About

Laura Weigert is a faculty member at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, specializing in Art History. Her research focuses on the intersection of theatricality, visual culture, and performance in medieval and early modern contexts. She has contributed to the understanding of how images, tapestries, and painted cloths relate to theatrical performances, religious plays, and societal ideologies of the time. Her work includes analysis of 'Theatricality' in tapestries and mystery plays, exploring their afterlife in painting and their role in shaping perceptions of religious and political narratives. Weigert has examined the transformation of audience relationships through painted images of preachers and the depiction of biblical and historical events in art, emphasizing their function in creating modern notions of spectatorship. Her publications also address the ideological implications of visual representations, such as the depiction of Jewish punishment in medieval painted cloths and their connection to crusade ideology. Weigert's scholarship integrates visual analysis with historical context, contributing to the fields of medieval and Renaissance art, visual culture, and performance studies. Her work demonstrates how images and performances from the past continue to influence contemporary understandings of religious, political, and social identities.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Criminology
• Law

Selected publications

• To move the hearts and spirits of men towards joy and recreation. The Entry of Joanna of Castile as Entertainment

  Burgundica · 2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This article turns to Berlin ms 78 D5 for clues to an experience of Joanna of Castile’s entry as entertainment and spectacle, one that moved beyond the processional route and into the city. It focuses on the series of pictures of the ‘entertainers’ who accompanied the procession and on three intriguing stagings of female figures and amorous themes. Looking closely at details within the pictures, it makes a new argument about the collaboration between rhetorician chambers and shooting guilds—in addition to the political elite, craft guilds, and inhabitants—in this event in honour of Joanna of Castile. The article also contributes to a broader understanding of fifteenth-century civic entertainment and performance traditions.

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• Autonomy as Deviance: Sixteenth-Century Images of Witches and Prostitutes

  Routledge eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Criminology

  A coincidence therefore exists between the production of the images and the increased marginalization of these two groups; in both cases their sexual activity was the focus. The drawing depicts the entwined bodies of three women: one peers from between her legs at the viewer, while a second straddles her, her arm wrapped around the third, who holds a cauldron in one hand and touches her own genitals with the other. Art historical literature has related these images to sexual discourses or to the formation of social categories. The studies of Baldung Grien’s depictions of witches link his work to polemics on witchcraft that would have been available to him in Strasbourg at the time. The images of bathing women also deviate from contemporary bath scenes which relate narratives of sexual exchange. The transition from a narrative of sexual exchange to an isolated view of women at the bath can be traced in two drawings by Durer.

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• : <i>Art et société à Tours au début de la Renaissance</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2019-06-01

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  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Laura Weigert. Review of "Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Work/Travail/Arbeid" .

  CAA Reviews · 2017-03-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Stage

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-06-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines transitions in theatrical representation from the multiple presentation areas of the medieval pageants to the fixed stage of the Renaissance period designated for the performance of plays that we associate with the early modern theatre. It also considers some of the performative conventions that persisted, including the use of statues, paintings, and fabric to personify ideas, along with the more conventional body of the actor. By focusing on foundational images pertaining to the history of the European stage, the chapter offers a glimpse into the nature of early modern ‘theatricality’: the practices, representational strategies, and organizing principles that defined dramatic performance from the late fourteenth through to the sixteenth centuries.

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• Illuminating the Arras Mystery Play

  2017-11-30 · 1 citations

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  This chapter focuses on the Arras Mystery Play as evidence of a relatively unexplored form of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript production in Flanders. It examines the miniatures and their numbering system establishes the distinct stages in their making and shows that the artists modified their working methods over the course of the project. The chapter discusses that this mode of production is situated within contemporary debates that sought to define the nature of illustration and to circumscribe the work of its makers. It suggests that this mode of production contributed to the creation of both a new market for illuminated manuscripts and a new type of illuminated cycle that was ideally suited to the illustration of a mystery play. The significance of the manuscript known as the Arras Mystery Play for the history of medieval literature and theater has long been recognized.

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• The Environment of Theatre

  2017-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Kate Dimitrova and Margaret Goehring, eds., <i>Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages</i>. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Pp. 225; 150 black-and-white and 32 color figures. €100. ISBN: 978-2-503-53676-7.Table of contents available online at http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503536767-1 (accessed 22 July 2016)

  Speculum · 2016-09-09

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• French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-12-18 · 12 citations

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  This book revives what was unique, strange and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in &amp;apos;theaters&amp;apos; but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a playgoing experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.

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• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-12-18

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Frequent coauthors

• Robert E. Bjork

  Arizona State University

  2 shared

• Thomas E. A. Dale

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1 shared

• William Chester Jordan

  1 shared

• Paul E. Szarmach

  1 shared

• Robert G. Babcock

  1 shared

• Lawrence M. Clopper

  1 shared

• Timothy Graham

  1 shared

• William Mahrt

  1 shared

Labs

• Rutgers Alumni CommunityPI

Awards & honors

• Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2019-2020)
• Invited Researcher, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, P…
• Visiting Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Soci…
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2011-2012)
• Samuel H.. Kress Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in…