Title: Nuns as artists
First published: 1997
Description: Jeffrey F. Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spiritually of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from an extraordinary and previously unknown group of devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses in unprecedented detail 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 imagery - manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork - within the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany.

Hamburger's book reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.

In illuminating the patterns and protocols of viewing that governed the nuns' devotional and liturgical life, 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.
Subjects: Benediktinerinnen-Abtei St. Walburg (Eichstätt, Germany), Catholic Church, Christian art and symbolism, Devotional objects, Nuns as artists, Church history, middle ages, 600-1500, Nuns, Women artists, Germany, church history, Benediktinerinnenabtei St. Walburg (Eichstätt, Germany), Objets de dévotion, Église catholique, Religieuses artistes, ART, Subjects & Themes, Religious, Medieval, Beeldcultuur, Nonnen, Religieuze kunst
Places: Eichstätt, Germany
Time periods: Medieval, 500-1500
LC classification: NK1655.E35 H36 1997