Current Projects

A Lactating, Menstruating Christ

Book Project

Despite inequalities and what we as modern individuals identify as rampant racism and sexism in the Middle Ages, the period still has something to teach us in this time of reckoning with absolutism, division, and revision of what exactly gender is and how it works. At the root of the fears and worries about gender in the Middle Ages was an inherent belief that gender could fluctuate and change. Gender is depicted as an unstable category in literature and art, but its spectrum was also a lived reality, as there is written proof for trans, inter-sex, and gender non-conforming individuals. And there were men and women who gave Christ, arguably the most important christian figure of the era, attributes of the feminine, despite an insistence on his masculinity. Those who feminized him were not heretical, but rather ecstatically devout and were even accepted by the Church. Through language and approach intended to engage a general audience, this book tells the story of this gender-queer Christ. It guides the reader through the depictions of Christ and explains how women were able to use this reimagined Christ as a way to access religious influence, before tracking the church’s documented fear of these women’s growing influence and their consequent shift toward Mary as a central religious figure. In doing so, this book demonstrates the way in which religion changes over time and the way it complicates the narrative of long-held tradition and the natural-ness of binary gender and sexuality that is so often deployed against the LGBTQAI+ community.

Staging Gendered Access to the Divine in Late Medieval Burgundy and Early Modern Flanders

Book Project

This book presents Margaret of Flanders’ (1350-1405) innovative use of architecture and sculpture as a technological solution for accessing the divine and explores the tangled web of gender expression woven through that access and its performance. By connecting the sensorial experiences at the contemporaneously built ducal oratories of the Chartreuse de Champmol and the Château de Germolles, it identifies Margaret’s requirements for such a space as well as how she adapted these requirements to the specific physical and social contexts of each. Comparisons of these oratories to those Margaret experienced and those produced by her offspring chart her potential influences, her own ingenuity, and the impact she had on the oratories that came after her. The book contextualizes Margaret’s efforts within the nuanced expressions and performance of gender during the late medieval and early modern and connects Margaret’s work to the contemporaneous efforts to assert the holy authority of women by connecting their perceived fleshy embodied-ness with Christ’s holiness. It also argues that Margaret’s construction of the oratory at the Château de Germolles created a three-dimensional sacred space previously only depicted within the imagined spaces of painted and sculptural donor portraits of the period.

Study of the Upper Chapel at the Château de Germolles, Burgundy, France

Archaeological excavation

Between 1381 and 1400 CE, Margaret of Flanders constructed a château on a property gifted to her by her husband, Philip the Bold. Some pre-existing architecture from the 12th-century grange and the subsequent fortified manor house was incorporated into this new château, including a 12th century chapel that Margaret built a new chapel atop. Margaret’s configuration of the space was inventive and unusual, orienting a small oratory facing a turret choir with a nave horizontally spanning the entrances to each. The archaeological excavation directed by Dr. Chilson-Parks has aimed to better understand this upper chapel. In particular, the circulation level, barriers and separations of space, and the resulting gendered and classed experience within the chapel and its oratory.