Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent / Edition 1

by Jeffrey Hamburger

Overview

Jeffrey F. Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spirituality of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from a previously unknown group of late-fifteenth-century devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses the distinctive visual culture of female communities. The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity.

Setting the drawings and related imagery—manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork—within the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany, Hamburger reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.

Hamburger convincingly demonstrates the overwhelming importance of "seeing" in devotional practice, challenging traditional assumptions about the primacy of text over image in monastic piety. His presentation of the "visual culture of the convent" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of medieval art and, more generally, of late medieval monasticism and spirituality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520203860
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/30/1997
Series:	California Studies in the History of Art , #37
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey F. Hamburger is the Irving E. Houck Associate Professor in the Humanities at Oberlin College and the author of The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (1990). Among his several honors are the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities (1991), and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America (1994).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 
Preface and Acknowledgments 
INTRODUCTION
I. PATTERNS OF PIETY PROTOCOLS OF VISION:THE VISUAL CULTURE OF ST. WALBURG 
Delineating Devotions 
Printed Exemplars 
Manuscript Models 
Woven Work 
Consecration and Enclosure 
II. THE SWEET ROSE OF SORROW 
Roses and Remembrance 
Passionate Prayer 
Agony, Ecstasy, Obedience 
III. WOUNDING SIGHT 
Exemplary Images 
Penetrating Vision 
IV. THE HOUSE OF THE HEART 
Union and Communion 
The Heart as a House 
Knocking at Heaven's Gate
An Interior Castle 
V. NUNS' WORK
Ora et Labora: Prayer and Work 
The Circulation of Images 
CONCLUSION:VISION VERSUS SUPERVISION 
Abbreviations 
Notes 
Bibliography
Index of Biblical Citations 
Index of Manuscripts Cited 
General Index 

Editorial Reviews

Hamburger has conquered a new province of medieval art. Thanks to his efforts nuns as artists will be no longer overlooked.

New York Review of Books