Patronage at the Convent of Flines

Works in this section consider the dynamics between devotional imagery, monastic experience, and gender in the southern Low Countries. Their focus is the Cistercian convent of Flines near the town of Douai and the artistic patronage of the community in the early-sixteenth century during a period of reforms. It explores in part the use of commissioned art, especially by abbess Jeanne de Boubais, to convey compliance with the reforms as other convents that resisted were shuttered by the Order.

Publications

“Spirituality, Authority, and Monastic Vows: An Antependium from the Community of Flines,” in Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture VI, ed. Meredith Parsons Lillich, pp. 323-363. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2005.

“Nuns and Clerics: Ambiguous Authority in a Devotional Portrait Diptych,” Chap. 4 in Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art (1350-1530): Experience, Authority, Resistance. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.

“Nuns, Images, and the Ideals of Women’s Monasticism: Two Paintings from the Cistercian Convent of Flines,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 1356-1402.

Doctoral Dissertation

“Gender, Images, and Ideals at the Cistercian Convent of Flines, 1500-1575.” University of California, Santa Barbara, 1995.

Awards

Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship in the History of Art, 1993.

P.E.O. Scholar, 1991-93.