Women’s Spaces —Real and Imagined— in the Illustrated Beatus Commentaries

Abstract

The medieval Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, with twenty-nine surviving examples that extend from a single page to over 300 folios, is an illustrated genre spanning more than three centuries. Although the color-filled manuscripts have been well studied by scholars from a range of fields, the Beatus tradition has never been analyzed from a gendered perspective. In the present article, therefore, the authors investigate this apocalyptic genre as a whole in order to recover the memory of women’s involvement with the Beatus Commentaries. To do so, we apply a spatial analysis to female patronage and practices, and to the most telling examples of female representations within, demonstrating that a gendered lens brings to the fore evidence of originality in medieval manuscripts while restoring a more complete and balanced understanding of the Beatus tradition overall.

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