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Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page i
Architecture and the Politics of

Gender in Early Modern Europe
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page ii
Women and Gender in the

Early Modern World
Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger
In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the
most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern
period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies,
‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge,
reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early
modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and
Africa.
Titles in the series include:
Maternal Measures
Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period
Edited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh
The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan

Kate Langdon Forhan
Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Edited by Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam
‘Shall She Famish Then?’

Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England
Nancy A. Gutierrez
Marie Madeleine Jodin 1741–1790

Actress, Philosophe and Feminist
Felicia Gordon and P. N. Furbank
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page iii
Architecture and the Politics of

Gender in Early Modern
Europe
Edited by
Helen Hills
University of Manchester
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page iv
First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2003 Helen Hills
Helen Hills has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe
(Women and Gender in the Early Modern World).
1. Architecture and women–Europe–History–1500. 2. Architecture–Europe–16th
century. 3. Architecture–Europe–17th century. 4. Architecture–Europe–18th century.
I. Hills, Helen
720.8’2’094’0903
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe
p. cm. (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World).
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Architecture and women–Europe–History. 2. Architecture and society–Europe–
History.
I. Hills, Helen
NA2543.W65A73 2003
720’.82’094-dc21 2002038461
ISBN 9780754603092 (hbk)

ISBN 9781138275836 (pbk)
Typeset in Times New Roman by Bournemouth Colour Press, Parkstone, Poole.

Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page v
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations ix
Notes on the Editor and Contributors xv
PART I INTRODUCTION 1
Theorizing the Relationships between Architecture and Gender in

Early Modern Europe 3
Helen Hills
PART II PRODUCTION: ARCHITECTS AND PATRONS 23
1 A Noble Residence for a Female Regent: Margaret of Austria

and the ‘Court of Savoy’ in Mechelen 25
Dagmar Eichberger
2 The Val-de-Grâce as a Portrait of Anne of Austria: Queen,
Queen Regent, Queen Mother 47
Jennifer G. Germann
3 The Architecture of Institutionalism: Women’s Space in
Renaissance Hospitals 63
Eunice D. Howe
4 Women and the Practice of Architecture in Eighteenth-century
France 83
Tanis Hinchcliffe
PART III PRACTICE AND RESISTANCE 97
5 ‘Repaired by me to my exceeding great Cost and Charges’:

Anne Clifford and the Uses of Architecture 99
Elizabeth V. Chew
6 ‘Women in wolves’ mouths’: Nun’s Reputations, Enclosure and
Architecture at the Convent of the Le Murate in Florence 115
Saundra Weddle
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page vi
vi CONTENTS
7 Spatial Discipline and its Limits: Nuns and the Built

Environment in Early Modern Spain 131
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
8 Spaces Shaped for Spiritual Perfection: Convent Architecture and
Nuns in Early Modern Rome 151
Marilyn Dunn
9 Women in the Charterhouse: the Liminality of Cloistered
Spaces at the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon 177
Sherry C. M. Lindquist
Select Bibliography 193

Index 209
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page vii
Acknowledgements
This book was completed during research leave funded by the AHRB. I am
pleased to thank that institution and the University of Manchester, which
afforded me leave from teaching and administrative duties.
Some of the chapters in this volume started life as papers in sessions on
‘Gender & Architecture’ which I chaired at the College Art Association in
Toronto in 1998 and at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies
Conference in Pittsburgh in 1996. The enthusiasm with which both sessions
were greeted, together with provocative questions from the audience,
prompted me to consider putting together a volume like this one. I thank
everyone who participated then and who encouraged me subsequently.
I would like to thank the contributors for all their hard work. Most of them
adhered rigorously to the deadlines and responded to requests with
enthusiasm. My special thanks to Michael Savage for his insights and support
throughout the project, but particularly for his patient technical assistance
during the final stages.
Publishing with Ashgate has been a pleasure. Many thanks to Kirsten
Weissenberg for her excellent work as desk editor and to Tom Norton for his
help with the index. Above all, I am extremely grateful to Erika Gaffney. She
is that rare thing – a kind and intellectual editor.
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page viii
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page ix
List of Illustrations
FIGURES
1.1 Conrat Meit, Margaret of Austria as a widow, pear wood

sculpture, 7.4 cm, c. 1518, Munich, Bayrisches
Nationalmuseum (R 420).
(Photo: © Munich, Bayrisches Nationalmuseum)
1.2 The ‘Court of Savoy’, Mechelen, inner courtyard with the
great hall and the staircase leading to the new audience
chamber.
(Photo: © Dagmar Eichberger)
1.3 Plan for the reconstruction of the former palace as a French
law court, Mechelen, Stadsarchief, no. B 10388, before 1814.
(Photo: © Thomas Bachmann & Mechelen, Stadsarchief)
1.4 Reconstruction of Margaret’s former apartments on the first
floor of the western wing of the ‘Court of Savoy’, Mechelen.
(Reconstruction: © Dagmar Eichberger)
1.5 The ‘Court of Savoy’, Mechelen, view of the southern
section of the western wing with the living quarters of
Margaret of Austria on the first floor.
(Photo: © Thomas Bachmann)
1.6 Auguste van den Eynde, the ‘Court of Savoy’, Mechelen,
view of the southern wing from Voochtstraat with the
chapelle, the large staircase with two tracery windows and the
entrance gate, watercolour, Mechelen, Stadsarchief, Sch 345.
(Photo: © Thomas Bachmann & Mechelen, Stadsarchief)
1.7 Dirk Verijk, eastern view of the old Saint Peter’s church with
the wooden walkway across Korte Magdenstraat, drawing,
late eighteenth century, Arnheim, Gemeentearchief.
(Photo: © Arnheim, Gemeentearchief)
1.8 Boccaccio, Theseida, Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2627, Provence, c. 1460,
fol. 53r: Emilia in the garden of Theseus’ castle.
(Photo: © Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)
1.9 Hennessy Hours, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale d’Albert,
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page x
x ILLUSTRATIONS
ms. II 158, southern Netherlandish, early sixteenth century,

fol. 3v: View of a Flemish residence with garden.
(Photo: © Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique)
1.10 Brou, Augustinian monastery, Margaret of Austria’s living
quarters on the first floor of the northern cloister.
(Photo: © Bourg-en-Bresse, Musée de l’Ain)
1.11 Jan Mostaert, Philibert of Savoy, oil on wood, Madrid, Prado.
(Photo: © Madrid, Prado)
2.1 Façade, Val-de-Grâce, Paris, France.
(Photo: © Caroline Rose)
2.2 Inscription on the frieze of the dome.
Val-de-Grâce, Paris, France.
2.3 The nave vault. Val-de-Grâce, Paris, France.
2.4 The Virtues, from left to right, Temperance, Fortitude,
Religion, Divine Love, Faith and Charity, on the north side
of the nave. Val-de-Grâce, Paris, France.
2.5 The Virtues, from left to right, Prudence, Justice, Kindness,
Hope, Humility and Virginity, on the south side of the nave.
2.6 The Nativity, by Michel Anguier (1614–86).
2.7 Anne of Austria presenting the Val-de-Grâce to the Holy
Trinity, in the fresco by Pierre Mignard (1612–95).
3.1 Filarete, Ground plan of the Ospedale Maggiore, Milan from
Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, c. 1461–65, Book XI,
fol. 82v.
(Photo after facsimile: Author)
3.2 Filarete, Façade of the Ospedale Maggiore, Milan from
Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, c. 1461–65, Book XI,
fol. 83v.
3.3 Filarete, Cruciform plan of the Men’s Wards and Proportions
of the Ospedale Maggiore, Milan from Filarete’s
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xi
ILLUSTRATIONS xi
Treatise on Architecture, c. 1461–65, Book XI, fol. 79r.

3.4 Filarete, Cruciform plan of the Women’s Wards of the
Ospedale Maggiore, Milan from Filarete’s Treatise on
Architecture, c. 1461–65, Book XI, fol. 82r.
3.5 Filarete, Court-yard ‘of the Pharmacy’ at the Ospedale
Maggiore, Milan.
(Photo: © Author)
3.6 Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, attrib., Drawing of Plan
of Ospedale Maggiore (and the Portal of the Palazzo Fieschi),
Drawing: Uffizi 895A.
(Photo: Gabinetto dei Disegni)
3.7 Ospedale Maggiore, Wood-cut illustration from Book VI,
fol. 99v: Vitruvius, Architectura, trans. and
ed. Cesare Cesariano, Como, 1521.
4.1 Map of Paris, c. 1789, redrawn from Pierre Lavedan,
Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: Histoire de l’Urbanisme à Paris,
Paris: Hachette, 1993, pp. 8–9.
4.2 Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart and Francois Joseph
Belanger, House for Mademoiselle Dervieux. Detail from
J. Ch. Krafft and N. Ransonette, Les plus belles maisons
de Paris, Paris, 1801–03, Vol. I, pl. 7.
4.3 C.-N. Ledoux, House of Mademoiselle Guimard, front
elevation. Engraving from Daniel Ramée, Architecture de
C.N. Ledoux, Paris, 1847, Vol. 2, pl. 176.
4.4 C.-N. Ledoux, House of Mademoiselle Guimard.
Ground floor plan. Detail of engraving from Daniel
Ramée, Architecture de C.N. Ledoux, Paris, 1847, Vol. 2, pl. 175.
5.1 Artist unknown, Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke,
c. early 1670s.
By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
5.2 View of Brougham Castle from the east.
(Photo: Elizabeth Chew)
5.3 Plan of Brougham Castle, RCHME
5.4 Plans of keep and inner and outer gatehouses at
Brougham Castle. Courtesy of the Cumberland and Westmorland
Antiquarian and Archeological Society.
5.5 View of Brough Castle from the south.
(Photo: Elizabeth Chew)
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xii
xii ILLUSTRATIONS
5.6 Plan of Brough Castle, RCHME

5.7 Plan of Pendragon Castle, RCHME
6.1 Pietro del Massaio’s illustration of Florence from Ptolemy’s
Geografia, c. 1472. Ink sketch on vellum. Vatican library, Cod. Vat.
Urb. 277. Rubaconte Ponte is circled.
(Photo: courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
6.2 Stefano Buonsignori, Nova pulcherrimae civitati Florentiae
topographia accuratissime delineata. Circles indicate the
Ponte Rubaconte bridge and the complex of Le Murate on via
Ghibellina.
6.3 Stefano Buonsignori, Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae
topographia accuratissime delineata: detail showing the
complex of Le Murate.
6.4 Florence, convent of Le Murate: ground plan. Legend: A:
parlour; B: church; C: sacristy; D: refectory; E: sala grande.
Via Ghibellina lies at the bottom of the drawing.
(Drawing by Robert Weddle after the 1832 site plan
of Le Murate, Museo di Forenze com’era, Florence)
6.5 Florence, convent of Le Murate: first-floor plan.
Legend: A: choir; B: dormitory.
(Drawing by Robert Weddle)
8.1 Rome, S. Bernardino ai Monti: interior view towards the
high altar.
(Hutzel 1970, Library, Getty Research Institute, 86.P.8)
8.2 Rome, S. Lucia in Selci: view towards the choir gallery.
(McGuire)
8.3 Francesco da Volterra: Elevation drawing of S. Silvestro in
Capite, Rome, 1591.
(Archivio di Stato, Rome: Disegni e Mappe, Coll. I, Cartella 86, no.
531-D)
8.4 Rome, S. Silvestro in Capite: ground plan of the church and
convent.
(ASR: Disegni e Mappe, Coll. I, Cartella 86, no. 531-E)
8.5 Rome, S. Ambrogio della Massima: ground plan of the
church and convent.
(Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione: F 3409)
8.6 Rome, S. Ambrogio della Massima: high altar.
(McGuire)
8.7 Rome, S. Ambrogio della Massima: high altar detail showing
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xiii
ILLUSTRATIONS xiii
the De Torres family stemma.

(McGuire)
9.1 Aimé Piron, 1686. Drawing of the Chartreuse de Champmol.
Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale, portefueille de la
Chartreuse.
(Photo: Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale)
9.2 Anonymous plan of the Chartreuse de Champmol, detail,
eighteenth century. Dijon, Archives Municipales, D47 bis.
(Photo: Dijon, Archives Municipales, cliché D. Geoffroy)
9.3 Claus Sluter, Well of Moses, Moses and David, c. 1394–1404.
Stone, gilding, polychromy, figures approx 1.75 m in height.
Dijon, Chartreuse de Champmol.
(Photo: John Nagel)
9.4 Claus Sluter, Portal of the Church of the Chartreuse de
Champmol, c. 1385–93. Stone, H: 1.29–1.7 m.
(Photo: M. P. Lindquist)
9.5 Claus Sluter and Claus de Werve, Tomb of Philip the Bold,
c. 1384–1411, alabaster and marble, L: 3.6 m, W: 2.54 m,
H: 2.43 m. Dijon, Museé des Beaux-Arts.
(Photo: John Nagel)
9.6 Jacques de Baerze, Saints and Martyrs Altarpiece, wood,
with gilding and polychromy, c. 1390–1403, H: 1.50 m,
L: 3.77 m. Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
(Photo: John Nagel)
9.7 Jacques de Baerze, Saints and Martyrs Altarpiece.
Detail, Temptation of St Anthony, wood, with gilding and
polychromy, c. 1390–1403. H: 1.50 m, L: 3.77 m.
Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
(Photo: M. P. Lindquist)
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xiv
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xv
Notes on the Editor and Contributors
Helen Hills is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Manchester.

Her research interests focus on the relationships between religious beliefs and
practices and architecture, urbanism and gender. Her publications include
Invisible City: the architecture of aristocratic convents in baroque Naples
(Oxford University Press, 2003).
Elizabeth V. Chew received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in Art History
from Yale, the Courtauld Institute, and the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, respectively. Her research interests include the relationships
between architecture, material culture, and gender and family politics in early
modern Britain and America. The essay included in this collection is adapted
from her doctoral dissertation on female architectural patronage and art
collecting in seventeenth-century Britain. She is currently Associate Curator
of Collections at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Marilyn Dunn received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is
Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, Loyola University,
Chicago. Her numerous articles on art and patronage in seventeenth-century
Rome have appeared in Antologia delle Belle Arti, The Art Bulletin, Aurora,
Burlington Magazine, and Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana. She
has also published essays on women as patrons and producers of art in Women
and Art in Early Modern Europe (Penn State Press, 1997) and the Dictionary of
Women Artists (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997). Her current projects
include examinations of identity construction in Roman convent churches and
of the interaction of nuns and their families in patronage. She is working on a
book on female convents and art patronage in seventeenth-century Rome.
Dagmar Eichberger has taught Art History and Museum Studies in

Canberra, Melbourne and Saarbrücken, and is now attached to the University
of Heidelberg. Her publications in Northern Renaissance Art encompass
studies on Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, early modern court culture, the
iconography of death, and so on. Her most recent book investigates the art
patronage and collection of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands
Leben mit Kunst – Wirken durch Kunst, (Brepols, 2003).
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xvi
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Jennifer G. Germann is currently Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in

French Art, The Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens.
She has recently finished her dissertation (at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill) on the representation of Marie Leszczinska, queen of France.
She is currently assisting with the research and production of a catalogue of
the French collection at the Huntington, and continuing her research into
Marie Leszczinska’s portraits.
Tanis Hinchcliffe is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the

University of Westminster, London, where she teaches the history of
architecture. Her publications include North Oxford (Yale University Press,
1992) and articles on eighteenth-century French architectural theory,
nineteenth-century English suburbs, and twentieth-century housing history.
Her specialist area of research is women and the practice of architecture. At
present she is engaged in a comparative study of French and Canadian
conventual architecture.
Eunice D. Howe is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of

Southern California. She publishes on Roman art and architecture, and her
research interests (in addition to hospital design) extend to women’s history,
urbanism, and travel literature. Selected publications include: ‘Appropriating
Space: Woman’s Place in Confraternal Life at Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome’,
in Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle,
Images (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Andrea Palladio, the Churches
of Rome (Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991).
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt is Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State

University. Her work on convents and gender history in Spain includes
articles in Renaissance Quarterly, Journal of Social History and Sixteenth
Century Journal. She is currently working on a study of gender and political
legitimacy during the reign of Isabel and Ferdinand.
Sherry Lindquist received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her

work on artistic identity and court art appear in Gesta, Manuscripta and
Source. She has essays forthcoming in Manuscripts, Images and Publics:
Creating and Consuming Medieval Pictures (Ashgate), The Court Artist in
Renaissance Europe (Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum) and Les princes des
fleurs de lis: L’art à la cour de Bourgogne, Le mécénat de Philippe le Hardi
et de Jean sans Peur et l’art en Bourgogne (1360–1420) (Beaux-Arts de
Dijon et le Cleveland Museum of Art). Her current work includes a book-
length study on agency, visuality, and society at the Chartreuse de Champmol
in Dijon, and an investigation into the relationship among optics, artistic style
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xvii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
and socual maening grounded in writings of Jean Gerson. These studies are
supported by a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Arts and
Humanities and a Fulbright research fellowship repectively.
Saundra Weddle received her Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and

Urbanism at Cornell University. She is Assistant Professor of Architecture and
Art History at Drury University.
Architecture Prelims 26/9/03 12:05 pm Page xviii
Introduction 26/9/03 12:34 pm Page 1
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
4 INTRODUCTION
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
ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 5
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,
6 INTRODUCTION
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
8 INTRODUCTION
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’ spiritual
lives.25 An analysis of piety reveals it to be more complex and less socially
neutral than a simple model of piety-as-cause implies. Piety is anticipated,
delayed and traversed by social currents (including gender), and therefore
needs to be analysed in relation to them. A failure to undertake this task
condemns us to a continuing neglect of the forms that pious patronage
produced, in favour of a superficial concern with iconographies. It is the
interconnections between piety, desire for social distinction, political
ambition and familial status that are most sharply borne out in architectural
patronage and organization.
It is important to consider how architecture operates in ways that are
distinct from those of other forms of representation. In this respect, this
collection is an interrogation of Lefebvre’s claims:
I am not saying that the monument is not the outcome of a signifying
practice, or of a particular way of proposing a meaning, but merely that
it can be reduced neither to a language or discourse nor to the categories
and concepts developed for the study of language. A spatial work
(monument or architectural project) attains a complexity fundamentally
different from the complexity of a text, whether prose or poetry.26
It is above all in the built environment, much more than in figurative

representations (and far more than in the circumscribed area of painting,
paradoxically the subject of disproportionately greater scrutiny by brilliant
feminist scholars), that gendered relationships are produced, reproduced and
written into the body. Inhabited space, architecture, is the principal locus for
the objectification (which remains subjectively experienced through the body)
of hierarchical and generative arrangements. Architecture is a tangible
classifying system continuously inculcating and reinforcing the taxonomic
principles underlying all the arbitrary provisions of a culture.27 This is
particularly evident in early modern architectural practice, with its emphasis
on social hierarchy as spatially performed through etiquette, processional
ritual, and the conjuring of vistas and enfilades to evoke the distance
conferred by power.
Moreover, the lessons of architecture are embedded into the body itself. It
is the dialectical relationship between the body and structured space that leads
to the embodying of the structures of the world. Architecture, in Bourdieu’s
words, is a ‘book read with the body’, in and through the movements and
displacements which make the space within which they are enacted as much
as they are made by it.28 The relationships between bodies and the spaces that
inform them are consequently particularly intimate, particularly difficult to
disentangle (and, for that reason, often taken for granted, naturalized and
made rhetorically invisible). The ways in which architecture embodies power
relations and performs them on and through bodies is one of the major
contributions of Foucault’s work.29 It has particularly profoundly affected our
understanding of institutional control of sexuality; and his influence pervades
the essays presented here.
But why should women as active social agents accept gender relations
which oppress them? Are they forced to comply? Or are they voluntarily
complicit in their own subordination? If we wish to escape the crudest
naïveties of legalism (which construes practice as resulting from obeying
rules), Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is helpful. He suggests that agency, the
activities of individual social actors, supports hierarchical systems of
organization based on age and gender.30 Individuals are not necessarily aware
of the consequences of their actions in any broad sense, or in relation to
others. Actions which reproduce structural relations against a protagonist’s
own best interests are produced by ‘learned ignorance’ or habitus, which
lends agents a sense of order. The habitus is the internalization of objective
structures, the immanent law, lex insita, established in each person during
his/her earliest upbringing, which is brought to bear on his/her behaviours,
both physical and mental, and body. Thus the individual’s ‘disposition’,
assumptions, appearance, gestures, represent a nexus of social, economic and
religious arrangements and relations, which, in turn, also means that those
assumptions and social conditions are marked on that person and perpetuated
by her or him.31 In Bourdieu’s words, ‘agents have an interest in obeying the
rule, or more precisely, in being in a regular situation’.32 Bourdieu also points
out that conformity to the rule can bring secondary benefits, such as the
prestige and respect which reward actions apparently motivated by nothing
other than pure, disinterested respect for convention. In other words, it is their
present and past positions in the social structure that individuals carry with
them, in the form of dispositions that are so many marks of social position and
hence of the social distance between objective positions.33
Such a model allows us to understand why women acting on their habitus
may well reproduce structural relations which determine their subordination
10 INTRODUCTION
to men, even while they may sometimes exploit their freedoms to initiate
social change. Foucault describes how power grips at the point where desires
and the very sense of the possibilities for self-definition are constituted.34 Thus
analysing the politics of gendered architecture is a more ambitious project
than cataloguing the activities of women in relation to architecture (a
confusion persisting at the heart of much scholarship on early modern art and
architecture), since it seeks to illuminate significant enactments of the
relationships between disposition and spatial organization, and to analyse the
social formation of that disposition which required or desired specific spatial
arrangements.
Gendered patronage
Several of the essays here shed light on the politics of architectural patronage,
particularly female architectural patronage. Up until a few years ago, female
patrons on the whole received less nuanced treatments than their male
counterparts. But this picture is changing rapidly as more critical research
dedicated specifically to patronage by women is undertaken.35 This has
(belatedly) forced attention not only to the social conditions in which such
patronage is possible and even sustained, but to the purposes and functions of
such patronage.
Within patronage studies which pay attention to gender, there lurk two
opposed dangers. The first is that of ascribing female architectural patronage
to a singular ‘exceptional’ woman, whose undertakings are portrayed as
innocent of the muddy compromises of familial and urban politics. This has
produced a flowering of scholarship focused on individual artists, architects,
and even artist–nuns.36 Fascinating though such studies are, they risk
interpreting art and architecture as the inspired product of one or two
exceptional individuals, whether artists or patrons, whose capacity for
innovation is explained in terms of their exceptionality, their disconnection to
their context, effectively dehistoricizing them (thus falling into the trap of
early ‘celebratory’ feminist studies), rather than as participants in broader
social forces, subject to (not separate from) specific historical circumstances.
The second danger arises from an approach, willed or unwilled, to the
social history of art which contextualizes artistic production in such a way as
to make the art produced seem inevitable. That is to say, the more seamlessly
art is seen in relation to the contexts in which it was produced, the less readily
retained is any sense of contingency, chance, or impetus for change in the
production of those objects and their peculiar appearance, their curious
fashioning and stylistic handling. Too often still, perhaps, that sense of
contingency and of a desire to push things in a certain direction is retained
only by recourse, to a greater or lesser degree, to the notion of ‘genius’, by

explaining the intervention in terms of the extraordinary individual, the gifted
artist, or even the far-sighted patron. Although the seamless contextualizing
approach appears to differ fundamentally from one which explains female
patrons and artists in terms of their exceptionality as individuals, they are, in
fact, intimately related. Emphasis on the exceptionality of individual artists or
patrons, more divorced from than embedded in their times, tends to blind us
to the social implications of exceptionally courageous and ambitious art
works, as does the seamless contextualizing approach. Thus we have the
familiar art-historical dichotomy between contextualization and an essentially
Kantian notion of art work that – propelled by artist or by patron – orbits
outside its time. It is the seamlessness of the contextual model that is
problematic. The essays here seek to expose architectural patronage and form
as not inevitably arising from given specific historical, material and religious
conditions, but as necessary for, or useful to, certain groups or interests in the
specific and changing – often uncomfortable and awkward – historical
circumstances in which they found themselves. In this regard, it is important
to grasp that a building produces new spaces inside and out, and can suggest,
indicate and even make necessary an alteration of social relations, rather than
simply perpetuating an existing arrangement. In short, architecture is part of
a social dynamic co-involving all participants in its production and use. Thus
there is, in Tafuri’s words, no historical ‘background’ against which
architecture is made: architecture is part of the social and political history that
is irrevocably changed by its being made.37
Thus a more attentive architectural history is needed which analyses the
forces that made certain spatial arrangements desirable, the specific historical
circumstances which brought them into being, including the role of architects
and patrons, and the social effects of those spaces once produced. The essays
presented here seek to treat architecture as the never inevitable product of
specific historical conjunctions of skills, ambitions, aspirations and anxieties,
involving groups of people, always politically and socially motivated, intent
on ensuring that they were not obscured by rival aristocrats, competing
religious orders, or jealous subjects.
These essays also seek to circumvent the persistent resort in discussions of
female patronage in particular to a model either of ‘reflection’ or of
architecture as ‘proclaiming’ or ‘expressing’ the patron’s ‘own taste’, as if that
‘taste’ already existed fully formed, but invisible and entirely personal before
being metamorphosed into architectural form.38 Art history which ‘explains’
interventions in terms of the ‘taste’ of the patron (or artist) actually shrinks
from addressing the issues it purports to analyse.39 Reifying taste stagnates the
explanation of a process that is dynamic and involves change. To regard
architecture of this period as the ‘reflection’ of something else (whether social
12 INTRODUCTION
class, wealth, status, or taste) is to ignore the fact that architectural production
would be unnecessary if what it represents existed already elsewhere in
clearly defined form; and it ducks the difficult issues involved in trying to
account for the invention and adoption of specific architectural forms, why
wealth is ‘reflected’, for instance, in a grand portico in one case and in a
splendid dome elsewhere. Thinking of patrons as gendered and in relation to
their social and economic circumstances, their social class and habitus, allows
these subjects’ identities to remain contingent, shifting and unstable and helps
to avoid a superficial circularity of argument (a woman of a certain taste
brings into being art that precisely embodies that taste).
By drawing on the theoretical resources of Pierre Bourdieu and Henri
Lefebvre in particular it is possible to trace a path which avoids the present
dichotomy between the ‘heroic’ and the ‘passive’ view of women and
architecture, as the essays gathered here attempt to do. Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus and Lefebvre’s of spatiality help to inflect Foucault’s still useful
conceptualization of relationships between space and power. These essays
fully acknowledge the degree to which art patronage is not simply the product
of social and political privilege, but actively helps to maintain that privilege.
In other words, the social conditions in which certain forms of architecture are
brought into being are central and not incidental to an understanding of those
forms. This allows us to depart from the restrictive celebratory mode which
has dominated studies of female patronage, and to appreciate the degree to
which art patronage was a mode by which women could use architecture to
change social relations in a way that was not possible through other forms of
representation. It should also require us to pay scrupulous attention to
architectural form itself.
All the essays presented here emphasize the significance of practice and
social structure, rather than discourse alone, in interpreting architecture.40 As
Bourdieu has argued, ‘The explanation agents may provide of their own
practice, thanks to a quasi theoretical reflection on their practice, conceals,
even from their own eyes, the true nature of their practical mastery.’41
Protagonists’ claims or descriptions of architecture and architectural practice
can never be accepted at face value, but must always be read in relation to the
social structures in which such utterances and practices have meaning.
Nevertheless, some of the essays presented here show that discourse, though
never simply at face value, is significant, a vital part of the triangular
relationship between architecture, social structure and discourse, each node of
which and their interrelationships are interrogated here in relation to gender.42
The organization of this book
The first section of this book (Part II) includes essays which address the
gendering of the production of institutional architecture, ecclesiastical and
secular. It focuses on the roles of architects and patrons, while seeking to
explain them in relation to broader historical issues. Essays in the second
section (Part III) address the relationships between built form and social
practice, how architecture was used and resisted, both by institutions and
individuals responsible for its production and by their successors. Although
there are overlaps between these sections, this organization of material
usefully emphasizes the most important themes the collection addresses.
Two chapters (Germann and Eichberger) emphasize the significance of
individual female patrons, not in order to identify and pursue exceptional
female figures, but to trace their architectural relationship to the prominent
institutions with which they are most sharply identified architecturally, and to
investigate both the degree to which their architectural projects can be said to
be gendered, and the ways in which architecture afforded them the possibility
to articulate or disguise some of the contradictions of their public roles.
Dagmar Eichberger’s essay investigates the architectural consequences of
a woman’s holding a powerful political office thitherto held by men. She
examines the ways in which the social rank and gender of Margaret of Austria,
governor-general and regent of the Burgundian–Habsburgian Netherlands,
impacted on the design and decoration of her principal residence, the ‘Court
of Savoy’ in Mechelen. She shows that while the floor plan and elevations
were left as designed for previous (male) holders of the office and were
untouched by Margaret, the treatment of some of the rooms and of the gardens
surrounding the palace can be read as gendered feminine. Those aspects of
architecture (floor plan, exterior elevations) which were most publicly visible
and which functioned at the broadest and highest political levels to articulate
and advertise the status of the governor-general remained ‘ungendered’ (or
masculinized), and were beyond Margaret’s touch, because too intimately
connected to the power of the office of governor-general: changes made there
would have risked immediate loss of face, of political status and power.
However, the more marginal and private – less politically exposed – areas,
such as the garden and library, were personalizable and feminizable. While
Margaret’s concentration on the interior of her house was in keeping with
conventional views on women’s domestic duties, her orchestration of
distinctive displays in her library, dining-room and her cabinets indicate a
more ambitious wish to define herself publicly in intellectual and cultural
activities on an international stage. Thus her architectural interventions can be
read as both attempting to assert and accommodate her intellectual curiosity
while maintaining the conventionalized political power of her office.
14 INTRODUCTION
Access to a public space crucially allowed women to put on a public face.

Jennifer Germann’s essay subjects the public face of the church of the Val-de-
Grâce to scrutiny, reading it as a portrait of Anne of Austria, its patron. The
very subject of this essay usefully exposes the problems of seeking to
distinguish sharply between secular and ecclesiastical architecture and issues
at this date, as a secular patron exploits ecclesiastical architecture for both
religious and political ends. Harnessing Gadamer’s notion that decoration is
ontological, Germann focuses on the relationship between decoration and
patronage. Anne of Austria, she shows, built a church which articulates key
components of her public identity to meet her political needs, using the church
as a tool to negotiate the demanding and sometimes contradictory roles of
queen, queen mother and queen regent.
Eunice Howe’s essay focuses on the gendering of institutional space in
hospitals in Renaissance Italy. She shows how the assumptions made by the
architects Leon Battista Alberti and Filarete about ideals of hospital
organization and architecture stem as much from their ideological views about
the family as the immutable representation of the correct ordering of social
class and gender, as from their understanding of physiological illness.
Believing in the close relationship between social conduct and architectural
organization, Alberti advocates the separation of the curable from the
incurable and of women from men. He treats social class itself as a contagion,
insisting on segregating one class from another, as important as the separation
of chronic from non-chronic illness. In his hospital the spaces where men
were housed are visible, accessible and extroverted, while spaces for women
are internal, policed and introverted. Meanwhile Filarete’s sick women are
equally cocooned from contact with men, even a priest. For both Alberti and
Filarete the starting-point for their designs is the intensely hierarchical
household, in which the dominance of the male head of household is
expressed architecturally. Naturalizing their concept of the well-ordered
family allowed these men to design architecture which continues to reproduce
the gender inequivalences of the upper-class family home.
Tanis Hinchcliffe’s essay focuses on the professional formation of the
architect in eighteenth-century France. She discusses the ways in which the
career was restricted to men, and the ways in which it was masculinized. But
she takes pains to illuminate the important roles assumed by women at key
moments in specific architects’ distinguished careers and argues that familial
connections, often through women, played a vital part in the construction of a
network of professional patronage at this date. She goes on to argue that
interventions by women in the production of architecture which assumed
more direct form also bear the imprint of gendered identities. Her examination
of late eighteenth-century Parisian suburban villa architecture, patronized by
economically independent women, argues that the often innovative spatial
design of such buildings, privileging luxury, even sensuality, was masked

behind conventionalized façades and their discreet suburban location.
The principal theme explored in the essays in Part III is the relationship
between architecture and practice, including resistance (that is, the
relationship between architecture and practical relationships). De Certeau
argues that the ‘geometrical space of urbanists and architects seems to have
the status of the “proper meaning” constructed by grammarians and linguists
in order to have a normal and normative level to which they can compare the
drifting of “figurative” language’.43 ‘In reality’, argues De Certeau, ‘this
faceless “proper” meaning cannot be found in current use, whether verbal or
pedestrian; it is merely the fiction produced by a use that is also particular, the
metalinguistic use of science that distinguishes itself by that very
distinction.’44 All the essays in this section, in varying ways, address these
claims.
How women actually used and moved through architecture in the early
modern period is rarely glimpsed, but Elizabeth Chew presents remarkable
evidence of both practice and its rhetorical significances in her account of
Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676). She reveals a woman remarkably conscious
of the degree to which the ownership of property was embodied through
avidly architectural privileges and rituals. This essay is important in its
concern less with Clifford as an architectural patron than with her awareness
of the uses of practice in her residences. Clifford’s careful written record of
her routes through and use of (especially sleeping in) specific rooms in her
several houses served both to connect herself through them to her dead
ancestors, rendering her (precarious) birthright inalienably her own by
inscribing the passages and privileges of ownership on to her own body, and
to obliterate time (and gender difference) both by her bodily spatial
identification with her forebears (often through sleep) and by her insistent
communication of these processes in writing to her descendants.
Monastic architecture, which is investigated in relation to its uses and
abuses in four essays here, was central to the social construction of difference
between religious men and women, and even between men and women tout
court. The Augustinian view of Creation regarded maleness as of the soul,
spirit and intellect, while women were equated with sin, carnality and the
body. In the thirteenth century Aquinas developed the theological
understanding of women’s natural inferiority by isolating the reason for
women’s existence in terms of biological reproduction alone. Women were
excluded from the sacramental and teaching functions of the priesthood,
because they were identified with their body and corporeality, which were
regarded as inferior to the spirit and intellect. But virginal monasticism
offered women the possibility of individual spiritual equality. Christianity
proffered sexual equality in salvation as a result of accepting inferiority,
16 INTRODUCTION
including social inferiority, within Creation. Active participation in religious

life allowed women access to power which was in other spheres closed to
them. Indeed, it gave them access to a ‘public’ space, when such spaces were
generally inaccessible to women. The constraints on that access and the nature
of that ‘publicness’, arising in part from definitions derived from Christian
exegetes and historical circumstances, are examined in essays here by Dunn,
Lehfeldt, Lindquist and Weddle.
Conventual space poses particularly interesting questions. If it is careless
to assume that a space almost devoid of the physical presence of men can be
described as ‘female’, and if it is rash to suppose that conventual space is
necessarily organized for the benefits of its female occupants, how do gender
politics affect the organization and use of conventual space beyond the
separation of the sexes? Elizabeth Lehfeldt’s, Marilyn Dunn’s and Saundra
Weddle’s essays examine these issues in relation to female conventual
architecture. They trace the official declarations of ecclesiastical prescription,
made at the Council of Trent, in relation to both built architecture itself and
its uses by conventual inmates and outsiders in Italy and Spain. They find that
while practice departs from the official pronouncements, just as the tracery of
pathways existing on the ground departs from the neat line indicating a
bridlepath on a map, nevertheless, there is adherence to the prescripts of the
Church, at least in appearance. In other words, part of architecture’s
functioning as a disciplinary machine, as Foucault brilliantly identified, is that
it also acts as a bulwark offering the reassurance of conformity, while
simultaneously hiding non-conformity from critical eyes behind high walls.
The capacity of architecture to assist the resistance to power, even as it
appears to conform to it, is one of its most important characteristics, and one
which necessitates an analysis of architectural form in relation to social
practice, as these essays attempt to do.
Institutions discipline minds, bodies and emotions, according to
hierarchical relations within them, such as social class or religious or health
status. Power is exercised through relations which classify the body. While
Howe explores how hospital design focused on the containment of the
contaminating body, in convents bodies were classified through the discourse
on chastity and virginity, as we see in Dunn’s, Lindquist’s and Weddle’s
essays, and through spatial organization which separated nuns not only from
the outside world, but hierarchically from each other, as Dunn shows.
Convents were closely linked to the aristocracy through their material culture,
to particular families through sites and bequests, but above all to the habitus
of aristocratic women. Architecture constructed the habitus which connected
common interest groups. Religious identities, personal mobility and sexuality
were maintained through space, boundaries and architectural adornment.
Control of female sexuality was a central function of post-Tridentine convents
and at the same time spirituality became particularly sexualized. Thus

sexuality and virginity were themes of great weight both inside and outside
the convent, though with different emphases and for differing reasons.
Weddle, Dunn and Lindquist present detailed studies of convent architecture,
planning, organization and decoration to relate these issues to social,
devotional, urban and sexual politics.
Saundra Weddle’s essay focuses on one institution, the Florentine convent
of Le Murate, and traces its development in terms of architectural change,
religious reputation and social status between 1390 and 1597. She argues that
Trent ‘changed image more than practice’, and demonstrates the crucial role
architecture and architectural discourse played both in constructing a
prescribed image and in betraying practice which ran counter to it. Elizabeth
Lehfeldt’s essay concentrates on Spanish case studies which chronologically
straddle the Council of Trent, often regarded as a moment or rupture, in order
to investigate the degree to which Trent affected convents’ adherence to the
principles of chastity and separation from the world. She shows that
conventual enclosure was permeated with holes from within and without, that
nuns asserted direct control over conventual space, fashioning it to suit their
needs, breaking active enclosure if necessary, while their families violated
passive enclosure to make their mark through artistic patronage inside
convent walls.
Marilyn Dunn analyses spatial divisions within Roman convents in relation
to institutional organization, ecclesiastical prescription, and evidence of
inmates’ practices. She shows that these spaces, in spite of a rhetoric of
impermeability, were richly multi-layered, and able to present a wide range of
simultaneously conflicting realities, to audiences, visitors, and inhabitants –
surely one of the remarkable characteristics of architecture.
Sherry Lindquist’s essay, which examines the late medieval Charterhouse
at Champmol in Dijon, focuses on a male institution haunted by women, or,
more precisely, by the threat of defilement represented by the temptations of
the female body, figured as an outsider (just as female convents were haunted
by the spectre of the defiling male). But whereas the protection and control of
religious women is undertaken through their unrelenting surveillance (insisted
upon architecturally throughout female conventual institutions), the
Carthusian monks were isolated architecturally, their preserve of solitude, the
monastic cell, was figured as innocence, charged with representing their
dedication and spirituality, and became the hallmark of institutional identity,
while the rest of the monastery afforded more liberal interpretation of the
Rule.
18 INTRODUCTION
Notes
1. S. Wren, Parentalia, or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London, 1750), p.
261.
2. See, for instance, N. Zemon Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’ and
‘Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early
Modern Europe’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 65–95, 147–90; N. Zemon Davis and A.
Farge, eds, A History of Women: Renaisssance and Enlightenment Paradoxes
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993); J. Kelly, Women,
History and Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984); T. Laqueur,
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990); J. G. Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); M. Gallucci,
C. Gallucci, G. Ruggiero and E. Muir, eds, Sex and Gender in Historical
Perspective: Selections from Quaderni Storici (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990).
3. The interest in space as a subject of study arises partly from its materiality and
everyday relevance, and partly because it is the context in which all other cultural
representations are produced and reproduced. Space is the medium in which
social relationships are organized and negotiated; space becomes a map in which
personal identity and boundaries between social groups are expressed.
4. G. Lerner usefully warns of the dangers of class erasure in historical analysis of
gender. G. Lerner, ‘Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges’,
Feminist Studies, 3, Fall 1975, 1–8.
5. Lefebvre is key in thinking of space as socially and historically produced. See,
especially, H. Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith,
The Production of Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 1–60,
68–168. For a further discussion of how this might be thought in relation to
Cartesian philosophy, see A. Benjamin, ‘Policing the Body: Descartes and the
architecture of change’, in N. Leach, ed., Architecture and Revolution (London
and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 81–91.
6. Women’s groups and feminists have long been active in architectural design; but
architectural history, especially of early modern Europe, blithely disregarded the
implications of gender for architectural design, meanings and interpretation.
Influential textbooks and surveys, such as S. Giedion, Space, Time & Architecture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959 and 1980), C. Norberg-
Schulz’s Baroque Architecture (New York: Abrams, 1979), or Spiro Kostof’s A
History of Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), ignored the
implications of gender entirely, even at a time when their counterparts writing
about other forms of visual art production were demonstrating its centrality.
7. The historical relationship between feminism and art history has been plotted
many times elsewhere. See, for instance, N. Broude and M. Garrard,
‘Introduction: Feminism and Art History’, in N. Broude and M. Garrard, eds,
Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper & Row,
1982), pp. 1–18; N. Broude and M. Garrard, ‘Introduction: The Expanding
Discourse’, in N. Broude and M. Garrard, eds, The Expanding Discourse:
Feminism and Art History (New York: Harper & Row, 1992), pp. 1–26; R. Parker
and G. Pollock, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–85
(London: Pandora Books, 1987).
8. K. Petersen and J. Wilson, Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the
Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1976),
was one of the key publications in bringing the work of female artists to the
attention of a wide public during the 1970s and R. Parker and G. Pollock, Old
Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London and Sydney: HarperCollins,
1981), guided the debate beyond simply adding women to the canon of artists to
considering the relationships between art history and the treatment of women in
art.
9. See, for example, G. Pollock, Vision and Difference, Feminism, Femininities and
the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), Differencing the Canon
(London: Routledge, 1999).
10. The first wave of feminism saw the publication of a range of different sorts of
studies addressing the exclusion of women from architectural practice, the effect
of gender on design, and the impact of gendered design on social relationships.
See, for instance, S. Torre, ed., Women in American Architecture: A Historical
and Contemporary Perspective (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977);
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1982); C. Lorenz, Women in Architecture: a contemporary perspective (London:
Trefoil, 1990); A. Garland, ‘A Woman’s Place’, Building Design, 664, June 1983
and ‘Getting an Even Deal for Women’, Building Design, 675, Feb 1984, and
their bibliographies. An outstanding analysis of architecture designed by men in
terms of gendered identities remains M. Roberts, Living in a Man-Made World
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Among the exhibitions on the subject,
‘The History of Women Architects’, held in Berlin in 1986, organized by the
Union Internationale des Femmes Architectes Sektion Bundesrepublik e V., and
‘That Exceptional One’, an exhibition of work by female architects from 1888 to
1988, touring in the USA 1988–90, were particularly important. The reasons why
architectural history has proved more or less impermeable to many of the
intellectual currents which have transformed the rest of art history, such as post-
structuralism, is an issue deserving of examination, but beyond the scope of this
book. This problem is touched on briskly and provocatively in M. McLeod,
‘Introduction’, in M. McLeod, ed., Architecture and Ideology: Proceedings of the
Symposium (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), pp. 7–11.
11. See, for example, S. Kent, Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hillier and Hanson proceed on
these assumptions in using structuralist arguments to develop formal analysis of
spatial patterns in architecture. B. Hillier and J. Hanson, The Social Logic of
Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); B. Hillier, Space is the
machine: a configurational theory of architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996). Though useful in providing a language in which to
articulate spatiality, this approach fails to consider meanings within specific
cultural contexts.
12. I do not, of course, suggest that these strategies are necessarily successful.
13. H. Moore, Space, Text and Gender: an anthropological study of the Marakwet of
Kenya (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1999), p. 188.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Distinction: a social critique of the
judgement of taste (La distinction: critique sociale du jugement) (London:
20 INTRODUCTION
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), pp.
195–230.
17. L. Davidoff and C. Hall, ‘The Architecture of Public and Private Life: English
Middle-Class Society in a Provincial Town 1780–1850’, in D. Fraser and A.
Sutcliffe, eds, The Pursuit of Urban History (London: Edward Arnold, 1983); S.
Ardener, ed., Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (Oxford and
Providence, RI: Berg, 1993); J. Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on women
and culture (Oxford: Polity, 1990).
18. L. Irigaray, ‘Sexual difference’, in T. Moi, ed., French Feminist Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 123.
19. Domestic architecture has most famously been investigated in relation to gender
by Dolores Hayden, who examined feminists’ attempts to reform the nature of
unpaid domestic work and the problems for women resulting from a sexual
division of labour. Her research focused primarily on nineteenth-century
reformers in the United States. Much of the more recent scholarship concerned
with precisely such problems comes from the USA and continues to focus almost
exclusively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century, mostly domestic, architecture.
See, for instance, B. Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1992); D. Agrest et al., eds, The Sex of Architecture (New
York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996); D. Coleman et al., eds, Architecture and
Feminism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); M. Roberts, Living
in a Man-Made World: Gender Assumptions in Modern Housing Design
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991); E. P. Berkeley and M. McQuaid,
Architecture: A Place for Women (Washington and London: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1989). J. Rendell, B. Penner and I. Borden, eds, Gender Space
Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (New York and London:
Routledge, 2000), likewise presents texts concentrating overwhelmingly on
twentieth-century issues. But see L. Durning and R. Wrigley, eds, Gender and
Architecture (Chichester: John Wiley, 2000) for a usefully more ambitious
chronological span.
20. R. Hirschon, Women and Property: women as property (Beckenham: Croom
Helm, 1983); J. Attfield and P. Kirkham, eds, A View from the Interior:
Feminism, Women and Design (London: Women’s Press, 1989); L. Walker,
‘Home making: an architectural perspective’, Signs, 27, Spring 2002, 823–30.
21. Patricia Waddy’s stimulating analysis of seventeenth-century palace plans in
relation to the gender of their occupants remains exceptional. P. Waddy,
Seventeenth-Century Roman Palace Architecture (New York: Architectural
History Foundation; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 25–30.
22. See, for instance, the work of C. W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Fragmentation and
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
(New York: Zone Books, 1991); S. Boesch-Gajano and L. Sebastiani, eds, Culto
dei Santi, istituzioni e classi sociali in età preindustriale (Aquila: LU Iapadre
Editore, 1984); L. Panizza, ed., Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and
Society (Oxford: University of Oxford European Humanities Research Centre,
2000); C. Monson, ed., The Crannied Wall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992); G. Zarri, Donna, Disciplina, Creanza Cristiana dal XV al XVII
Secolo (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1996), and Recinti: Donne,
clausura, matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).
23. But for useful work which seeks to address this relationship in the early modern
period, see S. Boesch-Gajano and L. Scaraffia, eds, Luoghi sacri e spazi della
santità (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990); M. Dunn, ‘Piety and Patronage in
Seicento Rome’, Art Bulletin, LXXVI, 1994, 644–63; J. W. Mann, ‘The
Annunciation Chapel in the Quirinal Palace, Rome’, Art Bulletin, LXXV, 1993,
113–34. See also H. Hills, Invisible City: The Architecture of Aristocratic
Convents in Baroque Naples (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003) pp. 2–8.
24. See C. Lawrence, ‘Introduction’, in C. Lawrence, ed., Women and Art in Early
Modern Europe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1997), p. 5. For a more complex discussion see E. Schulte van Kessel, ‘Virgins
and Mothers between Heaven and Earth’, in N. Zemon Davis and A. Farge, eds,
A History of Women in the West: III Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1993), pp. 132–66 and ‘Gender and Spirit, pietas et
contemptus mundi. Matrons–Patrons in Early Modern Rome’, in E. Schulte van
Kessel, ed., Women and Men in Spiritual Culture (XIV–XVII Centuries) (The
Hague: Netherlands Government Publishing Office, 1986), pp. 47–68.
25. He regards it as significant that, for instance, Sister Maria Domitilla Galuzzi’s
visions should have begun soon after the redecoration and adornment with new
icons of the chapel where she meditated. Monson, Crannied Wall, p. 6.
26. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 222.
27. The fullest analysis of this remains P. Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la
pratique: précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle (Paris and Geneva: Seuil,
2000), pp. 45–69, which remains untranslated in full into English. But see P.
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977); also Language and Symbolic Power, ed.
J. B. Thompson and trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 117–36, 229–51.
28. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 90.
29. See, especially, M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1977), pp. 195–308.
30. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, pp. 72–95.
31. ‘The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material
conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus,
systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structures predisposed to
functioning as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and
structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated”
and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules,
objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at
ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being
all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating
action of a conductor.’ Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 72.
32. Ibid., p. 22.
33. See ibid., pp. 72–95.
34. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony also illuminates these apparent
paradoxes of people acting against their own interests. A. Gramsci, Further
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. D. Boothman (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1995). He argues that consensus is developed between
dominant and subordinate groups through the process of hegemony, which may
be very slow and gradual. Subordinate groups, which may include women,
22 INTRODUCTION
subscribe to dominant values, symbols and beliefs, which are part of an encoded
value system which is maintained through institutional and individual action. But
interest groups, such as aristocratic women, may also develop views which differ
from prevailing orthodoxies.
35. See, for example, C. E. King, Renaissance Women Patrons (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), for a rich treatment of the
subject. See also C. Lawrence, ed., Women and Art in Early Modern Europe:
Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1997).
36. Scholars have energetically investigated art work and music produced by nuns
inside convents. Particularly useful are J. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: the visual
culture of a medieval convent (Berkeley and London: University of California
Press, 1997), and C. Monson, ‘La Pratica della musica nei monasteri femminili
bolognesi’, in O. Mischiati and P. Russo, eds, La Cappella Musicale nell’Italia
della Controriforma (Cento: L. S. Olschki, 1989), pp. 143–60. Mary-Ann
Winkelmes argues that the nuns of S. Zaccaria in Venice, S. Paolo in Parma, and
S. Maurizio in Milan communicated with local monks of the Cassinese
Congregation of reformed Benedictines regarding the building and decoration of
their churches, while working with marked autonomy as art patrons. M.-A.
Winkelmes, ‘Taking Part: Benedictine Nuns as Patrons of Art and Architecture’,
in G. A. Johnson and S. F. Matthews Grieco, eds, Picturing Women in
Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 91–110.
37. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from
Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 1–24.
38. Lawrence, Women and Art in Early Modern Europe, p. 7.
39. The best critique of this mode of approach remains Pierre Bourdieu’s remarkable
Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (La distinction: critique
sociale du jugement) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), a thesis which
remains disturbing to many who prefer to regard the marks of their social and
economic privileges as signs of their innate individual talent and taste. See also
J. Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press,
1981), pp. 49–70.
40. Paul Ricoeur usefully distinguishes between physical movement through space
(as a mnemonic which informs and reinforces social action) and the activity of
interpreting spatial orientation. He sees meaning as produced by actions and
interpretations of individual social actors in specific historical settings.
41. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 19.
42. Compare Griselda Pollock’s claim that ‘[r]epresentation is to be understood as a
social relation enacted and performed via specific appeals to vision, specific
managements of imaginary spaces and bodies for a gaze. The efficacy of
representation, furthermore, relies on a ceaseless exchange with other
representations.’ G. Pollock, ‘Feminism/Foucault – Surveillance/Sexuality’, in
N. Bryson, M. A. Holly and K. Moxey, eds, Visual Culture: Images and
Interpretations (Hanover and London: University Press of New England for
Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 14.
43. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, trans. by S. Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), p. 100.
44. Ibid.
Chapter 1 26/9/03 12:11 pm Page 23
PART II
PRODUCTION: ARCHITECTS AND PATRONS

Chapter 1 26/9/03 12:11 pm Page 24
Chapter 1 26/9/03 12:11 pm Page 25
CHAPTER ONE
A Noble Residence for a Female

Regent: Margaret of Austria and the
‘Court of Savoy’ in Mechelen
Dagmar Eichberger*
This chapter investigates the principal residence, the ‘Court of Savoy’, of

Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), governor-general and regent
of the Burgundian–Habsburgian Netherlands (Fig. 1.1).1 Margaret of Austria
is the first of a series of female regents who resided and ruled in this
economically important part of the Holy Roman Empire.2 Margaret’s
residence in Mechelen was one of the most significant princely courts in the
early sixteenth-century Netherlands, which attracted the attention of
humanists, international diplomats and artists alike.
This chapter examines the ways in which Margaret of Austria’s social rank
and gender had a particular impact on the edifice itself or on the interior
decoration of her residence. The first part of this study looks closely at the
architectural structure of the so-called ‘Court of Savoy’ (Fig. 1.2) and the built
environment surrounding the residence. Particular attention is paid to the
living quarters inhabited by the widowed archduchess and to her garden. The
second part of this chapter analyses how Margaret of Austria organized and
interpreted these spaces by carefully furnishing her rooms with a large variety
of objects and artefacts. It argues that her identity as a female regent is clearly
reflected in the way in which she decorated her residence.
When Margaret of Austria returned from the Duchy of Savoy to the Low
Countries in October 1506, she established her permanent residence in the city of
Mechelen. While her forebears, the dukes of Burgundy, had resided in princely
residences in Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Lille, Hesdin and Arras, she chose to live
in the city where her close relative and foster mother, Dowager-Duchess Margaret
of York (1446–1503), had spent the last thirty years of her life.3 Margaret of
Austria took over her foster mother’s last apartment and her private oratory at the
old St Peter’s church and integrated them both into her new residence.
The city of Mechelen, which was also the seat of the Great Council, was
Chapter 1 26/9/03 12:11 pm Page 26
26 PRODUCTION: ARCHITECTS AND PATRONS
eager to become the new centre of political activities. The town council
therefore offered to pay for the erection of a new residence worthy of a high-
ranking court with international connections. The burghers of Mechelen
hoped that the presence of such a court would bring trade and prosperity to
their community.4
The construction of the ‘Court of Savoy’
The site chosen for the erection of Margaret of Austria’s ‘Court of Savoy’ was
situated opposite the so-called ‘Court of Austria’ or ‘Court of the Emperor’.5
This spacious fifteenth-century mansion on Keizerstraat had been given to
Maximilian by the city of Mechelen as a residence for his grandchildren, the
young prince Charles (1500–58) and three of his sisters. In 1507, Maximilian
acquired several houses in the vicinity of the ‘Court of Austria’ from his
treasurer-general Hieronymus Lauwerijn in order to secure a large block of
land for the future domicile of his only daughter.6 Margaret’s future residence
was to be framed in the north by Keizerstraat and in the south by Voochtstraat.
The other two sides of the precinct bordered on to the medieval St Julian’s
Hospital on its eastern and the old St Peter’s church on its western side. The
churchyard was separated from the new residence by a narrow road called
Korte Magdenstraat.7 My reconstruction of the rooms on the first floor of the
western wing (Figs 1.3 and 1.4) is based on the earliest existing floor plan of
the ‘Court of Savoy’8 as well as on written and visual documents.
Construction of three wings which constituted Margaret of Austria’s
residence began in 1507, but the residence was still unfinished twenty-three
years later when the archduchess died unexpectedly at the age of fifty. The
task of planning and execution of Margaret of Austria’s official seat of
government was entrusted to three members of the Keldermans family, one of
the foremost families of architects and entrepreneurs in the Burgundian–
Habsburgian Netherlands.9
Anthonis Keldermans I (d. 1512), city architect of Mechelen, and his son
Anthonis II (d. 1515) were responsible for the first building phase of the
‘Court of Savoy’ between 1507 and 1515. Their first priority was to construct
comfortable living quarters and the necessary administrative areas for the
regent and her sizeable household. For economic reasons, the Keldermans
made use of extant structures, particularly a long row of smaller houses along
Korte Magdenstraat. These older structures are still recognizable today
(rooms D to J), as the difference in width and height of the individual
segments was not harmonized by the Keldermans. The older houses were
integrated into the newly formed western wing of Margaret’s residence. There
is thus a marked difference between the regular and grander elevation facing
Another random document with
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jouissons sont bien douces, et j’en bénis Dieu tous les jours ; tous
les jours, je me trouve heureuse d’avoir des bois, des eaux, des
prés, des moutons, des poules qui pondent, de vivre enfin dans mon
joli et tranquille Cayla avec une famille qui m’aime. Qu’y a-t-il de plus
doux au monde ?
Il ne nous manque que toi, cher membre que le corps réclame.
Quand t’aurons-nous ? Rien ne paraît s’arranger pour cela. Ainsi,
nous passerons la vie sans nous voir. C’est triste, mais résignons-
nous à tout ce que Dieu veut ou permet. J’aime beaucoup la
Providence qui mène si bien toutes choses et nous dispense de
nous inquiéter des événements de ce monde. Un jour nous saurons
tout ; un jour je saurai pourquoi nous sommes séparés, nous deux
qui voudrions être ensemble. Rapprochons-nous, mon ami,
rapprochons-nous de cœur et de pensée en nous écrivant l’un à
l’autre. Cette communication est bien douce, ces épanchements
soulagent, purifient même l’âme comme une eau courante emporte
son limon.
Pour moi, je me trouve mieux après que je me suis laissée couler
ici. Je dis ici, parce que j’y laisse l’intime, sans trop regarder ce que
c’est, même sans le savoir quelquefois. Ce qui se passe en moi
m’est inconnu à certains moments ; ignorance sans doute de l’être
humain. J’ai si peu vu, si peu connu en bien comme en mal !
Cependant, je ne suis pas un enfant. J’aime bien d’écrire à Louise,
mais ce n’est pas comme à toi ; d’ailleurs, mes lettres sont vues et le
cœur n’est pas un livre qu’on veuille ouvrir au public. Merci donc
d’aimer ma correspondance, de me donner le plaisir innocent et tout
fraternel de te dire bien souvent que je t’aime de cette affection vive,
tendre et pure, qui vient de la charité. C’est ainsi qu’on s’aime bien ;
c’est ainsi que Jésus-Christ nous a aimés et veut que nous aimions
nos frères.
Le 9. — Une journée passée à étendre une lessive laisse peu à

dire. C’est cependant assez joli que d’étendre du linge blanc sur
l’herbe ou de le voir flotter sur des cordes. On est, si l’on veut, la
Nausicaa d’Homère ou une de ces princesses de la Bible qui
lavaient les tuniques de leurs frères. Nous avons un lavoir, que tu
n’as pas vu, à la Moulinasse, assez grand et plein d’eau, qui embellit
cet enfoncement et attire les oiseaux qui aiment le frais pour chanter.
Notre Cayla est bien changé et change tous les jours. Tu ne
verras plus le blanc pigeonnier de la côte, ni la petite porte de la
terrasse, ni le corridor et le fenestroun où nous mesurions notre taille
quand nous étions petits. Tout cela est disparu et fait place à de
grandes croisées, à de grands salons. C’est plus joli, ces choses
nouvelles, mais pourquoi est-ce que je regrette les vieilles et replace
de cœur les portes ôtées, les pierres tombées ? Mes pieds même ne
se font pas à ces marches neuves, ils vont suivant leur coutume et
font des faux pas où ils n’ont pas passé tout petits. Quel sera le
premier cercueil qui sortira par ces portes neuves ? Soit nouvelles
ou anciennes, toutes ont leurs dimensions pour cela, comme tout nid
a son ouverture. Voilà qui désenchante cette demeure d’un jour et
fait lever les yeux vers cette habitation qui n’est pas bâtie de main
d’homme.
Une lettre de Marie nous est venue. Je signale toujours une lettre
comme l’arrivée d’un ami. Celles de Marie sont gracieuses, toutes
pleines de nouvelles, de petites choses du monde. Aujourd’hui elle
nous annonce l’arrivée de M. Vialar, l’Africain, et celle d’un prince
arabe : choses curieuses pour le pays et pour ceux qui savent voir
les choses dans les hommes. Que ne fait pas voir un Africain à
Gaillac et un Gaillacois en Afrique ! La Providence qui mène tout
n’aura pas fait pour rien rencontrer ces deux hommes et tiré l’Arabe
de son désert pour lui faire voir notre France, notre civilisation, nos
arts, nos mœurs, nos belles cathédrales.
Le 10. — Une lettre écrite à Louise, mes prières, des occupations

de ménage, voilà ma journée. Comme je descendais un chaudron
du feu, papa m’a dit qu’il n’aimait pas de me voir faire de ces
choses ; mais j’ai pensé à saint Bonaventure qui lavait la vaisselle de
son couvent quand on alla lui porter, je crois, le chapeau de cardinal.
— En ce monde, il n’y a rien de bas que le péché qui nous dégrade
aux yeux de Dieu. Ainsi, mon chaudron m’a fait faire une réflexion
salutaire qui me servira à faire sans dégoût certaines choses
dégoûtantes, comme de me noircir les mains à la cuisine. Bonsoir ;
demain matin je vais me confesser. Le vent du nord a soufflé tout le
jour, nos journaliers grelottaient dans les champs. Faut-il voir l’hiver
au mois de mai !
Depuis hier je n’ai pas eu le temps de m’arrêter pour écrire. C’est
une privation pour moi de ne pas toucher ma plume, comme pour un
musicien de ne pas toucher son instrument. C’est ma lyre à moi, que
ma plume ; je l’aime comme une amie, rien ne peut m’en détacher. Il
y a entre elle et moi comme un aimant.
Aux flots revient le navire,

La colombe à ses amours ;
A toi je reviens, ma lyre,
A toi je reviens toujours.
Dieu, de qui tu viens, sans doute,

Te fit la voix de mon cœur,
Et je lui chante, en ma route,
Comme l’oiseau voyageur.
Je compose mon cantique

Des simples chants des hameaux ;
Je recueille la musique
Qu’en passant font les ruisseaux ;
J’écoute le bruit qui tombe

Avec le jour dans les bois,
Les soupirs de la colombe
Et le tonnerre aux cent voix.
J’écoute quand il s’éveille

Ce qu’au berceau dit l’enfant,
Ce qu’aux roses dit l’abeille,
Ce qu’aux forêts dit le vent.
J’écoute dans les églises
Ce que l’orgue chante à Dieu,
Quand les vierges sont assises
A la table du saint lieu.
Ames du ciel amoureuses,

J’écoute aussi vos désirs,
Et prends des hymnes pieuses
Dans chacun de vos soupirs.
La poésie irait grand train si je la laissais faire ; mais demain c’est

la Pentecôte, grande fête qui dispose au recueillement, qui fait taire
l’âme pour prier et demander l’esprit saint, l’esprit d’amour et
d’intelligence qui fait connaître et aimer Dieu. Je vais donc entrer
dans mon cénacle, ma chambrette ; plus rien du dehors, s’il est
possible. Mais encore je pense à toi, pauvre errant dans le monde.
Si tu savais comme je te voudrais avec nous ! Que Dieu veuille un
jour t’amener, te rendre à la société des frères !
Le 13. — Je reviens ici le lundi de la Pentecôte, sans m’arrêter

au jour d’hier, si grand, si divin ; causons un peu d’à présent, du
temps que je fais lire Miou, mon écolière. A elle l’oreille, ici le cœur ;
mais je suis souvent détournée pour la reprendre. Cette enfant a
l’intelligence lente et molle, de sorte qu’il faut être là sans cesse à
l’exciter. Patience et persévérance : avec cela nous ferons quelque
chose de Miou, non pas un esprit orné, mais une intelligence
chrétienne, qui sache pourquoi Dieu l’a mise au monde. Pauvre
petite ! elle ne le savait pas du tout naguère. Que nous sommes
ignorants, que nous le sommes tous en naissant ! Un Lamennais
n’en aurait pas su plus que Miou à dix ans, si on ne lui eût pas
appris davantage. Cela me semble ainsi, et que notre intelligence ne
se développe que par l’instruction, comme le bois ne s’allume que
par le contact du feu.
J’aime assez d’instruire les petits enfants, de leur faire le
catéchisme. C’est un plaisir et même un devoir d’instruire tous ces
pauvres chrétiens. On peut faire les missionnaires à tout moment
dans nos campagnes, et je doute que des sauvages en sachent
moins en fait de religion que certains de nos paysans. Notre
cuisinière, Marianne, voyait des cochons dans les commandements.
Un autre croit que faire son salut c’est se saluer, et cent autres
bêtises qui font pitié. Mais Dieu est bon, et ce n’est pas précisément
l’ignorance qu’il punira. On doit bien plus craindre pour les génies
qui s’égarent, pour ceux qui savent la loi et ne veulent pas la suivre,
pour ces aveugles qui ferment les yeux au jour. Oh ! que ceux-là me
font pitié ! qu’ils sont à plaindre ! On voit leur sort dans la parabole de
la vigne et de l’arbre stérile. Je l’écrirais, mais tu sais cela.
Un chagrin : nous avons Trilby malade, si malade que la pauvre
bête en mourra. Je l’aime, ma petite chienne, si gentille. Je me
souviens aussi que tu l’aimais et la caressais, l’appelant coquine.
Tout plein de souvenirs s’attachent à Trilbette et me la font regretter.
Petites et grandes affections, tout nous quitte et meurt à son tour.
Notre cœur est comme un arbre entouré de feuilles mortes.
Le pasteur est venu nous voir. Je ne t’ai pas dit grand’chose de
lui. C’est un homme bon et simple, instruit de ses devoirs, parlant
mieux de Dieu que du monde qu’il connaît peu. Aussi ne brille-t-il
pas dans un cercle ; sa conversation est commune et lui fait trouver
peu d’esprit par ceux qui ne connaissent pas un esprit de prêtre. Il
fait le bien dans la paroisse ; sa douceur lui gagne des âmes. C’est
notre père à présent. Je le trouve jeune après M. Bories. Il me
manque cette parole forte et puissante qui me soutenait ; mais Dieu
me l’a ôtée, il sait pourquoi. Soumettons-nous et marchons comme
un enfant, sans regarder la main qui nous mène. Au demeurant, je
ne me plains pas ; il parle bien, très-bien pour les âmes calmes.
Jamais Andillac n’eut une si douce éloquence, c’est le Massillon du
pays. Mais Dieu seul peut apaiser les troubles de l’âme. Si tu t’étais
fait prêtre, tu saurais cela, et je t’aurais demandé conseil ; mais je ne
puis rien dire à Maurice. Ah ! pauvre ami, que je le regrette ! que je
voudrais passer de la confiance du cœur à celle de l’âme ! Il y aurait
dans cette ouverture quelque chose de bien spirituellement doux. La
mère de saint François de Sales se confessait à son fils ; des sœurs
se sont confessées à leurs frères. Il est beau de voir la nature se
perdre ainsi dans la grâce.
On vient de m’apporter un jeune pigeon que je veux garder, et
priver, et caresser ; il me remplacera Trilby. Ce pauvre cœur veut
toujours quelque chose à aimer ; quand une lui manque, il en prend
une autre. Je remarque cela, et que sans interruption nous aimons,
ce qui marque notre fin pour un amour éternel. Rien ne me fait
mieux… Papa est venu me faire couper le mot entre les dents. Je
recommence. Rien ne me fait mieux comprendre le ciel que de me le
figurer comme le lieu de l’amour ; car ici nous n’aimons pas un
instant sans bonheur ; que sera-ce d’aimer sans fin ?
Le 16. — Je viens de faire une découverte. En feuilletant un

vieux livre de piété, l’Ange conducteur, j’ai trouvé les litanies de la
Providence qu’on dit que Rousseau aimait tant, et celles de l’Enfant
Jésus, simples et sublimes comme cette divine enfance. J’ai
remarqué ceci : « Enfant qui pleurez dans le berceau, Enfant qui
tonnez du haut des cieux, Enfant qui réparez la grâce de la terre,
Enfant qui êtes le chef des anges », et mille autres dénominations et
invocations gracieuses. Si jamais j’exécute un projet que j’ai, ces
litanies seront mises sous les yeux des enfants. Mon pigeon me vole
dessus et piaule si tendrement pour que je le mette au nid, que je te
quitte.
Le 17. — Un beau soleil levant nous fait espérer un beau jour,

chose rare en ce mois de mai. Jamais printemps plus froid, plus
aride, plus triste. Cela fait mal à tout : les poulets ni les fleurs ne
naissent pas, ni les pensées riantes non plus.
Aujourd’hui, de bonne heure, j’ai été à Vieux visiter les reliques
des saints, et en particulier de saint Eugène, mon patron. Tu sais
que le saint évêque fut exilé de Carthage dans les Gaules, par un
prince arien. Il vint à Alby, de là à Vieux, où il bâtit un monastère où
se réunirent beaucoup de saints. C’est aujourd’hui le Moulin de
Latour. Je voudrais que ceux qui viennent moudre là sussent la
pieuse vénération qui est due à ce lieu ; mais la plupart l’ignorent.
On ne sait même plus pourquoi il se fait des processions, à Vieux,
de toutes les paroisses du pays. Je l’ai expliqué à Miou, qui
m’accompagnait et qui comprend peut-être à présent ce que c’est
que des reliques, et ce qu’on fait devant ces pavillons où elles sont
exposées.
J’aime ces pèlerinages, restes de la foi antique ; mais ce n’est
plus le temps aujourd’hui de ces choses, l’esprit en est mort pour le
grand nombre. On allait à Vieux en prière, on n’y va plus qu’en
promenade. Cependant si M. le curé ne fait pas cette procession, il
sera cause de la grêle. La crédulité abonde où la foi disparaît. Nous
avons pourtant quelques bonnes âmes bien dignes de plaire aux
saints, comme Rose Dreuille, la Durelle qui sait méditer, qui a tant
appris sur le chapelet, puis Françon de Gaillard et sa fille Jacquette,
si recueillie à l’église.
Cette sainte escorte ne m’accompagnait pas ; j’étais seule avec
mon bon ange et Miou. La messe entendue, mes prières faites, je
suis partie avec une espérance de plus. J’étais venue demander
quelque chose à saint Eugène. Les saints sont nos frères. Si tu étais
tout-puissant, ne m’accorderais-tu pas ce que je te demanderais ?
C’est ce que j’ai pensé en invoquant saint Eugène, qui, de plus, est
mon patron. Nous avons si peu en ce monde, au moins espérons en
l’autre.
Le 20. — Trois lettres nous sont venues : une d’Euphrasie, une

d’Antoinette et une de Félicité, bien triste. Te voilà malade, pauvre
Maurice, voilà pourquoi tu ne nous écrivais pas. Mon Dieu ! que je
voudrais être là tout près, te voir, te toucher, te soigner ! Tu es bien
soigné, sans doute ; mais tu as besoin d’une sœur. Je le sais, je le
sens. Si jamais j’ai désiré te voir, c’est bien l’heure. Faut-il que
toujours le malheur t’amène ! tantôt la révolution, tantôt le choléra, à
présent ton mal. Le plaisir de nous voir serait-il trop doux ? Dieu ne
veut pas de parfait bonheur en ce monde. Tous ces jours-ci je
pensais : si Maurice arrivait aux vacances, quelle joie ! que papa
serait heureux ! Et voilà que tout ce bonheur s’en va dans une
maladie. Mais arrive, viens ; l’air du Cayla, le lait d’ânesse, le repos
vont te guérir. J’ai regret de ne t’avoir pas répondu ; je serai peut-
être cause de quelque pensée triste, de quelque doute qui t’aura fait
mal. Tu auras cru que je ne voulais plus t’écrire, que je ne voulais
plus de ton amitié. Je t’écrivais ici tous les jours, mais je voulais te
donner le temps de désirer une lettre : ce délai t’aurait fait répondre
plus vite une autre fois. Laissons tout cela maintenant, ne parlons
plus du passé. Nous allons nous voir, nous entendre, et tout
expliquer.
Le 22. — Pas d’écriture hier. La journée du dimanche se passe à

l’église ou sur les chemins. Le soir, je suis fatiguée ; à peine si j’ai lu
après souper un peu de l’Histoire de l’Église, mais j’ai beaucoup
pensé à toi pourtant, Dieu le sait. J’ai demandé à Rose de prier pour
toi. Elle m’a promis de le faire. Cela m’a fait plaisir ; depuis je suis
plus tranquille, parce que je crois que la prière est toute-puissante.
J’en sais une preuve dans un petit enfant guéri subitement d’une
cécité complète. Cette histoire est jolie, il faut que je te la conte. Il y
avait à Ouillas, dans un couvent de nos montagnes, une jeune fille,
pensionnaire si pieuse, si douce, si innocente, que tout le monde
l’aimait et la vénérait comme un ange. On dit que son confesseur, M.
Chabbert, que nous avons eu pour curé, la trouva si pure, qu’il lui fit
faire sa première communion sans l’absoudre. Elle mourut à
quatorze ans, en si grande vénération et amitié de ses compagnes
que, l’une après l’autre, elles vont chaque jour visiter sa tombe toute
blanche de lis dans la saison des fleurs, et lui demander ce dont
elles ont besoin, et plus d’une fois la sainte a exaucé leur prière.
Depuis deux ans le concours se faisait au cimetière, lorsqu’une
pauvre femme, venant ramasser du bois tout auprès avec son petit
garçon aveugle, se souvint des merveilles qu’on racontait de Marie,
et l’idée lui vint de mener son enfant sur la tombe et de demander sa
guérison. Voici à peu près sa prière :
« Petite sainte Marie, vous que j’ai vue si bonne et si
compatissante, écoutez-moi à présent du Paradis où vous êtes ;
rendez la vue à mon fils ; que Dieu m’accorde par vous cette
grâce ! »
A peine est-ce dit, la pauvre mère, encore à genoux, entend son
petit s’écrier qu’il y voit : ay, mama, té bési ! Des croûtes qui
fermaient ses yeux sont tombées ; la même plaie couvrait la tête, ne
laissant pas voir un cheveu, et huit jours après la pauvre mère faisait
voir à tout le monde son enfant aux beaux yeux et aux jolies boucles
blondes.
Je tiens cela de Mlle Carayon d’Alby qui a vu l’enfant aveugle et
l’enfant guéri miraculeusement. C’est une histoire charmante, que je
crois de tout mon cœur, et qui me donnerait envie d’aller à Ouillas
pour demander aussi quelque chose que je demanderais avec toute
la ferveur de mon âme.
J’attendais de tes nouvelles ce matin. Félicité nous dit que tu dois
nous écrire en même temps qu’elle ; mais pas de lettre, ce retard
nous met en peine. Qui sait ? peut-être es-tu plus souffrant. Le
temps n’est pas bon pour toi : toujours froid ou pluie. Il va bien me
tarder qu’il fasse beau, que le printemps paraisse, que l’air soit doux.
Depuis hier j’ai fait bien des baromètres. C’est ce rude hiver, cet air
froid et malsain qui t’ont fait mal.
J’ai fort grondé mon écolière qui manque souvent de respect à sa
mère. Pour lui faire impression, je lui ai cité ce trait de dix enfants
maudits par leur mère, que saint Augustin avait vus à Hippone dans
un tremblement et un état affreux. Miou a paru touchée ; peut-être en
sera-t-elle plus obéissante quand elle sera tentée de dire non à sa
mère. Je me souviens comme ces enfants maudits me faisaient
peur. La désobéissance fut le premier vice de l’homme, c’est le
premier défaut de l’enfant : il trouve un maudit plaisir dans tout ce
qu’on lui défend. Nous portons tous ce trait de notre premier père. Il
n’y a que l’Enfant Jésus duquel on ait pu dire qu’il était soumis et
obéissant. Ce serait un beau modèle à présenter à l’enfance que
cette enfance divine avec ses vertus, ses grâces, dont quelque pieux
Raphaël ferait ressortir les traits. J’ai pensé cela bien souvent, et
formé mon groupe de saints enfants du Vieux et du Nouveau
Testament : Joseph, Samuel, Jean-Baptiste, mené à trois ans au
désert ; Cyrille, qui mourut martyr à cinq ans ; le frère de sainte
Thérèse, qui bâtissait de petits oratoires à sa sœur ; la vierge
Eulalie. Non, elle est trop grande à douze ans parmi ces tailles
enfantines ; mais je trouverais bien quelque autre petite sainte à
encadrer. Tout cela parsemé de fleurs, d’oiseaux, de perles, ferait un
joli petit tableau pour l’enfance. Quelque chose me dit d’en faire un
livre, comme je t’en ai parlé dans le temps. Je ne sais pourquoi je
n’ai jamais pu me défaire de cette idée ; au contraire, elle se
présente plus souvent que jamais.
Le 27. — Rien ici depuis plusieurs jours ; mais j’ai bien écrit
ailleurs, car je me sens le besoin de me répandre quelque part, j’ai
fait cela avec Louise et devant Dieu : pour se consoler, rien de mieux
que la foi pour l’âme, l’amitié pour le cœur. Tu sais ce qui m’attriste,
c’est de penser que tu as été bien malade, que tu l’es encore. Qui
sait ? à cent lieues de distance ! Mon Dieu, que cet éloignement fait
souffrir ! Je ne puis pas même savoir où tu es, et je voudrais tout
savoir. Le cœur en peine se fait bien désireux et bien souffrant.
Voilà ma journée : ce matin à la messe, écrire à Louise, lire un
peu, et puis dans ma chambrette. Oh ! je ne dis pas tout ce que j’y
fais. J’ai des fleurs dans un gobelet ; j’en ai longtemps regardé deux
dont l’une penchait sur l’autre qui lui ouvrait son calice. C’était doux
à considérer et à se représenter, l’épanchement de l’amitié dans ces
deux petites fleurettes. Ce sont des stellaires, petites fleurs blanches
à longue tige des plus gracieuses de nos champs. On les trouve le
long des haies, parmi le gazon. Il y en a dans le chemin du moulin, à
l’abri d’un tertre tout parsemé de leurs petites têtes blanches. C’est
ma fleur de prédilection. J’en ai mis devant notre image de la Vierge.
Je voudrais qu’elles y fussent quand tu viendras, et te faire voir les
deux fleurs amies. Douce image qui des deux côtés est charmante
quand je pense qu’une sœur est fleur de dessous. Je crois, mon
ami, que tu ne diras pas non. Cher Maurice, nous allons nous voir,
nous entendre ! Ces cinq ans d’absence vont se retrouver dans nos
entretiens, nos causeries, nos dires de tout instant.
Le 29. — Depuis deux jours je ne t’ai rien dit, cher Maurice ; je

n’ai pu mettre ici rien de ce qui m’est venu en idées, en événements,
en craintes, en espérances, en tristesses, en bonheur. Quel livre de
tout cela ! Deux jours de vie sont longs et pleins quelquefois, et
même tous, si l’on veut s’arrêter à tout ce qui se présente. La vie est
comme un chemin bordé de fleurs, d’arbres, de buissons, d’herbes,
de mille choses qui fixeraient sans fin l’œil du voyageur ; mais il
passe. Oh ! oui, passons sans trop nous arrêter à ce qu’on voit sur
terre, où tout se flétrit et meurt. Regardons en haut, fixons les cieux,
les étoiles ; passons de là aux cieux qui ne passeront pas. La
contemplation de la nature mène là ; des objets sensibles, l’âme
monte aux régions de la foi et voit la création d’en haut, et le monde
alors paraît tout différent.
Que la terre est petite à qui la voit des cieux ! a dit Delille après
un saint, car les saints avec les poëtes se rencontrent quelquefois.
Rien n’est plus vrai que cette petitesse de la terre, vue de la sorte
par l’œil de l’âme qui sait se placer comme il faut pour bien voir.
Ainsi Bossuet a jugé du néant des grandeurs ; ainsi les saints ont
foulé aux pieds ce qui brillait aux autres hommes, fortune, plaisirs,
gloire, et se sont fait traiter de fous par leur singulière sagesse.
[Sans date.] — Enfin une de tes lettres ! Tu es mieux, presque

guéri, tu vas arriver. Je suis contente, heureuse ; je bénis Dieu cent
fois de ces bonnes nouvelles, et je reprends mon écriture demeurée
là depuis plusieurs jours. Je souffrais, je souffre encore, mais ce
n’est qu’un reste, un malaise qui va finir ; même je ne sais pas ce
que c’est, ni ce que j’ai de malade : ce n’est ni tête, ni estomac, ni
poitrine, rien du corps ; c’est donc l’âme, pauvre âme infirme !
Juin. — Deux visites, deux personnes que j’aime et qui nous
feront plaisir tant qu’elles voudront demeurer. On n’en dit pas autant
de tous les visiteurs ; mais Élisa F… est bonne, spirituelle ; sa
cousine, A…, fort douce, et, sans être belle, un charme de jeunesse
qui fait que je la trouve bien. Ma chambrette leur est cédée, ce qui
fait que j’y viendrai moins souvent. Cependant, de temps en temps,
je m’échappe et viens ici, comme à présent, pour écrire, lire ou prier,
trois choses qui me sont utiles. De temps en temps, l’âme a besoin
de se trouver en solitude, de se recueillir loin de tout bruit. C’est ce
que je viens faire ici. J’ai écrit à Félicité, répondu à Gabrielle, qui m’a
demandé avec empressement de tes nouvelles dès qu’elle t’a su
malade. Ces témoignages d’amitié me touchent et me font bénir
Dieu d’être aimée. L’amitié est chose si douce ! Elle se mêle à la joie
et vient adoucir l’affliction. Marie de Thézac a montré aussi le même
intérêt. Au moins, tu as des amis.
V
Le 26 janvier 1838. — Je rentre pour la première fois dans cette

chambrette où tu étais encore ce matin. Que la chambre d’un absent
est triste ! On le voit partout sans le trouver nulle part. Voilà tes
souliers sous le lit, ta table toute garnie, le miroir suspendu au clou,
les livres que tu lisais hier au soir avant de t’endormir, et moi qui
t’embrassais, te touchais, te voyais. Qu’est-ce que ce monde où tout
disparaît ? Maurice, mon cher Maurice, oh ! que j’ai besoin de toi et
de Dieu ! Aussi en te quittant suis-je allée à l’église où l’on peut prier
et pleurer à son aise. Comment fais-tu, toi qui ne pries pas, quand tu
es triste, quand tu as le cœur brisé ? Pour moi, je sens que j’ai
besoin d’une consolation surhumaine, qu’il faut Dieu pour ami quand
ce qu’on aime fait souffrir.
Que s’est-il passé aujourd’hui pour l’écrire ? Rien que ton départ,
je n’ai vu que toi s’en allant, que cette croix où nous nous sommes
quittés. Quand le roi serait venu, je ne m’en soucierais pas ; mais je
n’ai vu personne que Jeannot ramenant vos chevaux. J’étais à la
fenêtre et suis rentrée ; il me semblait voir le retour d’un convoi.
Voilà le soir, la fin d’une journée bien longue, bien triste. Bonsoir ;
tu peux presque m’entendre encore, tu n’es pas trop loin ; mais
demain, après-demain, toujours plus loin, plus loin !
Le 27. — Où es-tu ce matin ? Après cet appel, je m’en vais d’ici,
comme pour te chercher par-ci par-là, où nous étions ensemble.
Je n’ai fait que coudre et repasser ; peu lu, seulement le bon
vieux saint François de Sales, au chapitre des amitiés. C’était bien le
mien ; le cœur cherche toujours sa pâture. Moi, je vivrais d’aimer :
soit père, frères, sœur, il me faut quelque chose.
Le dimanche, que dire quand le pasteur ne prêche pas ? C’est la
manne de notre désert que cette parole du ciel, qui tombe douce et
blanche, d’un goût simple et pur que j’aime. Je suis revenue à jeun
d’Andillac, mais j’ai lu Bossuet, ces beaux sermons tout signetés de
ta main. J’ai laissé ces papiers, souvent avec ma marque par-
dessus. Ainsi, nous nous rencontrons partout comme les deux yeux ;
ce que tu vois beau, je le vois beau ; le bon Dieu nous a fait une
partie d’âme bien ressemblante à nous deux.
Le 28. — Te voilà sans doute parti de Toulouse ; tu roules, tu t’en

vas, tu t’éloignes. Au moins que tu ne tousses pas en chemin, qu’il
ne fasse pas froid, qu’il n’arrive pas d’accidents !!! « Que lui arrivera-
t-il, ô mon Dieu ! je n’en sais rien ; tout ce que je sais, c’est qu’il
n’arrivera rien que vous n’ayez réglé, prévu et ordonné de toute
éternité. Cela me suffit, mon Dieu, cela me suffit. J’adore vos
desseins éternels et impénétrables, je m’y soumets de tout mon
cœur, pour l’amour de vous. Je veux tout, j’accepte tout, je vous fais
un sacrifice de tout et j’unis ce sacrifice à celui de Jésus-Christ mon
Sauveur. Je vous demande en son nom la parfaite soumission pour
tout ce que vous voulez et permettez qu’il arrive. Que la très-juste,
très-élevée et très-aimable volonté de Dieu soit accomplie en toute
chose. » Prière de Madame Élisabeth, dans la tour du Temple, dite
bien souvent par moi dans la chambrette.
Je vais écrire à nos cousines Saint-Hilaire, puis nous irons à
Cahuzac, avec Mimi, voir Françon qui est bien malade.
Le 29. — Le tonnerre, la grêle, un jour d’automne ce matin ; un
temps d’été à présent, le soleil est chaud et lourd. Quelle variation
dans le ciel et dans toutes choses ! Tout était glace, il y a quinze
jours, et tu étais ici : ce n’est pas le froid que je regrette. Oh ! ce vent
du nord qui sifflait me faisait un plaisir ! Je le bénissais chaque fois
que je passais en grelottant à la salle. Cependant il te fallait partir, j’y
consentais pour celle qui t’attendait à Paris, il faut savoir se séparer
en ce monde. Que ne puis-je savoir où tu es, quel point tu touches,
quel chemin tu fais, pour te joindre, t’embrasser ! Que n’ai-je le bras
assez long pour atteindre tous ceux que j’aime ! Je conçois que
Dieu, qui est amour, soit partout.
Le pasteur nous est venu voir ; sa visite m’a fait plaisir ; j’aime sa
petite causerie qui ne s’étend pas plus loin que sa paroisse, et ne
fatigue pas pour la suivre tant que l’esprit soit abattu. Je ne sais ce
que j’ai gribouillé, mes idées sont gênées, mal à l’aise, comme
prises à la patte, et se débattant bizarrement dans ma tête. Les
laisser faire ? Non, je m’en vais après un tendre bonsoir.
Le 31. — Je me suis trouvé une drôle d’affection. Bête de cœur

qui se prend à tout ! Le dirai-je ? J’aime ces trois sangsues qui sont
sur la cheminée. Je ne voudrais ni les donner ni les voir mourir ; je
les change d’eau tous les jours, avec grande attention qu’il n’en
tombe aucune. Quand je ne les vois pas toutes, je prends la fiole et
regarde ce qui se passe dedans, et autres signes d’affection non
douteux, et cela parce que ces sangsues ont été apportées pour
Charles, que Charles est venu avec Caroline et que Caroline est
venue pour toi. Drôle d’enchaînement qui me fait rire sur ce que le
cœur enfile. Que de choses ! C’est plaisant d’y penser et de te voir
parmi des sangsues. Impossible même de vous séparer encore ; ces
bêtes me marquent le temps froid ou chaud, la pluie, le soleil, et
sans cesse je les consulte depuis que tu es parti. Par bonheur la
fiole a toujours marqué beau. Nous disons mille fois : « Maurice sera
arrivé sans rhume, sans froid, sans pluie. » Voilà, mon ami, comme
nous pensons à toi, comme tout nous y fait penser.
Le 1er février. — Jour nébuleux, sombre, triste au dehors et au
dedans. Je m’ennuie plus que de coutume, et comme je ne veux pas
m’ennuyer, j’ai pris la couture pour tuer cela à coups d’aiguille ; mais
le vilain serpent remue encore, quoique je lui aie coupé tête et
queue, c’est-à-dire tranché la paresse et les molles pensées. Le
cœur s’affaiblit sur ces impressions de tristesse, et cela fait mal. Oh !
si je savais la musique ! On dit que c’est si bon, si doux pour les
malaises de l’âme.
Le 2 (vendredi). — Voici huit jours que tu es parti, à la même

heure. Je vais passer par le chemin où nous nous sommes quittés.
C’est la Chandeleur, je vais à la messe avec mon cierge.
Nous arrivons d’Andillac avec une lettre de Félicité ; il y en avait
une pour toi de Caroline, que j’ai renvoyée en y glissant un mot pour
la chère sœur. Je puis bien l’appeler ainsi, au point où nous en
sommes ; ce n’est qu’anticiper sur quelques mois, j’espère. Qui sait
cependant ? J’ai toujours le cœur en crainte sur cette affaire et sur
toi, mauvais artisan de bonheur. Je crains que tu n’achèves pas
celui-là, que tu laisses là le dernier anneau de cette chaîne qui
t’unirait pour toujours… Toujours me semble effrayant pour toi, aigle
indépendant, vagabond. Comment te fixer dans ton aire ?…
Ce chapitre n’est pas le seul. Dieu sait ceux que je trouve en toi,
qui me déplaisent, qui m’attristent. Si du cœur nous passons à
l’âme, oh ! c’est là, c’est là !… Mais que sert de dire et d’observer et
de se plaindre ? Je ne me sens pas assez sainte pour te convertir ni
assez forte pour t’entraîner. Dieu seul peut faire cela. Je l’en prie
bien, car mon bonheur y est attaché. Tu ne le conçois pas peut-être,
tu ne vois pas avec ton œil philosophique les larmes d’un œil
chrétien qui pleure une âme qui se perd, une âme qu’on aime tant,
une âme de frère, sœur de la vôtre. Tout cela fait qu’on se lamente
comme Jérémie.
Voilà cette journée qui finit avec de la neige. Je suis heureuse de
te savoir arrivé à présent que le froid revient. Pourvu que tu ne
prennes pas mal dans tes courses, que ta poitrine aille bien, que M.
d’A… ne te fasse pas trop veiller en te racontant ses ennuis. Mille
soucis me viennent, m’attristent, mille pensées me viennent et
tombent à flocons sur Paris.
J’ai trouvé dans des chiffons de papier ma première poésie, je la
mets là. J’y mets tout ce que je rencontre, que je te ferais voir si tu
étais ici. Que tu n’y sois plus, ce me semble impossible ; je me dis
que tu vas revenir, et cependant tu es bien loin, et tes souliers, ces
deux pieds vides que tu as dans ta chambre, ne bougent pas. Je les
regarde, je les aime presque autant que ce petit soulier rose que tu
me lisais l’autre jour dans Hugo. Le cœur se fourre partout, dans un
soulier, dans une fiole ; on dirait qu’il est bien bête. Ne le dis-tu pas ?
Le 3. — J’ai commencé ma journée par me garnir une quenouille

bien ronde, bien bombée, bien coquette avec son nœud de ruban.
Là, je vais filer avec un petit fuseau. Il faut varier travail et
distractions ; lasse du bas, je prends l’aiguille, puis la quenouille,
puis un livre. Ainsi le temps passe et nous emporte sur sa croupe.
Éran vient d’arriver. Il me tardait de le voir, de savoir quel jour tu
étais parti de Gaillac. C’est donc vendredi, le même jour que d’ici.
Ce fut un vendredi aussi que tu partis pour la Bretagne. Ce jour n’est
pas heureux, maman mourut un vendredi, et d’autres événements
tristes que j’ai remarqués. Je ne sais si l’on doit croire à cette fatalité
des jours.
Le 4. — Il en est d’heureux, le dimanche, souvent le dimanche.

Des lettres au sortir de la messe, une des tiennes de Bordeaux,
enfin de tes nouvelles, de ton écriture. Quand en aurai-je d’autres de
Paris ? Comme le cœur est ambitieux ! Ce matin, transporté de ce
que je tiens ; maintenant ce n’est pas assez. Je t’ai renvoyé une
lettre de M… bien fâchée de n’avoir pas le temps d’y glisser un mot
pour toi. Ce mot est ici, tu le trouveras bien tard. Qui sait quand te
viendra ce petit cahier ? si ce sera lui ou moi que tu verras le
premier ? J’aimerais que ce fût moi.
Je te quitte avec un regret, un secret que je ne puis pas te dire
parce qu’il n’est pas mien. Peut-être quelque jour pourrai-je en
parler. Ça tiendrait grande place sur ce papier, mon confident, si ce
n’était pas d’abord écrit sous le scellé dans mon cœur.
Le 5. — Je n’ai pas le temps d’écrire.
Le 6. — Écrit beaucoup, mais loin d’ici, pas pour ici. C’est

dommage, car j’aurais rempli bien des feuilles de ce qui me vient du
cœur aujourd’hui. Tu aimes cela. Augustine est venue passer la
journée, n’ayant personne au presbytère. Cette petite qui m’amuse
ne m’a pas amusée et m’aura trouvé le front sévère avec l’air
préoccupé. J’ai pris ma quenouille pour distraction ; mais, tout en
filant, mon esprit filait et dévidait et retournait joliment son fuseau. Je
n’étais pas à ma quenouille, l’âme met en train cette machine de
corps et s’en va. Où va-t-elle ? Où était la mienne aujourd’hui ? Dieu
le sait, et toi aussi un peu ; tu sais que je ne te quitte guère, pas
même en lisant les beaux sermons que tu m’as fait connaître. J’y
vois tout plein de choses pour toi. Oh ! tu devrais bien continuer de
les lire.
Le 7. — Grand vent d’autan, grand orchestre à ma fenêtre.

J’aime assez cette harmonie qui sortait de tous les carreaux mal
joints, des contrevents mal fermés, de tous les trous des murailles,
avec des notes diverses et si bizarrement pointues qu’elles percent
les oreilles les plus dures. Drôle de musique du Cayla, que j’aime,
ai-je dit, parce que je n’en ai pas d’autre. Qui n’entend jamais rien,
écoute le bruit, quel qu’il soit.
Une visite, un ami, M. Limer. Presque en entrant : « Comment va
M. Maurice ? avez-vous de ses nouvelles ? » — « Demain, demain
sans doute. » Ces questions-là font plaisir, on voit que c’est le cœur
qui les fait. Ces bons prêtres, ils nous aiment ; nous n’avons pas de
meilleurs amis dans le pays. Bonsoir ; il faut bien s’occuper du
souper, et garnir le lit. Ce soir, Éran va occuper ta chambrette.
Demain matin, je viendrai voir si c’est toi, j’écouterai si tu me cries :
« Viens seule, viens ouvrir. » Hélas ! hélas ! que les choses passent
et que les souvenirs demeurent !
Le 8. — Oh ! des lettres, des lettres de Paris, une des tiennes !

Tu es arrivé bien portant, bien content, bien venu ! Dieu soit béni ! Je
n’ai que cela au cœur, je dis à tout le monde : « Maurice nous a écrit,
il a bien fait son voyage, a eu beau temps », et cent choses qui se
présentent.
Le beau jour, le beau temps, l’air doux, le ciel pur, il ne manque
que de voir des feuilles pour se croire au mois de mai. Cette riante
nature adoucit l’âme, la dispose à quelque bonheur. « Impossible, ai-
je pensé en me promenant ce matin, qu’il n’arrive pas quelque chose
de bon », et j’ai ta lettre. Je ne me suis pas trompée.
Ces lettres, cette écriture, comme cela fait plaisir ! comme le
cœur s’y jette et s’en nourrit ! Mais après on redevient triste, la joie
tombe, le regret remonte et fait trouver qu’une lettre, c’est bien peu,
à la place de quelqu’un. On n’est jamais content, toutes nos joies
sont tronquées. Dieu le veut, Dieu le veut ainsi et que le beau côté
qui manque ne se trouve qu’au ciel. Là le bonheur dans sa
plénitude, là la réunion éternelle. Cela devrait bien un peu faire envie
à certaines âmes, les faire vivre chrétiennement.
Écrit à Louise, à Marie.
9. — Anniversaire de la mort de notre grand’père. Nous avons

été à la messe ; au retour je t’ai écrit, j’écris encore, j’écrirais
toujours et partout, sur les briques de ta chambrette, sur les
semelles de tes souliers, que sais-je où la pensée va se poser ?
mais je l’apporte ici comme un oiseau sur sa branche, et elle chante.
Que te dirai-je ? la première chose venue : qu’en pareil temps, il y
eut deuil et joie au Cayla, mort et baptême, mort du grand’père,
naissance du petit-fils. Érembert alors vint au monde. C’est triste de
naître près d’un tombeau, mais ainsi nous faisons tous : la vie et la
mort se touchent. Que ne disent pas là-dessus les fossoyeurs de
Shakspeare dans je ne sais quel endroit ?
Je n’ai guère lu ton auteur, quoique je le trouve admirable,
comme M. Hugo ; mais ces génies ont des laideurs qui choquent
l’œil d’une femme. Je déteste de rencontrer ce que je ne veux pas
voir, ce qui me fait fermer bien des livres ; Notre-Dame de Paris, que
j’ai sous la main cent fois le jour, ce style, cette Esméralda, sa
chevrette, tant de jolies choses me tentent, me disent : « Lis, vois. »
Je regarde, je feuillette, mais des souillures par ci par là sur ces
pages m’arrêtent ; plus de lecture, et je me contente de regarder les
images. Je les aime encore comme un enfant ; de peu s’en faut que
je n’arrache celle de la galette au levain de maïs, de cette si jolie
mère et de ce si joli enfant. Nous l’avons admirée ensemble, ce qui
fait qu’elle me plaît bien.
Mais je suis bien loin de notre aïeul et des sérieuses pensées qui
commençaient sur la naissance et la mort. Revenons-y, j’aime cela
aussi, et j’ai tout juste, à livre ouvert, ce passage de Bossuet là-
dessus : « En effet, ne paroît-il pas un certain rapport entre les
langes et les draps de la sépulture ? On enveloppe presque de
même façon ceux qui naissent et ceux qui sont morts : un berceau a
quelque idée d’un sépulcre, et c’est la marque de notre mortalité
qu’on nous ensevelisse en naissant. »
Le 10. — Je reviens où j’en étais hier, à parler mort, vie et

Bossuet, ces trois grandes choses. Le petit de la femme de Jean
Roux est porté en ce moment au cimetière. Nous avons entendu la
cloche qui fait bien pleurer la pauvre mère et me donne des pensées
moitié douces, moitié sombres. On se dit que ces petits morts sont
heureux, qu’ils sont au ciel ; mais on pense aux grands, à ces âmes
d’hommes qui s’en vont devant Dieu avec tant de jours à compter, et
quels jours !… Quand leur vie s’ouvre, ce journal que Dieu tient,

Architecture and The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe 1St Edition Helen Hills Editor Full Chapter

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Architecture and the Politics of Gender

in Early Modern Europe 1st Edition

Architecture and the Politics of

Women and Gender in the

Titles in the series include:

The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan

Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe

‘Shall She Famish Then?’

Marie Madeleine Jodin 1741–1790

Architecture and the Politics of

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2003 Helen Hills

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 9780754603092 (hbk)

Typeset in Times New Roman by Bournemouth Colour Press, Parkstone, Poole.

Theorizing the Relationships between Architecture and Gender in

PART II PRODUCTION: ARCHITECTS AND PATRONS 23

1 A Noble Residence for a Female Regent: Margaret of Austria

PART III PRACTICE AND RESISTANCE 97

5 ‘Repaired by me to my exceeding great Cost and Charges’:

7 Spatial Discipline and its Limits: Nuns and the Built

Select Bibliography 193

1.1 Conrat Meit, Margaret of Austria as a widow, pear wood

ms. II 158, southern Netherlandish, early sixteenth century,

Treatise on Architecture, c. 1461–65, Book XI, fol. 79r.

5.6 Plan of Brough Castle, RCHME

the De Torres family stemma.

Notes on the Editor and Contributors

Helen Hills is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Manchester.

Dagmar Eichberger has taught Art History and Museum Studies in

xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jennifer G. Germann is currently Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in

Tanis Hinchcliffe is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the

Eunice D. Howe is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt is Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State

Sherry Lindquist received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Saundra Weddle received her Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and

Theorizing the Relationships between

considerable attention in recent years from sociologists, geographers and

Architectural history and gender

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 5

they are not without far-reaching cultural consequences. These consequences

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 7

womanhood, but were instead active shapers of their lives, capable of

Scholars initially concentrated on modern architecture to frame this

others look at the overlap, or even indistinguishability, between the

It is above all in the built environment, much more than in figurative

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 9

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 11

only by recourse, to a greater or lesser degree, to the notion of ‘genius’, by

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 13

The organization of this book

Access to a public space crucially allowed women to put on a public face.

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 15

design of such buildings, privileging luxury, even sensuality, was masked

including social inferiority, within Creation. Active participation in religious

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 17

and at the same time spirituality became particularly sexualized. Thus

ARCHITECTURE AND GENDER 19