Jeffrey F. Hamburger. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. (New York: Zone Books, 1998.)

By concentrating his studies on the art of female monasticism, Jeffrey F. Hamburger has devoted much of his work to filling a significant gap in the field of art history. In 1990, he published The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland,[i] and in 1997 Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent.[ii] In his latest book, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (1998), Hamburger shifts his concentration from art produced by nuns to art supplied to nuns while in pastoral care (cura monialium). This art served not only to accommodate, but also primarily to control the religious experiences of the nuns, as well as those of the lay piety, which also happened to constitute a mostly female community. Although not apparent in the art itself, the relationships of nuns and their pastors were not consistently harmonious, but included complications and arguments. “Images were hardly incidental to these debates, not least because, within the cura monialium, the opposition between text and image was often worked out in terms of other oppositions: Latin versus the vernacular, spirit versus flesh, word versus body, and, above all, man versus woman. In teasing out the tensions between these terms, I am less interested in revealing a preexistent, organic unity among images, texts and their contexts than I am in sounding the discord between nuns and their advisers” (22).

Hamburger begins this project by devoting the first of nine chapters to the material setting of female monasticism, focusing on the architecture, the institution, and the art of enclosure they created. In the second chapter, he discusses various attitudes towards images. Once this groundwork has been provided, Hamburger presents “case studies” (32) of specific literary and artistic works in connection with devotional practices. In his introduction, he appropriately categorizes his chapters as follows: “spiritual autobiography and confession (chapters 4 and 5), exempla and miracle books (chapter 6), the pastoral epistle (chapter 8), and the convent chronicle (chapter 9); visions (chapters 2 and 4-9), meditation (chapter 3), the imitatio Christi (chapters 4-6), penitential exercises (chapter 6), Marian devotion (chapter 6), pilgrimage and votives (chapters 6-7), the Eucharist (chapter 8), and cult images and iconoclasm (chapter 9)” (32).

More specifically, in the third chapter of his study, he discusses prayer books, such as the liber precum and the prayer book of Hildegard of Bingen, which are particularly important due to their introduction of extensive illustrations accompanying written prayers. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the mystical writings of Henry Suso, a Dominican preacher and pastor, who also included elaborate images in his texts. The sixth chapter discusses the particular icon liber miraculorum of Unterlinden and the seventh the iconic image known as Veronica. Chapters 8 and 9 move on to texts and images of the fifteenth century, such as the Sendbrief “Von Ihesus pettlein” and Johannes Meyer’s chronicle of Dominican reform, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens.

In his introduction, Hamburger states that his goal is to enrich the field of art history by researching an area so far very insufficiently studied. Nevertheless, his book not only addresses art historians, but also scholars interested in German medieval literature, the history of Christianity in medieval Germany, women’s history, as well as feminist studies: all will find this work just as informative as readers fascinated by medieval religious art. On the other hand, the reader does not have to be an expert in any of these fields in order to find this book accessible. While the author provides interpretations of a large number of art objects, his work is not limited to such analysis. He likewise discusses the background and functions of various manuscripts, some of them in light of their different versions, as well as their authors, distributors, and illustrators. Overall, he never neglects to describe their influence on and function in the lives of the nuns to whom they were presented. Hamburger puts particular texts and artworks into historical, circumstantial, and religious perspective while he provides a detailed presentation of the individual persons connected with those objects and images. The reader gains rich insights into the images, names, and interpretations of religious ideas with which the nuns were presented, and is constantly reminded that s/he is reading about the lives and realities of real women.

Their reality becomes even more accessible through the inclusion of prints of hundreds of icons and other art objects, photographs of several monasteries, and the volume’s six color plates. The prints add a vitality to this learned text as well as constituting a valuable and unique compilation of printed medieval religious art objects. The inclusion of these images in the text increases its value, making it essentially a handbook of pre-Reformation religious iconography. They help represent a temporally distant subject in a most tangible manner to the contemporary reader.

Hamburger’s interpretation of these images includes a discussion of the power relationship between the authors and distributors of the manuscripts, and the nuns reading them and studying the art contained in them. Generally, nuns were treated in a similar fashion to novices. Both groups were supplied with religious images that proved their inferior level of devotional ability-they were thought to require use of images to aid them in their devotional practices. Most of the men, however, who took over the role of guiding and likewise judging the religious life of the nuns had an ambivalent relationship to the use of imagery. Even men like St. Bernhard (chapter 2) who strove to banish images from religious life altogether were not consistent in their attitudes and relied on imagery for certain aspects of their teachings. Consequently, an extensive tradition of religious images and iconography produced for and by nuns developed and often gave nuns the opportunity to create a space for individuality in their otherwise enclosed and controlled lives.

The Visual and the Visionary is a well-organized, well-selected chronology of particular artworks marked by their influence on the religious lives of medieval nuns. As the author states in his introduction, each chapter presents a thoroughly researched essay on a particular topic. While each essay in itself is extremely detailed and indicates thoroughly researched and strongly presented material, the reader occasionally misses clearer connections among the individual case studies of chapters 3 through 9. Stronger links among these chapters might have helped the author present his main theme of the conflicted relationships between nuns and their advisers in a more complete and well-rounded manner.

Overall, Jeffrey F. Hamburger’s work is definitely an asset to any academic library, as well as to the bookshelf of anyone interested in a very detailed and thoroughly researched presentation of the art and life of medieval female monasticism.

Reviewed by Susanne Kelley

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