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Transforming Saints explores the transformation and function of the images of holy women within wider religious, social, and political contexts of Old Spain and New Spain from the Spanish conquest to Mexican independence. The chapters here examine the rise of the cults of the lactating Madonna, St. Anne, St. Librada, St. Mary Magdalene, and the Suffering Virgin. Concerned with holy figures presented as feminine archetypes—images that came under Inquisition scrutiny—as well as with cults suspected of concealing Indigenous influences, Charlene Villaseñor Black argues that these images would come to reflect the empowerment and agency of women in viceregal Mexico. Her close analysis of the imagery additionally demonstrates artists'innovative responses to Inquisition censorship and the new artistic demands occasioned by conversion. The concerns that motivated the twenty-first century protests against Chicana artists Yolanda López in 2001 and Alma López in 2003 have a long history in the Hispanic world, in the form of anxieties about the humanization of sacred female bodies and fears of Indigenous influences infiltrating Catholicism. In this context Black also examines a number of important artists in depth, including El Greco, Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, Pedro de Mena, Baltasar de Echave Ibía, Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and Miguel Cabrera.

Set Me as a Seal Upon Thy Heart: Constructions of Female Sanctity in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern Period is a collection of essays focusing on saintly women's representations both in Eastern and Western Christianity starting from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The volume discusses two different categories in relation to the conceptualization of female sanctity: the context of their construction in hagiographic sources and the emergent power rendered by their martyrdoms. It offers a transdisciplinary perspective on the present research carried out in the fields of hagiography, history, and art history.

Examining innovations in Mary Magdalene imagery in northern art 1430 to 1550, Penny Jolly explores how the saint's widespread popularity drew upon her ability to embody oppositions and embrace a range of paradoxical roles: sinner-prostitute and saint, erotic seductress and holy prophet. Analyzing paintings by Rogier van der Weyden, Quentin Massys, and others, Jolly investigates artists'and audiences'responses to increasing religious tensions, expanding art markets, and changing roles for women. Using cultural ideas concerning the gendered and pregnant body, Jolly reveals how dress confirms the Magdalene's multivalent nature. In some paintings, her gown's opening laces betray her wantonness yet simultaneously mark her as Christ's spiritually pregnant Bride; elsewhere'undress'reconfirms her erotic nature while paradoxically marking her penitence; in still other works, exotic finery expresses her sanctity while celebrating Antwerp's textile industry. New image types arise, as when the saint appears as a lovesick musician playing a lute or as a melancholic contemplative, longing for Christ. Some depictions emphasize her intercessory role through innovative pictorial strategies that invite performative viewing or relate her to the mythological Pandora and Italian Renaissance Neoplatonism. Throughout, the Magdalene's ambiguities destabilize readings of her imagery while engaging audiences across a broad social and religious spectrum.