CFP – Medieval and Early Renaissance Italian Women & Visual Culture (March 11-13, 2027)
This session investigates how late medieval Italian women lived their lives both in compliance with and in circumvention of the societal assumptions circulating about their nature and capabilities, read through their relationships to visual images and performative media. Papers will address this topic through two lenses: 1) ways that gendered religious and social beliefs were encoded in late medieval-early Renaissance visual imagery and performance and 2) how women of different social and economic strata negotiated regulations that defined and constrained them in the ways they engaged with these media.
The roles of women as artists, patrons, and audiences for visual culture enjoy extensive in-depth study for northern medieval and High Renaissance cultures since the mid 20th century. Studies of women’s participation in the visual culture of late medieval-early Renaissance Italy, itself an often-marginalized field, are much rarer. This session seeks to help redress that imbalance by focusing on late medieval-early Renaissance Italian women as patrons, but also as audiences of artistic projects and performative visual media, and the ways women responded to or helped shape the imagery and ideas those works projected.
Papers are welcome from scholars in all stages of their careers whose research focuses on Italian images of and/or used by women, religious drama, or sermon literature that address women or ideas about women in the 14th-early 15th centuries.
Please submit a 300-word abstract and a CV by JULY 15 to Judith Steinhoff at jsteinhoff@uh.edu