Written by Agathe Bonnin and Léon Rochard
A drawing attributed to Jacques Callot presented by Patricia Truffin during our visit to the prints and drawings department. It works both as an allegory of old age and the winter and as an artistically expressive representation of peasantry, which Callot printed as part of his series of “gueux”.
The summer school “A Place in Time: A Summer School for the Study of Women and Temporalities in Early Modern Europe”, organised by Léon Rochard (Université de Lille and member of the project) and Agathe Bonnin (CY Cergy Paris Université and member of project AGENART) as part of the Sinergia project “Capturing the Present in Northwestern Europe (1348–1648)”, took place between 6 and 8 July 2026. The event was co-organised with and hosted by HARTIS (Université de Lille), as well as the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, with the support of a grant from the French Institut du Genre. The aim of this summer school was to help participants develop an interdisciplinary reflection at the intersection of gender and time in the early modern period. The papers presented at this event and subsequent discussions will be published online in early 2027 on the project website, along with a profile for each participant.
6 July 2026
The knife, clearly emphasised in the composition and which we are tempted to grab, catches the viewer’s gaze with the artist’s signature, engraved into the handle. As Annelies Verellen has shown, it looks like wedding knives traditionally gifted to women of that time. Here, marital status cannot be dissociated from the self-image that Clara Peeters is trying to build as an artist.
The first day began with a general introduction presented by Agathe Bonnin and Léon Rochard. They exposed the main challenges and questions raised by research on gender and temporality in the early modern period and presented several relevant methodological frameworks to be discussed among participants. Specific case studies open the path to debates about the similitudes and differences between the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch contexts.
After discussing methodological questions that were more specific to each participant, such as the applicability of contemporary concepts and frameworks stemming from gender studies, queer theory, or decolonial studies to the early modern context, we listened to papers presented by Annelies Verellen (doctoral student, McGill University, Montréal), Femke Valkhoff (doctoral student, Utrecht University), and Chenyang Ma (masters student, KU Leuven). Annelies Verellen’s paper was titled “Domina Domus: The Knife as a Moral Compass and Promotional Tool for the Woman Artist”. She presented the wedding knife integrated by Clara Peeters in some of her still-life paintings as a tool to establish her artistic authority, her status as a woman and a wife – implying certain ways of inhabiting time – but also as a manner of inscribing herself in a legacy of artists signing their work. Femke Valkhoff then exposed part of her doctoral research with a presentation entitled “Lucretia Christina van Bochoven. Intellectual Self-development and Lifelong Learning”. Comparing Lucretia Christina van Bochoven’s letters and poems, she explored both the temporality and spatiality of the Bochoven daughters’ education, as well as the ways in which learning carried on, under different modes, at other stages of her life, in particular during her incarceration. Lastly, Chenyang Ma presented a paper motivated by her masters research, “Love Magic and the Entangled World Behind its Practice in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico”. She introduced the other participants and invited speakers to the methodological questions she was facing at this stage of her research, in particular the difficulty of studying triply marginalised individuals – on account of their place within the colonial system, their social status, and gender – from whom no first-person testimonies have been preserved.
Laura Bass, professor at Brown University, then gave a keynote presentation on temporality in the life of Estefanía de la Encarnación, a Spanish nun as well as a painter and a writer. Her conference invoked both literary theory on the temporality of autobiography and recent research on religious women’s life under the seventeenth-century Spanish Monarchy, offering rich methodological possibilities. The first day ended on a collective palaeography workshop on two seventeenth-century documents, in Dutch and in Spanish. Participants were able to hone their deciphering skills as well as their critical approach of different types of primary sources as tools to understand women’s temporalities in the early modern period.
7 July 2026
In her 2026 paper, Hanneke Grootenboer suggested a strong proximity between certain representations of women’s textile work and images of thinkers and philosophers in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. She showed that textile work could be perceived by the women who practiced it as a time of intellectual reflexion.
On the second day, we listened to papers presented by Jasper Martens (doctoral student, University of California, Santa Barbara), Elie Pretot (doctoral student, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès), and Oana Stan (independent researcher, founder of the Women of Haarlem project).
In his paper titled “Playing with Time: Identity and Queer Temporality in Seventeenth-Century Portrait Miniatures with Mica Overlays”, Jasper Martens introduced us to his research on a corpus of miniature portraits on which accessories, costumes, décors, as well as characters painted on transparent layers could be superposed. He offered an analysis of these objects as material technologies that made it possible to explore and transform one’s identity (socially, geographically, or from a gendered point of view), discussing the different ways in which this game could involve the user’s relationship to time. Elie Pretot then proposed a reflection titled “Staging the Old Witch in 16th-century Drama. Challenges and Implications”. Centred on the beginning of the period on which her research focuses, this paper questioned the methods and sources available to understand the archetype of the old witch in the theatre in connection with the visual culture of the time. Lastly, Oana Stan presented the early stages of her current research project, “Synecdoche, Rubens. Olfaction, Food, and the Performance of Wealth in a Patricipan Home”. She explained her choice of case study and introduced her project of researching the kitchen as a place that materially and sensorially structured gendered temporalities in an artist’s workplace.
Catherine Powell-Warren, assistant professor at KU Leuven, concluded the morning talks with a keynote entitled “Through the Lens of Time: Women, Art, and Praxis”, in which she contextualised the practice of artists such as Maria Sibylla Merian, Rachel and Anna Ruysch, as well as Anna Maria Janssenss, in relation with the gendered temporalities in which they were entangled (their marriage, pregnancies, chores, and their children’s education and artistic training). This made it possible to understand how their workshop functioned or what their role was in the family enterprise, but also to profoundly question traditional premises in art-historical research, such as what falls under the concepts of “artist” or “creation”.
In the afternoon were held two different reading workshops, chaired respectively by Hanneke Grootenboer (Professor at the University of Amsterdam) and Saskia Beranek (Associate professor at Illinois State University). Hanneke Grootenboer’s reading workshop consisted in a methodological discussion based on the participants’ research in relation to her paper “Sewing as a Form of Thinking: The Needle Versus the Pen in the Dutch Republic” (The Art Bulletin, Feb. 2026). This dialogue highlighted the importance of temporality in the querelle des femmes and the necessity to account for the agency of female viewers towards artworks commonly interpreted as aiming to discipline how they use their time, to instead explore more diverse modes of consumption. Saskia Beranek then discussed her book published a few months before by Routledge, The Cultural Work of the Early Modern Dutch Portrait. Amalia van Solms and the Shape of the Self in European Art, where she explores Amalia van Solms’s spatial and temporal inscription in the history of Dutch power, through an analysis of the spatial distribution of her palace and its décor. She presented her doctoral research from which her book derives, as well as the long process of turning it into a publication, opening a reflexion on the paradigmatic changes brought about by gender studies in the past few decades.
8 July 2026
Erasmus Quellinus’s interpretation of Jesus visiting Martha and Mary perfectly encapsulates early modern debates about the temporal incentives weighing on women, through the diagonal that oppose time spent on chores (Martha) and time spent on reflecting about Jesus’s teachings.
The third and final day of the summer school took place at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, where participants were invited to present research on a series of objects selected by the organisers, in collaboration with the curatorial team. In the morning, we visited the paintings collection, following a route elaborated with Donatienne Dujardin. In the afternoon, we were welcomed to the department of prints and drawings by Patricia Truffin, to study a series of works chosen with the help of Cordélia Hattori. We finished the day in the collection of medals, about which we had previously exchanged with François Becuwe. Other than the participants’ presentations on the selected corpus, Léon Rochard organised a method-oriented workshop around one of the medals on view, commissioned for Margaret of Parma in 1567, about which he has already published on this website.
Our warmest thanks go to the participants and invited speakers for the quality of our exchanges, as well as Aurélie Gyselinck, Thibaut Foutreyn, Christine Aubry, and the Institut du Genre for their support. Stay tuned for the publication!
Programme
About the organisers
Agathe Bonnin (she/her) is a doctor of Art History and Spanish Studies from Cergy Paris Université and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her doctoral research focused on women’s contribution to and uses of the visual and material culture surrounding the eucharist at the royal court of the Hispanic Monarchy during the 17th century. Now a postdoctoral researcher at ERC project JestArt, she studies representations of bodies deemed “extraordinary” in 17th century European courts, to better understand the production and uses of these images in the early modern era, and their place in the contemporary art historiography and cultural canon – with a focus on gender.
Léon Rochard (he/they) is a postdoctoral researcher within the project. His profile is available on the project website.
