Mercedes Pérez Vidal, PhD
Research Fellow
Mercedes Pérez Vidal is an art historian, specialist in Castilian Dominican nunneries. From 2017 to 2019 she was Clarín cofund post-doc fellow at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. There she carried out a research project which aimed to establish a comparative approach between monastic culture and nuns’ liturgical performance in the Iberian Kingdoms and Germany.
She obtained her PhD in 2013 at the University of Oviedo (Spain), with a dissertation on the Dominican female monasteries in medieval Castile. An updated synthesis of this work, was written during her stay at the HHU, and it has been published by Trea, constituting the first monograph on this topic. Dr. Pérez Vidal is also the editor of a collective volume on Transatlantic Women Religious, already in press with Arc Humanities Press.
She is particularly interested in the study of Medieval and Early Modern art and architecture in relation to liturgy in female monasteries in Spain, Mexico and Italy. Her former research project (2015-2017) focused on manuscript production, liturgical sources and libraries in Northern Italian convents. She worked at the University of Oviedo and the National University of Distance Education in Spain and she was postdoctoral fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 2014 to 2015, and at the University of Padua (Marie Curie-Piscopia). She is currently a research member of the project Books, rituals and space in a Cistercian nunnery. Living, praying and reading in Lorvão 13th – 16th centuries (FCT-NOVA).
Among her most recent publications:
Pérez Vidal, M. (2021) Arte y liturgia en los monasterios de Dominicas en Castilla. Desde los orígenes hasta la reforma observante (1218-1506), Gijón, Trea. ISBN: 978-84-18105-67-8.
Pérez Vidal, M. ed. (2021) Women religious between the Cloister and the World, A Transatlantic Dialogue, Arc Humanities Press. ISBN: 9781641892988.
Kristiansen, M. & Pérez Vidal, M. (2021) “Future perspectives: Epilogue from the views of an archaeologist and art historian”, in Croix, S. & Heilskov, M., Materiality and religious practice in Medieval Denmark, Turnhout, Brepols, pp. 269-292. ISBN: 978-2-503-59416-3.
Pérez Vidal, M. (2021) “Female aristocratic networks: books, liturgy and reform in Castilian nunneries”, in Dumitrescu, I.; Hardie, R.; O'Loughlin Bérat, E. eds., Relations of Power: Women's Networks in the Middle Ages, Bonn University Press, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag, Göttingen, pp. 105-132. ISBN 978-3-8471-1242-6.
Pérez Vidal, M. (2022) “Estavan todas no coro e ben cantand’ e Leendo. Tipologie e funzioni dei cori nei monasteri delle Domenicane dal XIII al XVI secolo, con particolare riferimento alla Castiglia”, in Morvan. H. ed., Spaces for Friars and Nuns: Mendicant Choirs and Church Interiors in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Rome, Publications de l'École française de Rome(forthcoming).
Further information about her work can be found under the following links: