This volume presents a timely contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the apocryphal writings and their reception in the Middle Ages, especially in connection with visual representation. It aims to bridge what often remains disconnected, the visual art and the written text, the early Christian roots and medieval reception, the East and the West, as well as methodologies of various disciplines. The studies in this volume firstly investigate issues related to the Virgin Mary, and through them, also the status, function, and identity of women. Mary and the female element thus...

Set Me as a Seal Upon Thy Heart: Constructions of Female Sanctity in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern Period is a collection of essays focusing on saintly women's representations both in Eastern and Western Christianity starting from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The volume discusses two different categories in relation to the conceptualization of female sanctity: the context of their construction in hagiographic sources and the emergent power rendered by their martyrdoms. It offers a transdisciplinary perspective on the present...

This volume is a collection of essays focusing on marginalized women mostly in Central and Eastern Europe from around 1350 to 1650. "Other" women are discussed in three different categories: women whose religious practices put them on the social margins, "common women" who are in society but not of society because they are in the sex trade, and women whose occupations were reason enough to shunt them. In order to fill a gap in gender history for countries east of the Rhine River, the studies included present how official city-funded brothels in medieval Austria worked, how a princess'...