2025 Theses Doctoral

Disciplinary Writing, Defiant Speech: The Politics of Textual Discourse in Northern Renaissance Art

McCann, Natalie

This dissertation examines the visual representation of writing as it pertains to class in northern Renaissance art. I focus on the social significance of oil paintings of the literate bourgeoisie and the illiterate peasantry, exposing how images of writing both reflected and participated in the negotiation of power relations during the long sixteenth century.

I maintain that literacy provided members of the emergent bourgeoisie with a fragile form of cultural capital that allowed them to associate themselves with the reigning Habsburg monarchs and, simultaneously, distance themselves from their peasant roots. The paintings examined in this dissertation reveal that upwardly mobile professionals are generally depicted as the producers of writing in works of art, while the lower classes are portrayed as the subjects or victims of their textual discourse. In this context, peasants function as iconographic foils that provide occasions for members of higher social echelons to perform their own class status through disciplinary acts of writing.

I explore how paintings of writing participated in a kind of commodity fetishism, whereby instruments of bureaucratic control—contracts, records, and ledgers—were transformed into composed objects for bourgeois consumption. In this sense, the paintings not only reflect the power of writing but also mystify it, ultimately making it appear natural, benign, and even pleasurable while obscuring the systems of domination behind it. But by shifting the focus to the peasantry, I reveal that works of art also provide indications of how those who were wholly or partially illiterate could make incursions into the sphere of letters—or find a ready means of resistance to elitist textual hegemony through subversive speech.