Jeffrey F. Hamburger

Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript

A history of the art and architecture of female monasticism requires a social history of female spirituality in the Middle Ages. Neither, however, has been written, perhaps because each is integral to the other. The cura monialium provides a common denominator linking both subjects to their larger context within medieval monasticism. After an overview of enclosure emphasizing its limits as well as its strictures, the article turns to problems in female monastic architecture. Architecture enforced enclosure and articulated its experience, yet the two topics have remained virtually distinct. A third section examines the role of women as patrons. In conclusion, the article considers whether convents produced or possessed a visual culture as distinctive as corresponding currents within female spirituality. Despite the restrictions imposed by enclosure, nuns used images to develop and sustain a spirituality that was distinct from prevailing norms and that ultimately helped to transform them. The study of female piety and patronage can therefore be seen as an integral part of a general history of medieval art and spirituality.

The iconicity of script

‘While sitting on his bed after Compline, a certain brother keeping watch saw in front of him the letter Q written many times each separated in turn from the others and written as if in pure cinnaber (vermillion) in that form in which capital letters ought to be written, and much though he tried, he could not figure out what it meant.’ Thus begins a revelation to the early thirteenth-century Cistercian, Richalm of Schöntal.1 Richalm only comes to 1 – For a fuller discussion of the issues introduced here, see my essay, ‘Script as Image,’ in: Oxford Handbook of Latin Paleography, ed. Frank Coulson, forthcoming. Richalm von Schöntal: Liber revelationum, ed. Paul Gerhardt Schmidt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 24 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2009), p. 156 (section 128, lines 5–17): ‘Quidam frater cum post completorium super lectum suum sederet, vigilans vidit ante se Q litteram multociens a se invicem separatim scriptam tamquam de zinobrio puro in ea forma, qua illa littera capitalis formari solet; et multum intendebat, nec paterat intelligere, quid significaret.’ understand the precise content of his vision some six months later. To the attentive reader, however, it is fairly obvious what he envisages: a majestically illuminated letter Q such as could have been found in any precious copy of the Gospels opening the Gospel of Luke (1:1): ‘Quoniam quidem multi conati sunt ordinare.’ These are the very words (‘Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order’) that themselves are set forth in order in the form of the imposing incipit of Luke in a Touronian Gospel book, dated 857–862, illuminated in vermillion, purple, and gold (figure 1).2

Introduction: Warburg's Library and Its Legacy

In this introduction to a Common Knowledge special issue on the Warburg Institute, the authors argue that the Institute remains today—as it has been, in different forms, for almost a century—one of Europes central institutions for the study of cultural history. At once a rich and uniquely organized library, a center for doctoral and postdoctoral research, and a teaching faculty, the Institute was first envisioned by Aby Warburg, a pioneering historian of art and culture from a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. Warburg rejected the traditional view that the classical tradition was a simple, purely rational Greek creation, inherited by modern Europe. He argued that it was as much Mesopotamian as Greek in origin, as at home in the Islamic as in the European world, and as often irrational as rational in its content—and on the basis of this rich vision he devised brilliant new interpretations of medieval and Renaissance symbols and ideas. Warburgs chosen associate Fritz Saxl put his creation on a firm institutional base, first in Hamburg and then, after a narrow escape from the Nazi regime, in London. For all the changes the Institute has undergone over the decades since then, it continues to ask the questions that Warburg was the first to raise and to build on the methods that he created.

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, 2011: The Haskins Medal

The Haskins Medal for 2011 goes to Caroline Walker Bynum for her book Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, published in 2007 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In a disturbing, intriguing, and masterly study of Christs blood, the author describes the (to us) strange yet logical, emotional yet analytic approaches of theology and devotion. From the late fourteenth century until the early sixteenth century, northern Europe experienced a kind of “blood frenzy,” as Bynum calls it. The material reality and sacrificial effect of the blood shed by Christs torment and execution provoked intense religious emotion as well as harsh criticism of popular practices. Discussion about the nature and implications of Christs blood reflected unease over what could be taken as unique remains of Christs body. Because the blood was an effusion, it was a physical symbol of Christs suffering that remained on earth after the Resurrection, yet it also could be regarded as c...

Peter Damian's sermon 63 on John the Evangelist in Middle Dutch

Peter Damians sermon 63 on St. John the Evangelist, which interrelates the themes of his virginity and his close relationship with Christ, had an significant impact on the mystical theology of the Late Middle Ages. One of the very few of Damians sermons that was translated into the vernacular, inter alia, into Middle High German and Old French. A complete translation of the same sermon into Middle Dutch survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript from the Beghards of Maastricht, which is introduced and edited here.