The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. . - book review

JEFFREY F HAMBURGER

fresh York: Zone Books, 1998. 608 PP 5 color ills., 241 b/w $4500

Following The Rothschild Canticles and Nun as Artists (1997) Jeffrey Hamburger continues his research of the relationship between images and feminine devotion during the Middle Ages in this lengthy magnificently presented book. Most of the chapters rework or exhibit separately published articles, but this does not detract from the coherence of the whole. The chapters are built around little-known or unpublished records, mustered from original sources with a rare meticulousness, and they shed light upon each other.

The introduction defines the methodological choices of the author, who not aways himself as an art historian and plants himself the task of finding and analyzing works that shaped the religious life of nun by the agency of resolutely affirming his interest in the past and the conviction that history is not sentenceed to withdraw into the fleeting preoccupations of the not absent that it is still possible to speak of something other than ourselves, he calls postmodernism into question, presenting it as a form of intellectual abdication of responsibility. Likewise, he puts his sights on feminist historiography. If, in a first stage, feminists accepted what they read as the authentic recording of female voices from the past, without taking into consideration the elaboration and transmission of the body s by men, the tendency has now revers itself; many feminists no longer reliance to find anything in the body s except the voice of men covering that of women These feminists thus agree with hypercritical postmodern pessimism, which ha s stopped looking for the original intention of works, renounces the research of the production of these works, and considers itself doomed to do an exegesis of their reception. In order to extricate himself from these conundrum Hamburger exhibits that the object of inquiry is neither the nuns nor their spiritual guides on the contrary the sometimes amicable, sometimes antagonistic relationships between these partners. The spiritual direction, the cura monialium, thus constitutes the leitmotiv of Hamburger's work.

The first chapter analyzes the influence that a more or les hermetic monastic enclosing exerted on the connection between the nun and art or images: the seclusion, the mediation by the agency of men of all relations with the exterior world, the frequently thwarted attempts to form a private sphere through possessing personal objects. The next to the first and third chapters concern the part of the image in feminine devotions and present to view how much these devotions contributed to the quantitative unfolding of images and their iconographic evolution. Here, too, men played a decisive part by defining a superior horizontal of devotion, which does without images and to which alone men rise, and an inferior horizontal which depends on images and which they grant temporarily to novices and definitively to nun who are basically considered permanent novices. sum of two units other chapters treat the eccentric on the other hand influential Dominican Henry Suso. His taste for images dated from his novitiate and is marked through a sensibility comparable to that of the nun he later have the direction ofed Thr ough his illustrated autobiography and his paradoxical relations with Elisabeth Stagel, who played in part the character of spiritual guide, Suso fashioned himself as a rather feminine image of Christ, which the nun in turn round imitated. The examination of the Liber miraculorum of the Unterlinden monastery at Colmar (chapter 7) makes clear the part a miraculous image plays and the importance it gripe [i]or[/i] grips in the tensions tied to the reform of the establishment, while the succeeding chapter, upon the veronica--the relic-image of Christ's face preserv in Rome--and upon its replicas, analyzes the functions and significance of individual of the iconographic types favored by the agency of the nuns. Finally, the last sum of two units chapters deal with respectively the render free of access letter of a spiritual guide who aims to supervise the nuptial devotion toward Jesus and the 1468 chronicle that the Dominican Johannes Meyer consecrates to convent reform, In the couple cases, Hamburger lays out the question s that the attitude of the nun created for reformers: the risk that the images plu ng the nun in the greatest in quantity profane sensuality or, on the contrary, the risk that ascetic excesse gave an excessive charisma and authority to certain women and to the images that they used.

Hamburger's exceptionally solid demonstrations are convincing, with sole rare imperfections. At the greatest in quantity one notes a slip concerning the famous alphabetic character from Saint Gregory to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles, here called "his disciple, Secundus" (p 111) and the incorrect dating of the tract Christus und die minnende Seele to the 15th hundred when the style implies a dating of about 1530 (p 124 and fig. 27) Other than these rather inconsequential trifles, I must mention that the miraculous Unterlinden image is neared without convincing argument as a half-length icon (p 294) The fact that this Madonna was exhibited in this way on an engraving that serv to disseminate it no more provides an argument for this thesis than its full-length representation in greatest in quantity of the Liber illustrations substantiates the contrary. As a comparison, the engravings produc for the Einsiedeln pilgrimage by dint of the Master E.S. show a seated Madonna, while the miraculous image is standing, and numerous examples of this emblem could be cite d. Moreover, it is likely that neither the engraver nor the illustrator had access to the Unterlinden image that they were suppos to generate This would be an insignificant detail if Hamburger did not then marvel at the early date that the 13th hundred and even the mid-l4th hundred would constitute for a half-length image in the West.