This semester for this first time I allowed students in my seminar (on the Virgin Mary in Medieval Art and Culture) to choose to make a work of art as the final outcome of their research projects, instead of requiring them all to write papers. This is my favorite of the pieces that they made. To talk through it a bit: it was made on a mirror because it's about images of women in contrast to women's own self-images. It represents St. Anne, the Virgin, and the Christ Child (although one of the problems with the piece is that it was supposed to center on imagery from books of hours, as patriarchal imagery projected at a female audience, but the real source images here are paintings by Durer and Leonardo da Vinci). In one of my favorite touches, the images are actually made up of bits of advertisements cut from magazines: the Virgin's blue mantle is made mostly from tampon and sanitary napkin ads! The idea is to liken the roles of book of hours imagery and the Virgin i