Elizabeth L’Estrange’s book, Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2008) was awarded the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s First Book Prize, 2010.
The study explores maternal and childbearing imagery in Books of Hours and its relationship to devotional and material culture in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. In particular it analyses how lay, aristocratic women concerned with the conception of male heirs responded to this imagery as a way of managing their social and gender roles. The book will be reissued in paperback in Spring 2012.