Person:

Hamburger, Jeffrey

A history of the art and architecture of female monasticism requires a social history of female spirituality in the Middle Ages. Neither, however, has been written, perhaps because each is integral to the other. The cura monialium provides a common denominator linking both subjects to their larger context within medieval monasticism. After an overview of enclosure emphasizing its limits as well as its strictures, the article turns to problems in female monastic architecture. Architecture enforced enclosure and articulated its experience, yet the two topics have remained virtually distinct. A third section examines the role of women as patrons. In conclusion, the article considers whether convents produced or possessed a visual culture as distinctive as corresponding currents within female spirituality. Despite the restrictions imposed by enclosure, nuns used images to develop and sustain a spirituality that was distinct from prevailing norms and that ultimately helped to transform them. The study of female piety and patronage can therefore be seen as an integral part of a general history of medieval art and spirituality.

The twelfth century marks a turning point in the history of the prayer book. During the first Christian millenium, pictures played only a limited role in prayer and in narrative imagery almost none, but by the later Middle Ages extensive cycles of narrative illustration appeared in booksof prayer across Europe. Focusing on developments in Germany, this article argues that the cura monialium or pastoral care of nuns provided a seminal context for the development of early illustrated prayer books. A newly discovered liber precum in Selestat serves as the point of departure for a reevaluation of the so-called Prayer Book of Hildegard of Bingen, the most profusely illustrated prayer book from twelfth-century Germany. Analysis of the prayers as well as the images in this group of manuscripts suggests that the history of prayer books with narrative illustrations should be carried back to the very beginning of the twelfth century, if not even earlier, and that, within the context of monastic reform, female patrons and recipients of prayer books had a formative role in this development.