Nuns as artists : the visual culture of a medieval convent /
Publication details: Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997.Description: xxiv, 318 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 27 cmISBN:- 0520203860
- 9780520203860
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Whitecliffe Library General Shelves | General | N 7431 HAM (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 0006383 |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-304) and indexes.
Patterns of piety-protocols of vision: the visual culture of St. Walburg -- Delineating devotions -- Printed exemplars -- Manuscript models -- Woven work -- Consecration & enclosure -- The sweet rose of sorrow -- Roses & remembrance -- Passionate prayer -- Agony, ecstasy, obedience -- Wounding sight -- Exemplary images -- Penetrating vision -- The House of the heart -- Union & communion -- The heart as a house -- Knocking at Heaven's gate -- An interior castle -- Nuns' work -- Ora et Labora: Prayer & work -- The circulation of images -- Conclusion: Vision versus supervision.
Jeffrey F. Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spiritually of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from an extraordinary and previously unknown group of devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses in unprecedented detail 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's book reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.
In illuminating the patterns and protocols of viewing that governed the nuns' devotional and liturgical life, 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.