This collection of essays, which began life as three conference sessions sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art in 2015, is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on medieval women and the history of art and objects. It consists of thirteen case studies focusing chiefly on European royal and aristocratic women and the luxury objects that travelled with them as they married, went on religious pilgrimages, or, more rarely, traveled on diplomatic missions. The volume begins with a Foreword by Joan A. Holladay that situates this volume in the context of an important lineage of feminist studies in history and art history, beginning with two groundbreaking essays published in 1982, Claire Richter Sherman’s “Taking a Second Look: Observations on the Iconography of a French Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon (1338-1378)” and Susan Groag Bell’s “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture” (1982).
Recent years have of course witnessed increasing attention to objects and to the agency of things. What makes this volume distinctive is its emphasis on movement, as editors Tracey Chapman Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany observe in their Introduction, “Women and the Circulation of Material Culture: Crossing Boundaries and Connecting Spaces.” The concept of “object itineraries,” first articulated in the field of anthropology, serves as a unifying theme and methodological orientation here. As the editors observe, the contributors “explore how women’s geographic and familial networks could spread well beyond the borders that defined men’s sense of region and, especially, how the movement of their belongings can reveal a great deal about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces” (8).
Closely-focused case studies include essays by Nancy L. Wicker, “Mapping Gold in Motion:
Women and Jewelry from Early Medieval Scandinavia”; Talia Zajac, “Remembrance and
Erasure of Objects Belonging to Rus’ Princesses in Medieval Western Sources: the Cases
of Anastasia Iaroslavna’s ‘Saber of Charlemagne,’ and Anna Iarosavna’s Red Gem”;
Kathleen Nolan, “Symbolic Geography in the Tomb and Seal of Berengaria of Navarre, Queen
of England”; Jitske Jasperse, “Matilda of Saxony’s Luxury Objects in Motion: Salving the
Wounds of Conflict”; Jennifer Borland, “Female Networks and the Circulation of a Late
Medieval Illustrated Health Guide”; Benjamin Zweig, “Saint Birgitta of Sweden: Movement,
Place, and Visionary Experience”; Amanda Luyster, “The Place of a Queen/ A Queen and Her
Places: Jeanne of Navarre’s
Given such broad geographical and temporal variety, it is worth noting the consistently high quality of the essays. This is surely due in part to the efforts of the editors, who appear to have been quite involved in the shaping and level of finish of each essay as well as in the conception of the volume as a whole. A sense of commitment, common purpose, enjoyment, and collaborative engagement comes through in the many cross-references that populate the footnotes.
As one might expect, the question of agency surfaces often--without any overarching or unifying resolution, which is also what we should expect. At times it seems that too much is claimed for women’s agency, in the sense of deliberate choices made by the women who move in these varied historical pageants--without, perhaps, sufficient attention to the fact that in many cases, especially in the many politically-advantageous marriages that prompted women’s movements across borders, the women themselves had little choice over what to wear or carry with them. Yet many of the case studies here do provide clear glimpses of women exerting choice and power. Zoe Palaiologina is a case in point. Sloutsky tells us that when Zoe reached the city of Pskov en route from Rome to Moscow, where she would marry, “the princess promptly exchanged her Italian clothes for royal Russian vestments and, without conferring with her accompanying papal envoy, venerated the Orthodox icons at Holy Trinity Cathedral. This episode, demonstrative of Zoe’s independence, tenacity, and assertiveness, set the stage for her reign” (285).
In addition to the wealth of empirical detail offered in this collection, one of the most interesting aspects of movement traced here has to do with scale. The opening essay by Nancy Wicker, “Mapping Gold in Motion,” exemplifies the reach and range of many of the essays. As Wicker puts it, “The scales of movement I have considered here proceed from vast distances that may have been traveled by Scandinavian women for exogamous marriages across the map of Europe, to the lives of women within the more bounded spaces of the great halls, to even smaller, constricted movements from hand to clothing as an ornament was fastened, finally encompassing the gentle action of the jewelry itself on the female body” (32). Tracing such movements, including those at the most intimate and immediate level of scale--pinning a brooch onto a cloak, fastening a belt, taking a walk in wobbly chopines--not only involves close readings of the objects and the documentary evidence; it also involves theorizing and disciplined speculation. Acts of imagination--imagining how a gold ornament might catch the light of the fire (32), how wearers activated objects (271), how clothing “animated” the person (315)--are recognized by many of this volume’s authors as an essential aspect of method. This is in part what makes the volume so enjoyable to read.
During the years when this essay collection was taking shape, medieval studies was
becoming more global in scope. This volume’s geographical and cultural range extends to
Rus’ and Byzantium, but one wishes for more.