Chapter 34: Women in virtual landscapes
[Spoiler Alert: This page contains a detailed summary and analysis of Chapter 34. If you have not read ‘Women in virtual landscapes,’ proceed with caution to avoid spoilers.]
Summary
The chapter contrasts the real, active women found in legal documents like the Coroners’ Rolls with the objectified and symbolically coded figures of medieval art. Adams first examines the Très Riches Heures, a fifteenth-century book of hours commissioned by Jean, Duc de Berry. Its calendar illuminations show noblewomen in leisure pursuits—riding, hawking, and receiving courtly flattery—while peasant women appear seasonally, toiling in hayfields or gathering grapes, always subordinate to the male gaze and the majestic backdrops of ducal castles.
A deliberate counterpoint is offered by Christine de Pizan’s allegorical treatise The Book of the City of Ladies, where the author is depicted in her blue gown, reading, writing, and even wielding a trowel on the building site of her imagined city. This image recasts the woman as thinker, designer, and public actor.
The analysis deepens with the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter, commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell III. Michelle Brown’s scholarship reveals that the manuscript’s apparently playful or devotional scenes are laden with moral warnings. A kneeling widow with a red squirrel conveys promiscuity; a woman braiding her hair before a mirror represents sinful vanity—both likely coded portraits of Sir Geoffrey’s daughter Elizabeth, who was embroiled in a scandalous elopement. Such imagery served as a family cautionary tale. Other illuminations draw parallels between the Luttrell family feast and the Last Supper, or allude to the adultery of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer. Even bucolic scenes of peasant women at work carry feudal messages of divinely sanctioned order and lordly bounty.
The chapter closes by tracing the northern Renaissance shift toward humanism in the works of Bruegel the Elder and the Younger. Here, women are no longer moral allegories but townswomen and peasants—baxters, alewives, market traders—who dance, kiss, and suffer. They inhabit credible landscapes alongside men as partners in life’s trials, their smiles expressing pleasure rather than sinfulness.
Key Events
- Très Riches Heures calendar: Noble ladies appear in finery for springtime gardens and summer hawking; peasant women work invisibly during winter and emerge for seasonal labors like haymaking, grape-harvesting, and sheep-shearing.
- Christine de Pizan’s artistic rebellion: In Le Livre de la cité des dames, the author is portrayed as an active intellect building a symbolic city, directly challenging the passive idealizations of devotional books.
- Elizabeth Luttrell’s coded scandal: The psalter’s marginalia—a flirtatious squirrel, a mirror-gazing Eve-figure, and a cleric catching birds—are reinterpreted as veiled references to the patron’s daughter’s seduction and marriage.
- Political scandal in the psalter: An image of a noblewoman on an acrobat’s shoulders serves as a likely allusion to Queen Isabella and Mortimer, lovers who overthrew Edward II.
- Bruegel’s humanist turn: Later Netherlandish paintings depict women as full characters in market squares, taverns, and weddings, no more or less virtuous than their male counterparts.
Character Development
The chapter tracks a collective arc in the visualization of women rather than the growth of a single figure. The idealized noblewoman of the Très Riches Heures is a decorative object, confined to courtship and leisure. Christine de Pizan’s self-portrayal shatters this mold by presenting a woman as intellectual laborer and civic builder, a direct argument for female agency in the male-dominated world of learning. Elizabeth Luttrell’s ghost in the psalter is a warning—a life reduced to a moral emblem of fallen sexuality. The peasant women of both courtly and devotional art are symbols of seasonal fertility and feudal order. Only with the Bruegels do women emerge from the symbolic register into something approaching full humanity, depicted in partnership with men amid the mundane pleasures and sorrows of daily existence.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
- Coded morality: Medieval images carried non-literal meanings. A blue gown signaled virtue (the Virgin Mary), while a red squirrel or an uncovered-braided hair signified promiscuity. Every prop and posture transmitted a moral judgment intended for contemporary viewers.
- Class-divided gazes: The noble calendar illuminates a world where working women are literally and figuratively “beneath the gaze” of their lords, appearing only when their labor is seasonally necessary.
- Cautionary biography: The psalter’s marginalia transform personal family scandal (Elizabeth’s elopement) into enduring moral lesson, blurring the line between portraiture, allegory, and domestic coercion.
- Humanist realism: The late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century turn away from exclusively religious imagery allows women to inhabit the same credible landscapes as men, expressing pleasure rather than inherent sinfulness.
Why This Chapter Matters
Adams uses visual culture to show how gendered expectations were constructed, enforced, and occasionally subverted long before the modern era. By moving from the ethereal symbolism of illuminated prayer books to the earthy realism of Bruegel, the chapter demonstrates that the ‘quiet’ women of history were also imagined women, their images deployed for moral, feudal, and familial ends. Recognizing these framing devices is essential to understanding how real women navigated a world that constantly told stories about them.
Study Questions and Answers
- What was the ideological function of the peasant-woman imagery in the Luttrell Psalter?
- The imagery conveyed the virtue of labor and the lord’s bounty in the fertility of both women and the land. This reinforced a feudal worldview where Sir Geoffrey Luttrell was the temporal lord under God, and the women’s toil reflected the natural, divinely sanctioned order.
- How does Christine de Pizan’s visual self-representation challenge the norms of fifteenth-century manuscript art?
- Instead of appearing as a decorative court lady or a passive devotional figure, she is depicted reading, writing, and physically building her allegorical city. This imagery asserts the woman as a thinker and project manager on a public stage, reclaiming the intellectual and constructive agency denied by conventional iconography.
- In what specific way do the Bruegel women differ from the figures in the Très Riches Heures?
- The Bruegel women are not idealized objects or seasonal laborers glimpsed by noble riders; they inhabit taverns, markets, and homes as partners in life’s struggles. Their smiles and actions express human pleasure and persistence rather than coded sin or moral vacuity, reflecting a humanist interest in real people’s lives.