Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter propagandist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women but actively engaged in shaping them. Today Rubenss paintings continue to be used and abused to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artists bestknown works within seventeenthcentury Catholic theology and female court culture this book