The Absent Made Present: Portraying Nuns in the Early Modern Low Countries

Abstract

Over the recent decades scholarly work on early modern nuns has truly taken off, a happy consequence of the general growth of interest in gender history. Nuns have been studied in terms of their social and political lives, their devotional and musical practices, their artistic and architectural patronage and much else besides.1 There is nevertheless something of a lacuna in this burgeoning field: portraiture.2 To my knowledge there are only two authors who have engaged directly with the portrayal of early modern nuns, James Córdova and Mónica Díaz, and they focus exclusively on New Spain and New France.3 Of course, there are also useful broader surveys of conventual visual culture such as Paul Vandenbroeck’s justifiably famous and methodologically provocative exhibition catalogue of 1994, Hooglied/Le Jardin clos d’âme.4 This