Elizabeth L'Estrange

I have a BA in English Language and Literature (European), an MA in Medieval Studies, and a PhD in History of Art from the University of Leeds. Before joining the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham in 2011, I was based at the University of Liège in Belgium, where I held post-doctoral fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust (2004-2006) and the Fonds national de recherche scientifique (2007-2010). In 2011, I spent three months in Rome as a recipient of a research grant from the Fondation Darchis.

I have previously received grants from the Medieval Academy of America, the Newberry Library, Chicago, the Scouloudi Foundation (IHR), and the British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund. From September 2017 to January 2018, I was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris where I worked on a chapter of my new book on Anne de Graville.

My research focuses on the art and culture of the medieval and early modern periods (c. 1350-1600) with a particular emphasis on illuminated manuscripts, book history, and on questions of gender in visual culture. In 2008 I published Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty and Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages (MUP, 2008) which won the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s First Book Prize in 2010. This study of maternal imagery in books of hours owned by aristocratic women and its relationship to the material culture of childbearing has led to other articles on the patronage of women at the French court, including Anne of Brittany, Anne of France, and Anne de Graville. In Holy Motherhood and in other articles on deschi da parto (birth trays) and carved ivory objects, I have also drawn on contemporary gender studies to inform my methodological approaches to assessing women’s agency as viewers.

My second monograph was published in April 2023 and is the first book-length study of Anne de Graville (c. 1490-1540), a writer in the circle of the French court who amassed an impressive personal library. She also wrote the Beau roman, a rewriting of Boccaccio’s Teseida, and the Rondeaux, a reworking of  Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy, for Queen Claude of France and Louise of Savoy respectively. In the book I reconstruct Anne’s library to assess the kinds of books she was reading and commissioning and analyse how her own works engaged with those in her library as well as contributing to literary debate at the French court, notably the querelle des femmes.

This research has been funded by the British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund grant (2013) and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris (2017-18).

In 2023 I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2023-25) to work on preparing a critical edition and translation of the works of Anne de Graville with Joan E. McRae of Middle Tennessee State University..

I also co-edited three collections of essays: Re-Presenting Medieval Genders and Sexualities: Construction, Transformation (Ashgate, 2011) with Alison More, Le mécénat féminin en France et en Bourgogne, XIVe-XVIe (a special issue of Le Moyen Age journal, 2011) with Laure Fagnart, and Mary of Burgundy: ‘Persona’, Reign, and Legacy of a Late Medieval Duchess (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021)

In 2018 I was awarded a ‘special commendation’ by the CARMEN medieval network in their annual Project Prize for my entry on ‘Reassessing Women and the Book, c. 800-1600’. This project seeks to reassess the field of women’s book ownership in the middle ages since the publication of Susan Groag Bell’s 1982 article, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’ (Signs, 7). The project has a twitter handle @womenandthebook and a website www.womenandthebook.wordpress.com where an online bibliography provides a first step in showcasing research in fields outside the traditional Anglo-French axis.