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

Jeffrey F. Hamburger. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany.

New York: Zone Books, 1998. 5 color pls. + 608 pp. illus. $45. ISBN: 0-942299-45-0.

For over a decade Jeffrey Hamburger's writings have delved into the little known and often marginalized realm of art made by or for nuns. His fascinating recent book, Nuns as Artists (Berkeley, 1997), offered a close reading of a handful of crude yet powerfully affective drawings produced around 1500 by a nun in the convent of St. Walburg in Eichst[ddot{a}]tt. Such Nonnenarbeiten rarely grace the walls of our museums or find their way into surveys of late medieval and Renaissance art. Nevertheless, these sketches with their accompanying inscriptions yield invaluable insights into the distinctive role of art in the practice of late medieval piety. While this is essentially a case study of a single corpus of images made for a specific convent, Hamburger's newest book, The Visual and the Visionary, presents a broad interpretative framework for exploring art associated with the cura monialium or the pastoral care of nuns. The author cautions that this is not intended to be the definitive book on religious women and art in the Middle Ages. Rather it represents a starting point for the serious consideration of convent art, which has never been accorded the same scholarly attention as given to contemporary religious texts. As this book maintains throughout, images and texts, while related and often used in tandem, function differently.

Describing his book as "largely the product of dissatisfied curiosity" (13), Hamburger seeks to present a much fuller assessment of convent art. In his notes, he frequently takes issues with both the superficiality and methodological rigidity of some scholars. For example, Hamburger argues for a middle ground between those who see female religiosity as "unmediated mystical experience" and others who claim that their art and their texts are merely expressions of the voice of their male supervisors. By the same token, the author sensibly reminds us to be wary of imposing twentieth-century gender preoccupations on the late Middle Ages since the majority of nuns were neither mystics nor radicals rebelling against male domination. Although they accepted enclosure as a way of life, these nuns were extremely active in the shaping and the control of their spiritual environment. Their art and their literature had an insistent physicality, one that often stressed their relationship with Christ's body whether it was in the act of clothing a statue of the infant Jesus or meditating upon one of his passion wounds.

The lengthy text offers a vivid picture of the art created for the pastoral care of nuns. The first six of the nine chapters have been published as articles elsewhere. Yet unlike most compilations of essays, these really do work collectively since Hamburger revised and often greatly expanded each. Chapter 1 addresses the architectural spaces of convents, such as Wienhausen, including the physical separation of nuns from their monastic custodians. Here Hamburger introduces the concept of pastoral care of nuns as well as its related material culture and artistic implications. This sets the stage for the succeeding chapters. Chapter 2 ("The Visual and the Visionary") focuses on the history and historiography of attitudes towards images, specifically the role of art in monastic devotions. Chapter 3 examines meditational practices associated with prayer books illustrated with narrative sequences. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the significance of Heinrich Suso, the Dominican father who spent much of his career working with nuns. Hamburger assesses Suso's texts, specifically The Exemplar, his specific instructions concerning the use of images for devotional purposes, and the concept of self-fashioning. Chapter 6 studies the Liber miraculorum (ca. 1465), a manuscript that recounts the impact of a miraculous Marian icon upon the Dominican convent in Colmar. The rather crude drawings yield a vivid picture of how this icon became integrated into the church's prayer and liturgical practices of both the nuns and laity.

The final three chapters were written specifically for this book. Chapter 7 details the popularity of images of Veronica's veil. With Veronica's sudarium inaccessible in Rome, quite varied representations of it, each claiming its own veracity, circulated widely. These were the subject of female mystic writings as well as displays in convents. In Chapter 8, Hamburger investigates "On the Little Bed of Jesus," an unpublished later fifteenth-century treatise from the Katharinenconvent in Nuremberg. Transcribed here, this short text, with its often sexually charged language, refers to the heart or bridal chamber where Christ "consummates his marriage with the virtuous soul" (386). Although unillustrated, the treatise, written by a male, alludes repeatedly to the sorts of images that circulated in nunneries, and, in Nuremberg, were the subject of considerable debate about their appropriateness and about institutional control. The last chapter uses Johannes Meyer's chronicle of the rejuvenation of the Observant br anch of the Dominicans in Germany (1468) to assess the role of images in the nun's spiritual practice both before and immediately after the order's reformation.

The Visual and the Visionary is an exceptionally stimulating book, one that reminds us that our scholarly focus on "canonical" images fails to consider the remarkably diverse ways that different populations related to visual images in the late Middle Ages. I do wish that Hamburger had explained at the outset precisely what he meant by his frequent references of the "feminization of Christian devotion." Furthermore, since this book is really about Dominican female spirituality, I was left wondering whether nuns of other orders shared the same preoccupations and practices. Hopefully, Hamburger will consider writing a more comparative assessment sometime in the future.