Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index



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  • Title: Humility Presenting Hope with the Severed Head of Pride
  • Creator:
  • Description: This small ink illustration shows the virtues, Humility and Hope, in the form of two veiled women. Humility gestures toward the severed head of Pride in her hand, while Hope extends her hands in gestures of speech. This violent representation of two virtues’ victory over the vice of Pride adorns a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the Psychomachia by Prudentius, a fourth-century allegorical poem that portrays Christian virtues conquering paganism in the form of dramatic military battles. Anglo-Saxon versions of the Psychomachia were heavily illustrated with 86 scenes presenting struggles between virtues (Chastity, Temperance, Hope, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, and Humility) and their opposite vices. Catharine Karkov observes that the Anglo-Saxon virtues are dressed in contemporary women’s clothes, perhaps to modernize the narrative. Although earlier Anglo-Saxon manuscript illuminations of the Psychomachia depict the virtues as male soldiers and the vices as monsters, tenth-century representations mark a unique shift in gendering and instead show virtues as women and vices as men. Nonetheless, the female virtues display the same militant attitudes as their previous male counterparts.
  • Source: Wikimedia Commons
  • Rights: Public Domain
  • Subject (See Also): Allegory Hope Humility Pride Personification Psychomachia (Poem) Vices Virtues
  • Geographic Area: British Isles
  • Century: 10-11
  • Date: Last quarter of 10th century
  • Related Work: Discord Attempting to Strike Concord with a Spear: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Psychomachia_Concordia_Discordia.jpg; See 52 pages from the manuscript on the Europeana site: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?start=1&query=%22british+library%22++psychomachia&rows=24
  • Current Location: London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra C. viii 17r
  • Original Location: England, S.E., near Christ Church, Canterbury
  • Artistic Type (Category): Digital Images; Manuscript Illuminations
  • Artistic Type (Material/Technique): Vellum (Parchment); Paint
  • Donor:
  • Height/Width/Length(cm): 21.5/13.5/
  • Inscription:
  • Related Resources: Brown, Michelle P. Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age. University of Toronto Press, 2007. pp. 142-43; Karkov, Catherine E. "Broken Bodies and Singing Tongues: Gender and Voice in the Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 23 'Psychomachia,'" Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001): 115-36; Thomas H. Ohlgren. Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration: Photographs of Sixteen Manuscripts with Descriptions and Index. Medieval Institute Publications, 1992. p. 81.