Professor of History, Hampshire College, jsperling@hampshire.edu

Visiting Scholar of History, Amherst College, jsperling@amherst.edu

Teaching Interests:

I teach a variety of courses on the history of medieval and early modern Europe (ca. 1000-1800), with a special interest in Renaissance and Baroque visual culture; gender, family and the law in the wider Mediterranean; body history; Catholicism; and late medieval and early modern Ethiopian History. I integrate bodies of knowledge from different disciplines such as art history, religious history, social and cultural history, the history of medicine, legal history, queer studies, and postcolonial studies. Recent courses include “Renaissance Bodies;” “Women’s Writing, Art, and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (ca. 1100-1800);” “The Virgin Mary;” “Law, Family, and Sexuality in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300-1800);” “Queering the Renaissance;” “Venice, Perfect City;” “Nuns, Saints, and Mystics;” “Decolonial and Colonial Archives: Historical Research Methods;” in addition to survey courses on Medieval and Renaissance history.

Current and Past Research Interests:

My current research takes me to Ethiopia, where I investigate the Nägärä Maryam or Story of Mary, a unique apocryphon that tells the story of the Holy Family’s peregrinations and persecution by Herod in a new manner. Focus of my analysis is an illuminated deluxe manuscript from 1721-30, a prime example of the Second Gondar Style, catalogued at the British Library as Or. 603. Prior to this, I have published on the fifteenth-century cult of the Nursing Virgin and its iconography in book art and painted wooden panels. Also, I am co-editing a volume entitled The Virgin’s Milk: On the Fluidity of Images and the Production of Divine Presence, with Mati Meyer and Vibeke Olson (forthcoming with Brepols). 

My monograph Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture investigates the popularity of the iconography of Pero and Cimon, or the daughter-who-breastfed-her-father-(or-mother)-in-prison. Drawing on recent concepts in visual culture and queer studies, I examine these highly sexualized representations as subversive of early modern patriarchal structures. Additionally, I have published articles on the Nursing Virgin, Venus lactans, and breastfeeding Charity. My investigations of images of the eroticized (and queer) maternal body builds on my prior work on marriage and women’s property rights in Portugal and the wider Mediterranean as well as Venetian convent culture. All of my work has the aim to reveal and deconstruct the workings of early modern patriarchies.

Selected Publications:

Books:

Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture (transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2016; open source: De Gruyter, 2016)

Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, and Practices (edited volume) (Ashgate Press, 2013).

Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (1300-1800); co-edited with Shona K. Wray; (Routledge, 2010).

 Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Articles:

“Venus Lactans – Venus Pudica: Archaeology of a Gesture,” Early Modern Women 19,2 (2025): 249-82.https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/Z5CUBD7TI3XNGTWWJZFE/full?redirectUri=/doi/epdf/10.1086/730156

“Icons of the Nursing Virgin in Fifteenth-Century Ethiopia,” The Art Bulletin 106,2 (2024): 92-118.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043079.2024.2296278

“Die Stillende Jungfrau in der äthiopischen Buchmalerei: Bemerkungen zu Stil, Medium, Gegenwärtigkeit und (Un-)Mittelbarkeit,” Convivium, XI,1, special issue: The Arts of Medieval Northern Africa, eds. Nathan Dennis and Ravinder Binning (2024): 150-67.https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503608297-1

“Caravaggios Sieben Werke der Barmherzigkeit und die stillende Tochter als Allegorie der Caritas,” Kunst und Kirche 3 (2022): 22-27.

“The Anachronic Madonna Lactans: Impersonations of the Nursing Virgin by Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie, and Vanessa Beecroft,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 84 (2021): 408-40.https://www.deutscherkunstverlag.de/article/10.1515/ZKG-2021-3005?backButtonTitle=Volume%2084%20(2021):%20Issue%203%20(September%202021)

“Nurse, Nursing,” with Mati Meyer, in: Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception Online, eds. Constance M. Furey et al., (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2010-).https://www.degruyter.com/database/EBR/entry/key_7a3ef899-0f22-4dda-890c-a890db1db086/html

“Milk and Miracles: Heteroglossia and Dissent in Venetian Art after the Council of Trent,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 51:2 (2021): 285-320.https://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-abstract/51/2/285/173425/Milk-and-Miracles-Heteroglossia-and-Dissent-in?redirectedFrom=fulltext

“Observing the Observant Self: Female Reader Portraits and the Lactating Madonna in Illuminated Prayer Books (1450-1566),” in: Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent: Naked, Veiled – Vilified, Worshiped, eds. Xenia von Tippelskirch and Elisabeth Fischer (Routledge, forthcoming 2021).

“Feminist, Queer, Subversive: Appropriations of Roman Charity/ΦΕΜΙΝΙΣΤΙΚΕΣ, ΑΛΛΌΚΌΤΕΣ, ΑΝΑΤΡΕΠΤΙΚΕΣ: Όικειοποιήσεις της Ρωμαϊκής ευσπλαχνίας” in: 59 TIFF (Thessaloniki International Film Festival) Non Catalog / 59 ΦΚΘ Α ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ (Thessaloniki, 2018), 52-65.

“The Family Economy: A Comparative Perspective on Legitimate Marriage, the Dispossession of Mothers, and the Displacement of Children” in: The Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age, ed. Joanne M. Ferraro (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 83-99.

“A Feminist Picture Atlas: Images of Lactation in Medieval and Early Modern Art,”Early Modern Women, vol. 13, no. 1 (2018), 117-31.

“Squeezing, Squirting, Spilling Milk: The Lactation of Saint Bernard and the Flemish Madonna Lactans (ca. 1430-1530),” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 3 (2018), 868-918.https://www-cambridge-org.amherst.idm.oclc.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0034433800136565

“Same-Sex Lactations in European Art and Literature (ca. 1300-1800): Allegory, Melancholy, Loss,” in: Cultural Representations of Breastfeeding, eds. Ann Marie A. Short, Abigail L. Palko, and Dionne Irving (Demeter Press, 2018, 50-69).

“Caritas Romana: zu einem verlorengegangenen Gemälde Angelika Kauffmanns,” in: Künstlerinnen der Vormoderne. Sammelband zum 4. Kunsthistorischen Forum Irsee, eds. Andreas Tacke and Birgit Ulrike Münch (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2017), 170-82.

“Address, Desire, Lactation: On some Gender-bending Images of the Virgin and Child by Jan Gossaert,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch LXXVI (2015): 49-77.

“Wet-Nurses, Midwives, and the Virgin Mary in Tintoretto’s The Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1563)” in: Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices, ed. Jutta Sperling (Ashgate Press, 2013), pp. 235-54.

“Charity’s Nudity and the Veil of Allegory,” in: Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, (Milan, Libraria Officina, and Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 520-26.

“The Economics and Politics of Marriage,” in: The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Allyson Poska, Katherine McIver, Jane Couchman, eds., (Ashgate Press, 2013), pp. 213-33.

“Las Casas and His Amerindian Nurse: Tropes of Lactation in the French Colonial Imaginary (ca. 1770-1810),” Gender & History, 23,1 (2011): 47-71.

“‘Divenni madre e figlia di mio padre.’ Queer Lactations in Renaissance and Baroque Art,” in: Sex Acts: Practice, Performance, Perversion and Punishment in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Allison Levy, (Ashgate, 2010), pp. 165-180.

[Italian translation: “‘Divenni madre e figlio di mio padre’: allattamenti strani ed incestuosi nell’arte rinascimentale e barocca,” in: Sesso nel Rinascimento. Pratica, performance, perversione e punizione nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Allison Levy, (Florence, Casa Editrice delle Lettere, 2009), pp. 171-185.]

“Marriage, Kinship, Property in Portuguese Testaments (1649-50),” in: Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (1300-1800), co-edited with Shona Kelly Wray (Routledge, 2010), pp. 158-174.

“Allegories of Charity and the Practice of Poor Relief at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, vol. LXX (2009): 119-146.

“Dowry or Inheritance? Kinship, Property, and Women’s Agency in Lisbon, Venice, Florence (1572)“, Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 11 no. 3 (2007): 197-238.

“Women’s Property Rights in Portugal under Dom João I (1385-1433). A Comparison with Renaissance Italy,” Portuguese Studies Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (2005): 1-33.

“Marriage at the Time of the Council of Trent (1560-70): Clandestine Marriages, Kinship Prohibitions, and Dowry Exchange in European Comparison,” Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 8, no. 1-2 (2004): 67-108.

“The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41, no. 1 (1999): 3-32.