<div>During the European Middle Ages, diagrams provided a critical tool of analysis in cosmological and theological debates. In addition to drawing relationships among diverse areas of human knowledge and experience, diagrams themselves generated such knowledge in the first place. In Diagramming Devotion, Jeffrey F. Hamburger examines two monumental works that are diagrammatic to their core: a famous set of picture poems of unrivaled complexity by the Carolingian monk Hrabanus Maurus, devoted to the praise of the cross, and a virtually unknown commentary on Hrabanus's work composed almost five hundred years later by the Dominican friar Berthold of Nuremberg. Berthold's profusely illustrated elaboration of Hrabnus translated his predecessor's poems into a series of almost one hundred diagrams. By examining Berthold of Nuremberg's transformation of a Carolingian classic, Hamburger brings modern and medieval visual culture into dialogue, traces important changes in medieval visual culture, and introduces new ways of thinking about diagrams as an enduring visual and conceptual model.</div>

Diagramming Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s Poems in Praise of the Cross (Louise Smith Bross Lecture Series)

Arts & Photography

Hamburger, Jeffrey F.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Throughout the Middle Ages, John the Evangelist, identified as the author of both the Book of Revelation and the most profound and theologically informed of the four Gospels, provided monks and nuns with a figure of inspiration and an exemplar of vision and virginity. Rather than the historical apostle, this book's protagonist is a persona of the Evangelist established in theology, the liturgy, and devotional practice: the model mystic, who, by virtue of his penetrating insight, was seen as having become a mirror image of Christ. In St. John the Divine, Jeffrey Hamburger identifies a remarkable set of images from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries that identify the inspired Evangelist so closely with the deity that he appears as his living image and embodiment. Hamburger explores the ways these representations of St. John in the guise of Christ elucidate the significance of images as such in medieval theology and mysticism. Above all, he shows how these artworks, presented together for the first time, epitomize the relationship between the visible and the invisible: between ideas, however abstract, and the concrete images that medieval Christians confronted face-to-face.

St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology

University of California Press

The Birth of the Author argues that the images devised to accompany medieval commentaries, whether on the Bible or on classical texts, made claims to authority, even inspiration, that at times were even more forceful than those made by the texts themselves. Paradoxically, it was in the context of commentaries that modern conceptions of independent authorship first were forged. Looking beyond author portraits and the genre known as the accessus ad auctores, usually seen as the sites of such claims, this study examines pictorial programmes in copies of Horace's poetic works, the Glossa ordinaria, the dominant biblical commentary of the first half of the twelfth century, anti-heretical polemics, and Rupert of Deutz's commentary on the Song of Songs. The inventive images fashioned to accompany these works do not merely illustrate or exemplify pre-existing understandings of authorship; rather, they help to shape them at the very moment at which a particular historically situated set of ideas about authorship was itself coming into being. Pictorial prefaces of the twelfth century represent commentaries of their own that work both in concert with the commentaries to which they are attached but also, at times, in ways that go beyond anything that the commentator himself authored or authorized. In this way, they participate in a broader trend in the High Middle Ages to champion the ability of images to articulate and elaborate in the manner of rhetorical persuasion complex arguments regarding critical matters of faith.

The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century (Studies and Texts)

Religion & Spirituality

PIMS

A bew interpretation of the role of the visual arts in the spiritual lives of women in late medieval monastic communities.
The Visual and the Visionary adds a new dimension to the study of female spirituality, with its nuanced account of the changing roles of images in medieval monasticism from the twelfth century to the Reformation. In nine essays embracing the histories of art, religion, and literature, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the interrelationships between the visual arts and female spirituality in the context of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of nuns. Used as instruments of instruction and inspiration, images occupied a central place in debates over devotional practice, monastic reform, and mystical expression. Far from supplementing a history of art from which they have been excluded, the images made by and for women shaped that history decisively by defining novel modes of religious expression, above all, the relationship between sight and subjectivity. With this book, the study of female piety and artistic patronage becomes an integral part of the general history of medieval art and spirituality.

The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany

Zone Books

Focusing on production and patronage, this new volume features over 150 images of magnificently illustrated books and precious bindings, drawn largely from North American collections. The book's three sections are arranged chronologically, yet in each case with a different thematic focus. Opening with a look at the precedents set by the Carolingian forerunners of the Empire, the first section considers deluxe imperial manuscripts associated with the Ottonian emperors. The second section examines the role of imperial monasteries in the production of manuscripts, considering in particular the patronage of aristocratic elites. The final section offers a tour of imperial cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from Vienna and Prague to Augsburg and Nuremberg. This final stop considers the impact of Albrecht Dürer and humanism on the arts of the book. The volume features a glossary, indexes, and maps showing the shifting borders of the Empire over 700 years.

Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, 800-1500

O’Driscoll, Joshua

GILES