Catz Professor Co-Curates Landmark Exhibition at The Met Cloisters

St Catherine’s College is delighted to announce that Professor Nancy Thebaut, Catz Fellow and Tutor in History of Art, is Co-Curator of Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, a major new exhibition which opened at The Met Cloisters on Friday, 17th October 2025.

Co-curated by Melanie Holcomb, Curator and Manager of Collection Strategy at the Met Cloisters, and Professor Nancy Thebaut, this exhibition presents over fifty objects gathered from the 13th to 15th centuries. Key items include gold jewellery, ivory sculptures, stained glass, and illuminated manuscripts. Many of these items come from The Met’s own collection, supplemented by such important contributions as the Rothschild Canticles from Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

The exhibition is made especially striking by its focus on medieval artists and patrons, examining the ways and intensities with which they engaged with themes of desire, gender, and eroticism – not simply in purely religious or devotional terms, but in varied registers. Some of these registers include courtly love and gender performance. Together, Melanie and Nancy challenge the stereotype of the Middle Ages as an entirely repressive period; instead, they reveal the imaginative visual expression and complex social understandings of the period.

As such, the exhibition invites audiences – including students, scholars, and the general public – to consider how the visual culture of the medieval period encoded and communicated ideas about kinship, identity, and longing. In so doing, it shares insights and invites fresh perspectives on how people once lived and felt, and on how we understand ideas of love, gender, and desire in today’s society.

For further information about the exhibition, please see here. The exhibition will run through the end of March 2026, and is accompanied by a full programme of talks, performances, and academic events.

We extend a very warm congratulations to Professor Thebaut and her co-curator, Melanie Holcomb, on this achievement.