Why have psychoanalytic approaches to interpreting medieval art long been resisted? For decades many art historians have explored how Sigmund Freud’s ideas can enhance the readings of objects, yet medievalists have considered psychoanalytic theories too remote in time and philosophy from their subject. Psychoanalysis seems too concerned with individual agency to be adapted for use in studying artists and patrons whose identities have largely been lost over time. Madeline H. Caviness claims to be “the first to attempt an articulation of current [psychoanalytic] theories in play with feminist analyses of medieval works of art” (229). The medieval field would benefit from an open discussion of the obstacles to theory that Caviness endeavors to overcome, though disappointingly these impediments often remain only implicit in her discussion. Nevertheless, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy addresses important topics about theory, art, and methodology that are relevant to the art historian as well as to the theoretician.

Caviness’s theoretical examination considers representations of women who have “sight” as well as those who are seen as “spectacle,” namely through the “male gaze.” Her secondary goal is to break down the barriers between theory and medieval art by proving that the application of psychoanalysis to medieval objects is not anachronistic. She implies that art historians should understand, as she has (see Caviness, Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine: Ornatus Elegantiae, Varietate Stupendes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990]; Caviness, “Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,” Speculum 68 (1993): 333–62), that theory can enhance the examination of art and its history.

Caviness shapes her discussion by referring to feminist and psychoanalytic theories and to contemporary art and film. She uses these tools to analyze the “scopic economies”—or “the hegemonies created and maintained by looking” (22)—in a group of medieval case studies. She presents her conceptual foundation in the prelude. Pointing to the example of the Virgin Mary, the quintessential object of the gaze in the Middle Ages, the author posits that “images [have] been used to construct the female body as an object of view” (15). Yet images, she notes, have also been used, especially by modern women artists, to arrest the objectification of the female.

The book’s introduction then maps the theoretical framework of its three chapters. Caviness explains her approach to the object as “triangulation” (30–31). The artwork is at the triangle’s apex, illuminated by a direct beam from the historical perspective and by a more oblique beam from modern and postmodern theories. Responding to feminist interpretations of psychoanalytic theories and applying a Marxist concern with social hegemonies, she analyzes how looking has had associations of power and sexuality. She considers that throughout history women have been disallowed the right to look. Central to the discussion is Laura Mulvey’s theory, which borrows from Freud and Jacques Lacan, that women are subject to the “male gaze” (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 [autumn 1975]: 6–18). Mulvey proposed that the male movie viewer seeing a woman’s sexual difference sustains a threat of castration; his reaction is either to devaluate or overvaluate the woman. Caviness discusses other theorists (such as Otto Fenichel, Linda Williams, and Kaja Silverman) to illustrate her problems with Mulvey’s identification of the male’s role as aggressive and the female’s role as passive. To shed light on women’s fragmented self-representation, the author refers to Lacan, who theorizes that women might prefer to see their bodies in bits before they experience them as whole in the mirror phase. To express how fragmentation is a useful alternative for the unified body, Caviness borrows from Georges Bataille’s ideas on the sadoerotic and deeroticized body and from Julia Kristeva’s concepts of the abject.

Throughout the book, Caviness manipulates theory and art-historical examples to illuminate one another and to influence the reader’s understanding of her arguments. In chapter 1, for instance, she describes how medieval art depicts Lot’s wife turning to salt when she looks at Sodom’s ruin. In psychoanalytic terms, the author claims that the wife is both scopophiliac (a compulsive viewer) and spectacle (as the strange pillar of salt). Lot’s wife appropriates the male gaze, but the gaze is then turned back on her as she is punished. Caviness also indicates that, to the medieval eye, the stare of a woman was a social transgression necessarily leading to punishment. The wife’s depiction as saltstone could bring fear and revulsion and display the working of divine power.

Chapter 1 proposes that the types of looks among Lot, his wife, his daughters, and the audience represent the same gazes considered by psychoanalysts. The author includes representations from the late-fourteenth-century Picture Bible from Padua (now in Rovigo) to Lucas van Leyden’s 1530 engraving of Lot and His Daughters to debunk Mulvey’s gendered concepts of the gaze. Caviness deftly moves from medieval to modern concepts of women and their viewing behavior to help us understand how Lot’s wife and her gaze were manipulated to cross (or retreat from) gender and power boundaries.

Chapter 2 applies modern concepts of sadism (pleasure in another’s pain), masochism (pleasure in one’s own pain), and eroticism (pleasure providing a sense of excitement) to depictions of female martyrs. Caviness presents the compelling argument that slasher films, in which women are regularly tortured and murdered, are modern analogues for the brutal punishments of Saints Agnes, Agatha, Barbara, Catherine of Alexandria, and Margaret of Antioch. The films reveal the evil behind the torture of women and reinforce the fear of female sexuality at the same time that they provide (erotic) stimulation to the viewer. The author points out how the images of Saint Agatha, whose breasts are cut off, render her as more masculine. This action instructs the viewer in the masochistic pleasure of suffering and enhances the sadoerotic impact of the scenes.

Caviness also posits that the style of images depicting saints’ tortures would have had an effect on the viewers’ sense of the erotic and on their sympathy toward the martyr. She proposes that “the Romanesque ciphers maintain a distance between signifier and signified, [while] the Gothic and Renaissance images progressively close the presentational gap” (119). This statement implies that artisans from the early to late Middle Ages (e.g. in the Pamplona Bible to the Ardagger Collegiate church stained glass) were working toward a more “realistic” style to elicit a greater sadoerotic response. To a traditional art historian, this sweeping proposition—contrary to her aim not to write a “history”—would be hard to accept. She seems to confine style to a reflection of a goal-driven progression. Notwithstanding this reductionist view, any scholar can now detect a variable sadoeroticism in the depictions of female saints’ tortures. The author’s psychoanalytic readings also enhance the interesting differences among the representations of female versus male martyrs.

In the final chapter, Caviness discusses how fragmentation allows body parts to be reframed for different types of exchange. The Romanesque Pamplona Bible displays the story of Saint Agatha. Her breasts are depicted as devotional objects that a scopophilic gaze cannot make sensual because they must facilitate the viewer’s communication with God. In a set of convincing comparisons, the author addresses other medieval representations of fragmentation (the Levite’s concubine in the Morgan Library’s thirteenth-century Picture Bible and the composite female figures in Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias manuscript), reliquaries of body parts, and contemporary art (by Kiki Smith, Judy Chicago, and Hannah Höch) to discuss how the fragmentation and “relic-izing” of the female body empower it. “Re-membered,” purified, and enriched in reliquaries, the female becomes an agent in society. She emasculates the male gaze by deeroticizing the female body.

Overall this book is exemplary in its clear presentation of psychoanalytic theory for the larger audience whom the author wishes to reach. For the book’s primary aim noted above, Caviness soundly demonstrates how her theoretical interests choose the art that interrogates gaze theory. A more traditional art historian may still find this method somewhat problematic, expecting instead an explanation of why the art demands a certain theory. Indeed some authors who have evaluated theory for a wider audience in the last decade have brought up the latter point: Michael Ann Holly and Jonathan Culler have discussed how a self-critical outlook and the object can drive theoretical applications (“Witnessing an Annunciation” and “Introduction: What’s the point?”, respectivelyin The Point of Theory: Practices of Culture Analysis, eds. Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer [New York: Continuum, 1994]).

In keeping with the secondary goal of Visualizing Women, Caviness remains critical of the theories she uses. She tries to test the truth claims of psychoanalysis in order to answer one of the main concerns of traditional art historians. Nevertheless, Caviness’s challenge of Mulvey’s discourse on the male gaze left some questions unanswered. Her analysis of Lot’s wife shows clearly how she tries to break with Mulvey’s gendered construct of the passive female as object of the gaze in her studies of medieval art. In chapter 3, however, the author minimizes an important difference between medieval and contemporary art. In the former, rarely were women the agents of the dismembering or re-membering of women as they are in the latter period (Hildegard von Bingen being an exception). So how were women in medieval times empowered by this process? She later suggests that modern female and male artists’ experiences can be enriched by the “vision of a de-eroticized and empowered female” (162). Yet what of medieval artisans? A few examples of known artisans of the Middle Ages exist, whom the author might use for comparison.

As a theoretical analysis that deals with medieval artworks, this book represents a valuable example. The oblique arm of Caviness’s triangulation is strong in its command of and focus on psychoanalytic applications. This book might be more persuasive to traditional art historians if the direct, contextual part of the triangulation were developed to the same extent for the chosen medieval artworks, mostly from northern Europe from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. The author discusses most images—commonly only one scene or segment from a manuscript or stained-glass window—with just one to two paragraphs. I would suggest that she could take greater advantage of the fascinating medieval objects that she introduces in order to develop more fully their theoretical issues. As Mieke Bal stated in her discussion of meticulous readings, close analysis can “make loud and clear statements…[while not overruling] the subtleties and nuances of the objects” ( “Close-ups and Mirrors: The Return of Close Reading, with a Difference,” in The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, ed. Mieke Bal [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 138)—or of the theories.

I agree with Culler in his introduction to The Point of Theory that theory is “what changes people’s views, [and] makes them conceive of their objects of study and their activity of studying differently” (Ball and Boer 1994, 13). Visualizing Women clearly shows the same understanding of theory. The book pushes forward new boundaries for the application of modern theories to the study of medieval objects. In particular, it is a noteworthy addition to feminist approaches to medieval art. Though not all art historians or theorists will agree with every point, Caviness’s efforts at juxtaposing theoretical and historical analyses represent an important challenge to traditions of intellectual inquiry in medieval studies. She reconsiders objects that are ensconced in the artistic canon with a stimulating new viewpoint. As the author herself states, “it is…the great value of this enterprise as an interdisciplinary and contested site that makes seeking agreement not only futile, but counterproductive” (229).