On view from October 17, 2025 to March 29, 2026 at The Met Cloisters, New York, Spectrum of Desire explores the diverse and sometimes surprising ways that medieval people thought about love, sex, and gender in the medieval past. In this talk, Nancy will offer an overview of the exhibition, which she co-curated with Melanie Holcomb (Metropolitan Museum of Art) as well as share new research on one of the objects featured in the show, namely a tapestry of the Queen of Sheba posing riddles to Solomon. Her study of the tapestry, which was made in late 15th-century Strasbourg, aims to shed light on the ways that medieval people were thinking about the relationship between gender, nature, and art making itself.
Nancy Thebaut is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford and a tutorial fellow at St Catherine’s College. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019, a museum studies diploma from the Ecole du Louvre in 2011, an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld in 2009, and her BA from Agnes Scott College in 2008. She is co-curator of Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages with Melanie Holcomb, and she is also co-author of the accompanying exhibition catalogue, published by the Metropolitan Museum and Yale University Press. In addition to her curatorial work, Nancy is also completing a book on Carolingian and Ottonian liturgical images, entitled Lessons in Looking: Difficult Images of Christ ca. 850-1050.
Organised by Dr Jessica Barker, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History, The Courtauld, as part of the Medieval Work-in-Progress Series.
