Nuns as Artist: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997. 12 color pls. + xxiv + 318 pp. $55. ISBN 0-520-20386-0.

This learned, well-written and well-illustrated book will be a rewarding resource for anyone interested in the spiritual life of late medieval/early modern nuns. In particular, it provides a vivid demonstration of the way nuns could use "artless" (5) visual imagery both to stimulate and record their devotional lives. To do this, Jeffrey Hamburger has exhaustively analyzed a group of ten hand drawn and colored/inscribed images (all illustrated here in color) produced by a nun around 1500 in the Benedictine abbey of St. Walburg, outside Eichstatt in southern Germany.

The book begins with a brief introduction comparing nuns' art work with traditional devotional Andachtsbilder. It moves on in chapter 1 to a general consideration of the style, iconography and "habits of visualization" (xxi) of nuns in the convent of St. Walburg. Chapters 2, 3, and 4, the heart of the book, provide detailed analyses of specific images - the Agony of Christ in the Garden painted in a rose, two different images of the crucifixion and two of the heart as a house. These are oftentimes brilliant demonstrations of the way the far-flung - or, as Hamburger refers to them, both "self-conscious" (117, 218) and "indirect" (94) - connotations of the nuns' devotional images can be elucidated by a dedicated historian of religion.

Hamburger is a bibliographic truffle hound of the first order: his 65 pages of small-type, densely packed footnotes are a goldmine of information on a wide range of topics. (Fortunately, the index is very good and can help guide the reader to these topics.) Overall, Hamburger believes that there are no single textual or visual sources for the St. Walburg drawings; rather, the images present a complex interpenetration of the verbal and visual "mediated by traditions of devotional practice" (164).

Hamburger's work (especially chapter 5, an overview of nuns' work, and the conclusion) raises a number of intriguing larger questions. Do these images of women made by women for women's use reveal a distinct female point of view - a particular female spirituality (xx, 181, 219-20)? Hamburger himself takes an equivocal position on this matter. He is not at all equivocal on another issue, however: the role of women, nuns in particular, in the increasing use of images in Christian devotional life (xxi). According to Hamburger, medieval nuns and their images "established the benchmark for the lay spirituality of the later Middle Ages" (222) which was heavily dependent on devotional images. But just how the nuns' work might have provided any sort of conscious or intentional model for lay people is not made clear.

For an art historian like Hamburger, some of the biggest questions must be: what kind of artists do nuns make? Do nuns exhibit a profound artistic imagination? Do the nuns' works shed some novel light on the production of the more famous artists who were their contemporaries? On the one hand, in evaluating nuns' works, Hamburger states that "we must forget any preconceived notion of 'Art'" (1). These are not works of art "as conventionally defined" (20) - they were never meant to be inserted into "a story of art" (222). On the other hand, he also consistently refers to the "vitality [of] their visual language" (4) and "their sophisticated visual rhetoric" (20). (In this vein, he makes the interesting suggestion that the "idiosyncratic imagery" of nuns "provides precedents for some early modern emblems" [4]). Hamburger is also quite taken with the fact that a Benedictine prior from Maria Laach wrote a little tract on painting in 1505 in which he referred to an abbess who did nuns' work and compared her to the engraver Israhel von Meckenem (207-11). Should the "high road" of art history (213) follow suit - as Hamburger implies? To me, the nuns's images are not "very effective" (117) so much as they are quaint and, in many cases, downright literal solutions to complex problems of verbal/visual metaphor and allusion. In my view, moral complexity is also an important component in art of the highest caliber. The nuns' work is simple and childlike because their sense of good and evil is so absolute - there is, understandably, little or no room here for the secular imagination. This is therefore an art completely lacking in ambiguity - it may be multivalent (170), but it is never ambivalent.

Hamburger's thorough-going contextual study of nuns' work might also make us differently aware of the way that the creations of more famous early sixteenth century artists like Hieronymus Bosch are (equally?) determined by their "special interest" audience or patrons. Has the discipline of Art History reified a canon of works which in various ways was (and remains) the ideological tool of dead white merchants, bankers, and princes? Should we give equal weight in the future to art as a devotional tool of nuns? Hamburger does not answer this, but his work certainly begs the question - what is "Art" - and who are the important (great?) artists - anyway?

CRAIG HARBISON University of Massachusetts, Amherst