Tuesday 11 November at 18:00 (UK time), Andrea-Bianka Znorovszky, ‘Transferring Saint Marina the Monk to the Iberian Peninsula: Illuminations, Statues, and Paintings’.

The phenomenon of female sanctity, particularly that of cross-dressed holy women, has been the subject of considerable research which has explored its literary, psychological, sociological, and/or theological, dimensions. My on-going research provides a comprehensive study on the artistic, cultural, and religious contexts in which depictions of cross-dressed saints namely, of Saint Marina the Monk, were disseminated throughout the Middle Ages, especially from the thirteenth- to the sixteenth century, both East and West. While previous scholarship offered a variety of interpretations and focused as per disciplines, my research demonstrates that the iconography of cross-dressed saints, more specifically of St Marina the Monk, is a result of complex phenomena which incorporate cultural, religious, and artistic exchanges between East and West through Venetian workshops, through iconographic conflation, and through the influence of Marian iconography significant to its evolution, popularity, and dissemination.

Today’s talk focuses on the visual/material evidence—iconographic programmes, material culture, circumstances of dedication/construction—of several churches dedicated to Saint Marina in the Iberian Peninsula (e.g. Pratdip, Huesca) which has been insufficiently addressed particularly from the perspective of its political and devotional contexts. I also discuss Saint Marina the Monk’s representations in illuminations, but more importantly I will focus on less discussed paintings, statues or sixteenth-seventeenth-century printed material that still preserves the iconographic conflation with Saint Margaret/Marina of Antioch.

Andrea-Bianka Znorovszky is Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow, on tenure-track, at the University of Lleida, undertaking a project on ‘Marian Pregnancy Representations in the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period’ funded by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain. Previously, she was a MSCA COFUND Research Fellow (2022–25) at the University of Salamanca, Spain, undertaking a research project entitled ‘From the Near East to the Iberian Peninsula: Visual Representations of Saint Marina la Monaca in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period’, which she hopes to turn into a monograph. She has also received a MSCA +1 Research Fellowship (2020–21) at Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy, with a research project ‘Mary on the Move: Global Devotion(s) in Late Medieval-Early Modern Franco-Italian Contexts;’, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship again with Ca' Foscari University, Venice (2018–20); and a Joint Excellence in Science and Humanities Research Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, in collaboration with Salzburg University (2018). She earned her PhD in 2016 from Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, with a dissertation on ‘Between Mary and Christ: Depicting Cross-Dressed Saints in the Middle Ages (c.1200-1600)’.