This dissertation examines late medieval pendant jewels as wearable, highly portable, multimedia objects whose meanings emerged through bodily interaction, material complexity, and social performance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Focusing on pendants produced and circulated at the Valois courts of France and Burgundy, it argues for a reevaluation of jewelry not as marginal ornament but as active agents in devotional practice, courtly display, and the construction of personal and gendered identity. Drawing on close analysis of extant objects, archival inventories, and visual representations in manuscripts, the study demonstrates that pendants were deliberately designed to hang, move, open, and invite—or strategically restrict—touch, mediating encounters between wearers and viewers and collapsing distinctions between private devotion and public spectacle. Central to this project is the concept of the interactive body, introduced to theorize how pendant jewels structured embodied experience and participated in social, spiritual, and political networks. Combining frameworks of materiality, intermediality, and sensory experience, the dissertation situates pendants at the intersection of devotion, luxury, and ethical decorum, revealing their role in debates surrounding sumptuary regulation, virtue, and excess. Particular attention is paid to the tactile and affective dimensions of these objects, including moments when touch was disciplined or deferred through protective materials such as rock crystal. Through case studies ranging from reliquary pendants—such as the British Museum’s Reliquary Pendant of the Holy Thorn—to fictive jewels in fifteenth-century manuscripts, the dissertation traces how late medieval pendants negotiated boundaries between sacred and secular, intimacy and display, and material and spiritual realms. It further demonstrates how these objects circulated within global networks of materials and meaning, functioning as repositories of memory and markers of status when worn, held, or manipulated. Ultimately, this study repositions pendant jewels—and jewelry more broadly—as artistically sophisticated and potently meaningful forms of late medieval material culture, arguing that wearable objects functioned as interactive artworks that disciplined touch, materialized identity, and mediated the most intimate negotiations between body and belief.
Sophia Helen Ong (Thu,) studied this question.