I use the term “transgender reception” to describe the dynamic these gendered representations of prayer produce when they interact with the gendered experiences and identities of their viewers. Through a close study of two devotional manuscripts produced around 1300, I argue that the emphatic gendering of owner portraits creates opportunities for devotional performances that traverse, even transcend the gender binary. In books with portrait figures of different types of people, each portrait still invites the viewer to identify with its subject, but the plurality of potential identifications in these books challenges tidy interpretations of owner portraits and their gendered meanings. These portraits operate by inviting a viewer to recognize themselves in the otherwise generic images of prayerful figures. Singular owner portraits use oblique identifiers and recursive elements to produce an intimate relationship with their anticipated subject-viewer, functioning as what Alexa Sand has called a “reflexive” image. While most books with owner portraits represent a single figure only once, a small number of lavishly illuminated books made in northern France and Flanders in the decades surrounding 1300 contain numerous devotee images representing different types of people numerous times. Owner portraits, images of women and men in prayer in the margins or initials of their devotional manuscripts, were an increasingly common inclusion in illuminated prayer books in the era of the book of hours (from about 1250 onwards). While these images conform to the conventions of the owner portrait, showing their figures in pious poses that anticipate the devotional activities of their viewers, they raise questions about such images’ reception and interpretation by the book’s medieval readers. Photo: IRHT.ĭozens of men and women dressed in lay clothing and religious habits appear separately and together throughout the pages of this prayer book. Marseille, Bibliothèques de Marseille, Fonds Patrimoniaux, MS 111, fol. Franciscan Psalter-Hours (hours fragment). Saint Francis displays his stigmata while a layman and laywoman kneel in prayer. Another page in the same book shows a layman in an ermine cloak kneeling in prayer across from Saint Francis displaying his stigmata a smaller laywoman kneels in prayer below (Fig. On one page of an elegantly illuminated prayer book from northern France, a woman, dressed in clothing evoking a religious habit, prostrates herself in prayer, holding an open book before her intensely fixed gaze (Fig. Doyle, “Looking Beyond the Binary: Gender and Owner Portraits in Later Medieval Devotional Manuscripts,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 8 (2022). My thanks to Bryn Mawr College, the Fulbright Commission, and Eastern Connecticut State University for supporting on-site study of these manuscripts. Manion, for sharing her wisdom on the Aspremont-Kievraing volumes when I was just getting to know them. I am grateful to the librarians and curators at the Bodleian Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque municipale de Marseille, and the National Gallery of Victoria for granting me access and generously sharing images of the books in their care, and to Margaret M. Kaplan for advice and encouragement on an early draft and the members of my dissertation committee, especially adviser Dale Kinney, who may recognize parts of this argument. I wish to thank the journal editors and readers, Tracy Chapman Hamilton and one anonymous reader, for their feedback and suggestions S. I am honored to contribute this essay to the special issue of Different Visions celebrating Rachel Dressler, a generous mentor and colleague whose groundbreaking scholarship on medieval representations of masculinity has been an inspiration and a beacon since I first encountered it.
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