One would think that by now gender studies would have made solid inroads into just about any artistic province. That is not, however, the case for Northern Renaissance art—and surprisingly so, considering the rich harvest its wonderful tradition of portraiture promises to yield. Andrea Pearson’s study is to be welcomed as one of the first to take up this task. Fluent with feminist theory’s non-essentialist, negotiated approach to gender and subscribing to the view that spirituality always is an embodied experience, Pearson is an excellent guide. Her aim is to demonstrate the “viability of gender methodologies” for the study of books of hours and devotional portrait diptychs produced in France and Flanders from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. While it has long been recognized that the latter genre evolved from the first, for Pearson that development was by no means natural or linear. Rather, compositional and iconographic formulas circulated because they were fought over—appropriation, usurpation, hijacking is the terminology she favors in thinking through what T.J. Clark has famously defined as the “battlefield of representations.”

The story of Envisioning Gender starts with fourteenth-century books of hours. Offering female patrons a channel for expressing their spiritual yearnings, these dainty yet artistically avant-garde creations often include donor portraits. Moreover, they show those whose worship was otherwise tightly controlled, and whose manipulation of sacramental matters was anathema, in direct dialogue with the divine, the Virgin and Child above all. Devotional manuscripts allowed women to carve out pockets of visual and spiritual autonomy in a male-dominated landscape. Because of that they typically had a long shelf life, being passed on as educational tools and meaningful heirlooms from mothers to daughters, aunts to nieces. By Pearson’s reckoning, female patrons commissioned them in a ratio of three-to-one until the 1370s when the male members of the ruling Valois dynasty annexed their innovative visual formulations and started to display themselves in the act of devotion to the Virgin as a way to stake out “their own religious hegemony.”

Fifteenth-century devotional panel diptychs continued to work within a similar idiom, but were now even more energetically regendered as male—of the forty-six studied by Pearson, as many as thirty-six sport portraits of men. Yet by the end of the period she considers, a handful of powerful and powerfully resilient female patrons reappropriated this now largely male-gendered repertoire. Margaret of Austria’s commission of several such diptychs, sprinkled with “powerful symbols of feminine authority,” is emblematic of this last shift.

But why, if devotional images were meant to be viewed privately, would Margaret have bothered to proclaim her fitness to rule in paintings claiming privileged access to Christ? Pearson is right to insist that they in fact often breached the divide between public and private consumption. The very habit of passing manuscripts and panels from owner to heir gave them a multi-generational reach, extending their significance well beyond an individual. Nor were devotional paintings necessarily locked away in private bedchambers for no one but the owner to see. Viewing conditions are best defined as semi-private. This is certainly the case in the loquacious miniature of the Traité sur l’oraison dominicale (ca. 1457), which shows Philip the Good in prayer. While he kneels in a textile oratory furnished with a prie-dieu surmounted by a small panel diptych, a servant conveniently draws the curtain so that we can see the duke looking out toward the chapel’s altar, where a priest is celebrating mass. The presence of other clerics and courtiers, praying and looking, make this an intimate but hardly solitary environment, one in which personal spirituality was indeed “played out on public turf.”

Pearson offers an extended discussion of Philip’s miniature. While one might not subscribe to every one of her referential interpretations or endorse all of her conclusions, her similarly attentive examination of the celebrated miniature of Mary of Burgundy in her eponymous Hours, or of the portrait diptychs commissioned from Hans Memling by the two wealthy Bruges burghers Martin van Nieuwenhove and Jan du Cellier, do invite us to look at these works with a new appreciation for their purchase on the subjects’ sexual and spiritual self-definition. Pearson is especially good on the paintings made in the troubled orbit of the Cistercian convent of Flines near Douai. There Jeanne de Boubais—the abbess who had to comply with and enforce the externally imposed rule of strict enclosure—hired Jean Bellegambe for several works. One that survives is a lovely diptych, dated around 1510, now at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh. On the inside wings pride of place is not given, as one would expect, to the patron; instead we see a Cistercian monk (possibly Guillaume de Bruxelles in charge of the reform program) presented by St. Bernard to the Virgin and Child. In order to set eyes on Jeanne, we need to close the panel, and there she is: absorbed in meditation, even a bit dour in a tidy and richly appointed interior defined by emphatically marked spatial boundaries. Instead of addressing Christ or the Virgin, she faces a gilt ciborium. One the one hand, Jeanne chooses to show her compliance with male oversight, accepting her curtailed authority; on the other, the presence of the ciborium allows her to claim a special relationship to the host, thus inserting herself in a long line of female Eucharistic devotion. This is one of several instances in which Pearson shows how well the same painting can work to different ends, for if Jeanne is literally marginalized and figuratively disempowered, she at the same time reasserts agency through a calculated act of displacement.

This is Pearson’s most persuasive analysis, because her overall framework of gendered spirituality works particularly well for paintings produced for nuns and clerics. When examining images made for lay people under those same lenses, the result, I think, is less satisfying. Nuanced as the author’s observations about the paintings’ details remain throughout, I am uneasy with the reliance on Jean Gerson’s prescriptive tracts or St. Bridget of Sweden’s mystical writings. Popular as these writings were, they are imperfect or at best partial tools for assessing either a Van Nieuwenhove’s or a Margaret of Austria’s visual self-fashioning. Not that the devotional practices of male burghers or female rulers did not intersect with those of priests or cloistered women. Yet much as Pearson takes into account both social distinctions and commonalities, she does not do justice to the pressures exerted by expectations that are not primarily spiritual or sexual in nature.

To assess how paintings allowed donors to express other longings, it would have been useful to tap into the vast body of Burgundian secular literature, with its endlessly rehearsed litany of glamorous worldly values. Thus the claim that Van Nieuwenhove’s devotional panel enforced a visual regime whose aim it was to suppress unmarried men’s “penis antics” seems not only, so to speak, a stretch but also proves reductive in its sense of the sexual roles lay people wanted, rather than were told, to perform. That Christ’s body, in its childish innocence or bruised mature state, could function as a locus for erotic desires, homoerotic or not, makes perfect sense to any reader of Leo Steinberg or Caroline Walker Bynum. But how can homophobia in fifteenth-century Bruges—no more rampant there and then than anywhere else—explain the absence of paintings juxtaposing a lay male donor with the Crucified Christ? If that were so, then why do we have Crucifixions or the often provocatively portrayed male martyrs in manuscripts and other types of paintings commissioned by men? In the end, the problem may lie in Pearson’s almost evangelical, vacuum-packed understanding of religious experience (so she can write that a Valois queen or a Burgundian duchess found “autonomy and authority in and through their faith”), one in which the cultivation of more mundane aspirations—whether involving corporeal prowess, economic achievement, social respectability, or material pride—have only the most ancillary role to play.

By the same token, it is perplexing that this book does not speak more forcefully to the debates that continue to make the field of Northern Renaissance art so lively. Why not actually engage with the work of a Craig Harbison, who has repeatedly tackled the problem of how Burgundian paintings drew the private and public, or else the religious and secular, both apart and close together? Why not take on explicitly the formidable literature on portraiture or even on “disguised symbolism”? Visited and revisited as Panofsky’s notion has been, it does in fact underpin many of Pearson’s interpretative moves, and so it would have been particularly interesting to see how well it fares within a gendered approach.

Envisioning Gender is engagingly written and abounds in fine observations about paintings and people. It is generally persuasive when measuring their sexual and spiritual temperature. But when it comes to art-historical questions proper, its pulse unfortunately beats at a reduced rate.