By Elliot Knell

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Julia DeLancey

Abstract

This paper will explore how medieval Christian understandings of gender and vision intersected to affect the use of images in womens’ daily religious practice. Examining how gender and sex were understood, what binaries were constructed, and what roles and attributes were expected are a vital part of establishing a framework for understanding medieval gendered experiences. A hierarchical binary that emerges where men were seen as rational, spiritual beings while women were more closely associated with the physical world. Like gender, how vision is understood has changed since the medieval period. Building on ancient Greek sources, Saint Augustine’s writings on vision were one of the widest reaching and most impactful sources of the period. Augustine argued that there were three levels of vision; corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual. This paper will specifically focus on corporeal and spiritual vision, which closely parallel the binary between women as physical beings and men as spiritual. Images were seen as tools that assisted the viewer in reaching spiritual understanding. This is particularly evident in objects such as illuminated manuscripts, which place text side by side with images. This paper will examine the books created by the women of the Medingen Abbey, what images were present in these manuscripts,and how the viewer may have been impacted by and reflected in these images.