Lay Bridegrooms of a Female Christ in Two 15th-Century French Miniatures

Conference Theme: Travel and Exploration, marking the 550th anniversary of the death of prince Henry ‘The Navigator’Session 1524: Constructing Religious and Secular Masculinities: Paper 1524-aComplex issues of gender and identity are raised when the concept of a mystic marriage with Christ is applied to men. In his Horologium Sapientiae, the German mystic Henry Suso describes a marriage to Wisdom, Christ's female alter ego. The few visual depictions of this event present a Dominican monk as Wisdom's bridegroom. Even rarer are visual images of laymen in such a marriage. Two miniatures in French copies of this book depict Christ in his female form wedding the book's patron, in one case Charles VIII, king of France; in the other, his cousin Charles d'Angoulême. This paper will examine these unusual images, their likely source, and their implications