Margaret Wilson // Making and Breaking Enclosure: The Movement of Art Through Late-Medieval Convents
In the Middle Ages, the convent was idealized as a literal and symbolic zone of separation from the profane world, a space of gendered separation (“enclosure”) for the pursuit of religious discipline. Convents were also places where sacred objects were fashioned, preserved, and venerated. As this dissertation examines, these spaces of enclosure were communities that invite the art historian to re-think basic categories in the study of medieval art: “creativity” and “authorship” especially in relation to gendered experience of space.
My dissertation examines a group of late-medieval objects from Germany and the Netherlands produced by makers including nuns, professional artists, and “amateur” lay women. Among these are the Katharinenthal sculpture groups of Christ and John; the Mechelen Enclosed Garden reliquary cabinets; a Lower Saxon embroidery of the Mystic Hunt; a Dominican manuscript from Nuremberg illustrating nuns at work; and the Hildesheim skull reliquaries. Each of these objects appears to represent a paradigm of monastic life cut off from worldly matters, but their production and imagery reveal the ways in which convents were not isolated but connected to communities in which they were embedded.
My project traces the movement of art objects through convent architecture across both rural and urban. Studying these objects’ production in terms of their spatial relationship to convent architecture reveals the ways late-medieval making was not the work of individuals but of communities inside and outside the convent. The barriers of architecture compressed nuns’ movement to a narrow path between cloister and choir. At the same time, art objects caused nuns to think and move in directions outside their normal orientation. Sculptures, textiles, and books passed through barriers during their arrival into or departure from the convent, creating paths which connected convent and lay communities. This project follows such paths by focusing specifically on the making and movement of convent objects.
[Caption: Enclosed Garden Reliquary Cabinet with Saint Anne (detail). Museum Hof van Busleyden. Mechelen, Belgium. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.]