and in particular as the chemise she wore when she gave birth to Christ. This relic was 24 Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Threads of Authority: The Virgin Mary’s Veil in the Middle Ages” in Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New York, 2001), 60–1; Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. 1, 134. Pulcheria’s involvement in the development of the Byzantine cult of the Virgin is now understood to be a later legendary development; see Liz James, “The Empress and the Virgin in Early Byzantium: Piety, Authority, and Devotion” in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, 128–9. For a different legend of the origins of the relic, which dates it to the time of Constantine and traces its passage through the hands of Jewish virgins see Rubin, Mother of God, 60–2. 25 On the maphorion relic see Christine Angelidi and Tito Papamastorakis, “Picturing the Spiritual Protector: From Blachernae to Hodegetria,” and Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “Representations of the Virgin in Lusignan Cyprus,” both in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, 209–10, 306–8; Carr, “Threads of Authority,” 61, 63–8; Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 2–5, 11–12, 38–59; Rubin, Mother of God, 66–71. On the Madonna of Mercy see Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University Park, 2015), 21, 91–4.

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FIG. 28. LIPPO MEMMI (C. 1285– 1361). MADONNA OF THE MISERICORDIA.

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FIG. 29. MICHAEL ERHART (1440/45–1522). VIRGIN OF MERCY OF RAVENSBURG. 1480.

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shown on chemisettes, pilgrimage badges that visitors to the Chartres shrine would attach to their own garments.26 Surviving chemisettes show a simple, loose, scooped-neck garment, similar in shape to the dress or robe visible on the fourteenth-century example from the Introduction (Fig. 1, Plate I). This sculpture’s robe is cinched by a belt or girdle, which corresponds to an especially common type of Marian relic: an alternative tradition identified the Blachernae relic as a belt spotted with the Virgin’s breast milk, and the record of the Visitation of Monasteries in England in 1536 documented eight girdles of the Virgin in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield alone.27 Finally, the example from the Introduction also wears a veil, which corresponds both to a later identity for the Chartres relics and to a relic held at Aachen.28 These relationships between Mary’s represented clothing in the sculptures and her relics may have given medieval beholders a way of understanding the visual prominence of these textile forms on the works of art: here, too, textiles replace flesh in making the Virgin’s body present and so making her available to her worshippers. As well as corresponding to Marian textile relics, furthermore, the represented clothing on the Virgin sculptures also relates to common forms of actual medieval dress for women. Beginning in the eleventh century, the chemise, robe, girdle, mantle, and veil made up a standard wardrobe for women that varied primarily in the quality, quantity, and color of the cloth used for the garments.29 New forms of dress developed in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, the period of time covered by these sculptures, but these new garments were worn primarily by men and by elite women.30 Indeed, in the late fourteenth-century Ménagier de Paris, the husband warns his young wife against adopting the newer clothing forms as she should not appear to aspire to a higher social status.31 For medieval beholders the Virgin’s appearance in these sculptures in the older clothing styles may have likewise served as a mark of her humility. And for the women among her beholders, her appearance in these garments may have made identification with her easier, as they may have worn the same clothing types. 26 E. Jane Burns, “Introduction: Why Textiles Matter” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork and other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York, 2004), 8–9; and E. Jane Burns, “Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s Chemise: Cultural Crossings in Cloth,” Speculum 81/2 (April 2006): 365–8, 383, 388. 27 Carr, “Threads of Authority,” 62–3; Rubin, Mother of God, 377. On girdle relics see also Herbert Norris, Medieval Costume and Dress (Mineola, 1998), 22–4; Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 90, 279–80; and for a Byzantine girdle relic, Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. 1, 196. 28 Carr, “Threads of Authority,” 71–3. 29 Norris, Medieval Costume and Dress, 22–5, 86–7, 161–2, 174–5. 30 Norris, Medieval Costume and Dress, 228–9, 329, 395. For a detailed account of these changes as visible in manuscript illuminations and other artworks see Anne H. van Buren and Roger S. Wieck, Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, 1325–1515 (New York, 2011). 31 Greco and Rose, eds., The Good Wife’s Guide, 59.

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Medieval women’s ability to use clothing as a motor for identification with the Virgin as represented in these sculptures would have been further heightened by practices that enacted transfers between their clothing and the sculptures’ garments. Women frequently willed girdles, veils, jewelry, and other items to sculptures, including those of the Virgin, to be used to dress these artworks for feast days and other special occasions.32 For example, in 1325, Maroie li Muisie left her “boin tissut,” good cloth, to cover the image of Notre Dame at Tournai.33 Likewise, Katherine L. French and Gail McMurray Gibson have identified several examples of English women leaving textiles and other items to sculptures in their wills: Alice Stacey left a linen sheet to a sculpture of the Virgin, perhaps to act as a veil; Agnes Awmbler left a kerchief to “the image of Our Lady within the choir”; and Jane Chamberlyn left her wedding ring, girdle, and rosary to a sculpture of St. Anne. Jane’s gifts appeared on the sculpture on the day of her burial, the ring on its finger, the girdle around its body, and the rosary in its hands. For Jane, this gift of personal items to the sculpture likely expressed her own sense of close identification with the saint.34 For the women who attended her funeral, encountering the sculpture adorned with Jane’s gifts would have brought the saint closer to their world and may have suggested developing such identifications for themselves. Finally, Jane’s choice of St. Anne suggests that her identification with the saint and so her interest in the sculpture was related to her maternal experiences, for as the Virgin’s mother, Anne was strongly associated with motherhood.35 She was, for example, one of the saints called upon in the perperit childbirth prayer (discussed in Chapter 3): “Sancta Maria peperit Christum, Sancta Anna peperit Marian …” Elizabeth L’Estrange likewise relates images of St. Anne that appear in Books of Hours to her role in these prayers.36 Additional clothing-based transfers between the Virgin and the women among her medieval worshippers were enacted specifically in relation to these women’s experiences as mothers. Relics of the Virgin’s girdle, along with similar relics from other female saints, were used to give aid to women in childbirth. For example, Henry III’s wife, Eleanor, had the Virgin’s 32 Marks, Image and Devotion, 139, 170–3, 183, 200–1 and Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1300–1500 (New York, 2002), 88–90, 102. 33 J. Dumoulin, “Le culte de Notre-Dame à la cathédrale de Tournai,” Revue Diocésain de Tournai 18 (1963): 279 note 29; Richard C. Trexler, “Dressing and Undressing Images: An Analytic Sketch” in Religion in Social Context in Europe and America, 1200–1700 (Tempe, 2002), 377. 34 For Alice Stacey and Agnes Awmbler see Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia, 2008), 17, 41–6; and for Jane Chamberlyn see Gail McMurray Gibson, Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989), 71. 35 On St. Anne see Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, eds., Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society (Athens, 1990); and Virginia Nixon, Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe (University Park, 2004). 36 L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 137, 206, 230.

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girdle brought to her from St. Peter’s in Westminster to aid in her delivery, and Anne of Brittany borrowed a girdle relic from Puy-Notre-Dame in order to enhance her fertility during her marriage to Charles VIII.37 Other women made similar use of girdles brought from sculptures of the Virgin or other saints, possibly girdles given to those sculptures by women, such as the girdle Jane Chamberlyn gave to the St. Anne sculpture: Elizabeth of York made use of a girdle from a Virgin statue to ease her delivery, for example.38 Still other women made use of girdle-like ribbons or cords that had been touched to a sculpture or used to measure it. These less precious but still powerful objects would be worn on the woman’s body first to promote her fertility and then during pregnancy and childbirth in order to secure a safe outcome.39 Long strips of parchment with prayers for safe childbirth could be used in a similar way.40 During pregnancy, however, a woman’s own actual girdle would be loosened or removed entirely in order to allow for the expansion of her body. And during childbirth, all closures in a woman’s clothing were typically opened as a way of opening up her body in order to ease the passage of the child.41 These practices used girdle relics and similar objects to create connections between the Virgin and medieval women and so would have furthered these women’s ability to identify with Mary. Furthermore, as these practices used these objects to create connections specifically around issues of fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, they would have furthered medieval women’s ability to identify with Mary through a shared experienced of motherhood. These practices would also have formed part of the horizon of expectations that medieval women brought to the Virgin sculptures and so the appearance of girdles on these artworks may have held special significance for the women among their beholders. Seeing a girdle on a sculpture of the Virgin may have recalled for a female beholder the use of girdle relics and similar objects in her own experiences of motherhood, either her own pregnancies and births or those of women in her family or community, and so led her to connect the sculpture to those experiences. Those experiences may also have included the opening and removal of the woman’s own girdle during pregnancy and childbirth and so the use of the girdle to articulate the opening up of her body for the growth and L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 61, 236; Fiona Harris Stoertz, “Suffering and Survival in Medieval English Childbirth” in Medieval Family Roles: A Book of Essays, ed. Cathy Jorgenswn Itnyre (New York, 1996), 106. 38 Gibson, Theatre of Devotion, 64. 39 Elsakkers, “In Pain You Shall Bear Children,” 195–6; Gélis, History of Childbirth, 74–5; Gibson, Theatre of Devotion, 64; L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 61; Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 144. 40 Elsakkers, “In Pain You Shall Bear Children,” 195–7; Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 142; Stoertz, “Suffering and Survival,” 107. 41 Gélis, History of Childbirth, 67, 119; Penny Howell Jolly, Picturing the “Pregnant” Magdalene in Northern Art, 1430–1550: Addressing and Undressing the Sinner-Saint (Burlington, 2014), 1–2, 13, 20–1, 31–2. 37

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passage of her child. Bringing that specific experience to a sculpture of the Virgin may have allowed such a beholder to understand the girdle on the artwork as similarly articulating the openness of Mary’s body in relation to her child. Where the girdle thus had a concrete relationship to medieval women’s experiences of motherhood, other clothing and textiles forms were related to motherhood on a metaphorical level. One longstanding set of metaphors used textiles and textile production to understand the Virgin’s role as the mother of Christ. According to the Apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Protoevangelion of James, Mary spent her early years spinning and weaving in the Temple in Jerusalem and continued to do so after her betrothal to Joseph, at which time she was chosen to spin the wool for a veil for the Holy of Holies. This veil was rent apart at the moment of the Crucifixion, according to Luke 23:44, which allowed it to be identified as a type for Christ’s body, and so identified that body as Mary’s handiwork.42 A second tradition identified Mary’s textile work instead as Christ’s seamless tunic, for which the Roman soldiers cast lots in John 19:23. According to legendary accounts this was a garment Mary made for Christ as a child, that grew along with his body into adulthood, and so was identified with his body itself.43 In both of these traditions, Mary as Christ’s mother is identified as the maker of his body, which is understood as a textile form. Both were ultimately used to understand the relationship between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, as the latter was identified with his body and so with this textile form as his mother’s contribution to his being.44 A somewhat different version of these ideas appeared in the work of the fifth-century archbishop of Constantinople, Proclus, who was a close associate of the Empress Pulcheria, mentioned previously for her role in bringing the maphorion relic to the Blachernae shrine. In one his homilies, Proclus praised Mary’s body as the “Workshop in which the unity of divine and human nature was fashioned … within her is the awesome loom of the divine economy, on which the robe of union was ineffably woven. The loom worker was the Holy Spirit … The wool was the ancient fleece of

42 Nicholas P. Constas, “Weaving the Body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the Theotokos, and the Loom of the Flesh,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3/2 (1995): 181; Maria Evangelatou, “The Purple Thread of the Flesh: The Theological Connotations of a Narrative Iconographic Element in Byzantine Images of the Annunciation,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium, Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot, 2003), 261–6; Gail McMurray Gibson, “The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin,” in Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold (New York, 1990), 46–7. 43 Gibson, “The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin,” 50. 44 Constas, “Weaving the Body of God,” 190–4; Evangelatou, “The Purple Thread of the Flesh,” 262–5; Gibson, “The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin,” 50.

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Adam … The interlocking warp thread was the pure flesh of the Virgin.”45 Here, instead of being the textile worker responsible for making Christ’s human flesh, Mary appears as the textile workshop in which that flesh was made, her womb is identified as a loom on which it was woven, and her flesh becomes the stable warp thread around which wool taken from Adam was wrapped. While this version of the metaphor still speaks to the relationship between the human and the divine in Christ, it also uses the processes of textile production to imagine in detail the invisible process of the gestation of the child within its mother’s body.46 And it imagines a particularly intimate relationship between the mother’s body and the child’s, by identifying her flesh as the foundation for his. Similar metaphors appeared closer to the time and place of the sculptures under consideration here, raising the possibility that such metaphors may have been familiar to the sculptures’ beholders and so formed part of their horizon of expectations for these works of art. For example, William Durandus in a treatise of 1295 identified the priest donning his robes in the sacristy with Christ taking on the “robes of humanity” in Mary’s womb. Likewise, in the fifteenth-century N-Town play of Joseph’s Doubt, when Joseph questions Mary about the origins of her pregnancy, she responds by saying that “It is no man but swete Jhesus, he wyll be clad in flesch and blood, and of your wyff be born.”47 Several fifteenth-century paintings of Joseph’s Doubt show Mary as sewing or spinning: one by the Master of Erfurt shows the thread crossing over Mary’s body and so crossing through an image of the Christ-child that appears on her abdomen as if in a transparent and glowing womb (Fig. 30).48 In this painting, as in Proclus’s metaphor, textile production is linked to the formation of the child within Mary’s body. While these textile metaphors were developed and used specifically to understand Mary’s relationship as a mother to Christ, Proclus’s metaphor resembles the understanding of reproductive processes in the Aristotelian biology that was popular in western Europe in the later Middle Ages. Where in Proclus’s metaphor Mary’s flesh provides the warp thread for Christ’s, according to Aristotelian accounts, the mother provided the matter from which the child was made, which was often identified with her retained menses. Both thus established a particularly close relationship between the mother’s body and the child’s.49 This resemblance produces at least the possibility that textile metaphors could also have been used to imagine the invisible growth of any child in its mother’s womb, and that the intimate relationship Proclus’s metaphor establishes between the

45 46 47 48 49

Quoted in Constas, “Weaving the Body of God,” 182. Constas, “Weaving the Body of God,” 193–4. Gibson, Theatre of Devotion, 157. Gertsman, Worlds Within, 50, 56; Gibson, Theatre of Devotion, 161–4. Florschuetz, Marking Maternity, 101–2; Park, Secrets of Women, 141–4.

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FIG. 30. MASTER OF ERFURT. JOSEPH’S DOUBT OR THE VIRGIN MARY WITH A DISTAFF. FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

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mother’s body and the child’s could likewise have been understood to hold for any such pair. Thus medieval beholders of the Virgin sculptures may have been able to use textile metaphors to think about other mother–child relationships, including, for beholders who were mothers themselves, their own relationships with their children. Finally, Jacques Gélis provides examples of textile metaphors that were used in later medieval and early modern France to think about the biological processes of ordinary motherhood, although in a different way. Gélis identifies the robe, tunic, or alb as potential metaphors for the membranes that appeared on a newborn child.50 These metaphors differ from the Marian metaphors discussed above in that they present the textile as an outer garment that covers the child’s flesh, rather than as that flesh itself, and in that they were used to understand the process of childbirth, instead of gestation. These membranes emerged from the mother’s body along with her child and persisted on the child’s body. The textile metaphors given by Gélis identified these membranes as a removable form, a garment worn over the flesh, and the membranes themselves were washed away soon after birth. These metaphors thus visualized the gradual process of separation between the mother’s body and the child, rather than an ongoing intimate relationship between the two. Finally, the contrast between the Marian metaphors and those reported by Gélis has similarities to the different meanings attributed to specific garment types, whether as relics or as everyday clothing. On the one hand, the veil and the chemise were intimate garments. Both were worn directly against the body: the chemise touched the wearer’s body underneath the robe and the veil touched her head and hair. And both were typically made from fine white linen, so that their texture and color approximated that of skin, which increased their level of intimacy with their wearer.51 On the other hand, the mantle was an enveloping outer garment and from this form it acquired a protective significance: the Marian maphorion relic was famed for its ability to protect the city of Constantinople against attack, and western Madonna of Mercy images similarly show the faithful gathered within Mary’s protection.52 These meanings for these garment types may also have informed medieval beholders’ understandings of the garments as they appear on the Virgin sculptures, where they work visually to construct the relationship between the mother and child. Medieval beholders may have looked to the veil to establish a level of Gélis, History of Childbirth, 172. Odile Blanc, Parades et parures. L’invention du corps de mode à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1997), 128–31; Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1997), 27–8, 40–3. 52 On the maphorion relic see Angelidi and Papamastorakis, “Picturing the Spiritual Protector,” 209–10; Carr, “Threads of Authority,” 61, 63–8; Kalopissi-Verti, “Representations of the Virgin in Lusignan Cyprus,” 306–8; Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 2–5, 11–12, 38–59; Rubin, Mother of God, 66–71. 50 51

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intimacy between the Virgin’s body and the child’s, similar to the Marian metaphorical formulations. Likewise, they may have looked to the mantle in these sculptures to place the child in relation to the protective outer enclosure of Mary’s overall form, and possibly to picture his emergence from her form as in Gélis’s metaphors.

GIRDLE, MANTLE, AND VEIL Thus the textile forms that dominate the Virgin sculptures corresponded to both Marian textile relics and the forms of actual medieval dress for women and that correspondence, along with practices that transferred actual items of dress from women to such sculptures, would have promoted medieval women’s ability to identify with the Virgin as represented in these artworks. The use of Marian girdle relics and similar forms, including some derived from the Virgin sculptures, to assist with fertility and childbirth would have further promoted women’s ability to identify with the Virgin specifically in their shared role as mothers. These practices also suggest that the women among the Virgin sculptures’ beholders may have paid particular attention to the girdle as it appeared in these artworks. Based on the manipulation of their own girdles during pregnancy and childbirth, medieval women may have seen the girdles on these sculptures as articulating the degree of openness of the Virgin’s body. Similarly, the use of textile metaphors for the processes of gestation and childbirth, along with the meanings attributed to the mantle and veil as both relics and as everyday items of dress, may have led medieval women to see these garments as they appear on the Virgin sculptures as giving shape to the relationship between the mother’s body and the child. The mantle and veil may have been seen as establishing a level of intimacy between the two, or as tracing the child’s emergence and final separation from her form. Here, I bring these suggestions about the potential significance of the girdle, mantle, and veil to attempt to reconstruct the ways in which medieval women as beholders may have understood a number of Virgin sculptures. I have selected the specific sculptures I discuss here in order to highlight the range of different possibilities for how the girdle, mantle, and veil might structure Mary’s body and the relationship between her and the child. I focus first on the girdle, then on the mantle, and finally on the veil. In each case, I identify two extremes in the way in which the garment works to structure the Virgin’s body and her relationship to the child – as closed or open, intimate or separate – along with complex and even contradictory combinations of those extreme possibilities. In discussing each garment type, I begin with my own responses to the visual forms of the garments on a number of sculptures. I then build to reception, drawing from material presented previously to suggest how medieval women as beholders may have understood these specific works of art.

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A fourteenth-century sculpture, likely from the Vexin region although its original location is unknown, highlights the role of the girdle in articulating the degree of openness of the Virgin’s body (Fig. 31).53 The girdle is visually highlighted in this sculpture as its end arches up from its closure point to where it was originally held in the child’s hand, and then passes in between the Virgin and the child to dangle down among the folds of her skirts. This girdle’s upwards arc creates a relationship between its form and that of the closure band for the Virgin’s mantle, which loops loosely downward over her chest to intersect with it: this creates a contrast between the girdle’s closure, as it closely encircles the Virgin’s waist before its end arches away, and the mantle’s more open form. This Virgin’s mantle falls open on either side of her body and she activates that opening by holding it out and away with her right hand. Her gesture with the mantle mirrors the child’s grasp of the girdle and so again contrasts the mantle to the girdle as open to closed. That contrast appears once again in the robe on the lower part of the Virgin’s body, as a pair of lines creates folds in her skirts that open up in an extended, inverted V shape from directly below the girdle’s closure point. This Virgin’s body is thus marked by her girdle and her clothing as a paradoxically closed-yet-open form. Other sculptures of the Virgin use the girdle to emphasize either the closure or the opening of her body, rather than combining and contrasting the two. A second fourteenth-century example, this one likely from the Lorraine, emphasizes closure (Fig. 32). 54 Its girdle wraps tightly around the Virgin’s waist before extending downward: unlike the previous sculpture, there is no upward arc to this girdle’s form and the child does not interact with it. Likewise, the folds in this Virgin’s skirts do not create an opening form to contrast with the girdle’s closure, but instead extend downward along with and similar to its dangling end. Similar to the previous sculpture, the form of the girdle is repeated by a horizontal band that is either the mantle’s closure cord or the neckline of Mary’s robe; however, that band creates a much shorter and tighter curve than the one on the previous example and so it works with the girdle to emphasize closure, rather than contrasting an open to a closed form. This neckband and the girdle both intersect with decorative edging on the Virgin’s mantle and this reinforces their connection as similarly closed forms and relates both to her mantle. While the mantle on this sculpture falls open on either side of Mary’s body, as in the previous example, this Virgin does not hold it open. Instead it falls flat against her robe beneath and the two seem to come together into one sealed surface, again emphasizing the closure of her body. 53 William D. Wixom, Medieval Sculpture at the Metropolitan, 800–1400 (New York, 2005), 30. 54 William D. Wixom, “Gothic Madonna from Lorraine,” Cleveland Museum of Art Bulletin 61 (December 1974): 343–9.

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FIG. 31. VIRGIN AND CHILD. VEXIN (OR NORMANDY), FRANCE. 1300–35.

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FIG. 32. VIRGIN AND CHILD. LORRAINE, FRANCE. 1310–20.

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An early sixteenth-century example, localized to Troyes, uses some similar forms as these two fourteenth-century versions, but uses them to instead emphasize the child’s active opening of the Virgin’s body (Fig. 33).55 As in the sculpture from the Vexin, this Virgin’s girdle is contrasted to the closure band for her mantle; but in this case the mantle’s band forms a straight line across her chest, emphasizing closure, while the girdle consists of a strip of cloth that is loosely tied around her waist and seems to be slipping down and open over her torso. The child in this sculpture is positioned so that his shoulders are in line with the mantle’s closure cord and his feet are just above the girdle’s loose tie. His feet are associated with that tie as the line of his front foot is continued by the line of one end of the girdle, as his other foot intersects with its other end, and as his crossed legs repeat its knot in reverse. His bent knees, finally, suggest a coming action of his legs that will kick the girdle, and so the Virgin’s body, fully open. The movement of the girdle in the sculpture from the Vexin, up and away from the Virgin’s body into the child’s hand, suggests the girdle’s separability from her form and so might have recalled for medieval women the practices that brought girdles relics as well as girdles and girdle-like forms from sculptures to assist with their fertility and with childbirth (Fig. 31). While this may have prompted women who were beholders of this sculpture to relate it to their own maternal experiences, they may have related its paradoxical closed-yet-open form instead to the special circumstances of Mary’s motherhood, initiated and completed without violating her body integrity. Elina Gertsman similarly argues that the visible split in Mary’s body in closed Shrine Madonna sculptures suggests the paradox of the Virgin’s closed-yet-open body and so the special circumstances of her pregnancy.56 For a woman who was otherwise likely to identify with the Virgin as represented in this image, its form could have prompted reflection on the difference between Mary’s maternal experiences and her own. Likewise, the emphasis on closure in the sculpture from the Lorraine might have recalled for a woman Mary’s idealized virginity and the impossibility of her maintaining that quality in the role of a wife and mother (Fig. 32). By contrast, the child’s opening of the Virgin’s girdle on the sixteenth-century example from Troyes may have recalled the practice of opening up girdles and other garment closures during childbirth in order to open the mother’s body in order to allow for the passage of the child (Fig. 33). Thus, for women as beholders, this sculpture may have more closely recalled their own experiences of motherhood. Much as the girdle can emphasize the closure of the Virgin’s body, or suggest the child’s opening up of her form, or create a paradoxical 55 Dorothy Gillerman, ed., Gothic Sculpture in America, Volume 2: Midwestern Museums (Turnhout, 2001), catalog number 274, pp. 389–90. 56 Gertsman, Worlds Within, 16–19, 68, 77.

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FIG. 33. SCHOOL OF TROYES (FRENCH), VIRGIN AND CHILD. 1500.

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combination of those two possibilities, so the mantle can work to emphasize either the child’s intimate absorption into Mary’s body or his separation from her, or it can position him between those two extremes. The fifteenth-century sculpture discussed in my introductory comparison for this chapter uses its massive mantle to integrate the child into the mother’s body (Fig. 26). By contrast, an additional fourteenthcentury sculpture, from either Champagne or the Ile-de-France (Plate III), exaggerates the twisted top fold of the mantle seen on the example from the Introduction (Fig. 1, Plate I) in order to emphasize the child’s separation from the mother’s form.57 This Virgin’s mantle is pulled up onto her right shoulder and crosses over the right side of her chest. It is thus juxtaposed with the child held in her left arm, which emphasizes his separation from it and so from her. As it crosses her chest, furthermore, the mantle on this sculpture folds downward and falls into the first of the curved folds that occupy Mary’s right midsection and suggest an emptiness to her form: in this way its inside-out movement is associated with her apparently empty interior. This fold also reveals the mantle’s red interior, in contrast to its blue exterior, and the child’s garment seems to have had a similar red tone. He is thus associated with its inside-out movement through color, even as he is separated from it in space, a combination that suggests this outward movement as having led to his separation. Likewise, the top edge of the mantle’s fold creates a diagonal line that continues to the child’s feet and the lower edge of his garment, so that its inside-out movement leads down to where he rises up as a separate form. Where the mantle on this sculpture thus suggests the process of outward movement from the mother’s body that led to the child’s final separation from her, additional examples seem to combine absorption with separation in order to picture that process itself. In a second fifteenth-century sculpture, said to come from a church at Montigny-surVingeanne, the Virgin is wrapped up in a massive mantle that covers the whole of her body and forms a series of curving horizontal folds that extend down her right side (Fig. 34).58 She holds the child in front of her body, tipped off to the side so that he is almost parallel with these folds. This visually associates him with the mantle and so suggests his enclosure within it and his absorption within the mother’s body. However, the wrapping action of the mantle also creates a long diagonal line that moves from the right side of the Virgin’s neck down the left side of her body. That diagonal is picked up by her left hand as she supports the child from underneath, and by both of his hands as they grasp hers, so that it continues across his body. His head extends past that line, finally, and this suggests his coming emergence from her body and so separation from her 57 58

Musée du Louvre, Sculpture française, vol. 1, 134. Musée du Louvre, Sculpture française, vol. 1, 192.

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FIG. 34. VIRGIN AND CHILD. BURGUNDY, FRANCE. SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

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form. A second sixteenth-century example, likely from Champagne, shows a similarly massive mantle that wraps across the front of the Virgin’s body and so wraps around the child as she holds him in front of her, suggesting his integration into her form (Fig. 35).59 However, this suggestion is contradicted as the child leans and reaches forward, and as Mary’s hand on his arm seems to encourage that reach forward and away. Thus, as in the previous example, the child seems to be midway through the process of separation from the mother’s body, although here the mother appears to take a more active role in that process. For medieval beholders, the action of the mantle in the sculptures in which it visually absorbs the child into the Virgin’s body may have recalled the maphorion or mantle relic’s protective significance as an outer enclosing form. In these artworks, the mantle may have been understood as enclosing and so protecting the child in a way similar to that relic’s protection of the city of Constantinople. As Gertsman has demonstrated, certain Shrine Madonna sculptures that in their open state represent the Madonna of Mercy further identify the mantle as an outer protective form with the enclosure of Mary’s own body (Fig. 36).60 Likewise, the mantle in certain of the sculptures discussed here may have suggested to medieval beholders the child’s enclosure within the mother’s body during her pregnancy. By contrast, the use of the mantle to suggests the child’s emergence and eventual separation from Mary’s body could have recalled for medieval beholders the metaphors that Gélis documents, or similar constructions that likened the membranes on a newborn child to garments such as the robe, tunic, or alb. Those metaphors used a garment to imagine the child’s gradual emergence and separation from its mother’s body; perhaps additional unrecorded metaphors used the mantle in a similar way. For beholders familiar with such metaphors, the fifteenthcentury sculpture discussed in the previous paragraph may have suggested the beginning of the child’s movement out of his mother’s body, as the child is still largely contained within the mantle’s protective outer enclosure (Fig. 34); the sixteenth-century sculpture may have suggested the mother’s desire for the child’s successful birth, as she seems to actively encourage his reach out and away from her (Fig. 35); and the fourteenth-century example that suggests the child’s outward movement while emphasizing his separation may have celebrated such a birth (Plate III). Much as girdles can emphasize either the closure or the openness of the Virgin’s body, and mantles either absorption or separation between the mother and child, so the veils on the Virgin sculptures can work to emphasize either the connection between the mother and child or their separation from one another. At the same time, much as the example from the Vexin (Fig. 31) combined the girdle with other garments forms to 59 60

Musée du Louvre, Sculpture française, vol. 1, 197. Gertsman, Worlds Within, 3, 11, 46–7, 91–4.

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FIG. 35. VIRGIN AND CHILD. CHAMPAGNE, FRANCE. FIRST THIRD OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

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FIG. 36. SHRINE MADONNA. MISTERHULT, SWEDEN. 1430–50.

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produce a paradoxically closed-yet-open body, so the simple dichotomy of connection/separation for the veil is complicated by the visual relationships established between each sculpture’s veil and its mantle, as the forms of these two garments can either reinforce or contradict one another. In the fourteenth-century sculpture introduced above in the discussion of mantles (Plate III), the veil and the mantle work together to suggest the child’s outward movement away from the mother’s body as leading to his final separation from her. The veil’s white color works to associate it with the Virgin’s white flesh, visible on her face and neck, and her white robe, which appears from underneath the mantle on her upper left chest. The veil also rests against this portion of the robe. These visual associations establish the veil’s identity as an interior and so intimate garment. Nevertheless, on the opposite side of Mary’s chest, the veil comes to rest against the exterior of her mantle; it thus repeats and reinforces the inside-out movement established by the mantle’s twisted top fold. And it is further associated with that fold as it intersects with it, specifically with the mantle’s white edging as it bends inward along the edge of its downward fold. The veil’s outward movement in this sculpture stops well short of the child himself, however; he does not interact with the veil as the child does in the fourteenth-century version from the Introduction (Fig. 1, Plate I). Instead the veil on this sculpture folds back on itself as it connects to the additional inward fold in the mantle’s edging. Thus both veil and mantle in this example trace the child’s movement out of the Virgin’s body as leading to his final separation from her. In a late fourteenth-century sculpture, localized to Champagne, the veil and mantle again both establish a movement from inside out (Fig.  37).61 This veil comes from underneath the Virgin’s crown to rest on top of her mantle, and the mantle wraps around her body, crosses over itself as it passes between her and the child, and then extends out to the side. The child is associated with the mantle’s outward movement as a thick fold in its fabric continues the line of his bent leg across its surface, and so its movement suggests his movement away from his mother’s body. The movements of the veil and the mantle in this sculpture likewise both end in a hand gesture, as the child reaches out to grasp the end of the veil and pull it across Mary’s chest, and as Mary holds the edge of her mantle out and away from herself. These similar gestures have different effects on the relationship between the mother and child, however. The child uses the Virgin’s veil to link the two of them together, despite his outward movement away from her form, as his arm and the veil together create one long curving line that leads from his torso back to her head. By contrast, Mary’s gesture pulls the mantle across between them, closing her off from him, and then leads away from him, and leads him away from her, as

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FIG. 37. VIRGIN AND CHILD. CHAMPAGNE, FRANCE. LATE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

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he is associated with the mantle’s form. Thus his reach for an ongoing connection to his mother’s body through her veil is in conflict with her use of the mantle to create a separation between them. A final example, a sculpture from Picardy and dated to c. 1400, uses both the veil and the mantle to emphasize an ongoing intimate relationship between the mother and child (Plate IV).62 The veil in this sculpture again passes from inside out, emerging from underneath the mantle as it is pulled up over the Virgin’s head. The veil then runs directly alongside Mary’s bared breast to rest in the child’s hand and its light color serves to associate it with both her flesh and his, so that it works to link the two of them together. The light tones of the veil and of the figures’ flesh contrasts with the dark blue of this sculpture’s massive mantle. This mantle comes forward on either side of Mary’s body, as it is held in her right hand and passes over her left, and then it tunnels back from that forward plane to create an open space in the center of her body. The child is tipped back into this space so that it becomes his outer enclosure. Lines move across the mantle and into his body, furthermore, and so integrate him into her form: a series of lines crosses over her chest to intersect with his arm as he grasps her veil, and other lines arc over her midsection to lead into his legs and torso. This final sculpture shows the child as nursing from the Virgin’s exposed breast. Breast milk was frequently identified as the mother’s transformed menstrual blood and so as a significant substance that was shared between the mother and child (as discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to the monstrous violation of bodily boundaries). This was the same retained menstrual matter that was understood in Aristotelian biology, as explained above, to provide the material for the child’s body as it developed in utero: thus breastfeeding continued the close connection between the mother’s flesh and the child’s that began in the womb. For a medieval beholder, these ideas may have suggested seeing the veil in this last sculpture as visualizing Mary’s breast milk as that shared substance and so as creating an ongoing intimate tie between her and the child. Furthermore, the child’s tip back into the enclosing form of the Virgin’s mantle could have relocated this intimate relationship between the mother’s body and the child’s back into her interior and so used it to visualize the invisible process of the child’s in utero development. The result would have been something similar to Proclus’s version of the Marian textile metaphor, which used textile production as an image of gestation and identified Mary’s flesh as the foundational warp thread for Christ’s own. In the late fourteenth-century example discussed immediately above (Fig. 37), the passage of the veil between the mother and child may likewise have suggested the intimate tie created through breastfeeding, although it is not explicitly represented

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here. In this sculpture, however, the opposing action of the mantle would have disallowed projecting that connection back into the Virgin’s interior and suggested instead the process of separation between mother and child during and after his birth.

VISUALIZING PARTURITION Each individual Virgin sculpture would have gained meaning as the visual forms created by its sculpted clothing met medieval beholders’ understandings of those garments. Thus, for example, in marking Mary’s body as an open-yet-closed form and by reminding beholders of the use of girdles in pregnancy practices, the girdle on the sculpture from the Vexin may have led a female beholder to consider the contrast between Mary’s ideal but impossible motherhood and her own experiences (Fig. 31). Likewise, on the sixteenth-century example from Champagne, the contrast between the mantle as an enclosing outer protective form, similar to the maphorion relic, and both the child’s reach and Mary’s apparent encouragement of that reach, may have allowed such a beholder to see the sculpture as visualizing a mother’s desire for her child’s successful birth (Fig. 33). However, the Virgin sculptures may also have been meaningful for medieval women on a second level, when considered as a group. Given the numbers of these sculptures that survive today, they must have been a common sight in the later Middle Ages. Medieval beholders thus would have had the opportunity to encounter a number of them, to recognize the differences between them, and to consider the significance of these differences. The differences in their clothing forms construct a wide variety of relationships between the mother and child, as is shown by the examples discussed in the previous section: the Virgin’s girdle may serve to close her body off from the child or to dramatize his active opening of her form, her mantle may absorb the child into her body or trace his movement out from it, and her veil may or may not establish an intimate tie between their bodies. Furthermore, individual sculptures may represent one of these relationships to the exclusion of the others, or may use a combination of different clothing forms to combine different, even contradictory, ideas. I find Theresa Krier’s concept of “parturition” to be useful for considering the potential significance of the wide range of relationships between the mother and child represented by the Virgin sculptures as a group. Krier defines parturition as “the long-term maintaining of a space between mother and child … the ways in which both mother and child may enfranchise each other after the confinement of labor and birth, may be at large – have elbow room, an openness of space between them, a passionate shifting interplay of proximity and difference” (italics in the original).63 63

Krier, Birth Passages, 11. For similar ideas see Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother

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Krier develops this concept through a rereading of the psychoanalytic work of D.W. Winnicott through the writings of Luce Irigaray and in relation to readings of pre-modern texts ranging from the Song of Songs through Shakespeare’s plays. Krier looks to Winnicott, Irigaray, and the literary texts to identify alternatives to accounts of the mother–child relationship that focus on nostalgia for fusion with a lost archaic mother, which she associates primarily with the work of Melanie Klein.64 Krier’s parturition is similar to Winnicott’s “disillusionment,” which occurs as the mother gradually fails to meet all of the infant’s needs and so begins to create a space between herself and the child. This may be traumatic for the child, but it is also productive for him or her, as it moves the child to take part in “traversing the space that the mother gradually enlarges and sustains.”65 Winnicott, and Krier following from him, speak of the relationship between mother and child as lines of force or energy moving across the space between them and as including movements or moments of both proximity and distance. Thus Krier writes of “the space created by the mother and child in varied, historically specific ways” and the “tangle of presence, absence, love, resentment, hate, friendship, need, protection, exposure, mourning” created by the lines that cross the space between them.66 In his practice with children as patients, Winnicott realized this space and the complex lines that cross it in a game in which the child and the analyst took turns in completing each other’s squiggling lines on a piece of paper.67 This visualization of these abstract concepts can help bring them to the Virgin sculptures: each sculpture as a whole can be identified with the piece of paper in Winnicott’s squiggle game as the space between the mother and child, and the forms of the garments identified with the lines that cross and recross that space in complex ways, whether within the contradictory forms of certain individual sculptures,

Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (New York, 1995). 64 Krier, Birth Passages, ix–xi, 4–5, 9–11, 43. See D.W. Winnicott, Through Pediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers (New York, 1992); Psycho-Analytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (Cambridge, 1989); and “Living Creatively” (1970) in Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psycho-Analyst (New York, 1986), 35–54. See also Luce Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order” in Je, Te, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (London, 1993), 37–44; “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother” and “Divine Women” in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill (New York, 1993), 7–21, 52–72; “I Love to You” and “A Breath That Touches in Words” in I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (London, 1996), 109–13, 121–8; Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, 1985) and This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, 1985). Finally see Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (New York, 1960); Envy and Gratitude and Other Works (London, 1975); and Writings, ed. Roger Money-Kyrle, 4 vols. (New York, 1975). 65 Krier, Birth Passages, 40–1. 66 Krier, Birth Passages, 19. 67 Krier, Birth Passages, 44; Winnicott, “The Squiggle Game” (1964–68) in PsychoAnalytic Explorations, 299–317.

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or as a cumulative experience as a beholder encounters multiple different sculptures over time. Winnicott and Krier’s account of the relationship between mother and child would not have been available to medieval beholders of the Virgin and Child sculptures, of course, except in so far as the ideas basic to that account may have been available to them in other forms – including, potentially, the visual forms of the sculptures themselves. Krier identifies these ideas as appearing in pre-modern literary texts in two distinct ways. First, they appear in the texts’ representations of mothers and maternal figures. For example, Krier points to Dame Nature in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules as a maternal figure: Nature in this text organizes a debate between the birds, creating a space for varied exchanges between them, and it is out of that space and with Nature’s encouragement that the formel (a female eagle) is finally able to speak. Krier visualizes the relationship between Dame Nature and the formel as that of a woman engaged in falconry, with the bird attached to her wrist but able to fly away and come back at will. Thus Dame Nature as a mother creates space for the formel as her child to come and go and speak and so to develop her own subjectivity.68 Secondly, Krier identifies these ideas as appearing in the formal features of poetic language, such as word choice and imagery. In the Song of Songs, for example, Krier notes that the combination of a close cataloging of the part of the beloved’s body – “eyes, hair, teeth, neck, lips, breasts” – with sometimes surprising images for those body parts – a neck like a turret hung with a shield, for example – and with repeated calls for movement over space – “walk, follow, arise, come away, draw in, enter, go about” – create constantly shifting relationships of proximity and distance.69 And while these relationships are between the woman of the Song and her beloved, they are identified with relationships to the mother by the woman’s stated desire to bring her beloved into her mother’s house and have him be her mother’s child.70 The Virgin sculptures when considered as a group combine these two levels of maternal representation. At the level of subject matter, each is obviously maternal as in each Mary holds her child in her arms. And as we have seen, at the level of visual form, the lines, shapes, and colors of the garments in each sculpture construct a relationship between the mother and the child. The sculptures’ representation of motherhood differs across these two levels, however. On the level of subject matter, they are highly repetitive, as again and again from sculpture to sculpture the Virgin is shown as a young mother holding her child; but on the level of form, as demonstrated in the previous section, the relationship established between mother and child differs from sculpture to sculpture to sculpture. 68 69 70

Krier, Birth Passages, 122–34. Krier, Birth Passages, 74–5. Krier, Birth Passages, 56–62.

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And this chapter has only examined a small number of these sculptures: work with additional sculptures would show still more variations on and combinations of garment forms and mother–child relationships. This combination of a fixed and repeating subject matter with varied visual forms allows a beholder of these sculptures to see in them, cumulatively, as a group, not a collection of different relationships between multiple mothers and their children, but instead a collection of different moments in a single, complex, and ever-changing relationship between this one mother and her child. Thus it is not that some of these mothers have close and intimate relationships with their children while others are more distanced and even closed off, but that this one mother and her child are sometimes closely tied together, sometimes split apart from one another, and sometimes somehow both at the same time. Mary thus appears cumulatively in the group of these sculptures as what Winnicott calls the “good-enough” mother: the mother who is sustaining to her child but does not fulfill all of his desires and so creates space both for herself as a subject and for her child’s developing subjectivity. In Winnicott’s terms, this mother is not entirely “good” in being all-present and all-giving to her child, but neither is she “bad” for experiencing moments of closure and withdrawal into herself, nor for allowing the child his movements of separation. Instead she and her child can draw together into intimate interactions and exchanges, can pull apart as separate selves, and can move repeatedly between those two positions.71 As argued in the earlier portions of this chapter, medieval women came to the Virgin sculptures as beholders primed for identification with Mary as represented in them and primed to pay particular attention to the forms and meanings of her represented garments. In approaching these sculptures in this way, these women may have been able to see Mary as a model “good-enough” mother, although they would not have had that term available to describe what they saw. Seeing Winnicott’s compoundcomplex “good-enough” relationship develop cumulatively within the group of these sculptures may have reassured these women that they too could have this type of complicated relationship with their own children. Indeed, for medieval women who experienced these sorts of shifts and changes in their own relationships with their children seeing such a relationship attributed to the ideal figures of the Virgin and Christ would have worked to validate their own experiences.

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Krier, Birth Passages, 73, 81, 132, 201, 234–5.

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D

eath, doubt, empowerment, grief, hope, intimacy, joy, life, loss, pain, presence, release, salvation, separation, subordination, suffering, validation: together these terms summarize the complexity of motherhood as an experience for medieval women as it has been reconstructed in this book through work with selected medieval sculptures. This complexity, expressed most clearly in the contradictions contained in certain pairs of these terms (empowerment/subordination, death/life, grief/joy, intimacy/ separation, and so on), may have marked the experiences of individual women, over one or more pregnancies, and would have marked the cumulative experiences of women as a group. A young woman in Reims in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, who worked in the market in front of the cathedral, might have encountered its Annunciation and Visitation sculptures during her first pregnancy and used them to think about the ongoing changes in her body and the upcoming change in her identity once she became a mother (Figs. 2–3). A few months later, she might have looked back at the Visitation sculptures and recognized in their elaborate forms the celebration of her new motherhood during her Churching: then, looking across the space of the portal, she might have seen in the Presentation sculptures her husband’s assertion of his power within their marriage during the post-Churching feast (Figs. 5 and 7). Over the years, through repeated pregnancies, the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures may have come to represent for her the highs and lows of marriage and motherhood. Years later, as a widow, perhaps now running her husband’s stall in the market, she might have recognized in Elizabeth’s rich visual form and mature face her own newly independent status. Another young woman who had decided to become a beguine, and who came to the

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cathedral for Candlemas, might have recognized in the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures instead her developing sense of an interior encounter with the divine. Or perhaps the first woman decided to become a beguine as a widow and now saw in these sculptures both a continuity from her earlier life as a wife and mother, in thinking of the divine presence within her as like that of a child, and a difference, in her transformed relationship to male, now clerical, authority. A century later, a woman living as a beguine in Reims might not have had a chance to visit the cathedral and encounter its sculptures; but if she did, she might have recognized in the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures the new demand for physical and so visible proof of any claims she might make to an intimate experience with God. A woman in twelfth-century Moissac might have gone into the monastery enclosure in order to collect water for her household and decided to stop by the church of Saint-Pierre in order to see the relics that Abbot Roger had put on display there; perhaps she was attracted to the church by the elaborate sculptures that covered the walls of its porch (Fig. 9). Once in the porch, she might have been taken aback by the tormented form of the femme-aux-serpents sculpture and by the tortured bodies of the lepers who gathered there (Fig. 8). Trying to make sense out of these encounters, she might have begun to make connections between the sculptures’ forms, the causes and cures of leprosy, and pregnancy and childbirth. She might have seen the snakes attached to the woman’s breasts as attacking her and thought of snakes as devouring the dead in the grave. At the same time she might have identified the snakes as nursing from the woman and connected them to the scaly texture of the lepers’ skin. She might likewise have seen the toad between the woman’s thighs as eating its way into her body, identified toads too as devourers of the dead, and connected that to the lepers’ missing noses and fingers, while also identifying the two toads as tracing out the woman’s impregnation by the demon, and thinking of toads themselves as born from dead bodies. Perhaps she was pregnant for the first time herself, but, like Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme, knew of women who had died in childbirth and so was wondering what labor might hold for her. Or perhaps, like Margery Kempe, she had survived a difficult labor and was pregnant again, was fearing the upcoming birth, and was trying to reconcile herself to its potential for pain and suffering, and even to her own potential death: would her suffering in this life lead to salvation in the next? A woman in this last position might have made a pilgrimage to a site like Saint-Lazare at Autun. At that church, a woman who had struggled to conceive, carry, or bear a child might have recognized her own difficulties in the Eve sculpture’s combination of a fruitful body with a grief-stricken face. Recalling the use of the Lazarus story in childbirth prayers, she might have used that story as told in the sculptures at Autun to pray for her child to come forth from her body easily and alive. Another woman might

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have made the pilgrimage to Saint-Lazare in thanksgiving for the miracle that had brought her child back from the dead. Seeing Eve, crying, at the feet of Christ, and perhaps seeing Lazarus resurrected and standing alongside him, she might have remembered her own grief at her child’s demise and the action she had taken to beg the saint to bring the child back to life (Figs. 22–3). Once inside the church, she might have identified the Lazarus shrine as like Eve’s body in being both a place of fertility and growth and a site of loss and grief. And once inside the shrine, she might have recognized her own grief in Martha’s inward and downward gesture, and then her relief, release, and even joy in Mary Magdalene’s outward and upward movements (Figs. 20–1). Together with Eve’s sorrowing face, these sculptures’ actions and expressions may have validated her own open display of emotion at the time of her child’s death, despite the general disapproval of such displays. Another woman might have come to the same shrine with her ill or injured child, or with the body of her deceased child, in hopes of a miraculous healing or resurrection. She might have identified the same aspects of the shrine as the first woman as signs of hope for her child, but she may also have registered the lurking presence of the demonic figures in the foliage behind Eve and on the exterior of the shrine as potentially undermining the promise of this place. If her child was healed or returned to life, she too might have identified with Martha and Mary’s representation of emotional transformation. But what if the child was not resurrected? Her only remaining hope would have lain in the final resurrection of the dead: looking at the representation of that moment on the church’s north tympanum, she might have remembered Martha’s declaration of faith that her brother would live again on the last day (Fig. 25). Finally, imagine a medieval woman struggling to care for one or more young children while meeting other demands on her time and energy: perhaps she also works with her husband in a workshop, market stall, or farm; perhaps she has a business of her own to maintain, possibly working with cloth or producing food for sale; certainly she needs to care for the rest of her household. Overwhelmed, she goes into a local church for a few moments on her own and encounters a sculpture of the Virgin holding the Christ-child. Perhaps the sculpture is draped with garments and objects willed to it by women she has known: perhaps a girdle or ribbon from it was used to assist with her own pregnancy or childbirth. Spending some time with the sculpture, she comes to recognize in its clothing forms traces of both her desire for an ongoing intimate connection with her child, to hold him or her so close that it is like they are one being, and her need to separate from the child in order to continue with the rest of her life’s activities. Perhaps the sculpture emphasizes one of these positions over the other, or perhaps it finds some sort of balance between the two. Struck by this first sculpture’s relationship to her own conflicted needs and desires, she begins to visit different churches, and to spend time with the

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Virgin and Child sculptures she finds there and in other locations, looking to see how each of them reconciles this conflict, and so gradually coming to resolve it for herself (Plates I–IV, Figs. 1, 26, 31–5, 37). How do these experiences of motherhood that I have reconstructed for medieval women relate to the experiences of women today? What similarities can be identified between these two sets of maternal experiences? What differences? The remainder of this Afterword attempts to answer these questions by investigating motherhood as it appears in selected works by contemporary (late twentieth- and twenty-first-century) female artists.

MOTHERHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY ART Not surprisingly, the physical changes caused by pregnancy form a first point of similarity between medieval and contemporary women’s experiences of motherhood. Thus a transformation similar to that of Mary’s body in the Reims Annunciation and Visitation sculptures appears in Susan Hiller’s Ten Months (1979) (Figs. 38–9). While pregnant, Hiller took a full-body photograph of herself each day and kept a journal. Her work of art selects from these two bodies of material and places them in juxtaposition. In the artwork, the photographs are cropped to show only her expanding abdomen, and the images from each month of her pregnancy are placed into a grid. The cropping of the photographs abstracts the form of her belly, while the grid format suggests a level of rigor and discipline in her self-observation during her pregnancy. As installed in a gallery, the grids are hung stair-stepping down the wall, and edited selections from Hiller’s journal are hung below the grids for the first five months and above them for the last five. This switch corresponds to an increasing complexity in the texts and so in Hiller’s reflections on her own role(s) as a participant in her pregnancy, an observer of it, and an art-maker.1 The text for the first month reads, “One/She dreams of paws, and of ‘carrying’ a cat while others carry babies. Later, all the cats pay homage”; while that for the tenth is Ten/ “Seeing” (& depicting) … Natural “fact” (photos) “feeling” (& describing) … cultural artifact (text). She needs to resolve these feelings of stress caused by having internalized two or more ways of knowing, believing, and understanding practically everything. She affirms her discovery of a way out through “truth telling,” acknowledging contradictions, expressing inconsistencies, double-talk, ambiguity. She writes that she is no longer confused.2 1 2

Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal (Minneapolis, 2009), 12–16. Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 15.

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FIG. 38. SUSAN HILLER, TEN MONTHS. 1979. COURTESY OF SUSAN HILLER.

FIG. 39. SUSAN HILLER, MONTH 10, DETAIL FROM TEN MONTHS. 1979. COURTESY OF SUSAN HILLER.

The combination of images and text in this work thus goes beyond documenting the changes in Hiller’s body during her pregnancy to reflect on accompanying changes in her sense of self, much as women in medieval Reims may have used the changes in Mary’s body visible in the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures to reflect on changes in their own identities. For women in Reims, the physical changes wrought by pregnancy and childbirth brought both empowerment and subordination, both of which were instantiated in the Churching ritual. On the one hand, that ritual celebrated the new mother and so celebrated motherhood; on the other, it required the mother’s subordination to the authority of the Church, in order to have the ritual performed, and the postChurching feast further subordinated the woman as a wife to her

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husband. I argued in Chapter 1 that the differences in Mary’s body in the Visitation as opposed to the Annunciation and Presentation sculptures could have represented these different positions for the women among their beholders. While Hiller’s increasingly complex texts in Ten Months suggest a form of empowerment in her combined experience of motherhood and art-making, works of art by other contemporary women have investigated motherhood instead as a site of women’s subordination to larger institutions and social systems. The “Documentation VI: Pre-Writing Alphabet, Exergue, and Diary” portion of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79) documents the effects of the child’s entry into school on the mother’s sense of herself and her social role. This portion of the artwork consists of slates modeled on the Rosetta stone in which the child’s early attempts at writing take the place of the hieroglyphics, the mother’s handwritten reflections on his attempts take the place of the Demotic text, and typewritten passages from the mother’s diary take the place of the Greek (Fig. 40).3 In the diary passages, Kelly writes about her son’s first days at school, her hesitations over the local schools, and the effects this encounter with the school system has on her. For example, in the entry for May 10, she writes, “I went for an interview at the new nursery to-day. I felt more nervous about this event than being interviewed for a job myself ”; and then on May 19, “The letter arrived to-day and they’ve accepted Kelly at the new nursery. I feel like a ‘good mother’ because I made an effort and actually changed his situation.”4 In the introductory text for this portion of the piece, Kelly further writes of being addressed as “Mrs. Kelly” by the headmistress and the way that located her in the social role of a wife and so the mother of a “legitimate” child.5 This recalls the medieval Church’s restriction of Churching to women in what it considered to be proper marriages and that restriction’s role in regulating the behavior of the lay population. In a similar vein, Judith Hopkins’s Stretching It: Surviving on AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) (1994), which was produced as a suite of photographs and as a pamphlet, focuses on the effects on poor mothers of applying for or receiving government assistance. One portion of the work responds to a mother’s experience of having to do hours’ worth of handwriting exercises in order to prove that she did not sign and cash her benefits check and then claim it was lost in order to request a second one. Hopkins photographs a woman’s hand writing, “tax fraud is more widespread and costly than welfare fraud,” repeatedly, on a sheet of ruled paper. The resulting image’s resemblance to an old-fashioned school punishment speaks to the way in which the welfare system “infantilizes 3 4 5

Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 33–4. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document (Berkeley, 1999), 176–7, slates 3.807M and 3.908P. Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 168.

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FIG. 40. MARY KELLY, POST-PARTUM DOCUMENT: DOCUMENTATION VI, PRE-WRITING ALPHABET, EXERGUE, AND DIARY. 1978.

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and disciplines” its recipients, while the content of the text argues back against that system.6 For certain beguines, motherhood provided a metaphor for thinking about their interior experiences of the presence of God. For beguines in Reims, the Annunciation, Visitation, and Presentation sculptures may have provided representations of that presence and its effect in transforming their relationship to male members of the clergy. Contemporary women artists have also employed motherhood as a metaphor by identifying it with work and using that identification to contest society’s devaluation of women’s activities and contributions. The sheer numbers of objects and texts included in Kelly’s Post-Partum Document – six sections plus an introduction, each with multiple framed units comprising texts and images along with additional texts – foregrounds the work involved in mothering and identifies it with the work of art-making as a way of asserting its value.7 Likewise, Elaine Reichek’s Laura’s Sweater (1975–76) juxtaposes her daughter’s infant sweater with an architectonic diagram that represents the individual gestures involved in producing the stitches that make up the garment (Fig. 41). Visually, the diagram transforms the diminutive and delicate sweater into something monumental and technically complex. In that way, the piece celebrates the labor and skill involved in the sweater’s production and presents it as an emblem of the work involved in motherhood.8 Reichek’s use of a textile form also recalls the medieval textile metaphors discussed in Chapter 4 that were used to imagine the invisible interior work of the gestation of the child in its mother’s womb. This suggests the possibility, at least, that medieval women who were engaged in textile production may have understood these metaphors as likewise positioning them as active agents in their own pregnancies. Returning from metaphorical uses of motherhood to its physical experience, the monstrous forms of the Moissac femme-aux-serpents and the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme disrupt the integrity of the mother’s body and in so doing suggest the proximate relationship between motherhood and death for medieval women, along with women’s experiences of pain and suffering in pregnancy and childbirth. Some artwork by contemporary women touches on similar issues. The Madres! project by the Mexican collective Polvo de Gallina Negra (1984–87) included a mail art sub-project, Liberté, Egalité, Maternité: Polvo de Gallina Negra Ataca de Nuevo. One of the mailers was identified as an “Epitaph”: in her contribution to it, Mónica Meyer asked for whom it was written: “women who die giving birth or those who kill themselves because they didn’t want to be a mother, or because they weren’t able to become a mother, 6 7 8

Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 83–4. Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 85–7, 95. Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 3–5.

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or those that kill their kids, or those that die from clandestine abortions, or lose their lives while saving their children.”9 Meyer thus catalogs a variety of situations in which motherhood and mortality might intersect for contemporary women, as they did for women in the medieval past. Andrea Bowers’s Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice and her associated video piece Letters to an Army of Three (both 2015) focus on one such situation, the potential consequences of unsafe abortions performed in places where abortion is illegal (Fig. 42). The letters in Bowers’s Wall are her hand-drawn reproductions of actual letters sent in the 1960s to the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws in which the writers request – even implore – the Association for information on reliable abortion providers. Bowers’s photo-realistic drawing technique serves to draw attention to the letters, to grant them value as works of art, and so to allow them to serve as “necessary reminders.”10 In the video, various people read the letters aloud, giving new voice to their requests and suggesting their potential future relevance. A floral arrangement 9 Mónica Meyer, “!Madres!” in The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, ed. Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein (Bradford, 2011), 165. 10 Margaret Morgan, “Home Truths” in The M Word, 222, 227–8.

FIG. 41. ELAINE REICHEK, LAURA’S SWEATER. ONE OF FOUR COMPONENTS OF LAURA’S LAYETTE. 1979.

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FIG. 42. ANDREA BOWERS, WALL OF LETTERS: NECESSARY REMINDERS FROM THE PAST FOR A FUTURE OF CHOICE #18. 2006.

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placed next to the readers gives the situation a funereal atmosphere and raises the question of what ultimately happened to the women who wrote the original letters.11 The Autun Eve’s sorrowful face combined with her fruitful body, seen within the context of the Lazarus story, raises the issue of infant and childhood mortality and the ways in which medieval women dealt with the loss of their children. Very little work by contemporary women focuses on this issue; or, at least, little such work appears in the two major publications on motherhood in contemporary art, Andrea Liss’s Feminist Art and the Maternal and Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein’s collection The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, that have served as my main sources. Liss discusses one project, Crossings (1990), that was informed by the loss of two children, the sons Daniel Rosenberg and Steven Baranik, and produced by their mothers, Civia Rosenberg and May Stevens. The two women incorporated images by both sons, who were both photographers, into their own work, as a way of collaborating with their sons after their deaths and so sustaining an ongoing relationship with them.12 However, both sons were adults at the time of their deaths, rather than infants or small children. The apparent lack of work by contemporary women focused on infant and childhood mortality, and on maternal pain and suffering as opposed to maternal mortality, may reflect changes in the medical care available to infants, children, and women since the Middle Ages: the medieval experiences that do not seem to appear in contemporary women’s artwork may be less common experiences today. At the same time, infants and children do continue to die, and women do continue to suffer in childbirth, despite advances in medical technology. Thus the apparent lack of contemporary artistic work on these topics may reflect instead an ideology that has accompanied the changes in medical care: the idea that, because of technical advances, infants and children are not supposed to die and women are not supposed to suffer, which results in these experiences not being openly discussed nor represented in public forums. Maternal loss and grief do appear as a major subject in Kelly’s PostPartum Document, but as experienced by a mother in her increasing separation from a living and growing child. The different sections of this project reflect the mother’s repeated experiences of separation as loss; first as the child’s weaning from the breast, secondly as his gradual acquisition of language, and then as the introduction of the father, the mother’s return to work, and child’s entry into school.13 The objects included in the artwork, including stained diapers printed with feeding charts that date from the first introduction of solid food into the child’s diet, and plaster 11 12 13

Morgan, “Home Truths,” 229–30. Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 125–44 Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 40, 72, 92.

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casts of the child’s hands accompanied by passages from the mother’s diary printed on the child’s comforter, act as “fetishes” for the mother; that is, as ways in which she attempts to hold on to her child, despite his growth and increasing separation from her, and ways in which she mourns that separation as a loss to her (Fig. 43).14 The introductory text for “Documentation IV: Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram,” which includes the plaster casts, identifies them as the mother’s “transitional objects,” and identifies in the accompanying diary passages the mother’s experience of “separation anxiety.”15 Elsewhere Kelly identifies herself as playing a “fort/da game” in this portion of the piece, as she tries to conceptualize the child’s absence and what it means for her.16 “Transitional object,” “separation anxiety,” and the “fort/da game” are all terms typically used to describe the child’s experience of separation from the mother, but that Kelly transfers to the mother’s experience instead. While the content of Post-Partum Document thus focuses attention on the experience of loss as central to motherhood, the existence of the piece itself suggests something different: it suggests the mother’s desire for separation from the child and for an independent role for herself in the world as an artist. Likewise, the texts and the Lacanian psychoanalytic diagrams included in the piece document Kelly’s process of reflection on and analysis of her experience as a mother, a process that enacted her separation from that experience. The academic voice that Kelly adopts in many of these texts similarly suggests a desire for detachment and for an authoritative adult position for herself, although that desire is simultaneously undermined by a sense of over-the-top exaggeration in these texts.17 Thus the content, form, and sheer presence of Post-Partum Document combine to create something like the conflicting movements of intimacy and separation between the mother and child visible in the Virgin sculptures discussed in Chapter 4. Likewise, one of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “Maintenance Art” projects, performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1974, included as its first and last steps a telephone call to her babysitter in New York to check to see that her children were okay.18 Its next-to-last step was “if I say it enough times, (maybe) it will come true,” with “it” implicitly referring to the idea that the children are okay with the sitter, or that it is okay for her to have left them with the sitter.19 While the content of this piece thus expresses 14 Andrea Liss, “The Body in Question: Rethinking Motherhood, Alterity, and Desire” in The M Word, 77; Lucy Lippard, “Foreword” in Post-Partum Document, xiv. 15 Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 165. 16 Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 108. 17 Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 28–9. 18 This piece has a number of titles: Some Kinds of Maintenance Cancel Out Others, Keep Your Head Together–1,000 Times, and Babysitter Hangup-Incantation Ritual. Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 59–60. 19 Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 59–60.

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FIG. 43. MARY KELLY, POST-PARTUM DOCUMENT: DOCUMENTATION IV, TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS, DIARY, AND DIAGRAM. 1976.

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Ukeles’s desire for connection with her children and her anxiety over her separation from them, the fact that she took on a project that required such a separation suggests her desire for it along with her desire to continue to be present and active in the world as an artist. The meanings given to motherhood by contemporary women artists thus resemble the meanings I have reconstructed for medieval women’s experiences of motherhood in a variety of ways. Both contemporary women artists and medieval women as beholders of works of art reflected on the visible, physical changes brought by pregnancy as connected to changes in their identities. Both made use of motherhood as a metaphor for other significant experiences in their lives and, in particular, for experiences with potentially empowering effects. Both recognized that pregnancy and childbirth had the potential to bring on their own deaths, rather than to produce new life. And both experienced conflicting desires to both remain connected to their growing children and to separate themselves from their children and assert their own independent identities. If both used motherhood as a metaphor, however, the meanings of those metaphors differed, with medieval beguines identifying motherhood as a metaphor for an interior experience of the divine that had the potential to empower them in relation to clerical authority, and contemporary women artists identifying motherhood with work and using that to challenge the devaluation of women’s contributions to society. And medieval women could have found in medieval artworks reflections of the pain and suffering caused by pregnancy and childbirth, along with resources to help them deal with the loss of their children, but these experiences do not seem to appear in contemporary women’s artwork and are frequently not recognized today.

MOTHERHOOD AND MEANING None of the contemporary works of art discussed in the previous section consists of a representation of a mother with her child. Instead, the majority of them (Crossings being the primary exception) use the strategies of conceptual art and/or the forms of minimalist and performance art to reflect on the meanings that motherhood holds for contemporary women. There are a number of potential reasons for these artists’ apparent resistance to the literal representation of mothers and children and their choice to pursue conceptual, minimalist, and performance-based strategies instead. In an essay entitled “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth” that was published in 1976 and so is roughly contemporary with Hiller, Kelly, and Reichek’s work, Lucy Lippard writes of the necessity for work by women artists, and in particular by feminist women, to look like that of their male contemporaries in order for it to be taken seriously.20 These 20

Lucy R. Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American

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artists’ conceptual and minimalist strategies identified their work with the artistic mainstream and so implicitly expressed their interest in being taken seriously as artists. Lippard also writes of the problem posed by the long history of objectifying representations of the female body for women artists who wish to circumvent that objectification in their own work and so resist participating in their own exploitation. Refusing representation was a way for the artists discussed here to accomplish this end.21 Likewise, the emphasis on text in many of their works provided these women with a way of presenting themselves (in Hiller, Kelly, and Meyer’s work) and other women (in Hopkins and Bowers’s) as thinking subjects, rather than as objects of the gaze.22 In the same essay, Lippard notes the absence at the time of its writing of art by women focused on motherhood – she first saw Kelly’s project a year later in 1977 – and speculates on potential reasons for that apparent lack. Was it because women artists over time had typically either rejected motherhood or kept it hidden, again in the interest of being taken seriously as artists? Was it because of an assumed conflict between biological and artistic creativity?23 These speculations relate to real tensions in the experiences of the artists discussed above: Ukeles’s “Maintenance Art” apparently originated as her response to a comment by one of her art professors that, since she was pregnant, she could no longer be an artist.24 The work discussed above that reflects on the artists’ own experiences of motherhood (Hiller, Kelly, Meyers, Reichek, Rosenberg and Stevens, and Ukeles’s) pushes back against such attitudes by positioning their motherhood as an impetus for their art-making activity, rather than as a hindrance to it. These contemporary artworks obviously differ from the medieval sculptures discussed in the chapters of this book in being the work of women active as artists. As stated in the Introduction, the medieval sculptures are assumed to be the work of male artists, typically working for clerical male patrons, such as Abbot Roger at Moissac. In Chapter 2, however, I argued for Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme’s patronage of her transi sculpture, for seeing that sculpture as her reflection on her own maternal experiences, and for identifying the reception of the Moissac femme-aux-serpents by women there as potentially similar to Jeanne’s Women’s Body Art,” originally published in Art in America 64/3 (May–June 1976), reprinted in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York, 1976), 122. 21 Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein, “Introduction” in The M Word, 4–5; Mary Kelly and Margaret Morgan, “On Love, Politics, and Fallen Shoes: Margaret Morgan in Conversation with Mary Kelly” in The M Word, 22; Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth,” 124; Liss, “The Body in Question,” 77; Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 12–13, 38. 22 Chernick and Klein, “Introduction,” 4–5; Kelly and Morgan, “On Love, Politics, and Fallen Shoes,” 22; Lippard, “Foreword,” xii; Liss, “The Body in Question,” 77; Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 16, 24. 23 Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth,” 138. 24 Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 51.

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patronage in allowing them to appropriate that sculpture in order to reflect on their own experiences. In closing, I would extend that chain of associations to identify medieval women as the beholders of works of art as being like the artists whose work is discussed above in being active thinking subjects capable of reflecting on their own life experiences, including their experiences of motherhood, and so capable of creating the meanings of those experiences for themselves. These medieval women’s acts of meaning-making may not have produced artwork or texts that can stand as historical documentation of them, aside from exceptional examples such as Margery Kempe’s Book, but these acts did occur. And their acts of meaning-making may have drawn on the common cultural materials contained in their horizons of expectations, but those materials would have served as the ingredients for these women’s individual acts of creativity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abou-El-Haj, Barbara. “Building and Decorating at Reims and Amiens.” In Studien zur Geschichte der europäischen Skulptur im 12./13. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck and Kerstin Hengevoss-Dürkop. Frankfurt am Main, 1994, vol. 1, 763–9. — “Program and Power in the Glass of Reims.” In Radical Art History: Internationale Anthologie, Subject: O.K. Werckmeister, ed. Wolfgang Kersten and Joan Weinstein. Zurich, 1997, 23–33. — “The Urban Setting for Late Medieval Church Building: Reims and its Cathedral between 1210 and 1240.” Art History 11/1 (March 1988): 17–41. Alexandre-Bidon, Danièle and Didier Lett. Children in the Middle Ages: Fifth–Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Jody Gladding. Notre Dame, 1999. Angelidi, Christine and Tito Papamastorakis. “Picturing the Spiritual Protector: From Blachernae to Hodegetria.” In Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki. Burlington, 2005, 209–24. Anglès, Auguste. L’abbaye de Moissac. Paris, 1926. Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick. New York, 1962. Arx, Walter von. “The Churching of Women after Childbirth: History and Significance.” In Liturgy and Human Passage, ed. David Power and Luis Maldonado. New York, 1979, 63–72. Ashley, Kathleen M. “The Fleury Raising of Lazarus and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought.” Comparative Drama 15 (1981): 139–58. — “The Resurrection of Lazarus in Late Medieval English and French Cycle Drama.” Papers on Language and Literature 22 (1986): 227–44. Ashley, Kathleen and Pamela Sheingorn, eds. Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society. Athens, 1990. Atkinson, Clarissa. The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, 1991. Baldwin, John W. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200. Chicago, 1994.

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INDEX Abou-El-Haj, Barbara, 21–2 afterlife visions, 61, 63, 68, 79 St. Patrick’s Purgatory, 79 Vision of Alberic, 57, 58, 61, 62–3 Vision of St. Paul, 56–7, 58, 62–3 Vision of Tondal, 80 agency, 5, female, 3, 8, 12–13, 72, 166 See also beholders, female and medieval women, and reception, as virtual production Amiens cathedral, 18, 19, 22 Anne, St., 8, 99–100, 134–5 See also peperit childbirth prayer Apocryphal Gospel of PseudoMatthew, 136 Ariès, Philippe, 118–19 Ashley, Kathleen, 98 Atkinson, Clarissa, 9–10 Autun, 93, 110, 114, 117 see also Saint-Lazare, Autun Balbiani, Valentine, 73, 74 Baluze, Étienne, 73 Baranik, Steven, 169 Barasch, Moshe, 103, 106 Barthes, Roland, 5 Baxandall, Michael, 6–7, 12 Bayeux Tapestry, 103 Beguines, 20, 38–9, 41, 42, 45, 48, 49 See also beholders, beguine, and Reims, beguines in beholders, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 10

beguine, 39, 40–51, 159–60, 166 female, 11–12 laypeople, 7, 12, 13, 55, 60, 65–70, 77 medieval, 12 in Autun, 100–1, 102, 104, 106 in Moissac, 55, 62–3, 83 in Reims, 19–20 of Virgin and Child sculptures, 124, 125–6, 133, 139–40, 148 medieval women, 3, 6–8, 12–14, 164, 172, 173–4 in Autun, 90, 107–8, 112, 115–16, 118–19, 160–1 in Moissac, 55–6, 67, 70, 72, 75, 77, 81–2, 85–6, 160, 173 in Reims, 20, 24–5, 26, 29, 30, 35, 36–8, 40, 51, 159–60 of Virgin and Child sculptures, 123, 126, 128, 133, 135–36, 144, 157, 161–2 monastic, 60–1, 62–3, 65, 83 Beriac, Françoise, 82 Birgitta of Sweden, 49–50, 51 Bowers, Andrea, Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice, 167, 173 breastfeeding, 57–8, 81, 153–4 breast milk, see breastfeeding Camille, Michael, 5 Candlemas, 32–3, 35, 37, 47, 160 in Reims, 33–4, 45 in visionary texts, 42–3, 45, 46

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Cantilupe, Thomas, St., 111 Catherine of Armagnac, 75 Chamberlyn, Jane, 134 Chartres cathedral, 18, 22, 32, 34, 111–13, 130 Chaucer, Alice, 73–4 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Parlement of Foules, 156 chemise, 133, 139 See also Virgin Mary, textile relics Chernick, Myrel, 169 child, see children childbearing, 7, 11, 56, 77 childbirth, 34–5, 58–9, 127, 144 art associated with, 11, 36, 77 assistance in, 80, 110, 112, 134, 140, 161 death in, 35, 75–6, 160, 166, 172 difficult, 99–100, 160 successful, 35, 148, 154 suffering in, 56, 77–8, 81, 85–6, 160, 169 childlessness, 110, 112 children, 8, 26, 30, 57 cures for, 90, 111, 112, 114, 118, 161 deaths or losses of, 114, 116, 118–19, 169–70 grief over, 14, 90, 115, 119, 169 illness and injury of, 90, 114, 115, 116, 118, 161 representations of, 11, 172 resurrections of, 90, 111–12, 115, 118, 161 stillborn, 75, 111, 114 Christ-child, 42–45, 47, 49–51, 127, 136–7, 161 doll, 8, 127–8 Christ as mother, 59, 85 Churching of Women after Childbirth, 30–2, 34–6, 38, 46, 51, 159, 163–4 in Reims, 32–4 Coakley, John, 46–7 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 54

Cohen, Kathleen, 72 conception, 11, 76, 78 See also impregnation Cressy, David, 30 deschi de parto, 11, 35 Despenser, Isabel, 73–4 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 5 Dombes, see pilgrimage, Dombes as destination dovizia statuettes, 11 Elizabeth, St. see Reims cathedral, sculptures, St. Elizabeth and Visitation, SaintPierre (Moissac), porch sculptures, Visitation, and peperit childbirth prayer emotion, 112, 115, 118–19, 161 gendered, 98–9, 106, 161 grief, 89–90, 98–9, 101–2, 106 joy, 42, 45, 98–9, 106, 161 See also children, grief over, and gestures, grief Encarnación, Karen Rosoff, 10 Ermine de Reims, 50–1 ex-votos, 80–1 Fassler, Margot E., 34 fathers, 30, 36, 111, 114–15, 169 fertility, 7, 112, 135, 140, 161 Finucane, Ronald C., 110–12, 114–15, 118 Florschuetz, Angela, 10, 35, 58 Forsyth, Ilene, 63, 65, 67–8, 125 French, Katherine L., 134 Fulton, Rachel, 124–7 Gélis, Jacques, 139–40, 148 Gerson, Jean, 51 Gertrude of Helfta, 42–6, 49–51 Gertsman, Elina, 144, 148 gestures, 94, 96, 102, 104, 107 grief, 89, 103–4, 106–7 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 30, 134

195

index

girdle, 133, 134–6, 141, 144, 154, 161 See also Virgin Mary, textile relics Goodland, Katharine, 98–9, 101, 104, 106 Grivot, Denis, 88 Gurevich, Aron, 61 Hellwarth, Jennifer Wynne, 10, 85, 127, Hiller, Susan, Ten Months, 162–4, 172–3 Hopkins, Judith, Stretching It: Surviving on AFDC, 164–5, 173 horizon of expectations, 4, 5, 6–8, 65, 68, 75, 130, 174 See also reception Howell, Martha C., 24 husbands, 11, 24–6, 36, 37, 73–4 impregnation, 20, 53, 55, 76, 160 See also conception infanticide, 57–8, 62–3, 116 infants, see children Irigaray, Luce, 155 Iser, Wolfgang, 4–5, 74 Jacobus de Voragine, 97 Jacques de Vitry, 42–4, 46–9, 51 Jauss, Hans Robert, 4–7, 74 Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendôme, 73, 160 motherhood, 56, 75–6, 160 patronage, 56, 72–6, 173–4 transi sculpture, 56, 70, 76, 81, 166 Jeanne d’Evreux, 122 John II, Duke of Bourbon, 73, 75–6 John III, Count of Auvergne, 73, 75 Julian of Norwich, 10, 59, 85 Kelly, Mary, Post-Partum Document, 164, 166, 169–70, 172–3

Kempe, Margery, 7–8, 10, 38, 85–6, 127–8, 160, 174 Klein, Jennie, 169 Klein, Melanie, 155 Klosterneuberg altarpiece, 103 Krier, Theresa, 123, 154–6 labor, see childbirth Lazarus, St., 97, 109, 116, 188 See also Resurrection of Lazarus and Saint-Lazare, Autun Le Boeuf, Emmeline, 24 Leclercq-Kadaner, Jacqueline, 57 Lee, Becky, 30 Le Goff, Jacques, 61 Le Graveur, Jean, 50–1 lepers and leprosy, 77–9, 80–1, 82–3, 85, 160 L’Estrange, Elizabeth, 11–13, 33, 35–6, 75–7, 108, 134 Lippard, Lucy, 172–3 Liss, Andrea, 169 luxuria, 53, 56, 60, 62, 68, 72 See also Saint-Pierre, Moissac, porch sculptures, femmeaux-serpents or snake woman Luyster, Amanda, 53, 62–3, 65, 68 lying-in, 11, 32, 35–6 Mâle, Emile, 53, 55–7, 60, 62, 68, 72 mantle, 133, 139–41, 144, 146, 148, 151, 153–4 See also Virgin Mary, textile relics Marie d’Oignies, 42–51 marriage, 26, 31, 159, 164 Mary Magdalene, St., 89, 90, 114–15, 116 See also Resurrection of Lazarus, textual sources, and SaintLazare, Autun McClanan, Anne L., 10 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 42

196

index

Melusina, 80 Ménagier de Paris, 124, 133 menstrual blood, 58, 137, 153 menstruation, 78 metaphors, 137, 153 for childbirth, 139, 148 for gestation, 137, 139–40, 153 for motherhood, 136–7, 139–40, 166 motherhood as, 43–4, 166, 172 Meyer, Monica, 166–7, 173 midwife, 8, 32 Miller, Sarah Alison, 54, 58–9, 62 Miller, Tanya Stabler, 39 Miller, Timothy S., 78 Mittman, Asa Simon, 54 Moissac, 58–60, 66 conflict in, 66–7, 68–70 lepers in, 66–7, 77, 81, 82–3, 86 women in, 66, 74–5, 76–7 monstrosity, 54–5, 58–9, 70, 81, 153 See also motherhood, as monstrous, Moore, R.I., 79 motherhood in contemporary art, 162–7, 169–70, 172–3 and death, 75–6, 81, 166–7, 169 as empowerment, 20, 30, 36, 46, 51, 163–4, 172 as experience, 9, 10, 162, 172 contemporary women’s, 162, 164, 169, 172, 73 medieval women’s, 3–4, 7–8, 10, 13–14, 127–8, 157, 159, 172, 174 and grief, 90 as monstrous, 54, 55, 58–9, 70, 72, 81, 83, 166 rejected, 38, 41, 45, 173 scholarship on, 9–11 suffering in, 56, 77, 85–6 as transformation, 20, 41, 44, 162

in visionary texts, 41, 42–3, 44, 49–51, 59 See also metaphors, for motherhood and motherhood as mothers and children, 123, 140, 146, 148, 155–7, 161, 170 medieval women as, 11, 12, 30, 110, 111, 119, 140, 144 See also motherhood Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie, 11–13, 36, 75, 77 Nesbitt, John, 78 Newman, Barbara, 127 Nolan, Kathleen, 111–12 Orsini, Clarice, 75 otherworld visions, see afterlife visions Ovid, 58–9 parents , 111, 118–19 parturition, 4, 123, 154 patronage, 3, 72–3, 75, 112 medieval women’s, 72–4, 76 See also Jeanne de BourbonVendôme, patronage Pereira, Maria, 76, period eye, 6–7, 12 peperit childbirth prayer, 99–101, 107–8, 112, 134–5, 160 Phillips, Dayton, 39 pilgrimage, 110 Autun as destination, 90, 109–10, 133–4, 116 Dombes as destination, 111, 114, 116 Thanksgiving, 110, 111, 112, 115, 119, 161 women’s, 7, 110–12, 114–15, 116, 119, 160–1 Pilon, Germain, 73 Pitti, Francesca, 75

197

index

pregnancy, 30, 35, 50, 75–6, 77, 85, 135, 159, 160, 162–3 Presentation of Christ into the Temple, 33, 42, 45, see also Reims cathedral, sculptures, Presentation Proclus, 136–7 Protoevangelion of James, 136 pseudo-Ovid, “The Old Woman”, 58–9 Pulcheria, Empress, 130, 136 Purification of Women after Childbirth, see Churching of Women after Childbirth and Virgin Mary, Purification of Randolph, Adrian, 6, 11–12, 35–6 ravestissement, 24–5 rebirth, 98, 108, 172 reception, 4, 5, 20, 55, 68, 76, 122–23, 130, 140 as virtual production, 7, 74–5, 173–4 See also horizon of expectations Reichek, Elaine, Laura’s Sweater, 166, 172–3 Reims beguines in, 38, 39–40, 41, 47, 48–9 conflict in, 21–2 economy, 21, 23–4 widows in, 24–6, 29, 30, 38, 40, 159 women in, 20, 24, 25–6, 32, 33, 163 Reims cathedral, 21–3, 32, 33–4, 45 location, 23–4 sculptures, 19–20 Annunciation, 15, 26, 29, 37 Elizabeth, St., 29–30, 44–5, 159 Presentation, 18, 26, 29, 34, 37, 45–6, 50–1, 159 Virgin Mary, 20, 26, 29, 37, 43, 44, 50, 51, 162–4

Visitation, 15, 26, 34, 35, 37, 38, 159 See also beholders, medieval, in Reims, and medieval women, in Reims, Candlemas, in Reims, Churching of Women after Childbirth, in Reims, and Reims response, 4, 5–6, 8, 20, 55, 76, 89, 123, 128, 140 Resurrection of the Dead, 117, 161 See also Saint-Lazare, Autun, Last Judgment tympanum Resurrection of Lazarus, 90, in medieval art, 102, 104, 108 textual sources for, 96, 97, 98, 100–3, 106–7, 116–17 Gréban, Arnoul, Mystère de la Passion, 98–9, 104 Chester play, 99–101, 104 Digby play of the Life of St. Mary Magdalene, 99, 106 Fleury playbook, 98–9, 101, 106 Golden Legend, 97, 101 Gospel according to John, 96–7, 101 Mercadé, Eustache, Mystère de la Passion, 98–9, 104 N-town play, 99, 104, 106 pseudo-Rabanus Maurus, Life of St. Mary Magdalene, 97, 101 Towneley play, 99 York play, 99 See also peperit childbirth prayer and Saint-Lazare, Autun, Resurrection of Lazarus narrative Rich, Adrienne, 9 Rieder, Paula, 30–3, 35–6 robe, 133, 139, 141, 148, 151 Rolle, Richard, 79 Rosenberg, Civia, Crossings, 169, 173

198

index

Rosenberg, Daniel, 169 Saint-Ladre, Havide de, 40 Saint-Lazare, Autun, 91, 93–4, 108–9 capitals, 113 eastern doorway, 91, 93–4, 102, 107, 109, 116–17, 161 Eve sculpture, 87–90, 91, 94, 96, 100–1, 102, 104, 106–7, 108, 160–1, 169 Last Judgment tympanum, 117, 161 Lazarus relics, 91, 93, 109 Lazarus shrine, 90, 91–3, 101, 107, 108, 109, 114, 161 St. Martha sculpture, 92, 94, 96, 102, 103–4, 106, 161 St. Mary Magdalene sculpture, 92, 94, 96, 104, 106, 161 Resurrection of Lazarus narrative, 100, 102, 107, 112, 114–15, 116–18, 119 See also pilgrimage, Autun as destination, and SaintNazare, Autun Sainte-Madeleine, Vezeley, 109, 116 Saint-Nazare, Autun, 93, 108–9 Saint-Pierre, Hélote de, 39, 47 Saint-Pierre, Moissac, 67–8, 160 monastery, 60, 65–6, 67 abbots, 66–7, 77, 82 cloister, 60, 66 porch, 56, 67–8, 77, 86, 160 patronage, 61, 62, 65, 67–8, 173 sculptures, 63, 65, 67–8, 160 Dives and Lazarus, 83, 85 femme-aux-serpents or snake woman, 52–4, 55–6, 58, 62–3, 70, 72, 76–7, 81, 86, 160, 166 Visitation, 63, 65, 68 relics, 67, 77, 160

See also beholders, medieval, in Moissac, and medieval women, in Moissac, and Moissac salvation, 4, 59, 82–3, 85–6, 159–60 Schapiro, Meyer, 68 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 104, 114, 116 Seidel, Linda, 89–90, 94, 101, 109, 116–17 snakes, 56–7, 77–8, 79, 80–1, 160 Song of Songs, 155–6 Spitzer, Laura, 111–12 Stacey, Alice, 134 Stephen of Bourbon, 116 Stevens, May, Crossings, 169, 173 Stratford, Neil, 109, 116 suckling, see breastfeeding Terret, Victor, 91 toads, 52–3, 55, 76–83, 160 Touati, Francois-Olivier, 82 transi sculptures, 72–3 See also Jeanne de BourbonVendôme, transi sculpture Travis, William, 113 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 170, 172–3 veil, 1, 4, 120, 133–4, 139–40, 151, 153–4 See also Virgin Mary, textile relics Virgin and Child sculptures, 120–3, 125, 129–30, 135, 154, 155, 156–7, 161–62, 170 Beautiful Madonna, 122, 128 Shrine Madonna, 144 Specific examples listed by museum and inventory number: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.14, 141, 144

199

index

Metropolitan Museum of Art 37.159, 1, 4, 120–1, 122, 125, 128, 146, 151 41.190.279, 141, 144, 148, 154 Musée de Cluny, CL18926, 120–1, 122, 125, 128, 146 Musée de Louvre RF 790, 151, 153 RF 1386, 148, 154 RF 1398, Vierge de la Celle, 146, 148, 151 RF 1433, 146, 148 RF 2333, 153 Toledo Museum of Art, 1958.14, 144 Throne of Wisdom, 125 Virgin Mary as Madonna of Mercy, 130, 139, 148 devotion to, 123–7 medieval women and, 8, 33, 85–6, 126–8, 133–5, 144, 157, 161 motherhood, 33, 126 Purification of, 32–3, 35

Textile relics, 130, 133, 134–5, 139, 144, 148 Textile work of, 136–7 See also Candlemas, Reims cathedral, sculptures, Virgin Mary, and Virgin and Child sculptures Warner, Marina, 126 Werckmeister, Karl, 89, 102, 109 Werve, Claus de, 122 widows, 51, 63, 74, 76 See also Reims, widows in wife, 25–6, 36–8, 144, 163–4 Wilde, 39 Winnicott, D.W., 155–7 womb, 6, 12, 107–8, 137, 153, 166 women, see beholders, medieval women, Moissac, women in, Reims, women in, pilgrimage, women’s, Virgin Mary, medieval women and Zarnecki, George, 88 Ziegler, Joanna E., 40

ALREADY PUBLISHED The Art of Anglo-Saxon England Catherine E. Karkov English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning Paul Hardwick English Medieval Shrines John Crook Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces Edited by Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson The Marvellous and the Monstrous in the Sculpture of Twelfth-Century Europe Kirk Ambrose Early Medieval Stone Monuments: Materiality, Biography, Landscape Edited by Howard Williams, Joanne Kirton and Meggen Gondek The Royal Abbey of Reading Ron Baxter Education in Twelfth-Century Art and Architecture: Images of Learning in Europe, c.1100–1220 Laura Cleaver The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving Edited by Spike Bucklow, Richard Marks and Lucy Wrapson

Marian Bleeke is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Cleveland State University. Cover image:Visitation column sculptures. Reims cathedral, west façade, right flank of the central

Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture

W

hat can medieval sculptural representations of women tell us about medieval women's experiences of motherhood? Presumably the work of male sculptors, working for clerical patrons, these sculptures are unlikely to have been shaped by women's maternal experiences during their production. Once produced, however, their beholders would have included women who were mothers and potential mothers, thus opening a space between the sculptures' intended meanings and other meanings liable to be produced by these women as they brought their own interests and concerns to these works of art. Building on theories of reception and response, this book focuses on interactions between women as beholders and a range of sculptures made in France in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, aiming to provide insight into women's experiences of motherhood; particular sculptures considered include the Annunciation and Visitation from Reims cathedral, the femme-aux-serpents from Moissac, the transi of Jeanne de BourbonVendôme, the Eve from Autun, and a number of French Gothic Virgin and Child sculptures.

portal. 1240. Photo: author.

 Bleeke

Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture Representations from France, c.1100 –1500 

Marian Bleeke