IMC 2026: Sessions

This session investigates how motherhood, maternal imagery, and female agency were mobilised in the later Middle Ages and beyond, in contexts shaped by crisis, devotion, and cross-cultural exchange. The papers highlight the adaptability of maternal roles as both lived experience and symbolic resource. The first paper examines the prominence of nursing saints, particularly Anna, in late Byzantine Crete and medieval Cyprus. Against the backdrop of infant mortality and plague, such images offered intercession, protection, and fertility, functioning as communal strategies of resilience and social continuity. The second paper explores how the protective patronage of saint Margaret of Antioch was visually activated across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through manuscript illuminations, panel paintings, and devotional objects. The final paper turns to funerary slabs in Lusignan Cyprus, asking how representations of the female body - especially pregnancy and motherhood - mediated between life and death, enclosure and exposure, private grief and public display. Together, the three papers illuminate how maternal figures - saints and mothers - embodied protective and symbolic roles. They reveal how rituals of mothering persisted and transformed across shifting landscapes of devotion, mortality, and intercultural encounter.