Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe

Helen Hills, Helen Hills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351957403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Written by leading scholars in the field, the essays in this book address the relationships between gender and the built environment, specifically architecture, in early modern Europe. In recent years scholars have begun to investigate the ways in which architecture plays a part in the construction of gendered identities. So far the debates have focused on the built environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the neglect of the early modern period. This book focuses on early modern Europe, a period decisive for our understanding of gender and sexuality. Much excellent scholarship has enhanced our understanding of gender division in early modern Europe, but often this scholarship considers gender in isolation from other vital factors, especially social class. Central to the concerns of this book, therefore, is a consideration of the intersections of gender with social rank. Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe makes a major contribution to the developing analysis of how architecture contributes to the shaping of social relations, especially in relation to gender, in early modern Europe.

Part I
Introduction

Theorizing the Relationships between Architecture and Gender in Early Modern Europe

Helen Hills

The Women, as they make here the Language and fashions, so they sway in Architecture.

Christopher Wren to an unnamed friend, during his visit to Paris in 1655.¹

The essays in this volume examine the relationships between the built environment and gendered identity in late medieval and early modern Europe. In what ways is architectural practice gendered at this date? With what consequences? What part does architecture play in producing sexual difference? In what ways were assumptions about gender articulated architecturally, why and how were they enforced, amplified and resisted, by whom, and with what results? This book explores the relationship between the architecture of early modern Europe and the bodies it was built to represent or to house, seeking to link architectural discourse not simply to that of social hierarchy and exclusivity, but to the anxieties and unspoken fears circulating in the shadows of proud proclamations and cautionary warnings.

Discussion of the ways in which architecture plays a part in constructing specific gendered identities and of how architectural space may be gendered in relation to institutional discourse has become increasingly sophisticated. But it remains focused on modern and contemporary architecture. The purpose of this book is to turn the focus on to the architecture of early modern Europe.

The early modern period was decisive for our understanding of gender and sexuality, as Natalie Zemon Davis, Joan Kelly, Michel Foucault, Thomas Laqueur, Guido Ruggiero and many others have shown.² Expanding secular bureaucracies, accelerated urban migration, spreading literacy, and reform and counter-reform in the Churches all affected gender relations. But how were these changes articulated architecturally? And what part did architecture play in bringing them about?

The interface between gender and spatial organization has received considerable attention in recent years from sociologists, geographers and architects, in particular.³ Much excellent scholarship has enhanced our understanding of gender divisions in early modern Europe, but often this scholarship is blunted because it considers gender in isolation from other vital factors, especially social class.⁴ Social class is a crucial aspect of the politics of gender. The intersection of social rank and gender is, therefore, at the heart of all the essays presented here.

The chapters of this book engage with the developing analysis of how the social organization of women’s and men’s bodies (sexual and otherwise), the institutions of family, class relationships, and religious and social regulation are defined by, relate to, and resist architectural discourses. Urbanism, architecture and architectural decoration actively produce meanings through their own social, semiotic, metaphorical and symbolic references and procedures – references and procedures which are always implicated in social relationships of power. Architecture does not simply frame a pre-existing practice; it serves to produce specific social practices and social relations.⁵ It is both the locus and the agent of change. The relationships between architectural organization, sexual and gendered difference, and social, religious and political power are examined here.

The book comprises nine case studies, selected to illuminate critical junctures, places, institutions and issues in this debate.

Inevitably there are limits to what can be achieved in a collection of essays. This book does not attempt to present a survey of the relationships between architecture and gender throughout Europe. Not all of Europe is represented; nor are all social classes. The essays focus predominantly, but not exclusively, on upper-class women. But gender, rather than women, is the focus of the analysis, since the aim is not simply to recover the history of women’s involvement in architecture, but to examine the ways in which early modern architecture defined and shaped gendered identities and sexual difference.

Architectural history and gender

Women were for many years more or less absent from accounts of architectural history, and gender was, at best, an untheorized presence. More so than in any other area of art history, gender differences were assumed to be irrelevant to the concerns of architectural history much beyond the position of the cooker or the height of the kitchen sink.⁶

In other areas of art history, particularly in studies of the history of painting, the rediscovery of a significant number of neglected female artists and the representation of the female body were the principal subjects of feminist interventions from the 1970s, which led rapidly to the development and application of theories of representation, sexual difference and gendered identities.⁷ It was characteristic of the contributions of feminist art historians of that first generation to celebrate female creativity and to focus on female practitioners.⁸ Although this work fundamentally changed our picture of artistic creativity, it tended towards an ‘additive’ approach to art history, in which female artists were merely added to a long list of their male counterparts. More recent feminist work has sought to go further (or, arguably, to take another path entirely), demonstrating that the consideration of gender in relation to artistic production is not simply a matter of making its social or cultural analysis more comprehensive. Instead it poses new questions, as well as opening to new interpretation material previously neatly packaged without any reference to gender. Rather than assuming a fixed nature for the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’, this scholarship has examined the role of art in constructing difference between ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’; that is, it has been concerned with analysing the relationships between sexual difference, sexualities, desire, representation (art), and ideology.⁹

Developments in architectural history have assumed rather different shape. Although the first wave of feminist scholarship concentrated on female architects and on historical and institutional obstacles to their training and emergence, much feminist scholarship bypassed architectural history.¹⁰ The reasons for this are complex, related to the ‘masculinizing’ of the architectural profession itself, the relative absence of female architects on whom ‘heroic’ narratives can be focused, and the non-figurative nature of architecture, which means it resists analysis of the sort developed for representations of the human body. Thus architecture evades ready subjection to the sorts of analysis developed in relation to figurative art. For those same reasons, scholars have had to adopt or invent different modes of analysing gender in relation to architecture.

The relationships between gender and architecture are the subject of increasing scholarly interest. Much early work on gender and architecture viewed spatial arrangements as a simple reflection of social relations, and accepted as a corollary of this that architectural arrangements reveal gender relations.¹¹ Structuralism encouraged the trend to use formal analysis to read architecture like a separate language. Although valuable in attending to pattern, these studies neglect the specificity of context, often assume that gender relations are fixed, and overlook the added complication that space does not simply map existing social relations, but helps to construct them – indeed, has a primary role here. Together gender and spatial organization may change meanings over time, according to changing cultural circumstances and metaphors, and therefore they can only be understood in relation to them. But while the meanings of spatial organization may shift radically through time, they are not without far-reaching cultural consequences. These consequences are particularly profound because architecture and the built environment are the products of strategies (conscious or unconscious) directed towards the satisfaction of material and symbolic interests and undertaken in relation to given economic and social conditions (hence the emphasis on politics – which is intended in the broadest sense – in the title of this book).¹² And while architecture shares much with the other arts (especially with painting and sculpture), it functions both more inescapably and more insidiously than they, because it organizes almost all aspects of life spatially through the body, while that organization, in spite of its radicality, is rarely subject to the degree of conscious awareness to which even the least unsettling painting is exposed. Thus an all-pervasive art form, adept at organizing, separating and ranking bodies, is often taken for granted and, in turn, its most profound effects become invisible.

Henrietta Moore has argued that ‘spatial representations help to produce and reproduce the distinctions on which the cultural constructions of gender are based’.¹³ In other words, spatial representations help to support gender ideologies. Moore argues that gender ideologies do not reflect a ‘true nature of gender relations’, but she sees ‘the values which both produce and are produced by the spatial text’ as being the dominant values of society, so that the spatial text is involved in reproducing the dominant male ideology.¹⁴ The organization of space helps construct a representation of gender relations which presents male authority as natural and pre-given.¹⁵ Although the notion that architecture is shaped by the ‘dominant values’ of society with regard to gender is useful in connecting both architecture and gender directly to power relations, this model is perhaps too rigid in supposing that that relationship is clear-cut. Although Moore concedes that ‘the true nature of gender relations’ is not represented spatially, she sees ‘the dominant male ideology’ as smoothly reproduced in space. The work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, among others, helps to conceive rather more fragmented, contradictory and complex notions of these relationships. Foucault has shown that power does not flow unidirectionally, as Moore’s model implies, and Bourdieu argues that cultural capital may be at cross-purposes with economic capital, so that the relationship between economic power and spatial representation is not necessarily straightforward; a careful understanding of what constitutes cultural capital in any time or place is essential to grasping social power.¹⁶ Likewise, scholarship on social class and ethnicity renders the characterization of authority as ‘male’ unacceptably simplistic. The formulation of the essays presented in this book assumes that women of early modern Europe were subject to and indeed complicit in many of the pressures of patriarchal society; but they also postulate that women were not passive foils on which men could simply project their needs and ideals of womanhood, but were instead active shapers of their lives, capable of conforming to or resisting stereotypes. In this regard, social class played a central role in determining women’s actions.

Early feminist approaches to space frequently emphasized ‘separate spheres’ in which men and women occupied separate areas of work and influence.¹⁷ These domains have been characterized as a dichotomy between men and women, in which men inhabit a public sphere and women are confined to the private sphere of the household:

From the depths of the earth to the vast expanse of heaven, time and again he robs femininity of the tissue and texture of her spatiality. In exchange, though it is never one, he buys her a house, shuts her up in it, and places limits on her.¹⁸

Scholars initially concentrated on modern architecture to frame this discussion, resulting in a preoccupation with the private/public division, crucial to thinking about the gendering of space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹⁹ Early studies of women and social space attacked the domestic sphere as a material expression of women’s subordination, and one which confirmed her lack of status. More recently, feminist studies have sought to re-evaluate the private domestic sphere, traditionally devalued by western European attitudes which have prioritized the public.²⁰ Absent from the debate has been a consideration of these questions in relation to early modern architecture, when the ‘domestic’ was neither exclusively private nor familial, but was necessarily the sphere of work and business and was the locus of political patronage.²¹

Moreover, the emphasis on public/private distinctions as key to understanding the spatial organization of gendered relations has diverted scholarly attention away from ecclesiastical architecture. The central role of the Church and religious devotion in early modern Europe in terms of creating symbolic and social hierarchy means that an analysis of ecclesiastical architecture is vital to any understanding of the relationships between gendered identity, architecture and power and, indeed, that a division between secular and non-secular rapidly founders in any consideration of early modern architecture. The intimacy of relationships between religious beliefs, social relations and architecture has long been recognized, but Seicento architectural history frequently persists in presenting these ideologically interwoven aspects as separate strands. The gendering of religious devotion is an area of rapidly growing scholarly interest and sophistication.²² However, this scholarship tends to shrink from relating devotion to the architecture and decoration of the churches, monasteries and convents where most religious experiences occurred.²³ Several essays in this volume examine spaces of religious devotion; and others look at the overlap, or even indistinguishability, between the domestic and the political, the secular and the religious, and the ways in which architecture framed and dissolved such boundaries in the early modern period. As such, they form part of a current in contemporary scholarship which seeks to avoid resorting to a much-overworked ‘explanation’ of intervention, especially female intervention, in these spaces as simply ‘pious’.²⁴ While piety and religious conviction are a central aspect of ecclesiastical patronage and cannot be reduced to political or other motivation, the assumption that piety is separate and primary, causal in relation to ecclesiastical patronage, must be critically examined. Piety, in itself, neither explains nor determines. Indeed, as Craig Monson has observed, artistic activities, such as the patronage of churches and chapels and their decoration, could form important impetuses to nuns’ spiritua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on the Editor and Contributors
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II PRODUCTION: ARCHITECTS AND PATRONS
• PART III PRACTICE AND RESISTANCE
• Select Bibliography
• Index