Details
ONLINE ART HISTORY COURSE
Saints, Sinners and Servants: Lives of Renaissance Women
Course Description:
The lives of Renaissance women were defined by certain roles: wife, mother, nun, courtesan, or servant. In this three-class course, we’ll examine how women fit into (or circumvented) societal expectations by looking at depictions of women in painting, sculpture, and archival documents. Saints, whose stories were told in books and displayed in paintings, served as models of behavior for both wives and nuns. On the other end of the spectrum were sinners: courtesans and prostitutes who were judged for illicit behavior yet frequented by men across social classes. Servants maintained homes, convents, and brothels in the cities, and their networks crossed classes and borders throughout Renaissance Italy.
Instructor:
Dr. Meghan Callahan has lived and worked in London since 2006. Like Rocky, she earned her Master’s degree in Art History from Syracuse University as a Florence Fellow. She has a Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University. Meghan is the Assistant Director for Teaching and Learning at Syracuse University London, where she has taught art history and history classes on Italian Art in London and the UK; Women and Art: London and UK; and Underground London.
She worked on the reinstallation of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and then with the sculpture dealer Patricia Wengraf. Meghan has published various articles and essays on the architectural patronage of the 16th-century mystic nun Sister Domenica da Paradiso, miraculous paintings in Renaissance Florence, and Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculpture.
Course Objectives:
- To understand the role of saints’ lives in secular and religious women’s lives
- To consider how courtesans and prostitutes worked in Renaissance society
- To investigate the role of servants in building networks
- To examine differences among upper and lower class women’s lives
- To use paintings, sculpture and archival documents to learn more about the life of women in the Renaissance
Virtual Classroom: Upon registration, participants will have full access to an online educational platform with videos of recordings, syllabus, readings and discussion forum. Each lecture lasts around 1 hour 15 minutes.
Credits: Certificate of Completion
Access: Students have lifetime and unlimited streaming access to the course content.
Supplemental Readings:
Readings are provided to students to enhance the course experience.
