‘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 Convent

This article explores the intersections of community identity in Dartford Priory, a Dominican house of nuns, seen through the case study of the Battel Hall retable, a fourteenth-century altarpiece. This article argues that the intersections of English, female and Dominican identities are visually symbolised in the altarpiece in unique and specific ways, and that the imagery and the viewing of the altarpiece offers an explanation as to the strength of this community, which survived two Dissolutions in the sixteenth-century.