Women, Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy - Review

While the scope of this book is encyclopedic, the entries themselves are very brief and offered without any accompanying references. This makes the book very useful for a quick answer to a query; one can look up a particular symbol or attribute, such as the "dove," and discover the many ways it refers to female beings in different religious traditions. Or look up "breast" and find the most usual associations linked to this part of the female body among different faiths. While there is a brief bibliography that mostly points to other reference works, there are no signposts for further research. This encyclopedia will be invaluable, however, for scholars doing cross-cultural research, as the author intends for it to stimulate research into the cultural history of women. In addition to entries that discuss such unfamiliar female divinities as Inuit or Aztec goddesses, the book includes appendices that provide variant names of the female figures better known to us. There are also topical indices that allow one to identify the female figures associated with specific characteristics or ideas. For example, there is a long list of female deities associated with birth, death, fertility, and motherhood, as well as entries for topics like foster mothers, demons, nuns, and artists.

This last category points to one of the idiosyncracies of this encyclopedia. Certain terms require cross-listings of art-historical terms that aid in the definition; thus the entry for "Cleopatra," which discusses her depiction in art, sends the reader to separate entries on "baroque" and "romantic" art, although I was unable to find an entry for the latter. (Why Cleopatra is included at all is equally puzzling.) For a term like "baroque" there is only room for a brief definition and a short cross-referenced list of representative artists that is necessarily arbitrary. There are equally brief definitions of some of the basic tenets of the world's religious traditions. To be fair, such adumbrations are a product of the genre, and as this encyclopedia aspires to "serve as an introduction to a fascinating field of study" (p. xii), it meets its aims admirably.

These books all point to the changes in the study of late medieval art that have been stimulated by gender studies in recent years. Though Wood, Hamburger, and Buettner all treat objects that date from the 13th through the early 16th centuries, they avoid the term "Renaissance" as best they can. This avoidance does not seem to be an answer to Joan Kelly Gadol's important question about whether women had a Renaissance. Rather, these scholars prefer to situate the objects they discuss not in grand historical schemes but in more localized and carefully delineated contexts (social, pietistic, or visual). Hamburger claims that the drawings he studied challenge "the boundaries imposed by periodization" (p. xxi) and even the distinctions between Catholic and Protestant pietistic practices. Except perhaps for the altarpiece for the convent of Monteluce that Raphael never finished, the objects studied by Wood and Hamburger have been left out of more traditional schemes of art history. These books mark a redefinition of what we call "Art" as a product of including women in the writing of art history. And though they construct their arguments very differently, both Hamburger and Buettner urge art historians to privilege the visual over the verbal, to rethink how we interpret the objects we study. Hamburger wants to historicize the activity of seeing through careful contextual reconstruction of medieval attitudes toward art and vision, while Buettner wants art historians to analyze more closely late medieval "pictorial language, whose powers of signification tend to be somewhat forgotten in contextual studies" (p. 98). That these somewhat contradictory points of view have their origins in the study of women in the late Middle Ages indicates that, while there is no consensus about the best way to reshape medieval art history to account for women, attempts under way are exciting and full of promise.