A Queer Look at Manuscript Illumination: Metamorphosis, Imagination, and the Ovide Moralisé (Richards, Correa-Reyes, & O'Mara)
- mmapodcast1
- Nov 25, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 7
JULY 2025 UPDATE: Christopher T. Richards follows up on the conversation from our episode in his new article, “Painting Against Nature: A Medieval Queer Theory of Art and the Artist” (Art History 48.2).
The article’s abstract is as follows:
This essay argues that a group of fourteenth-century illuminators from Paris understood painting as an ‘unnatural’ or queer art form, adopting Narcissus as a reflexive emblem and a site of artistic self-fashioning. After excavating a medieval intellectual tradition that associated deceptive images with queerness, I demonstrate how medieval artists leveraged queerness as a strategy to articulate artistic freedom. Art-historical narratives have framed their miniatures as failures to reproduce texts accurately, and failures to reproduce the natural world stylistically. Queer methodologies offer a new framework in which to appreciate ‘unnaturalistic’ medieval artworks in the terms of the medieval queer theory that they espouse.
Congratulations on the article, Christopher!
In this episode, art historian Christopher T. Richards chats with Jon and Reed about what we can learn from medieval theories of art-making and sexuality from illuminations found in manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé, an anonymous French poem composed in the fourteenth century.
Christopher T. Richards is an art historian who specializes in medieval art and queer visual cultures. His research considers the intersection of picture theory and the history of sexuality. They are a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Colby College.
Jonathan Correa-Reyes is an Assistant Professor of English. He joined Clemson University in 2023. His research focuses on constructions of collective identity in the medieval literary archive. He is especially interested in premodern articulations of race and understandings of the Human. Although mainly working on the medieval literary traditions of the British Isles, Jonathan also studies the textual cultures of medieval Iberia and Scandinavia. His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation.
Reed O'Mara is a fifth-year PhD candidate and Mellon Foundation Fellow in the joint art history program between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She focuses on the arts of medieval Germany, and her primary research interests lie in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and Gothic architectural sculpture. Reed's dissertation considers the complex histories of Hebrew and Yiddish in late medieval Europe through an examination of text and image relationships in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and Christian prints from Ashkenaz and Italy, ca. 1200-1500.
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