This dissertation examines the devotional portrait illuminations of two Duchesses of Burgundy, Margaret of York and Mary of Burgundy, within the reconstructed context of their physical, mental, and spiritual sensory environments to demonstrate how these women would have understood the sensory aspects of their portrait miniatures and how these images guide their viewers towards specific religious goals while privileging these women's sensory and devotional capabilities. The investigative method applies insights from the work by numerous scholars in the fields of the medieval senses, imagination and memory, and theological history-most notably Caroline Walker Bynum, Mary Carruthers, and Margaret Miles-to the examination of portrait illuminations from the following manuscripts: Benois seront les misericordieux, Le Dyalogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne it Jesus Christ, La Vie de Sainte Colette, and the Vienna Hours ofMary of Burgundy. Employing evidence from the textual content of these manuscripts and from works by St. Augustine, Jean Gerson, and Thomas a Kempis, the analysis addresses the studies of Andrea Pearson, Nancy Bradley Warren, and Anne van Buren, among others, to reveal heretofore unidentified iconographical, compositional, and personal elements of these miniatures. This dissertation first argues that the frontispiece to Le Dyalogue represents an Annunciation that, in conjunction with its second iconography as a noli me tangere, instructs Margaret how to mold herself into a model of female piety for the purpose of inciting monastic reform. The discussion then turns to La Vie de Sainte Colette, asserting that its portrait illumination uses a miraculous threshold to privilege both Margaret's intercessory relationship with St. Colette and her devotional sensory abilities, and proposing the most likely scenario for the manuscript's donation to Ghent's Monasterium Bethlehem. Finally, this dissertation resolves the question of the identity of the kneeling figure in the portrait miniature of the Vienna Hours and establishes how text and image function jointly in activating Mary's senses to direct her devotional development.

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Today, Belgium is an oft-cited example of a “fabricated state” with no real binding national identity. The events of 1787-1790 illustrate a surprisingly strong rebuttal to this belief. Between 1787 and 1790, the inhabitants of the Southern Netherlands protested the majority of reforms implemented by their sovereign Joseph II of Austria. In ten independent provinces each with their own administration and assembly of Estates, a resistance movement grew and its leaders eventually raised a patriot army over the summer of 1789. This force chased the imperial troops and administration from all the provinces except Luxembourg, allowing the conservative Estates and their supporters to convene a Congress at Brussels, which hosted a central government to the new United States of Belgium. By November 1790, however, infighting between democrats and conservatives and international pressures allowed Leopold II, crowned Emperor after his brother’s death in February, to easily reconquer the provinces. This thesis investigates the moment in which “Belgianness,” rather than provincial distinctions, became a prevailing identification for the Southern Netherlands. It tracks the transition of this national consciousness from a useful collaboration of the provinces for mutual legal support to a stronger, more emotional appeal to a Belgian identity that deserved a voice of its own. It adds a Belgian voice to the dialogue about nations before the nineteenth century, while equally complicating the entire notion of a nation. Overall, the thesis questions accepted paradigms of the nation and the state and casts Belgium and the Belgians as a strong example that defies the normal categories of nationhood. It examines how the revolutionaries—the Estates, guilds, their lawyers, the Congress, and bourgeois democratic revolutionaries—demonstrated a growing sense of “Belgianness,” in some ways overriding their traditional provincial attachments. I rely on pamphlet literature and private correspondence for the majority of my evidence, focusing on the elite’s cultivation and use of national sentiment throughout the revolution.