Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe

What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artist’s sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter is mainstream?

We know little about the identities and personalities of most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends that we ...