Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages

By Elizabeth L’Estrange. Manchester: Manchester University Press, October 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0719075438, $84. 320 pages.

Review by Kerr Houston, Maryland Institute College of Art

Elizabeth L’Estrange’s Holy Motherhood is an ambitious book that is built around several telescoping aims. Most basically, it involves an attempt to describe some of the ways in which images of saintly mothers and birth narratives in a group of manuscripts associated with the fifteenth-century houses of Anjou and Brittany may have been perceived by the aristocrats who owned the texts. More broadly, but relatedly, the book also argues for the general value of a specific interpretive strategy: in accenting what she calls the “situational eye,” L’Estrange emphasizes a mode of inquiry in which viewers’ experiences and what we might call their cultural equipment are seen as critical in informing their relationship to images. And, more broadly still, L’Estrange also sees her book as forging an alternative to essentialist interpretations of images used by women, and to recent readings of female imagery as either empowering or victimizing. Given such aims, Holy Motherhood is certainly a provocative book. But its reach, I think, exceeds its grasp, and I’ll try to show why.

First things first. Hoping to define the ways in which a group of aristocrats might have seen the manuscripts that they owned (the Fitzwilliam Hours is the best-known of them), L’Estrange spends most of the first half of her book investigating fifteenth-century views of, and practices related to, birth. She acknowledges the popularity of Saint Anne, the belatedly fertile matriarch who has also proven a fertile subject of academic inquiry over the past 25 years. She looks at medical treatises, and she argues that a range of birth-related prayers, amulets, and spells “would have been known by a wide variety of people” (55). And she argues that aristocrats familiar with the lying-in (a period of post-delivery recuperation) were attuned to a range of details, from the quality of cloths used to decorate the birthing room to the temporary inversion of gender relations that stemmed from the attention given to recovering mothers. At the least, then, the first half of the book thus offers a neat overview of some of the practices associated with birth in the later Middle Ages.

Any larger payoff, though, is only partial. L’Estrange argues that the responses of fifteenth-century readers to birth-related images were informed by a familiarity with these practices and by their own personal experiences and ambitions. But when she tries, in the second half of her book, to outline the reactions of individual readers to specific manuscript paintings, the speculative nature of such a venture is clear. Repeatedly, L’Estrange is forced to employ tentative phrasings, as when she writes that “it is possible to suggest” (218) that a later reader saw evidence divine intervention in the Fitzwilliam Hours. Given such qualified language, the notion of a situational eye sometimes feels more like a pretext for simple speculation than a lens through which actual historical practices are thrown into focus.

Even when she does root her analysis in hard historical fact, L’Estrange never fully resolves a nagging tension between the asserted relevance of individual experiences and the obvious relevance of larger cultural patterns. She usually offers biographical details regarding each reader, as if to indicate the possibility of a specifically personal reaction to the texts. But her assertions regarding the responses of readers are quite generic: fifteenth-century viewers, we learn, would have seen the images in relation to a common social pressure to produce male offspring, or a general familiarity with the fine cloths available to the aristocracy. And, oddly, L’Estrange also offers several extended Italian parallels, thus implicitly advancing transalpine similarities. Were the cognitive habits of fourteenth-century Paduans really comparable to those of fifteenth-century Angevins? Both the structure and the subtitle of L’Estrange’s book imply that they were, and point to an implicitly pan-European late medieval eye. Such a move is not, it’s worth pointing out, unusual in contemporary scholarship, and titles frequently exaggerate the scopes of studies. But in a book that wants to establish a new mode of art-historical analysis, a cavalier attitude towards the relative value of sources is surprising, and result in a diluted situational eye, which comes across as broadly collective.

Of course, all historical accounts have to come down somewhere on the spectrum between individuality and collectivity. But nothing in this book necessitates, as L’Estrange seems to think it does, a newly minted methodological term. Decades ago, Hans Robert Jauss famously argued that texts exist within a “horizon of expectations,” and L’Estrange’s manuscripts are no different. Similarly, her aristocrats form what Stanley Fish would call a general interpretive community. L’Estrange never mentions these well-known concepts, but she could: instead of trying to blaze a trail by herself, she might recognize that the forest was largely cleared decades ago.

L’Estrange’s arguments are also weakened by shaky readings of certain images in the manuscripts and by a selective presentation of evidence. Pamela Sheingorn has detailed, in another review of the book, several instances in which L’Estrange seems to misconstrue specific figures, or to ignore the likely understood meanings of narratives. L’Estrange might reply that, from her point of view, the meaning of an image is never fixed; rather, it depends on the cognitive habits of the viewer. But, if so, why are so many prominent aspects of the images simply left undiscussed? Surely some of the fifteenth-century readers of the Fitzwilliam Hours might have been struck by the fact that the paintings of birthing consistently unfold against a backdrop of utterly contemporary sexpartite rib vaults and late-Gothic interior architecture. Moreover, why limit the list of a viewer’s relevant experiences to marriages and births? Once we begin to speculate about the responses of historical viewers, any topic is potentially in play, and any reading that simply refuses to treat potential bands of evidence is by definition only partial.

A volume that tries, like this one, to do too much is guilty of a small sin, but it still manages to provoke useful questions about the fifteenth century and about modern scholarship.