Description

The heart had a key position in the visual media of religious women's communities in the early modern era. Maria Schaller analyzes portraits and image-bearing jewelry created in Catholic nunneries and Protestant women's convents during the 17th and 18th centuries; these address ideas such as the indwelling, imprinting, or inscribing of the divine in the human heart. This study examines their recourse to the heart visions of late medieval mystics, but also to remarkable new semanticizations such as constructing the genealogy of an 'eternal wound of the heart'. The primary question is how far the body images and imaginaries of the heart presented here reflect mediation processes in the field of tension between denomination, class, and gender.

• Fundamental contribution to gender research and the history of the body during the early modern age
• Images of the heart in various Christian denominations