Women and Gender in Trecento Art & Architecture

images, ideals, realities

Steinhoff, Judith (ed.)

This volume is the first to bring together a full range of current trecento art historical thought on the significance of gender in women’s patronage, reception of images, and representations of female characters and individuals. Emerging in the 1970s and 80s, the topics of women, their roles in personal, social, economic, and political life, and the significance of gender have become major issues throughout many fields of scholarship and, indeed, in many aspects of contemporary life. The earliest studies of late medieval Italian (trecento) women and the visual art and spaces commissioned by or for them primarily focused on women as patrons, with some but much less attention to audiences and to representations of women.
The richly varied array of topics presented in this volume greatly deepen and expand previous discourses and methods of inquiry, by authors ranging from advanced Ph.D. students to senior scholars, including new work by some of the those who were early pioneers in the field. Considering a plethora of specific subjects and materials and employing a variety of methods, the authors enrich our understanding of attitudes toward women as well as women’s complex relationships to images in religious, public, and domestic spaces, both within and beyond the restrictions placed on them by trecento society.