‘That Profession and Habit that None Other Be of Within this Realm’: The Battel Hall Retable, Visual Culture and Intersections of Community Identity in a Late Medieval English Convent

Abstract The Battel Hall Retable – created around the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century and once belonging to the Dominican nuns of Dartford Priory – offers a rare glimpse into the visual lives of late medieval English nuns, inviting an insight into the intersections of communal identities for these women religious. This article builds on scholarship that has predominantly addressed Dartford's textual history, and of the piety and experiences within female monastic communities more widely, by exploring the intersections of English, female and Dominican spiritual identities for the community within, reflected by and provoked by this visual culture. It argues that the iconography, the specific portrayal of the figures and the potential positioning of the altarpiece speak to the engagement of these women with key facets of their identities, partially forming and enhancing a community identity that enabled them to withstand the Dissolution of the Monasteries.