My Book Is Now Listed Among Bloomsbury’s ‘Feminist Perspectives,’ Publications on Art

Bloomsbury is now advertising my book among its feminist art critique and feminist art history titles: https://email.bloomsburynews.com/q/1eXKTRzYWdcCtV5ZwQan1tx/wv

‘Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art, ‘ by Yvonne Owens

‘Hans Baldung Grien’s paintings, drawings and prints offer some of the most iconic early modern depictions of witches, crones and “poison maids.” In her groundbreaking study of these images, Yvonne Owens reconstructs the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany to show how classical and medieval ideas about medicine and natural philosophy shaped perceptions of the female body.’

From the publisher’s website:

Description

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, ‘death and the maiden’ and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body.

Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural ‘feminine defect,’ a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung’s iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword by Joseph Leo Koerner
Introduction: Baldung’s Polluted Witches, Poison Maids, Basilisks and Crones
1. The Abject Erotic Feminine in Baldung
2. The World of Baldung’s 1510 Witches’ Sabbath
3. Baldung’s ‘Jewish’ Witches
4. Baldung and the Witch Doctors
5. Blood, Visions, Witch Women and Saints
6. Baldung and the Morality of Vision
7. Classical Reception, Toxic Femininity and Hippomanes
8. Humanist Humour in Baldung
9. Erudite Obscenities and Pious Pornography
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index

Author Biography

Yvonne Owens writes art history, emotional histories, philosophy of art, and creative critical studies. Her publications to date have mainly focused on representations of women and the gendering of evil “defect” in classical humanist discourses, cross-referencing these figures to historical art, theology, literature, and the sciences. She also writes cultural criticism, exploring contemporary post-humanist discourses in art, literature and new media. She is currently exploring the intersections among science, the sacred and the arts.