Picturing spaces, considering places

Some notes on medieval religious women within historiographic turns

Abstract

In order to study narratives outside a History of Art with a positivist approach, as is the case of the medieval female monastic phenomenon, the specialised literature has been reformulating for decades a historiography of turns -such as the spatial or the material turn-, which allows the linear sequentiality of traditional historical discourse to transcend in favour of a hypertextual conception of the past. Moreover, the progressive specialisation of technological instruments has emerged on the academic scene as an alternative medium for the management, transference and research of these ruins, traces, and echoes of the Hispanic conventual heritage. Following such paradigms, this paper seeks to propose some ideas about the historical consciousness of the contemporary individual according to the parameters of philosophical hermeneutics and cultural history of art, for the particular context of the digitisation of heritage in the field of art and female religiosity in the Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula. This case study reveals a series of assimilations -and also digressions- developed between virtual heritage and the current historiography of turn; in response to the Information Society from which researchers, as historical beings, approach the discourses on the Middle Ages.