Search results for ""Author Jeffrey F. Hamburger""

During the European Middle Ages, diagrams provided a critical tool of analysis in cosmological and theological debates. In addition to drawing relationships among diverse areas of human knowledge and experience, diagrams themselves generated such knowledge in the first place. In Diagramming Devotion, Jeffrey F. Hamburger examines two monumental works that are diagrammatic to their core: a famous set of picture poems of unrivaled complexity by the Carolingian monk Hrabanus Maurus, devoted to the praise of the cross, and a virtually unknown commentary on Hrabanus's work composed almost five hundred years later by the Dominican friar Berthold of Nuremberg. Berthold's profusely illustrated elaboration of Hrabnus translated his predecessor's poems into a series of almost one hundred diagrams. By examining Berthold of Nuremberg's transformation of a Carolingian classic, Hamburger brings modern and medieval visual culture into dialog, traces important changes in medieval visual culture, and introduces new ways of thinking about diagrams as an enduring visual and conceptual model.

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Focusing on production and patronage, this new volume features over 150 images of magnificently illustrated books and precious bindings, drawn largely from North American collections. The book's three sections are arranged chronologically, yet in each case with a different thematic focus. Opening with a look at the precedents set by the Carolingian forerunners of the Empire, the first section considers deluxe imperial manuscripts associated with the Ottonian emperors. The second section examines the role of imperial monasteries in the production of manuscripts, considering in particular the patronage of aristocratic elites. The final section offers a tour of imperial cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from Vienna and Prague to Augsburg and Nuremberg. This final stop considers the impact of Albrecht Durer and humanism on the arts of the book. The volume features a glossary, indexes, and maps showing the shifting borders of the Empire over 700 years.

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A pair of leaves recently acquired by Houghton Library presents an opportunity to examine the illuminated sequence composed in honor of John the Evangelist, Verbum dei deo natum, within its broader cultural context. Written and illuminated at the Dominican nunnery of Paradies bei Soest in Westfalia as part of a set of liturgical books that are among the most elaborate of their kind from the entire Middle Ages, the richly decorated fragments promise to transform our understanding of the special place of Christ’s “beloved disciple” in fourteenth-century art, liturgy, theology, and mysticism.In addition to an introduction on art and liturgy in the Middle Ages, the interdisciplinary collection of essays includes contributions by musicologists, philologists, and art historians.

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Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University's Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area institutions, this catalog provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as a guide to its production, illumination, functions, and readership. Entries by eighty-five international experts document, discuss, and reproduce more than two hundred and sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little known before now. Beyond Words also explores the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste. Of broad appeal to scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike, this catalog documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ever to take place in North America.

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