Literary and Visual Cultures in the shaping of female monastic life (Iberian Peninsula, c. 1350-1550)

This project aims to assess the existence of interrelations between the nuns’ literary and visual cultures in the shaping of female monastic life in the Iberian nunneries (c. 1350-1550), since the rising suggestions on the mutual influences between the use and development of texts and artworks in conventual context demand that these phenomena be analysed as part of the same equation in order to be fully understood.

By addressing these communities' visual and literary cultures and their religious praxis from a joined perspective, LITVIS will contribute for the further comprehension of artworks, texts and rituals that shaped monastic life, unveiling information about their development, functionality and reception that could not be obtain when inquiring those phenomena individually as has been happening until now, not only in Iberia, but also at an European level.

The surviving of important elements of material culture in the Iberian Peninsula - such as conventual inventories, books and artworks -, can enable a study that will further analyse what informed the nuns’ choice and use of artworks and texts and if and how both media were interconnected in monastic life.

This entails a change of focus from the isolated object (an artwork or text) and its formal characteristics, to its functionality and reception, acknowledging it as part of the religious praxis to which it bears witness.

Such a task demands an interdisciplinary study that brings together the fields of Art History, Literature, and Religious History, borrowing notions born within the Cultural Studies, such as Visual Culture and Literary Culture.