The ICMA is proud to sponsor our first session at the Association of Art Historians Conference next week in the United Kingdom. See below for more information.
Don't forget! The Call for Proposals deadline for the 2018 AAH Conference is 1 April! AAH 2018 will be held in London.
Revisiting Susan Groag Bell: New directions for ‘medieval women book owners’
Friday 7 April 2017, 9am
Loughborough University
Room BC SOAR
Convenors:
Elizabeth L’Estrange, University of Birmingham
Sherry Lindquist, Western Illinois University
2017 marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of Susan Groag Bell’s pioneering article on ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’ which paved the way for much subsequent research on women’s manuscript ownership. This session revisits the topic by re-examining Bell’s conclusions in light of the decades of fruitful scholarship that it has stimulated. Papers in this session address the relationship between manuscripts, dynastic ambitions, and political authority: how they were designed to situate their readers in complex networks of mutual obligation. They also address the complicated connection of manuscripts to place--incorporating images of local saints or integrating styles of diverse localities to create compelling personalized objects for the women who read them. The papers in this session consider how books impacted both female and male readers, regardless of who owned the books. They consider how reading was gendered, how manuscripts may project family identity and how they might instate, subvert and/or reinstate gendered social roles and expectations. They consider how methodologies and technologies not available to Bell can build on the history of the book in an expanded field, thanks to her legacy.
Elizabeth L’Estrange (University of Birmingham) Introduction: Revisiting Susan Groag Bell
Eliza Garrison (Middlebury College) Repetition, Replication, and Simulation in the Marriage Charter of Empress Theophanu
Claire Harrill (University of Birmingham) 'In Divinarum lectionum studio sese occupare': Textual and Visual Images of St Margaret of Scotland (d.1093) as Reader
Emily Wingfield (University of Birmingham) Towards a History of Scotland's Royal Women and their Books, c. 1424-1587
Anne Rudloff Stanton (University of Missouri, Columbia) Mapping Moving Manuscripts: Women and books in the 14th Century
Alixe Bovey (The Courtauld Institute of Art) Filial Piety, Marian Devotion, Masculine Agency: The Case of the Carpentin Hours
Sherry C.M. Lindquist (Western Illinois University) Gendered Self-fashioning in Late Medieval Books of Hours