Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art ed. by Carlee A. Bradbury, Michelle Moseley-Christian (review)

If early feminists focused on the medieval and early modern belief that men were the norm and women a malformed aberration, then later scholars complicated this binary opposition by considering how the intersection of gender with class, race, and religion produced either a central or marginal position in society. The complex ways in which images represent the intersection of gender and “otherness” is ripe for exploration. Carlee A. Bradbury and Michelle Moseley-Christian have edited a collection of essays, Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art, which forms a welcome addition to this discussion.

The volume opens with a superb introduction by Sherry Lindquist, who succinctly and subtly summarizes the state of research and outlines the major theoretical issues in considering the intersection of gender, “otherness,” and visual culture. Seven essays follow, arranged in chronological order.

The first is Beth Fischer’s examination of a thirteenth-century torso-length statue of King David that incorporates as its head a refashioned ancient Roman cameo of Medusa, the monstrous female who could turn men to stone. Although at first glance this appears to be an ideal object with which to explore gender and “otherness,” Fischer’s essay is flawed by two assumptions. First, although a fifteenth-century base obscures its original function, Fischer claims that the figure of King David was probably designed to hold the Eucharist. Yet even though ancient Roman cameos are common on reliquaries, they rarely, if ever, appear on a pyx or monstrance. Indeed, Wolfram Koeppe recently termed this object a reliquary, yet Fischer offers no evidence to support her new theory. A second unfounded assumption is that because the combination of Medusa’s head with David’s body may appear strange to modern eyes, medieval viewers had the same reaction. Yet it is unclear whether they would have recognized the cameo as Medusa. Fischer fails to take into account the fact that the cameo has been refashioned so that its intertwined snakes, especially those that would have joined under Medusa’s chin, have been removed or significantly altered. She relegates to a footnote Koeppe’s assertion that the modified head of Medusa would make a “plausible David” (35n17). In fact, she never proves that hybrid forms that combine female and male body parts would have struck medieval Christians as “monstrous” (19). The head of the twelfth-century reliquary of Ste. Foy, formed from an ancient Roman helmet or funeral mask, appears decidedly masculine, yet was accepted, and in fact revered, as a representation of an eleven-year old girl. Conceptions of medieval gender, as many scholars have shown, were far from rigid. Christ was portrayed as mother, and Mary, on occasion, was represented as a priest.

Carlee Bradbury’s essay, about a Jewish mother who converts to Christianity after her son is miraculously saved from death, is a slightly revised version of an essay that she first published in 2012. It also invokes a shaky assumption. Bradbury writes, “It is a vast understatement to say that any mother would be troubled in mind and choked with distress at the sight of harm to her children” (43). Yet numerous texts and images make clear that medieval mothers, especially unwed and impoverished ones, sometimes killed their children. The myth of the always-loving mother is part of an ideology of motherhood, which Laura Jacobus discusses in “Motherhood and Massacre: The Massacre of the Innocents in Late Medieval Art and Drama” (1999). Bradbury’s most original observation, that Jewish women are depicted in a much more positive light than Jewish men, was first published by Sara Lipton in 2008, four years before the first version of Bradbury’s essay. Yet, neither edition cites Lipton’s article. Bradbury does make clear, however, how her case study supports the notion that anti-Semitism worked hand-in-glove with Christian spirituality...