Women's Space in a Church, Ren. Italy

When women sat to listen to a sermon, how were they expected to sit? What does the act of attendance mean? This first week we've been discussing patriarchy and agency in class, and it should not surprise us to learn that women's space was regulated in a sacred space. (side note: do any religions in the modern world regulate the space for women? why are those women's sections always in the back, and so tiny?). Because women's bodies brought with them the essence of pollution (thanks, Leviticus), they were explicitly linked to danger and uncleanliness (Wiesner 19). For that reason, women and men were barred from church after sex, in theory.

But what about during sermons? In any interesting article by Adrian Randolph, she argues: "women did participate, pre-eminently in the more expressive margins of religion" (Randolph 19).  Women were expected to attend sermons and this meant a special ticket to participate in the rituals of public space. Too many women at a sermon was deplored by some contemporary moralists: "A women goes to see sermons only to show herself off"(20). Yet women attended and this act should be seen as documentation of women's presence and participation as well as recording their social mobility.

In the images below, note the division . See also how the audience is divided by sex, demonstrating a curtaining or cloth division. However, it's not a front/back scenario, and women are portrayed as equally active, at least in these images.  Randolph further argues through an analysis of literature and poetry that the sacred church was also a place for connected eyes, lust, rushing the altar for the Eucharist, and private affairs. This idea lets us see beyond restrictive space to connect to the lives of actual women.

Savonarola preaching in the Duomo, Florence, 1495 (women on the top, left side)

San Bernadino preaching, note the curtain, 1400s

Adrian Randolph, "Regarding Women in Sacred Space," Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, 17-41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1997.  + Wiesner class text