The Rijksmuseum Research Library and Study Room Prints & Drawings are host to national and international researchers who are working with the collections. One of these researchers is Amaya Pérez Almenara, who visited us regularly as part of the Vrouwen van het Rijksmuseum project. Having seen Amaya working in the library almost every day for several months, we became curious about her research on the medieval Saint Ursula sculptures in the Rijksmuseum collection.

Tell us a bit more about yourself, what are you researching at the Research Library?

I am a PhD student at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where I am invovled in two Spanish National Research Projects: GENAMEL and INTERSECTIONS. I am currently undertaking a funded three-month research visit at the History Department, in the Vrouwen van het Rijksmuseum project, studying some pieces of the medieval collection.

The Rijksmuseum collection provides valuable insight into women’s medieval spirituality. Once in museums, most objects become untouchable. It can be hard to imagine them as an active part of spiritual practices where they would have been regularly touched. And we easily forget that artworks were powerful miraculous objects with profound social meaning and impact. Thinking about the ways that sculptures, reliquaries or prints could have been experienced by the communities that housed them is one of the main interests that I currently develop in my PhD research.

I address these issues through the study of a specific group of female saints’ cult in the Middle Ages: Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins. In my research visit I address why it is important to pay attention to holy women and their material culture in order to assess women’s experiences and to contribute to a more gender-aware historiography. How did medieval women’s communities relate to these saints and their related objects? Can it help us address how female identities were shaped and negotiated? What can their material culture tell us about female devotional experiences?

For those of you who want to know a bit more of Saint Ursula and the Elevan Thousand Virgins, legend has it[1] that she was the most beautiful princess, born in Brittain in the V or IV century. She was forced to marry, but she managed to delay it by going on pilgrimage to Rome together with the (so-called) Eleven Thousand Virgins. On her way back home, this “army of women” (that’s how they were frequently called) got murdered at Cologne by the Huns. But what would be determinant for her cult happened much later: in the 12th century, an ancient graveyard was found in Cologne and identified as the martyrdom place of the virgins. Consequently, thousands of bones were excavated, and venerated as sacred matter, her cult spread rapidly from Cologne to other countries as a result of an unprecedented trade and plundering of relics.

And which objects could be related to all of this?

The Rijksmuseum houses two big, fabulous sculptures of Sint Ursula and her companions, a reliquary bust, an ostensorium, and around 20 prints from the XVI-XVII centuries, most of them for devotional use, probably.

The big sculpture of St. Ursula and her companions (fig.1) interests me specifically because of a hole 12,5 cm deep located on top of her head, where a relic could have been placed. The sculpture is carved all around, so it could have been placed somewhere to be seen from different angles. It is almost a meter high and weighs forty-seven kilos. Sint Ursula is depicted as a young beautiful noble woman with her virgins (women only) sheltered underneath her cloak, as a Schutzmantelmadonna.

The size tells us something about the ways it might have been seen and touched. Such a big reliquary would have been the protagonist of an altar, where she would have been placed a bit up from a person’s point of view. This way, Ursula would be looking down straight at the observers (possibly a female community), and they, identifying themselves with her female companions, would have looked up towards her, as though sheltered beneath her cloak (fig.2). They could perhaps touch her cloak, like the group is doing (fig. 3); and if they could not because of the height, perhaps a priest or a nun would encourage them to imagine that they were touching it in a sermon, or in a devotional reading. Maybe this reliquary was made for a convent, but sadly we cannot affirm with certainty for whom it was made and where it was placed.[2]

Which book of the Rijksmuseum Library would you recommend to know more about this perspective and topics?

The Rijksmuseum Library offers a spectacular collection. I would recommend the beautiful and very recent exhibition catalogue: Zien & Geloven: Zintuiglijke ervaring in de late middeleeuwen, by Johan Oosterman, Irene van Renswoude, Kathryn Rudy and Nelleke de Vries that took place in Rijksmuseum Twenthe, in 2025. Also, for a specific approach to the objects in the Rijksmuseum collection: Duitse en Franse beeldhouwkunst 1200-1600 uit het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, curated by Frits Scholten and Guido de Werd and heldin Museum Kurhaus Kleef, in 2004-2006.

Those catalogues (specially the first one) explore the uses and social life of different types of objects. They bring us closer to the people who held them and encourage us to imagine the worlds these objects once lived in and shaped.

---

[1] Based on the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine which is a widespread and widely read compilation of hagiographies from the 13th century. Consulted the Spanish edition: De la Vorágine, Santiago. La Leyenda Dorada II, [Trans. José Manuel Macías], Alianza Editorial, 1997.

[2] Several female convents dedicated to Sint Ursula’s were founded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some examples in the Low Countries are Amsterdam, Purmerend, and Delft and Neder-Elten (now Germany). Other important centres of cult were established in Lower Rihne regio. See suggested places for this piece in Bieke van den Mark catalogue entry and cited bibliography: B. van der Mark, 2024, ‘anonymous, St Ursula and her Virgins, Low Countries, c. 1525 – c. 1530′, in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam.

---