Ut commutando donemus : An Approach to Female Artistic Patronage in Northeast Iberia (1000-1100)

Centring on the specific context of northeastern Iberia in the eleventh century, this article offers a concept of patronage as it was understood by the women who performed it. While medievalists are accustomed to reconstructing the circumstances in which an artwork was born, when studying artistic patronage there is still a general tendency to avoid consideration of the social, economic, and legal differences between men and women in the Middle Ages. By focusing on a representative set of women from the period, one of the main goals of this article is to show that, beyond devotional reasons, artistic patronage helped medieval women overcame some of these social constraints and allowed them to exercise different degrees of power and authority.