Call for Papers
College Art Association
Medieval Italian Women & Visual Culture
31 August, 2026

CFP for CAA, New York City, March 11-13, 2027

“Medieval Italian Women & Visual Culture”

This session investigates how late medieval women lived their lives both in compliance with and in circumvention of the societal assumptions circulating about their nature and capabilities, read through their relationships to visual images and artistic patronage. Papers will address this topic through two lenses: 1) ways that gendered religious and social beliefs were encoded in visual imagery and 2) how women of different social and economic strata negotiated regulations that defined and constrained them in the ways they engaged with visual imagery or commissioned works of art or architecture.

The roles of women as artists, patrons, and audiences for illuminated manuscripts enjoy extensive in-depth study for northern medieval cultures since the mid 20th century. Studies of women’s participation in the visual culture of medieval Italy are much rarer and less well-known. This session seeks to help redress that imbalance by focusing on medieval Italian women as patrons, but also as audiences of artistic projects and performative visual media, and the ways women responded to or helped shape the imagery and ideas those works projected.

Papers are welcome from art history scholars in all stages of their careers as well as advanced graduate students whose research focuses on Italy in the 5th through 14th centuries.

If interested, submit a proposal by August 31, 2026 to jsteinhoff@uh.edu

Please include:

Your name and affiliation (if any)

Title

Abstract of 300 words

CV of a maximum 3 pages

Notifications will be sent out on September 16. More information can be found HERE.