medieval

July 3, 2026
CFP: Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italian Women & Visual Culture (RSA 2027)

This session investigates how 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 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, ideas about women constructed or reflected in religious drama, or sermon literature that address women or ideas about women in the 14th-early 15th centuries.

If you are interested, please send an abstract for a 20-minute paper (max 300 words) and a short c.v. by JULY 10 to jsteinhoff@uh.edu

The session configuration will be announced on or before August 4.

July 1, 2019
Coppo di Marcovaldo: Duecento Soldier and Artist

July 16, 2018
Call for Papers, “Beyond the Microcosm: The Impact of Confraternities on the Civic Sphere”

Call for Papers, “Beyond the Microcosm: The Impact of Confraternities on the Civic Sphere”

December 10, 2017
10 December: An Important Date in Eleventh-Century Byzantium.

November 13, 2017
Call for Papers: The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 23rd Annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium: Collecting (in) the Middle Ages, 16 February 2018.

Call for Papers: The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 23rd Annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium: Collecting (in) the Middle Ages, 16 February 2018 Deadline: 15 November 2017 The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 23rd Annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium invites speakers to consider the nature of medieval collections, the context of their creation and fruition, and their legacy — or disappearance — in the present.