JHI Undergraduate Fellow
A&S Art History and SMC Book & Media Studies (double major)
Supervisor: Emily Nacol, UTM Political Science
Jukka-Pekka Saraste Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Molly Bray is a student of Art History and Book & Media Studies entering her fifth and final year at the University of Toronto. Having completed coursework on medieval art at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, her work considers the invested cultural significance applied to textiles across the middle ages as communicators of collective and individual identity within intersections of gender and social positionality. Molly’s prior research endeavours include assisting Dr. Michael Gervers with an ongoing project investigating the presence of imported and domestic textiles in Ethiopian manuscripts and authoring a soon-to-be-published essay on sartorial syncretism in the Book of Kells Virgin and Child.
Fellowship Project—Tactile Devotion
Tactile Devotion will consider decorative textile production within convents as a form of devotional labour in Germany and the Low Countries across the 10th to 16th Centuries. It will position the nuns’ material labour as an active pursuit of materializing the divine, with textiles asa constructive medium for facilitating an engagement with spatial and theological realms external to the convent. I will relate clerical and public anxieties, the geographical transmissionof resources and techniques, and the socio-financial precarity of the nuns as makers through material and textual analysis. In doing so, this project seeks to re-address how history values both textiles and women’s contributions to medieval productivity.