Portraying Medieval Women 

The Materiality of Female Images and Art Patronage in the Latin-Ruled East (12th–15th centuries)

In the past few decades, women have been a central subject in a vibrant interdisciplinary debate in the social sciences and humanities, which has fostered particular interest among medievalists. Great interest has been shown and progress made in scholarship towards a better understanding of historical women and the contextualization of their agency within medieval society. The project “Portraying Medieval Women: The Materiality of Female Images and Art Patronage in the Latin-Ruled East (12th–15th centuries)” focuses on the multicultural and multireligious context of the Eastern Mediterranean under Latin rule in the 12th–15th centuries, specifically addressing the Syro-Palestinian territory, mainland Greece, the Ionian and the Aegean, and South Italy.

The project investigates female visual indicators as well as their initiatives, with the goal of tracing, as much as possible, the image of female individuals, their possible attachment to pervasive patterns or idiosyncrasies, and the degree to which these phenomena conform to gender norms. It thus aspires to foreground recent advances in scholarship and apply a new, dynamic approach from a cross-Mediterranean perspective. It puts extant visual, material and textual evidence into perspective in order to create a synergy between the ways women were represented in figurative images and the ways women were described in written sources. In order to elucidate the female image in the proposed chronological and geographical context, the following questions will form the core of the project: Are there particular stylistic, iconographic or formal characteristics employed for the delineation of the female? Does the analysis of visual testimonies differ from the textual insights? Do text and other material evidence allow us to delineate or dismiss the potential correspondence between the way women were portrayed and their actual appearance? Are the women autonomous in their patronage? Did female patronage differ from male patronage, and how? Are there specific media favoured by women? Finally, can evidence support the definition of patronage as gendered?

The research will result in an extensive corpus of comparative data and its publication in an open-access database, scientific publications, lectures and seminars, and an exhibition of selected material. It will restore female images to their social and historical dimensions and place them in their own context, elucidating the presence and representation of medieval women in the eastern Mediterranean. As such, there is no doubt about the importance of this research project to the development of new insights and approaches to the study of medieval women, which will contribute to new stimuli to the history of art and related disciplines.