Review of Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art by Merve Emre

Merve Emre’s review of my book, Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art: The Witches and Femmes Fatales of Hans Baldung Grien (Bloomsbury, 2020) is only one paragraph, so I can post the entire thing here, as featured in the ‘Cyberflâneur’ section of ‘The Syllabus,’ in which, “Our trusted guides — artists, intellectuals, academics, journalists, and more — use our research infrastructure to uncover fascinating pieces related to their practice” ~

The images alone would be enough to recommend Yvonne Owens’s study of Hans Baldung Grien, famous for his fleshly images of witches with names like “the poison maiden” and “the venomous virgin.” Yet Owens’s patient feminist analysis also shows how Grien exploited medical and philosophical notions of female anatomy as “toxic” and “dangerously beguiling.” Far from participating in the humanist intellectual conversations of his time, his woodcuts and paintings depicted how “a monstrous female sexuality victimized men and brought them low.”