The Women in the Family: Behavioural Models and Gendered Social Roles in Transylvanian Medieval Mural Paintings
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24193/subbhistart.2024.03Keywords:
visual narratives, iconography, gendered social roles and gendered behaviour, secular clergy, nobility, mendicantsAbstract
The Women in the Family: Behavioural Models and Gendered Social Roles in Transylvanian Medieval Mural Paintings. Using visual documents, primarily wall paintings in the churches of medieval Transylvania, this study has a three-fold purpose. It wishes to decode the messages transmitted by visual narratives and compositional types that decorate the northern wall of the nave in several Transylvanian medieval churches, it intends to identify their target audience and to discover the agency involved in their conception. The study relies on the depiction of the Labors of Adam and Eve in the church at Mălâncrav and several visual narratives representing the Lives of Virgin Martyrs, especially Catherine and Margaret, presented together with the story of St. Ladislas in the churches at Şmig, Ighişu Nou and Drăuşeni. Approaching the visual documents by using iconography as the preferred method of analysis, while taking into account its relational and serial versions, the study will focus on the possible functions of these depictions, didactic, mnemonic and devotional, in an attempt to reconstruct the motives of their commissioners. Trying to disengage from the assumption that visual narratives dedicated to the Virgin Martyrs were addressing women, providing them with a devotional model, the study argues that the target audience were the secular clergy who were meant to model their behaviour on the chastity and intellectual prowess of these saints, particularly in the case of Catherine, and enthusiastically assume their pastoral duties, as also suggested by the presence in the program of the martyrdom of the apostles. By placing the Labors of Adam and Eve from Mălâncrav in a series that follows the development of this compositional type between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries, and by focusing on the changes in the meanings attached to them, the study advocates the importance of motherhood for the noble patrons of the church, as this can easily be connected to their concern for fertility, lineage and the self-reproduction of the group. The study ultimately posits that while St. Ladislas is undoubtedly the ultimate role model for men, especially for those with military careers, the three female characters, Eve and the two Virgin Martyrs, can become models of gendered behaviour for women and the constructed third gender of the clergy. Considered together, the two sets of images suggest that secular and ecclesiastical elites were equally invested in their conception: the nobility because they wanted to instill a chivalric spirit in the men of the family and commitment to motherhood in the women, while the higher and the regular clergy, most probably the mendicants, wished to shape the gendered identity of the parish priests.
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