ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates two instances in which Burgundian women fissured the masculine prerogative for devotional portrait diptychs in response to gender stereotypes and patriarchal controls. The Flines diptych is universally assigned on stylistic grounds to painter Jean Bellegambe of Douai. The nuns of Flines had connected with Bellegambe by 1509 at the latest, for a document from the convent dated to that year records the artist as having made an altarpiece for the chapel of Saint Michael at Flines. Resistance to enclosure quickly led to clerical intervention in reform. On the advice of the abbots of Aulne, Villers, and Cambron, the Cistercian Chapter general threatened to disband errant convents and replaced nuns by monks at Moulins in 1414 and Jardinet in 1430. For the engineers of the reform mandates, cloistering severely curtailed an abbess' capacity for informed decision-making: one could hardly be sufficiently experienced in matters of the outside world when isolated from it.
