Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (California Studies in the History of Art) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (California Studies in the History of Art) Book

This groundbreaking book explores, in unprecedented detail, the distinctive visual culture of female communities, a genre never before given serious attention by art historians. The group of works discussed, a previously undiscovered group of devotional drawings by a Benedictine nun in the later Middle Ages, also includes illuminated manuscripts, prints, textiles, and metalwork. This book carefully reconstructs the artistic traditions that were fundamental to the lives of cloistered women. Nuns that were separated from the high altar, for instance, could participate in the mass through their art, which served as an expression of visual longing. The drawings provided the nuns with a substitute for sacramental presence and thus represented the fulfillment of spiritual desires. This fascinating, if scholarly, work is a gladly received contribution to the study of medieval art.Read More

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  • Product Description

    Jeffrey F. Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spirituality of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from a previously unknown group of late-fifteenth-century devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses the distinctive visual culture of female communities. The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity. Setting the drawings and related imagerymanuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalworkwithin the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany, Hamburger reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women. Hamburger convincingly demonstrates the overwhelming importance of "seeing" in devotional practice, challenging traditional assumptions about the primacy of text over image in monastic piety. His presentation of the "visual culture of the convent" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of medieval art and, more generally, of late medieval monasticism and spirituality.

  • 0520203860
  • 9780520203860
  • J Hamburger
  • 28 May 1997
  • University of California Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 370
  • illustrated edition
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