The Visual and the Visionary

by Hamburger, Jeffrey F.

• ISBN13: 9780942299458
• ISBN10: 0942299450
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-10-30
• Publisher: Zone Books

Summary

Winner, 1999 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, Art & Music category, given by the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference. and Winner, 1999 Charles Rufus Morey Award given by the College Art Association (CAA). The Visual and the Visionaryadds 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.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	9	(4)
Introduction
Texts Versus Images: Female Spirituality from an Art Historian's Perspective	13	(22)
I Art, Enclosure, and the Pastoral Care of Nuns	35	(76)
II The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions	111	(38)
III Before the Book of Hours: The Development of the Illustrated Prayer Book in Germany	149	(48)
IV The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Henry Suso and the Dominicans	197	(36)
V Medieval Self-fashioning: Authorship, Authority, and Autobiography in Suso's Exemplar	233	(46)
VI The Liber miraculorum of Unterlinden: An Icon in Its Convent Setting	279	(38)
VII Vision and the Veronica	317	(66)
VIII "On the Little Bed of Jesus": Pictorial Piety and Monastic Reform	383	(44)
IX The Reformation of Vision: Art and the Dominican Observance in Late Medieval Germany	427	(42)
Notes	469	(120)
Index of Manuscripts Cited	589	(4)
Color Plates	593	(10)
Index	603