Nicola CourtrightSpring 2012, ARHA 284/WAGS 206
My office: Fayerweather 206M/W 2:00-3:20
Office Hours: T 3:30-4:30 & by appointmentClassroom: Fayerweather 217
WOMEN AND ART IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
SYLLABUS
DESCRIPTION
This course will examine the ways in which prevailing ideas about women and gender shaped visual imagery, and how these images, in turn, influenced ideas concerning women from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. It will adopt a comparative perspective, both by identifying regional differences among European cultures and tracing changes over time. In addition to considering patronage of art by women and works by women artists, we will look at the depiction of women heroes such as Judith; the portrayal of women rulers, including Elizabeth I and Marie de' Medici; and the imagery of rape. Topics emerging from these categories of art include biological theories about women; humanist defenses of women; the relationship between the exercise of political power and sexuality; differing attitudes toward women in Catholic and Protestant art; and feminine ideals of beauty.
GOALS FOR LEARNING
- Gain an understanding about how historical attitudes about women and by women affect art made about and by women;
- Develop an analytical ability to examine deeply points of view expressed in texts and art of a historical period other than our own and to distinguish them from another;
- Find ways of learning collaboratively with classmates;
- Develop and argue an original thesis in an extended research paper.
CLASS MEETINGS
Attendance is extremely important, for the substance of this course is in material introduced in the classroom, not in a textbook. Your grade will depend in part upon your participation in class.
READING
The following books may be purchased at the bookstore:
*Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women (Pennsylvania, 1992)
*Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (3rd ed., Cambridge,
2008)
None of these contains a real survey of the course material, so we are going to have to make one up as we go along. To this end, I have placed a variety of required readings (labeled Reading on the syllabus) on electronic reserve in Frost Library. They, along with visual imagery placed in juxtaposition with them on a daily basis, will form the basis of class discussion and essays. The section entitled Other Bibliography contains useful background reading, and provides sources for your research papers. Some of these books may be on reserve.
EXAMS NONE!
COURSE FORMAT AND ASSIGNMENTS
In the first half of the semesteryou will be developing critical skills through discussion and analysis of texts and art. (All assignments and course documents will be posted on our web portals under “My Amherst,” then “Women and Art in Early Modern Europe.”)
The assignments that will help you achieve this goal are:
*Responses and abstracts. Either brief visual analyses of works of art, responses to a prompt about issues in the readings, or an abstract of the readings will be due before class for posting on the CMS or Moodle. Your overall grade goes down if you do not post each one. We will discuss issues emerging from them in class.
*Short, graded papers. Two analyses relate a work of art to a particular issue emerging from the readings and discussion. I would like you show all first drafts to someone at the Writing Center. (3 typed pp., one due Week 3 and the other Week 7.) All papers must be typed and submitted on time online.
Week 3 --First graded analysis (due Friday Feb. 10)
Through observation of elements of form, write about a work of art in the Mead Art Museum representing a female saint or another woman in a religious context and consider how the artist conveys an idea about women and spirituality through the use of forms. (See “Considerations for a Formal Analysis.”) Be sure to:
- Organize your paper so that it follows a continuous argument;
- Use visual evidence to make your points;
- Write at least 2 versions. I recommend you take the first to the Writing Center.
In the second half of the semester you will research and write a paper featuring an original idea (around 10 pp.) The week-by-week assignments will help you to identify an original idea, do research on your topic, and develop an argument through sequential writing assignments. You will still have regular responses to the readings.
Week 5: I’ll be gone Wed., Feb. 22.
Week 6 (Feb. 27-29)
Read Diane Owen Hughes, "Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy," or Christiane KlapischZuber, "The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento," and analyze the way either writer sets up and makes an argument. In a few sentences, write:
1) What does the author do in the first paragraph and in the second paragraph? Where does she say what other scholars have done and what she is preparing to do?
2) What is some of the main evidence she uses to make her point?
3) What is her conclusion? Where does she place it?
Week 7 (March 5-7)
1)Pick a work of art for your research paper and begin your research (see “First Set of Steps toward a Research Paper”). Hand in paper telling me which work of art you’ve chosen.
2)Second graded analysis(due Friday, March 16)
Through observation of elements of form, write about a work of art in the Mead Art Museum representing a woman – portrait, domestic scene, or other – and consider how the artist conveys an idea about women and her place in society through the use of forms. (See “Considerations for a Formal Analysis.”) Be sure to:
- Organize your paper so that it follows a continuous argument;
- Use visual evidence to make your points;
- Write at least 2 versions. I suggest that you take the first to the Writing Center.
SPRING BREAK– Get plenty of rest and go see some art!
Week 9 (March 26-28) Write and hand in:
1) a page summarizing the usefulness of 3 articles and/or books you’ve located for your research (“First Set of Steps…”); and
2) a page analyzing the best article on the subject of your research paper in the same manner you did for the article by Hughes or Klapisch-Zuber (see above, Week 6).
Week 9 (March 31-April 2)
--Collect a group of related works of art and write a paragraph on their similarities and differences (see “Second Set of Steps toward a Research Paper.”)
Week 10 (April 2-4)
-- Figure out a problem that your topic presents and hand in a paper stating what it is, and positing a hypothesis for a solution (see “Third Set of Steps toward a Research Paper.”)
--Hand in an annotated bibliography.
--Come see Prof. Courtright with illustrations and talk about your problem/hypothesis.
Week 11 (April 9-11)
--First version of research paper due Wed. April 18 (see “Fourth Set of Steps toward a Research Paper.”)
1) Write your rough draft.
2) Write a descriptive outline (see “Descriptive Outlines as a Tool for Revision.”)
3) Revise your draft.
Week 12 (April 21-23)
-- Meet with me to discuss your revised first version of your paper.
--Do more research and re-write (see “Fifth Set of Steps toward a Research Paper.”)
-- Go to Writing Center, re-write again.
Week 13.(April 28-30)
Final version of research paper due Friday, May 4.
TOPICS
Week 1-2 (1-23-2/1)
1. FIRST PRINCIPLES
Art as documentary evidence
Art history and feminism
Biology as destiny
Gender, sexuality
Reading
Primary sources
(1/30)
*Aristotle, De generatione animalium, Bk. 1. ch. 2. (716a-b), trans. D.M. Balme (NY: Oxford UP, 1992), 21-24, 127-34
Secondary material
1/25
*Scott, Joan W. “Women’s History” and “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,”
chaps. 1-2 in her Gender and the Politics of History (rev. ed., NY: Columbia UP, 1999), 17-50; 223-235.
*Delphy, Christine. “Rethinking Sex and Gender,”Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global
Perspectives, ed. Carole McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (2nd ed., ), 58-68.
*Wiesner, M. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, “Introduction.”
1/30
*MacLean,Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, 1980), Chap. 3, 2846.
*Greenblatt, Stephen. “Fiction and Friction,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality,
and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986), 30-52, 329-32
Other Bibliography
Ariès, Philippe, ed. A History of Sexuality, trans. Anthony Forster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985)
Crawford, Katherine. European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2007)
Davis, Natalie Zemon and Arlette Farge, eds. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes (AHistory of
Women in the West, vol. 3) (Cambridge: Harvard, 1997)
Gilman, Sander. Sexuality: an Illustrated History (New York, 1989).
Hartman, Joan E. and Adele Seeff, eds. Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women
(Newark: U Delaware Press, 2007)
Laqueur,Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, 1990)
Meade, Teresa A. and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, A Companion to Gender History (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2004
Muir, Edward and Guido Ruggiero, eds. Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Baltimore, 1990)
Simons, Patricia, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance and Baroque Italy: A Working Bibliography (Sydney, 1988)
Rabb, T.K. and Jonathan Brown. "Introduction," in The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and T.K. Rabb (Cambridge, 1988), 16
Tuana,Nancy. The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature (Indiana, 1993)
Turner, James G., ed. Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images
Cambridge, 1993).
Week 2-3 (1/30-2/8)
2. WOMEN AND CHRISTIANITY: THE MEDIEVAL HERITAGE AND ITS TRANSFORMATION
Eve
Mary, mother and virgin
Early Christian saints: Mary Magdalene Donatello, Caravaggio, Lanfranco
Nuns and mystical union with Christ -- Bernini, Lanfranco
Reading
Primary sources
*Genesis 1, 2
*Teresa of Avila, in Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (Oxford, 1981), 107
Secondary material
*Bynum, Caroline Walker. “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,”
in: Fragmentation and Redemption: Essay on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
(NY: Zone Books, 1991), 181-238, notes ??
*Miles,Margaret. Image as Insight (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), Intro., 113
*Wiesner, Mary. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Ch. 6
Other Bibliography
Bell,Rudolph M. and Donald Weinstein, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 10001700 (Chicago, 1982)
[Bokenham, Osbern.] A Legend of Holy Women, trans. Sheila Delany (Notre Dame, 1992).
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia, 1988)
Bynum,Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essay on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (NY: Zone Books, 1991)
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: U Cal Press, 1987)
Johnson, Penelope. Equal in Monastic Profession. Chicago, 1991.
Malvern,Marjorie. Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen's Origins and Metamorphoses (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1975)
Matter,E. Ann. "The Personal and the Paradigm: The Book of Maria Domitilla Galluzzi," in
The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig Monson (U. Michigan, 1992), 87103
McLaughlin,Megan. "Gender Paradox and the Otherness of God," Gender and History, 31 (1991), 14759
Miles, Margaret. Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)
Or Mooney, Catherine, ed. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Phil: U
Penn, 1999).
Russell, H. Diane. Eva/Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington: Nat. Gallery of Art, 1990)
Schulenberg,Jane Tibbetts. "Female Sanctity: Public and Private Roles, ca. 5001100," in Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens: U. Georgia, 1988), 10225
Valone, Carolyn. "Roman Matrons as Patrons: Various Views of the Cloister Wall," in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig Monson (U. Michigan, 1992), 4972
Warner,Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (NY: Vintage, Random House, 1983)
Week 4 (2/13-2/15)
3. THE POWER OF WOMEN
Sexual inversion
Witches
Female heroes
Reading
Primary sources
(2/15)
*Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris/Famous Women, trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1991), 3-7 (Dedication), 159-63 (Penelope), 167-81 (Dido), 193-5 (Sappho), 233-
43 (Artemisia), 361-73 (Cleopatra), 467-73 (Joanna, queen)
Secondary material
(2/13)
*Monter,William. "Protestant Wives, Catholic Saints, and the Devil's Handmaid: Women in the Age of Reformations," in Becoming Visible, ed. R. Bridenthal et al. (Boston: Houghton, 1987), 203219
(2/15)
*Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1989), Chap. 2: "Historical Feminism and Female Iconography," 141179
*Wiesner, Women and Gender, Ch. 7
Other Bibliography
Buettner, Brigitte. Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes :Systems of Signification in an Illuminated
Manuscript(Seattle: U Wash P, 1996)
Burns, Norman T. and Christopher J. Reagan, eds., Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Albany, 1975)
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore,1996)
Hults, Linda. The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender and Power in Early Modern Europe (Phil: U
Penn P,2005)
Jordan,Constance. "Boccaccio's InFamous Women: Gender and Civic Virtue in the De Mulieribus Clarism, in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (Detroit: Wayne State U., 1987), 2547
Mullins, Edwin B. The Painted Witch: How Western Artists Have Viewed the Sexuality of Women (New York, 1985)
Smith, Susan L. The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia,
1995).
Week 5-6 (2/20-2/29)
4. BEAUTY AND EROTICISM: PORTRAITURE, NUDES
Portraits and proportion
Renaissance vs. Baroque nude
Eroticism
Reading
Primary sources
*Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women (1548) (Philadelphia: U Penn Press, 1992)
*Sigmund Freud [handouts]
Secondary material
*Elizabeth Cropper, "The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture," in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. M.W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago, 1986), 175190
*Jones, Ann R. and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Material of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), ch. 2 “Composing the Subject: Making Portraits,” 34-58
*Sohm, Philip. “Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia.” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), 759-808.
Other Bibliography
Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (NY: Doubleday, 1956)
Duby, Georges, ed. Power and Beauty: Images of Women in Art (London, 1992)
Crawford, Katherine.The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2010)
Rogers, Mary. "The Decorum of Women's Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in SixteenthCentury Painting," Oxford Art Journal, 2 (1988): 4787
Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Chicago, 1992
Saunders,Gill. The Nude: A New Perspective (London: Harper and Row, 1989)
Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999)
Wolfthal, Diane.In and Out the Marital Bed. Seeing Sex in RenaissanceEurope (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2010
Week 7-9 (3/5-3/28)
5. EARLY MODERN WOMEN: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN ITALY
Status of women in early modern societies
Italian Renaissance portraits, single and conjugal
Court lady, court imagery in Italy
Reading
Primary material
(3/5)
*Christine de Pisan. A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor:The Treasury of the City of Ladies,
trans. Charity Willard (Tenafly: Persea/Bard Press, 1989), Bk. 1, ch.18-22 (pp. 113-21),
Bk. 2, ch. 10-13 (pp. 170-83), Bk. 3, ch. 1-9 (pp. 185-214)
(3/26)
*Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book 3, trans. Charles Singleton (Doubleday, 1959),
20182
*Isabella d'Este, selected letters, from Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este (London, 1903)
[Courtright will distribute]
Secondary sources
(3/5)
*Wiesner, Women and Gender, Ch. 1-4
*Davis, Natalie Z. Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), “Women on
Top,” 124151
*Hughes,Diane Owen. "Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy," in Disputes and Settlements, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, 1983), 6999
*KlapischZuber,Christiane. "The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento," in her Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), 21347.
(3/26)
*Jordan,Constance. "Feminism and the Humanists: The Case for Sir Thomas Elyot's Defense of Good Women," in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. M.W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago, 1986), 24258
*Solum, Stefanie. “Attributing Influence: the Problem of Female Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” The Art Bulletin, 90 (2008), 76-100.
Other Bibliography
WOMEN’S PLACE IN EARLY MODERN SOCIETY
Burckhardt,Jakob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Oxford, 1937)
Cereta, Laura. Collected Letters of the Renaissance Feminist, trans. and ed. by Diana Robin (Chicago, U
Chicago P, 1997)
Goffen, Rona. Titian's Women (New Haven: Yale, 1997)
Kelly,Joan. "Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 14001789," in her Women, History, and Theory (Chicago, 1984), 65109
Kelly, Joan. "Did Women Have a Renaissance?," in Becoming Visible, ed. R. Bridenthal et al. (Boston: Houghton, 1987), 175201
Kelso,Ruth, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: U. Ill., 1956)
Migiel, Marilyn and Juliana Schiesari, eds., Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991)
Schurman,Anna Maria von. Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and Other Writings from her Intellectual Circle, ed. Joyce L. Irwin (Chicago, 1998)
Simons, Patricia. "(Check)mating the Grand Masters: The Gendered Sexualized Politics of Chess in Renaissance Italy," Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993): 5974
Tinagli,Paola. Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester
and NY, 1997)
Wiesner,Merry. "Women's Defense of Their Public Role," in Women in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, ed. M.B. Rose (Syracuse, 1986), 127
FAMILY
Alberti, Leon Battista. Della famiglia/The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. R. Watkins
(Columbia: U. So. Carolina P, 1969)
Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (NY: Vintage, 1962)
Ariès, P. and Georges Duby, eds. A History of Private Life, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1987)
Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambr: Cambridge UP,
1983)
Ozment,Steven. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Harvard,