Gendered Devotions: Negotiating Body, Space, Object, and Text through Performance

Abstract

This paper investigates how the performance of devotion and faith by female elites in fifteenth-century francophone Metz contributed to the creation of community narratives and cultural memory. Concentrating on Catherine Gronnaix, a wealthy patrician and key patron of the parish church of St-Martin, it embeds her personal religious practices and those of her peers within this space and its material culture. Analysis of the sculpture, murals, and windows of the Notre Dame chapel reveals that, over time, use of these images shaped a local paradigm of women’s performance in which female practice was elevated on the basis of a gendered capacity to nurture and bring forth sanctity.