Moving Women Moving Objects (400–1500)

This collection forges new ground in the discussion of aristocratic and royal women, their relationships with their objects, and medieval geography. It explores how women’s geographic and familial networks spread well beyond the borders that defined men’s sense of region and how the movement of their belongings can reveal essential information about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces. Beginning in early medieval Scandinavia, ranging from Byzantium to Rus', and multiple lands in Western Europe up to 1500, the essays span a great spatio-temporal range. Moreover, the types of objects extend from traditionally studied works like manuscripts and sculpture to liturgical and secular ceremonial instruments, icons, and articles of personal adornment, such as textiles and jewelry, even including shoes.

"This is an important work for medievalists, but sufficient contextual detail is provided to enable the nonspecialist to approach each topic, a significant feature in a work covering such a range of material and one which expands its usefulness to researchers in other fields, most notably court and women’s studies." - Sara Smart, University of Exeter. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXXIV, No. 1 pp. 273-275. "[...] this book is an important contribution to the study of medieval women, demonstrating the utility of ideas around the agency of objects for supplementing and revising extant evidence about their worlds. [...] the strengths of this volume suggest the need for continued attention to movement and mobility at all levels of society and for many different kinds of aesthetic objects." - Michelle K. Oing, Stanford University. In: Speculum, 96/4 (October 2021), pp. 1178-1180. "The chapters are fluently written and well-researched[...]The capacity to reveal new geographies, to show how women and their things created places united across space, interlacing diverse spheres, is the major contribution of this volume and opens the door to further studies of medieval and early modern women through the lens of materiality in motion". Erin J. Cambell in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2021. "Given such broad geographical and temporal variety, it is worth noting the consistently high quality of the essays. This is surely due in part to the efforts of the editors, who appear to have been quite involved in the shaping and level of finish of each essay as well as in the conception of the volume as a whole. A sense of commitment, common purpose, enjoyment, and collaborative engagement comes through in the many cross-references that populate the footnotes [...] Moving Women Moving Objects is excellent in itself and sets a high standard for future collaborative work on “object itineraries” that is global in its reach." -Sarah McNamer, Georgetown University. In:The Medieval Review

Tracy Chapman Hamilton, (Ph.D. 2004, University of Texas at Austin) is Visiting Associate Professor of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie de Brabant (1260–1321) (Brepols, 2018).Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, (Ph.D. 2007, Brown University) is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of Medieval Art in Motion: The Inventory and Gift Giving of Queen Clémence de Hongrie (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).