The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany [1 ed.] 9780942299458, 0942299450

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface and Acknowledgments (page 9)
Introduction - Texts Versus Images: Female Sprituality from an Art Historian's Perspective (page 13)
I. Art, Enclosure, and the Pastoral Care of Nuns (page 35)
II. The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions (page 111)
III. Before the Book of Hours: The Development of the Illustrated Prayer Book in Germany (page 149)
IV. The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Henry Suso and the Dominicans (page 197)
V. Medieval Self-fashioning: Authorship, Authority, and Autobiography in Suso's Exemplar (page 233)
VI. The Liber miraculorum of Unterlinden: An Icon in Its Convent Setting (page 279)
VII. Vision and the Veronica (page 317)
VIII. "On the Little Bed of Jesus": Pictorial Piety and Monastic Reform (page 383)
IX. The Reformation of Vision: Art and the Dominican Observance in Late Medieval Germany (page 427)
Notes (page 469)
Index of Manuscripts Cited (page 589)
Color Plates (page 593)
Index (page 603)

Citation preview

The Visual and the Visionary

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

Jettrey F. Hamburger

ZONE BOOKS - NEW YORK 1998

© 1998 Jeffrey E Hamburger ZONE BOOKS

6u Broadway, Suite 608 New York, NY 10012 All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America. Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hamburger, Jeffrey F, 1957The visual and the visionary : art and female spirituality in late medieval Germany / Jeffrey E Hamburger.

p- cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-942299-45-0 1. Devotional objects—Germany. 2. Devotional objects—Catholic Church. 3. Christian art and symbolism—Medieval, 500-1500—Germany. 4. Nuns as artists—Germany. J. Title.

704. .9'482’082—dc21 96-4941 NK1653.G4H36 1998

CIP

For Caroline and for Jim and in memory of my father Joseph Hamburger (1922-1997)

In the year of our Lord 1487, on the vigil of St. Michael, this book,

which was begun by me, Anna von Buchwald, in 1471, was completed and finished. It is not to be thought that this book has been

written or compiled out of other books, but through the grace and the inspiration of the Highest One. The names and words contained in this book were not first written in some other book, which came into possession of the convent. How much work I had

in carefully seeking out, compiling, and writing no man would readily believe, but it is known by God alone. May He, to whom |

offer the book for the use and requirements of the convent and the entire community, be my reward for so much work. — Colophon of the Buch im Chor, compiled 1471-1487

by Anna von Buchwald, prioress of the Benedictine convent of Preetz.

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments 9 Introduction

Texts Versus Images: Female Spirituality

from an Art Historian’s Perspective 13 I Art, Enclosure, and the Pastoral Care of Nuns 35 II The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions 111

Ill Before the Book of Hours: The Development of the Illustrated Prayer Book

in Germany 149 IV The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Henry Suso and the Dominicans 197 V_ Medieval Self-fashioning: Authorship, Authority, and Autobiography in Suso’s Exemplar 233 VI = The Liber miraculorum of Unterlinden:

An Icon in Its Convent Setting 279 VII Vision and the Veronica 317 VII] “On the Little Bed of Jesus”: Pictorial Piety and Monastic Reform 383 IX The Reformation of Vision: Art and the Dominican Observance

in Late Medieval Germany 427

Notes 469 Index of Manuscripts Cited 589

Color Plates 593 Index 603

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Lip service to interdisciplinarity has become all too fashionable. I would like to think, however, that this book could only have been written by an art historian. It is not simply that, in the course of my research, I repeatedly came up against the limits of my own disciplinary competence. Although I have repeatedly turned to texts, my primary purpose has been to identify and investigate the distinctive character of the images employed by nuns in their devotions and the institutional contexts and traditions that shaped the visual culture of female monasticism. At the same time, I have worked in the conviction that the study of female piety and patronage can and must be seen as an integral part of a general history of medieval art and spirituality and that to approach either subject without taking into account the contributions of female monasticism would be to mis-

represent them both. My wife, Dietlinde, has been my companion and mainstay over the many years this project was in progress. She comes first, not last, in the list of those to whom I am indebted. For their interest and generosity in sharing information and ideas, my thanks to colleagues at Oberlin and beyond, in particular, Walter Cahn, William Hood, Richard Spear, and Jeffrey Weidman. In Barbara Newman, I found a reader of uncommon insight and imagination. The many others who assisted with each essay are acknowledged in the notes. Here, however, I wish to single out two friends who, in very different ways, have inspired and informed my work, and to whom this book is dedicated: James Marrow, a scholar of images who is no less at home in late medieval devotional literature, and Caroline Bynum, a scholar of texts who taught me to see with new clarity. Over the years, both have given unstintingly of their time and advice, but it is their friendship and encouragement — neither of which ever impeded frank criticism — for which I am most thankful. Readers who know their work or, better yet, their conversation, will immediately recognize the extent of my indebtedness, which extends far beyond what can be expressed in the narrow conventions of notes and acknowledgments. 9

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

Most of the research on which this book is based was carried out between 1989 and 1994 and was facilitated by two leaves, the first funded by

Research Status at Oberlin College, the second by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities held conjointly with a membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The manuscript was completed in 1996-97 during a year spent in Munich on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. For their help in seeing this project through with such speed, I am immensely grateful to the entire staff of Zone Books, above all, my editors, Ramona Naddaff, Meighan Gale, and Don McMahon. A generous grant from the dean’s office at Oberlin College subsidized the cost of color plates. Six of the nine chapters in this book have been published previously, in whole or in part, sometimes under slightly different titles, as follows: “Art, Enclosure and the Cura monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript,” Gesta 31 (1992), pp. 108-134 (chapter 1); “The Visual and the Visionary: The Changing Role of the Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions,” Viator 20 (1989), pp. 161-82 (chapter 2); “A Liber precum in Sélestat and the Development of the Illustrated Prayer Book in Germany,» Art Bulletin 73 (1991), pp. 209-36 (chapter 3); “The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Heinrich Suso and the Dominicans,” Art Bulletin 71 (1989), pp. 20-46 (chapter 4); “Medieval Self-fashioning: Authorship, Authority, and Autobiography in Suso’s Exemplar,” forthcoming in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans, eds. K. Emery Jr. and J. Wawry-

kow (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press) (chapter 5); and “The Liber miraculorum of Unterlinden: An Icon in Its Convent Setting,” in The Sacred Image East and West, eds. R. Ousterhout and L. Brubaker (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 147-90 and 283-98 (chapter 6). Previously published essays are reprinted here with permission; all have been revised or expanded, some extensively. In places, changes have been made to take into account subsequent research, my own and that of others. I have also allowed myself the liberty of correcting some outright errors and oversights, all of them my own responsibility. The essays gathered in this volume represent my efforts to recover the forgotten art of female monasticism, but I would never claim that the evidence I have gathered is definitive or even representative. | have, however, striven for a premature synthesis, no matter how much more spadework remains to be done.

10

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Note to the reader: the terms “convent” and “nunnery” are used interchangeably throughout this book. All translations from the Vulgate Bible are from the Douay-Rheims translation, The Holy Bible translated from the Latin Vulgate (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1899; reprinted Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1971). All other translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

1

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INTRODUCTION

Texts Versus Images:

Female Spirituality from an

Art Historian’s Perspective

This book is largely the product of dissatisfied curiosity. Curiosity may no longer be considered a suitably serious motivation for the writing of history; in the monastic tradition, it was considered a sin. The contemporary historian, conscious of the profession’s imperfections, more often investigates the past to expose or excoriate its transgressions (or those of colleagues, if not his or her own). History, we are told, tells us as much, if

not more, about ourselves than about our predecessors; it is, paradoxically, about the present, not the past. This book is very much a product of the present moment, yet | have written it in the conviction that it remains possible to recover glimpses of the past, even if what and how we see necessarily remain open to interpretation. Lest this strike some as too nostalgic or recuperative an endeavor, let me add at the outset that I have approached my materials, whether texts or images, on the assumption that they themselves represent interpretations or responses to the moments in which they were made. Construed in this way, context provides more than just a foil or backdrop; text, image, and context merge into a larger, if unstable, pattern of kaleidoscopic complexity: shifting, intricate, and multifaceted. !

The roots of the project of which this book is a part lie in the early 1980s, when I was still a graduate student, and a book on female spirituality, let alone on the “visual culture” of female monasticism, would have been regarded as an oddity. Today, mercifully, neither subject needs justification, even if “visual culture” remains a controversial, if increasingly common, term.? Fifteen years ago, when I began working on the Rothschild Canticles, a devotional miscellany made for a woman, in all likelihood a nun, I found myself confronted with an almost complete absence of serious or systematic research on the art of female monasticism.* To my astonishment, even relatively straightforward questions concerning how nuns lived and worshiped, what they saw and read, were not easily answered. In 1982, the year that witnessed the publication of Caroline 13

INTRODUCTION

Bynum’s Jesus as Mother, temale spirituality was only just emerging as a distinctive and significant subject of research.* Another landmark, Peter Dronke’s Women Writers of the Middle Ages, appeared only two years later.°

The social history of female monasticism remained relatively undeveloped, in spite of precocious contributions by pioneers such as Eileen Powers and Lina Eckenstein.® The study of the material and visual culture of female monasticism was, as yet, unheard of.’

In the intervening years, much has changed, although less than one might have hoped or expected.® The study of writings by or commissioned for medieval women has become an academic industry.’ The rela-

tive lack of research on the art commissioned by and for medieval women 7 is all the more striking.!° There is still nothing approaching a survey of the art and architecture of female monasticism in the medieval West, and any attempt to write one would be in some respects premature, given the lack of research. The dearth of scholarship has many causes. Some are rooted in historiography and academic tradition.’ Much of the relevant material comes from the German- and Netherlandic-speaking world. In the United States, however, where the commitment to feminist art history has been strongest, interest in Germany and Germanic culture has been relatively weak, at least among medievalists, certainly lagging behind that in subjects French, Italian, and English. As with modernism, so too with medieval art: the focus remains France.

Other causes are more deep-seated. With the dissolution of numerous convents in the early modern period, there remained few incentives to collect sources and maintain institutional traditions. The system of the “fine arts,” developed in the Renaissance, canonized what was to become the academic curriculum in painting, sculpture, and architecture at the expense of other media, especially the so-called minor, or decorative, arts, including textiles, which were predominant in the so-called craft traditions practiced in monasteries, male and female.'? Closely connected with this development was the emergence of a novel conception of art, the notion of art as such, as opposed to the medieval idea of the imago, a representation which, as a reflection of a higher truth, could never transcend its secondary status, and yet at the same time was invested through that higher reality with miraculous powers. As art history accommodates anthropological approaches to the image — including a greater emphasis on issues of function and reception rather than on aesthetics and production — attention has turned to bodily responses to images, whether weeping, self-mortification, or ecstatic elevation.’* The anthropological turn in art history has restored to premodern artifacts some of the immediacy and liveliness that they had lost in inter14

TEXTS VERSUS IMAGES

vening centuries. Despite the convergence of postmodern and premodern, however, there remains the danger of anachronism. Contemporary interest in the body tends to make of it an almost infinitely malleable entity; biology is no longer destiny. In the Middle Ages, the complementary doctrines of original sin and the resurrection of the flesh assured an understanding of the body and its limits both less and more utopian than any imagined today.” Women have historically been regarded as one of the primary, even formative, audiences for devotional art, so it comes as a surprise that devotional imagery has never been adequately analyzed in terms of gender." The oversight is part of a larger pattern of neglect which, paradoxically, is rooted, at least in part, in theory. The very commitments that might have led to a surge of studies devoted to the visual culture of female monasticism often had the opposite effect: How could one study what was presumed to have been suppressed, misrepresented, and obliterated (and what, in some cases, demonstrably, had been)?" The impact of semiotics and structuralism on the humanities, and the consequent shift, first, from women's history to the study of the representation of women in the Middle Ages and then, further still, to gender history and the social construction of gender roles and representations, has at times precluded any access to medieval women as such.'® Whereas the vast corpus of literature by and about nuns was once thought to define the experiential horizons of religious women, more recently its claims to immediacy have been dismissed as spurious, tainted in the process of transmission by the redaction of men.'? Even so famous an author as Heloise has been declared a literary fiction.’° In schematic terms, the two points of view could be said to represent the first and second, if not the most recent, stages of feminist criticism, of which the first sought to recover female voices that had been silenced, or at least not heard, and the second to uncover the ways in which those “voices” had been constructed according to preconceptions and paradigms of gender. The two critical strategies — which hardly exhaust the range of available interpretive approaches — represent respectively faith and skepticism. Whereas the first approach accepts the possibility of unmediated mystical experience, the second suspects it of false consciousness. Whatever their differences, each way of reading tends to restrict the role of the putative female author or reader to no more than a vessel or medium, the one, for the unmediated voice of God, the other for the less sublime and highly mediated voice of her male supervisors who, in turn, mouth the dominant discourse.?! Developments in textual criticism have reinforced this fundamental shift in perspective. As philologists increasingly acknowledge the diffi15

INTRODUCTION

culty of recovering original texts, reception has replaced invention as the focus of critical inquiry.’ The textual critic identifies borrowings and layers of transmission, less to strip them away from an untainted original

than to demonstrate the impossibility of its recuperation. By a strange : twist of philological fate, feminism, to the extent it allies itself with this approach, joins in the muffling or even the silencing of the voices it had once hoped to recover. In 1988, Ursula Peters could argue that a vox feminae as such did not exist in medieval literature and that “the literary historian does not reach a level of specifically female expression, but only that of the representations of women, the ideological production of programmatic preconceptions about women.’ At approximately the same time — 1985 — Margaret Miles made the manifestly false declaration that “not a single image of any woman — saint, Mary, scriptural or apocryphal figure — was designed or created by a woman. The images we must deal with are images provided for women by men.’** Such statements easily become self-fulfilling prophecies if they are allowed to sanction turning a deaf ear or a blind eye to the materials that, no matter how mediated, might tell something of how medieval women shaped, viewed and responded to their own culture. Short of resigning oneself to the utter inscrutability of the past, some way has to be found out of this hermeneutical impasse. It is easy enough to romanticize female “voices” from the Middle Ages, but it is also cynical to ignore them. To a degree, all that is required is the willingness to look, or, as the case may be, to stop overlooking. At the very least, one can search for a tenable middle ground, one that admits the impossibility of unmediated communication from past to present but nonetheless allows women to speak from the silence within enclosure. There is no Archimedean point on which to rest a definitive interpretation of any given set of historical materials. To acknowledge, however, that history is written by historians and that historians are never entirely disinterested need not entail the open embrace of partisanship.”* Historians, having dismissed the notion that historical sources merely mirror their subjects, should

have little incentive to see in the past little more than the reflection of their own agendas and concerns. Recent theories of representation emphasize the ways in which images mold rather than mirror their contexts. Yet, to extrapolate patterns of discourse and, by extension, governing social settings from texts or images read in isolation, threatens an act of historical solecism writ large.*® As early as 1970, Brian Stock warned that “an excavation of the function of signs can contribute to an overall reconstruction. But semiotics is perhaps most skillfully deployed in con-

cert with more traditional historical tools, not in isolation” and that 16

TEXTS VERSUS IMAGES

“institutions can only partially be reconstructed via texts” — words that seem to have gone largely unheeded in the interim.’’ With regard to gender in the Middle Ages, David Aers has remarked that “there is no excuse now for literary scholars to think that the stereotypes of misogynistic writing and iconography provide an adequate account of gender relations and ideas in the period.... Any understanding of antifeminist traditions, their continuities and changes, must analyze them as part of a specific struggle to create, to defend and, in the changing circumstances of the later Middle Ages, often to reimpose traditional patriarchal order.’ Aers’s conception of history from the bottom up provides welcome resistance to the tyranny, postmodern as well as medieval, of discourse imposed from the top down.” The concept of a unified culture is easily projected onto a Catholic Middle Ages that, by definition, harbored pretensions of universality. In recent years, however, even medievalists have abandoned it in favor of the principle of competing communities and subcultures.*? This form of historical pluralism implies the refusal to identify any type of evidence as foundational, be it intellectual, religious, or economic. It also means accepting a certain fluidity and imprecision — male and female spiritualities, all in constant flux —in lieu of monolithic constructs such as orthodoxy and heresy, monastic piety and lay piety, male spirituality and female spirituality. At a practical level, it has meant looking beyond the small and in many respects unrepresentative set of texts that often are taken to exemplify female spirituality. Within so complex a configuration, to read any genre in isolation is to divorce it from the setting that would have informed its making or writing and reception from the outset. In a recent book, I examined the images made by nuns for nuns: predominantly devotional drawings, but also textiles and illuminated manuscripts.*! To those who argue that the texts attributed to medieval women at best distort their voices, the imagery made by and for enclosed women replies with a vigorous, if not uncomplicated, affirmation of presence. In this book, my emphasis lies less on the devotional images made by women than on the images supplied to them in the context of the cura monialium, or the pastoral care of nuns.** From our perspective, the pastoral care of nuns hardly seems a major factor in the historical drama of the pre-Reformation period. In the High and late Middle Ages, however, it emerged as a pressing and pervasive problem. For the church to find appropriate institutional structures to accommodate and to control the religious aspirations of women was (and remains) no easy task — one that almost all religious orders, including the mendicants, at one point either shirked or outright rejected. Female spirituality flourished nonetheless, especially in 17

INTRODUCTION

regions of rapid urban growth: Tuscany, and, in the north, the Rhineland and the Netherlands.?? For example, in Strasbourg, the Dominicans alone could claim eight nunneries.** Cologne boasted twenty-one female foundations, ranging from venerable communities of canonesses to humble beguinages.*> The marginal, secondary status of many medieval women has made them heroines of postmodern historiography. Yet the culture of female monasticism was hardly marginal in its day, especially in the urban landscape of the later Middle Ages. The history of images within the cura monialium cannot substitute for a comprehensive history of the art and architecture of female monasticism. Nor does it simply supplement standard histories of art by way of challenging established canons. It does, however, have the potential to challenge and subvert doggedly maintained oppositions between text and image, high and low culture, ecclesiastical and vernacular traditions, and lay and monastic spirituality in the period that witnessed the origin of what, in retrospect, is defined as modernity. At first glance, the more outlandish forms of female piety — often condemned as “paramystical” phenomena — seem far removed from the forms of lay piety cultivated among the urban laity. Monastic and lay piety should not, however, be interpreted solely in terms of the contrast between sacred and secular.*© For nuns as for the laity, the vernacular was the primary vehicle of religious expression.*’ Moreover, female piety — even if not “normal” by medieval, let alone modern, standards — in many respects proved normative, not least because the pastoral care of nuns paved the way for the care of the laity which, following the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, increasingly preoccupied the Western church.** Lay piety was, to a large extent, female piety; women served as models of religious conduct, not only in hagiography, but also in the home.*? Although some convents remained resolutely aristocratic, increasingly their inhabitants came from the very same families who patronized the Franciscans and Dominicans, many of whom devoted much of their time to the care and supervision of nuns, tertiaries, and Beguines.*?

To insist on the cura monialium as one, if not the exclusive, context in which to examine the art of female monasticism is not inevitably to assign

women a passive role in the creation and control of images. The cura monialium itself represents a response to movements initiated, in part, by women. Even if not always as artists, then often as patrons and recipients,

nuns played active, resourceful roles in determining how images were employed in the rituals that dominated their lives. The cura monialium had a formative impact on the production of pastoral literature both by and for women: sermons, treatises, chronicles, poetry, and accounts of vision18

TEXTS VERSUS IMAGES

ary experience.*! Its impact on the visual arts, however, remains largely unexamined. The two bodies of evidence — devotional images and devotional literature — complement and contradict one another. They stand — not only in dialogue but also in argument — at times even in outright confrontation. Medieval devotion embraced the entire person, not only the mind, the emotions, and the imagination, but the body as well. Devotional performance engaged all the senses, corporeal as well as spiritual, through speech, sight, and gesture.** Devotional imagery has often been construed as the starting point for an imaginative flight out of the body.* Increasingly, however, it came to involve an immersion in the senses, one that pastors sought to control. If devotion was a performance, the struc-

tures of pastoral care raise the issue of who orchestrated and directed devotional practice.

The quarrels between nuns and their pastors are rarely represented in medieval texts or images. Instead, a picture of paradisical harmony prevails, as in a miniature from a copy of Willem van Affligem’s life of the Cistercian Lutgard of Aywieres (1182-1246), illuminated in Flanders ca. 1300 (figure I.1).“* Lutgard, the visionary, appears in a vision herself, condescending to place a crown on the head of the pious Benedictine, who styles himself an eyewitness to her life and miracles. Assisted by angels, the holy woman emerges from a tabernacle reminiscent of a sacristy cupboard. The shrinelike space, combined with the enframing architecture,

recalls the enclosed, claustral spaces within which charismatic women were constrained. It is almost as if Lutgard, although already in heaven, were still confined to speaking from behind a grille. In a reversal of roles, the miniature styles the nun as the Christlike mediator who confers blessings on her humble male follower.

More in keeping with the experience of most nuns are the relationships represented in a copy of the Amterbuch, or Book of Offices, and the Buch der Ersetzung by the fifteenth-century reformer, Johannes Meyer, transcribed and illustrated by nuns at the Dominican Katharinenkloster

in Nuremberg shortly after 1455 (figure I.2 and color plate I). A fullpage drawing from the compendium encapsulates the cura monialium, at least from the friar’s commanding point of view: high in a pulpit, Meyer preaches to his literally captive audience. Dwarfed in scale, the nuns do not stand out as individuals. Instead, they merge to form a corporate entity, silent and submissive. The scroll, which renders Meyer’s speech visible, reads “Audi filia et vide et inclina aurem tuam quia,” an ellipsis of the epithalamium, or marriage ode, Psalm 44.11-12: “Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and forget thy people and thy father’s house, And the king shall greatly desire thy beauty; for he is the Lord thy God, 19

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NTRODUCTION

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as well as “Zwey kleine Poppen wieg,” or “two small doll’s cradles.’ For

a Madonna and Child, dated to the turn of the thirteenth century, the nuns fashioned four sets of clothing from Italian silk, one for the child on Mary’s arm, and three for the Virgin, who also sports an elaborately wrought crown — one of eighteen such ornaments once in the nuns’ possession.°© (See figure I.5.)

Stripped of their accoutrements, the devotional dolls invite aloof appreciation (figure I.6). Their clothing ironically reinforces their corporeality, investing them with bodies to which the viewer can then respond as if they were alive. Decked out in their finery, they threaten to reduce religion to recreation, piety to play. Yet their whole purpose was to animate the object and to undercut its autonomy as an image, in short, to endow it with a body.°’ In these objects, the work of art becomes a work in progress, one whose reception literally obscures its production in the form of layer upon layer of cloth and devotional jewelry.°* Each one is a cumulative, collaborative work of craft that challenges modern, if not postmodern, conceptions of the work of art as an isolated and organic entity, complete and untouchable. In contrast, the dolls cry out to be dressed, undressed, kissed, caressed, and consoled. A meditation attributed to Gertrude of Helfta portrays such a “little Jesus” (“Jesulus”) in action. As Gertrude drifts off to sleep, she sees the crucifix by her bed leaning toward her, as if it were about to topple over. Gertrude enters into a dialogue, not with the image, but with Christ himself, who explains that his love draws him toward her. Gertrude presses the crucifix between her breasts, echoing Song of Songs 1.12: “a bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, he shall abide between my breasts.”°? Having removed the iron nails from the crucifix, Gertrude replaces them with cloves, then kisses the corpus repeatedly.°° When she finally falls asleep, the image extends its right arm and embraces her, whispering in her ear a love poem, in fact, a stanza from the Jubilus that was attributed, in the Middle Ages, to St. Bernard.®! Gertrude’s devotion, in its interweaving of 23

INTRODUCTION

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Figure 1.3. Christ Child, Mechelen, ca. 1500, from the Cistercian convent of Heilig Kreuz, Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Inv.-Nr. Pl. 600.

Figure 1.4. Christ Child, Mechelen, ca. 1500, from the Cistercian convent of Heilig Kreuz, formerly housed in a reliquary shrine (destroyed), Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Inv.-Nr. Pl. 600.

example and experience, scriptural prototypes and affective piety, is typical of many monastic devotions, not just those associated with women. In the meditation, text and image interact just as they did in the experience of the nuns for whom it was originally written. The images used by nuns have always been subject to scorn and suspicion, in no small measure on account of their insistent physicality. The mockery of the Freymiithige has a familiar ring: A virgin with a sensitive and sentimental heart, who possibly was unlucky in love in this world, suddenly has the idea of currying favor with heaven and, by degrees, allows herself to slip into a ceremonious courtship with Christ.... 24

TEXTS VERSUS [IMAGES

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Even within architectural history, the structures of female monasticism have received short shrift.’* The oversight can only partially be explained by the minimal importance attributed to buildings erected on the foundation of modest endowments.’° Just as feminist art history has forced a reevaluation of which monuments we investigate and why, so too 45

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

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46

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

a history of female monastic architecture requires reconsideration of the architectural canon. Rather than implying by exclusion that the monuments of female communities do not meet conventional criteria of structural and formal complexity, we should consider the contexts that conditioned their simplicity. Despite the temptation to compare plans with statutes, we need to remember that both are abstractions. Neither was drawn up in a vacuum. Monastic legislation responded to circumstances, and convents often adapted existing buildings to their own purposes.’ The peregrinations of the Petersfrauen in Salzburg underscore the extent to which the enforcement of enclosure became embroiled in local rivalries. Rarely was an ideal plan built on a site free of encumberments, physical or psychological. At St. Peter’s, the nuns’ choir, known as their “basilica,” was situated in the parish church (today the Franziskanerkirche) adjacent to the men’s monastery and consisted of a raised gallery

occupying the center of the nave. The nuns’ rights to this space were fiercely contested by the parish, although ultimately confirmed by Archbishop Eberhard II, who decided in the nuns’ favor because the portion

of the church containing the choir stood on ground belonging to the abbey. Although the altar in the choir was separated from the nuns by a screen, indulgences testify that on certain days the public and their priest had access to the space. The choir in the nave was replaced with another, less obtrusive gallery over the right aisle, dedicated in 1454; documents record payments for stained glass, wall paintings, choir stalls, and, in 1453, a new altar and monstrance.’”” Work requiring the relocation of the organ and the walling up of doors and windows continued at least until 1457. The nuns opposed their relocation, going so far as to take legal action to block the permission sought by the abbot to build a new choir in return for salt rights to be ceded to the archbishop. The nuns were even able to enlist the monks of the abbey as allies, to whom the income represented by the salt rights was dearer than a more lavish liturgical space. To sweeten the pill, the archbishop promised to subvent the building costs and to dedicate the new choir with great ceremony. Many nuns continued to use the old choir and were only prevented from doing so by its demolition in 1458.78

An impassable perimeter was indispensable for the enforcement of enclosure, yet, surprisingly, many convents were without one. Especially in urban contexts, barriers posed problems for the surrounding population. Often it was the convent, contrary to the wishes of its neighbors, that sought solitude and isolation. In Basel, for example, sometime before

1287 the nuns of the convent of Poor Clares erected a wall extending from their choir to the city’s fortifications, across what many considered a

4]

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

public right of way, in order to prevent people from traversing their property. They also pierced the perimeter to permit direct access to their gardens beyond the wall so they would not have to take a circuitous route through the city. Although the citizens protested and tore down the new construction, the Poor Clares were eventually vindicated.” Even under ideal conditions, female monasticism presented builders with a distinctive set of problems. In all convents, the subdivision of spaces was predicated on a paradox: the inhabitants were segregated from men but nonetheless required their periodic presence for their salvation. Without priests, neither could Mass be said nor confession heard. Convents dictated communication without contact. As a result, plans ensured strict control over entrance and egress, often through complex gateways and avenues of approach. Convents also required discrete sacramental spaces, whether special chambers for confession or, in some cases, sacristies or “armaria” for the reservation and protection of altar implements.®° Apart from more elaborate structures, which often survive in disproportionate numbers, some underlying similarities emerge. Many convent churches share simple, rectangular plans.*! Such simplicity reflects more than the constraints imposed by limited funds: elaborate chancels or chapels were superfluous for nuns who had no sacerdotal duties. Of the almost 300 convents in German-speaking regions affiliated or claiming affiliation with the Cistercian order, the majority adopted a plan based on a single vessel.82 The shift from complex cross and basilican plans to simpler hall structures mirrored broader developments in late medieval German ecclesiastical architecture, but it also met the basic needs of female communities.8? The Cistercian convent at St. Georgenberg in Frankenberg (Hessen) offers a drastic example of simplification: church, convent choir, and dormitory form a single, massive block, aligned in sequence from east

to west (figure 1.4). Adherence to local building traditions and the vagaries of patronage proved powerful, if not overriding, factors. Variety remains the keynote not only from region to region, but also among houses affiliated with a single order. If in many Cistercian and mendicant convents, the vestigial east end underwent drastic simplification and, in some cases, was no longer distinguished from the rest of the building, at least in plan, other convents incorporated vastly expanded choirs. For example, at the Dominican convent of Unterlinden, a choir of seven bays, dedicated in 1269 by Albertus Magnus, eclipsed a nave a mere six bays long (figure 1.5). When a gallery —no longer extant and probably an addition — overshadowed the two westernmost bays, the nave was still more constricted.®> Indicative of the size and wealth of this celebrated convent, the enlargement of the 48

ART, ENGLOSWRE;, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

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°9°

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choir also points to the diversification of paraliturgical devotions in this corporate space, a process to which the convent’s chronicle and other ‘ide ample ample testimony.*6 sources provide testimony. Compounding the challenge for architects and patrons, particularly after the decline of double monasteries in the later Middle Ages, was the added presence of a lay congregation, what the chronicle of the DominiatToss Tossidentifies identifies simply as “people f h id wor ld” (ussercans; at simply as people trom the outside welt menschen).*’ Both the nuns and the laity had to see (or at least hear) the Mass celebration, yet neither was allowed so much as a glimpse of -

7

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87 h th ; and the laity had least h é

i 88 Th ‘entional plans dieval convent the other audience.* e unconventiona plans oof ate |medieval churches reflect the composite character of their congregations. Different patterns emerge in different countries. In France, monks, nuns, and the

SIN SAA | THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

Figure 1.5. Convent of Unterlinden, Colmar, plan (E. Coester, Die einschiffigen Cistercienserinnen-

kirchen West- und Siddeutschlands von 1200 bis 1350 [Mainz: Gesellschaft fur mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1984], p. 354).

laity commonly shared a single level, divided from each other by barriers as solid as a screen or as flimsy as a curtain. In cruciform churches, nuns might be confined to a transept arm, allowing for easy access from the cloister and the dormitory.®’ In England, there was no standard plan: nuns occupied either the choir or a portion of the nave. Some churches — for example, those of the Gilbertines — placed the nuns and the laity in parallel aisles. As the relative size of the cohabiting congregations changed over time, so did the disposition of spaces.” In German-speaking regions a distinctive architectural solution emerged: the nuns’ choir or gallery. Astonishing as it may seem, a comprehensive study of this salient architectural feature and its origins has yet to be written.”! To measure the extent of this neglect, one has only to turn to the otherwise exhaustive entry, “Empore,” in the Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte: the galleries and raised choirs in convents are mentioned only in passing’? —in spite of the fact that they developed from the rich and varied tradition of raised crypts and Westwork galleries in earlier German ecclesiastical architecture.?* Although galleries survive in considerable numbers, their function has often been obscured by changes in the surrounding fabric, especially the removal of the stairs that provided the priest access to the nuns’ choir from the altar in the nave and the low-

ering or outright removal of the barrier that prevented the nuns from seeing anything of the church except, in some cases, the high altar at the east end.”*

The Cistercian convent at Chefmno in Poland, formerly Kulm in western Prussia, offers a textbook example of a gallery laid out and decorated with the requirements of enclosure in mind (figures 1.6-1.8).% Founded ca. 1266, the convent tells us much of the material circumstances that alternately helped and hindered architectural and artistic patronage of 50

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

female communities. In 1266 a local magnate, Berthold von Cist (Czyste),

and his wife Christine, willed to the nuns their entire estate, which, in turn, was to serve as the site of the convent.”° For almost half a century, however, the community was unable to find a permanent home. Local troubles and disputes over the legacy imperiled the site in the country; moreover, the city was reluctant to grant the nuns the right of permanent residence within its walls.?” Eventually church and convent were built adjacent to the fortifications, but no earlier than the first decade of the fourteenth century.”®

Filling virtually the entire nave, the nuns’ choir dominates the church

(figure 1.6). Capped by elaborate star-ribbed vaults, the airy and expansive gallery occupies three-fourths of the nave, which is 22.25 meters long and 9.25 meters wide. In contrast, the underlying space set aside tor the laity (or perhaps for lay sisters) is dark and unaspiring (figure 1.7). It occupies only two bays; the third, westernmost bay is set aside as a narthex. The gallery and the lay church share a simple polygonal choir; the two low chapels to either side of the east end are later additions (figure 1.8).”” Running around the upper choir is a band of paintings: their narrow, elongated format resembles the tapestries and embroideries that were a staple of convent inventories (figure 1.6).!°° Joining scenes from

or related to the Song of Songs with episodes from the life of Christ, the paintings enveloped the nuns with the bridal imagery that defined their roles as Sponsae Christi.!°! (See figure 8.5.) Despite its foundations in exegesis, the amorous narrative presents the spiritual dalliance of Christ and the soul as a coherent narrative of unprecedented physical immediacy. The nuns are no longer assimilated to Christ through suffering, but through love, boldly displayed in imagery that, were it not for the halos, might easily be mistaken for a secular romance, not an allegorical drama. The elision of secular and sacred narratives at Chetmno need hardly

come as a surprise.'°* Nuns maintained their ties to the world and its images in spite of their segregation from their surroundings. Cloistered women who entered enclosure as widows would have been well versed from childhood in the conventions of romance literature. But even those who entered as oblates might have known secular stories from objects such as the Malterer embroidery from the convent of Adelhausen in Freiburg that combines secular and sacred representations of the power of women.!°3 Of the decorated textiles conserved in the convents of Lower

Saxony, some are stitched with tales of love and adventure, such as the story of Tristan.'°* Secular imagery was no more out-of-place in a convent than a volume of Ovid in a twelfth-century monastic library. §1

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ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

from quarrels with irresponsible priors to payments for paintings, were commonplace. In conjunction with other documents, the codex attests that Anna often assumed many duties usually delegated to the prior, from the supervision of repairs to the keeping of accounts. Among Anna's first accomplishments were the renovation of her own accommodations, which were on the point of collapse, the installation of three new bath houses, and the complete refurbishing of the church and the refectory, the two centers of communal life.6° The Buch im Chor provides a detailed account of the renovations, right down to the twelve hundred nails needed for Anna’s apartments.’! A mason, Klaus, spent seventy-two days whitewashing the interior in preparation for paintings (“daf} man Bilder darauf malen sollte”).'? Traces of the murals and panels survive, which, by Anna’s own account, included the history of True Cross in twenty-eight separate scenes.°3 The paintings were executed by one Peter from Liibeck, who received payment for colors, gold, silver, oil, and varnish. Payment came in part from the fifteen shillings donated by the wife of the knight Otte von Walstorp.’* When Peter died in 1491, Anna also saw to it that his name was remembered in the prayers of the nuns.!° Most of Anna’s attention, however, was lavished on the nuns’ choir, or Binnenkirche (inner church).° The choir occupied four of the six bays in the nave and was separated from the aisles by high walls. The lay congregation had use of the two western bays (originally under a gallery) and the south aisle. As at other convents, for example, Ebstorf, the north aisle was absorbed into the cloister.’ Whereas the altar for the lay church stood to the west of the nuns’ choir, the nuns themselves were oriented toward the high altar in the sanctuary toward the east. Anna von Buchwald gives a precise description of how and why she reorganized the interior: All our predecessors took Communion at the high altar, on account of which

we were often obstructed by clerics and the laity, who were always standing about there. Because of this I had one altar enclosed in our choir and had it consecrated in honor of the heavenly queen, Mary, the all-holy brother John

the Baptist, and our dear holy father, St. Benedict, and in the name of all God’s saints, there we henceforth undertook to take Communion, and | had the doors to the choir closed. 58

Figure 1.19 (opposite page). Anna von Buchwald, Buch im Chor, Kloster Preetz, 1471-87, Klosterarchiv, HS 1, f. 2v. (Photo: Kloster Preetz.)

Figure 1.20 (following page). Mass of St. Gregory, Kloster Preetz, PK | 10504, 1966. (Photo: Landesamt fur Denkmalpflege Schleswig-Holstein.)

69

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1a)

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

Of the goods manufactured in convents, decorated textiles were the most important.’ During his prolonged absences from Ulm, Jodocus Wind became something of a traveling salesman, offering, wherever he could, rosaries, gloves, and textiles produced by the nuns. At one point Wind even asked them to send some shaving cloths for his personal use.” Between 1492 and 1501, the nuns of St. Clare’s in Basel washed and repaired vestments for the friars of St. Peter’s.?°?' At Wienhausen ca. 1501, the nuns sold handicrafts, either embroidery or miscellaneous devotional images, to raise the funds required to pay for the restoration of the chapel of St. Anne.” In Le Chastel perilleux, it is hardly by chance that Frére Robert cites as an exemplum of avarice the refusal to teach fellow nuns the art of working in silk.*°? The early fifteenth-century didactic poem “Das Beginchen von Paris” describes a Beguine who refuses to alternate communal prayer with spinning and sewing so that she can devote herself entirely to contemplation.?°* Within some beguinages and convents of the Windesheim congregation, the production of linen, wool, and other textiles grew to such proportions that guilds took measures to protect their interests.?°°

Surviving objects correspond closely to documented forms of devotion. For example, a small fourteenth-century Madonna from Cologne almost certainly belonged to the Poor Clare who figures on the base. Originally, the Virgin held a removable Christ Child; we have to imagine the nun taking the Child in her hands so as to model herself on Mary.?°6 Sources spelling out how such objects functioned are sparse — but not nearly as sparse as is often assumed. A type of text especially common in convents and known as Handwerkliches Beten — literally, “craft-prayer” — testifies to the way in which devotional objects were used, not simply as material accessories to prayer, but also as mnemonic devices for more elaborate meditations.*°” The procedure was simple, if strange: rather than use an object such as a rosary to structure her devotion, the nun presented the object’s imagined counterpart to God or the saints, then used it as a memory image to keep track of a complicated cycle of prayer. The objects existed only as fictions, yet simulated actual practice. For example, the book of the confraternity of St. Ursula in Strasbourg describes how the Dominican nuns of the convents of St. Matthew and

St. Nicholas “made St. Ursula a golden crown or a luxurious cloak with

gold buckles and gold fittings, everything that might be known and named as befitting the embellishment of a queen: that was presented to her through prayer and offered with love and gratitude.”?°8 The prayers read like detailed descriptions of Klosterfrauenarbeiten, the embroidered garments and coverings for relics encrusted with pearls and spangles that 78

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

remained among the most common productions of convents well into the modern period.?” All of these accessories — clothes, jewelry, rosaries — could be described as devotional paraphernalia in the common-law sense

of the term: “those articles of personal property that the law allows a married woman to keep and, to a certain extent, deal with as her own”?! In this context private devotional objects could be construed as appropriate attributes of a Sponsa Christi— whatever remained from the dowry made over to the convent as the price of her admission.

Texts that took works of art or other objects as their point of departure did not simply structure responses to images, they informed the very process of their manufacture. Rather than categorize the texts as “sources” for an iconographic program, they can instead be read as part of a larger culture of literary experience. At Ebstorf, for example, Matthias von dem Knesebeck, prior from 1464 to 1493, commissioned a new, cast-iron lavabo, inscribed with a record of his donation, together with a stained-glass window of the Crucifixion, installed nearby, so that, whenever the nuns washed their hands they would be reminded how Christ bathed them in his blood so as to absolve them from sin.2!" The ensuing allegorical and typological reading of the window, its colors, and even its shapes (the small circles are to be viewed as “mirrors of conscience’) represents one of the few surviving texts in which a symbolic reading of a stained-glass window is both described and prescribed.?” The window does not merely turn an everyday activity into a devotional exercise, it takes for granted a certain familiarity with exegetical commonplaces and their elaboration in devotional treatises. In one such text, “Die geistliche Padstube,” from the Birgittine convent at Altomitinster, near Aichach (Oberbayern), the nuns fashioned from their prayers “an exquisite fountain with five golden pipes and drains, that flowed so full of grace to wash away sin.... [T]he living fountain is Jesus Christ hanging on the Cross.”?8 For each part of the fountain, the nuns offer a separate devotion, including prayers said before images described as “die pildung der parmhertzigkeit gottes” (a depiction of the mercy of God) and “ein bild der parmhertzigkeit” (an image of mercy), most likely depictions of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, of which one is said to include “die waffen der marter Christi” (the arms of Christ, the martyr), the abbreviated mnemonic tokens of the the Passion known collectively as the arma Christi.*!* Texts serve as cues to images, which, in turn, serve as cues to texts. There is no need to speak of the priority of one medium over the other.

The presence of a given work of art at a convent does not guarantee that the nuns would have been able to see it.245 In some cases, enclosure 19

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

ensured that nuns never had access to, let alone saw, objects that stood in the public parts of convent churches. No less than nuns, however, images populated the cloister. In the literature of female spirituality, the images came to life. The visions of female mystics and convent chronicles brim over with accounts of nuns standing before works of art, exchanging love vows with Christ, sharing embraces, kissing his wounds, and, of course, receiving the stigmata —so full, in fact, that the extraordinary at times seems in danger of becoming humdrum. Too often analyzed as if they

were no more than iconographic source texts, the visions and (auto)biographies of holy women provide an invaluable record of the ways in which works of art were used and perceived.’ Read in conjunction with the material record, the literature of female monasticism suggests that nuns produced a visual culture as distinctive as their spirituality. Some works of art, especially those known collectively as Andachtsbilder (literally devotional images), are rooted in convents, even if individual examples can be traced to other contexts.”!” Distinctive iconography, however, need hardly be the only measure of the particular character of

the images used by nuns. The image most frequently cited in convent chronicles is the crucifix. Once such an image entered enclosure it could take on a life of its own entirely different from any it might have had outside.2'? More often than not, the nun embraces the crucified Christ, who responds with an embrace of his own. To imagine the impact of these images, we need only remind ourselves that enclosed women lived with these simulacra as their constant companions, day and night, year after year. No wonder that in their visions nuns speak of images as if they were alive. Images and visions were linked by liturgical experience, which, at least

in theory, structured each day in enclosure. The Mass was a focal point of female spirituality.?° The corpus Christi, however, was not the only trigger that could spark unions and ecstasies. Simply in terms of frequency, the Divine Office was more important within a nun’s religious routine. Liturgical chant permeated the literature, and, we must assume, the experience of female spirituality, the plainsong for each day providing a pedal point above which the imagery of visions soars like an elaborate melisma.””'

On a less elevated note, rote repetition, let alone ardent devotion, ensured that any nun would have been versed in the corpus of antiphons. Events at Ebstorf during the reform of 1469 underscore the preeminence of the Office. After segregating the nuns from the laity, the first act of the new prioress, Gertrude von dem Brake, was to confiscate all existing choir books — whether lectionaries, graduals, or antiphonaries — declare them corrupt, and, much to the consternation of her charges, have them 80

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

cut to shreds.?”? In the weeks that followed, the nuns spent each night writing out a rough script for the following day’s services, performed by a skeleton staff of twelve nuns. Until they learned the new ordo, all others were barred from participation.’*? Book by book, the chronicle catalogues the acquisition of a new liturgical library. At first the prior commissioned

some paper manuscripts from an outside scriptorium, no doubt in the interest of speed. Over the course of three years, however, the nuns produced their own, more lavish, set of liturgical volumes, including codices with golden and historiated letters (“literis aureis et pictatis” ).??* None of Ebstorf’s choir books survive, but the imagery of choir and chant intermingle in the gradual commissioned, if not actually illuminated, by the nun Gisle, ca. 1300, for a Saxon convent, probably Rulle

bei Osnabruck.?*° In the initial for Christmas Mass, the nuns, led by Gisle, join the angelic choir in celebration of the Nativity (figure 1.24). The Codex Gisle is one in a cohort of choir books, many with illumination as iconographically idiosyncratic as it is lavish, commissioned by female communities around the turn of the fourteenth century.’*° As a group, the illuminated choir books testify to a novel interest in the pictorial possibil-

ities of the liturgy contemporaneous with the emergence of a visionary literature orchestrated by the imagery of chant. The intersection of corporate worship and visionary experience indicates that the line between “public” and “private” experience, so central to modern definitions of devotional imagery, can be misleading when tracing patterns of piety better described as paraliturgical.*?’ The structure and character of paraliturgical worship emerges from the illustrations of “La Sainte Abbaye,” in which the nuns can be seen attending Mass, prayer books in hand.’ (See figure 1.2.) A prayer book from the Katharinenkloster in Nuremberg contains a note specifying that it “should not be carried out or kept out of the choir. It should remain in the choir for the common use of all the sisters.’**? For women not fully literate in Latin, paraliturgical compendia incorporating vernacular prayers amplified and articulated the chant, extending its reach from choir to cell.??° In most cases, the prayers in these compendia revolve around the twin poles of Christmas and Easter. Twenty-two such collections survive from the convents of Lower Saxony, more than half of them illustrated.?#! In form and

content their illumination mirrors embroideries produced by the same hands.’** Inadequately categorized as crude or, at best, unpolished, the repetitive, unskilled craftsmanship in these manuscripts testifies to the paucity of models in an enclosed environment.? Even when unillustrated, paraliturgical prayer books chart ceremonies and devotions in which images played the leading roles. For example, in 81

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

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py ee I eG "tun S~— Si aan oom Ry Figure 1.24. Codex Gis/e, Nativity, ca. 1300-10, Osnabrtick, Schatzkammer, p. 25. (Photo: Bischdfliche Pressestelle Osnabriick.)

an early thirteenth-century Rhenish psalter, German rubrics interspersed with Latin orations instruct the female reader to direct her gaze as well as her thoughts toward an image of the crucified Christ: “Stand in front of the cross and gaze at it, and say this prayer with all your heart.’*** Subsequent rubrics direct her attention to Christ’s face and wounds, anticipat82

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

ing later, more systematic devotions to the Arma Christi: “Now look at the visage of our Lord... Now speak with all your heart to his breast... Now to his right hand... Now to his left hand... Now look at him sweetly.’*®

In their combination of Latin and the vernacular and their elaborate instructions integrating images and prayers, these directions recall the better-known set outlined in the introduction to the Ancrene Wisse, a handbook for anchoresses written in England ca. 1215.36 Miracles reported in the chronicle from Wienhausen indicate that its statue of the crucified Christ, dated ca. 1300 and over a meter in height, served as the focus of similar devotions.?3’ Of approximately the same date are the Christ in the Easter Sepulcher and his dramatic counterpart,

the resurrected Savior, whose function remains uncertain, but which probably served as a cult image on an altar (figures 1.25 and 1.26).?38 Cistercians did not approve of liturgical drama, but the nuns at Wienhausen may have made these images the primary protagonists in the Depositio and Elevatio rites that marked the climax of the liturgical calendar.*?? Mirrored in images throughout the convent — wall paintings, stained glass, even single-leaf miniatures — the two statues made Christ

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83

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

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purpose: to serve as a shrine for the administration and adoration of the consecrated Host.?®

Fronaltar, the “corpus Christi altar,” is a term often used to describe the altar in the nuns’ choir.?®? The chronicle of the Dominicans at Schonensteinbach in Alsace recounts how Clara von Ostren, who was especially devoted to the Passion, spent each night after Compline praying before the Holy Sacrament with her arms extended crosswise — the very posture that Humbert of Romans recommended to Dominican novices 91

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

when they witnessed the priest at the altar take the Host in his hands.*7° The chronicle’s author, Johannes Meyer, tells of a nun at another Dominican house, Westeroye, whose doubts regarding the true presence were answered as she prayed “before the altar on which the Holy Sacrament stood” (fiir den altar, da daz hailig sacrament uff stund).’7! Elsewhere Meyer indicates plainly that in some Dominican convents it remained customary for nuns to receive the Eucharist at the altar in their choir directly from the hands of the priest, despite his stated preference that “the priest be in the outer church and give the Sacrament through a window to the sisters who kneel within the choir.”?”

Sometimes the Host was housed in the altar itself, sometimes in a sacrament cupboard specially designed for the purpose.’”? Following Pope Clement V’s elevation of the feast of Corpus Christi to universal status at the Council of Vienne in 1311, the use of monstrances — liturgical vessels designed to display the consecrated Host — became increasingly common (figure 1.31).?”* The inventory of the Poor Clares in Strasbourg, taken at their dissolution in 1526, is explicit: “Item, a silver monstrance in which the Sacrament stands.’2”> Most of the German convent chronicles or “sis-

ter books” were compiled during the first half of the fourteenth century; the numerous allusions to monstrances or other forms of sacramental dis-

play suggest that the visions of nuns were not simply spontaneous but responded to the novel orchestration of the cult. In their visions of the corpus Christi, nuns seem to assimilate themselves, not only to Christ’s body, but also to the golden containers in which it was displayed; their visions identify the consumption of the Eucharist as a foretaste of the beatific body: glittering, translucent, and blazing like the sun.*’* At Schénensteinbach, Margreth Slaffigin had an uncommonly great grace and pious desire, not only to receive the Holy Sacrament, but actually to see it herself. And therefore, while the Holy Sacrament was on the altar in the monstrance during the eight days following Corpus Christi, God recognized the heartfelt desire and piety that she had toward it. And when the priest removed it from the monstrance on the octave of the feast, she demonstrated such pious, grace-filled desire that the sisters were inflamed. She followed the priest as he carried the Sacrament down from the

choir, and brought her hands together so spiritually, as if to say: “Oh no, you are taking away from our eyes the greatest good, the most precious treasure,

the heartfelt inner love of the soul.’ And she fasted on that day until after Compline, with permission of the prioress, so that she might drink the water with which the priest had washed the finger with which he had touched the holy, worthy Sacrament that she received with great desire and devotion.?”” 92

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

Margreth drinks the ablution water with a sacramental reverence familiar from the lives of female mystics. In keeping with her vows, however, and the rule of obedience, she only does so having asked the prioress’s

permission. Moreover, her desire to see, to touch, to taste the Host is not defined entirely by denial. Rather, her devotion to the corpus Christi exceeds the norm, specified as its ostentation in a monstrance in the choir for the octave after the feast itself. The fervent desire to see Christ’s body overcame most obstacles. Convent chronicles brim over with accounts of women gazing at the priest holding the Christ child in his hands at the moment of the elevation.’” On occasion, the enclosed woman “sees” the host through the wall, as if with X-ray vision.?”” Other stories stress that the nun in question saw the corpus Christi “with bodily eyes” (mit leiplichen augen), not with spiritual sight.*8° Some women relied on outsiders, who knocked on the wall di-

viding the choir from the lay church, signaling when they should stand to see the elevated Host.?8! Only the exceptional nun does not seize every opportunity to gaze at Christ. The chronicle of Adelhausen reports that the lay sister Gute Tuschelin refused to join her companions in the kitchen and the infirmary, who all rushed to a window to witness the elevation of the Host, even though, strictly speaking, they were excused from attendance at Mass.282 At St. Katharinenthal, Elsbeth von Stoffeln “had the

habit of standing in her place in the stalls when the convent took Communion so that she could see Him well.” Elsbeth’s actions are reported without disapproval; indeed, she is rewarded with a vision.’*° Sometimes it was not nuns but the laity who violated enclosure in their desire to lay eyes on the consecrated Host. For example, in 1289, when Strasbourg was under papal interdict and the celebration of Mass forbidden, Hermann of Minden instructed the nuns of the city’s seven Dominican convents that all visitors be kept out of their churches “by lock and key” (obicibus et clavibus) when their chaplains said Mass, and that “no

crack or opening (nec rima nequa foramen) be left through which anyone might seek to catch a glimpse of the Host.’?8* The circumstances to which Hermann responded were not normal; nonetheless, they suggest that it was hardly unusual for priests to celebrate Mass within enclosure. Altars and altarpieces feature prominently in the spirituality of nuns — and not just in visions. More mundane testimony comes from other, less extraordinary forms of devotional expression. For example, the prayers contributed by the Birgittine nuns of Gnadenberg, near Nuremberg, to the Bruderschaftbuch of Tulln provide a systematic, if somewhat tedious,

inventory of all the parts of an altar, along with all the accompanying apparatus, “built” by the nuns through their meditations.?®> The construc93

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THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

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ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

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Figure 1.35. Predella shrine, open, of altar in nuns’ choir, 1519, detail, Kloster Wienhausen. (Photo: Niedersachsisches Landesverwaltungsamt, Institut fir Denkmalpflege, Fotothek der Bauund Kunstdenkmalpflege, plieg Hanover.)

and beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary that was placed on the altar whenever the community received Communion. We can imagine the sacristan lighting the flame at the altar, just as she does in an early fifteenth-century Austrian miniature (figure 1.36).?°° The nuns then received the unconsecrated ablution wine — in lieu of the consecrated wine consumed by the celebrant — from the same chalice with which, prior to the reform, the priest had served them. Now, however, instead of the priest, the Virgin herself dispensed the Sacrament. The chalice was placed in a copper hand specially attached to the image for this purpose.’’’ The accounts of the convent confirm that the statue cost eight marks, six schillings, the copper hand, an additional six schillings.??8 No such object has survived nor, were it not for Anna’s account, would

we ever have imagined it. It nonetheless reminds us of the unexpected 59

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

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Figure 1.36. Sacristan lighting altar lamp, Bohemian, ca. 1430, 24 x 17 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin — Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Nr. 12834. (Photo: Jorg P. Anders.)

variety of solutions devised in response to the challenges posed by the iso-

lation of enclosure. It also testifies to the initiative and imagination of nuns. At Preetz, Mary served as the high priestess who first brought Christ into the world.???

100

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

The Topography of Visionary Experience Art and architecture played essential roles in enforcing women’s access to the altar and in shaping their experience of the Mass. Yet a history of women’s spirituality integrated with the history of art and architecture remains a desideratum. What were the spaces in which their ecstatic encounters took place? How were they furnished? What was the relationship between environment and experience? A systematic attempt to reconstruct the topography of visionary experience within enclosure remains to be written.?° The vitae of female saints provide invaluable information about images

and their settings. Whether the accounts are true or false is hardly the point; they had only to be plausible to their audience. The life of Elsbeth Achler (1386-1420) by her confessor, Konrad Kiigelin of Waldsee (13641428), offers a case in point. Prior and priest at the Franciscan hermitage at Reute (Oberschwaben), where Elsbeth, or “Gute Beth,” lived for two decades under his tutelage, Kiigelin wrote the Life of his spiritual protégée in 1421, immediately following her death. His legendary biography emphasizes Elsbeth’s austerities, above all, her zealous devotion to the Passion, crowned by her stigmatization, and her prolonged fasting, an act of asceticism all the more remarkable for her having served in the kitchen of the convent.*°! Konrad takes us — or appears to take us — into parts of the hermitage that, at least in theory, no ordinary visitor, nor even a priest, could penetrate: And I swear [literally, “imbibe”] by God —for he is a fountain of truth — that,

one day, as I celebrated Mass for a high feast, and after I had enjoyed the Sacrament according to custom, I then wanted to furnish the sisters with the holy, worthy Sacrament, and the sisters were three in number. And I went from the altar and carried with me four consecrated Hosts, with which | wanted to serve the three sisters (for the aforenamed [Elsbeth] was very ill,

therefore I did not have to serve her). And I carried the four consecrated Hosts about with me, so that the people adored the transformed God in the Sacrament on the return to the altar. Now as I climbed some steps to the place where I served the sisters with the Sacrament, the fourth Host disappeared. From which | took a horrible fright and shuddered to the bottom of my heart. And I searched anxiously on the steps and briefly under the steps of

the stair, so that I went back down the steps to the altar without the Host with great fear and trembling. As I now completed the Mass, | searched even more industriously. And, in the end, as I didn’t find it, I went into the cloister and wanted to bewail my predicament and fear to the virgin [Elsbeth], so that she might comfort me and advise me what should be done on my behalf. And

| 101

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

as I went into her prayer hall, in which she lay sick, she began to laugh sweetly and said: “I know exactly what is troubling you and what you are looking for; you have been looking for the Holy Sacrament. I received it from

my bridegroom, Christ, the Son of God, and I have seen him in his heavenly

nature and | also have seen a crowd of angels and many saints, who stood . about him and served him, and he himself fed me spiritually with the Sacrament. Therefore be neither troubled nor sad!”3°?

In Kiigelin’s account, all the characteristic themes of the cura monialia converge. The story of the lost wafer underscores the awe and reverence in which the consecrated Host was held, not only by nuns, but also by clerics and the laity. Yet the nuns are curiously independent of Kiigelin. On entering the enclosure to seek comfort from his charismatic charges, he finds that Christ himself has administered the Sacrament to Elsbeth spiritually in a vision.*°> The nuns’ physical circumstances correspond precisely to what his readers would have known: they are segregated in an enclosed choir, to which the priest must ascend via a staircase. The Vita of St. Hedwig offers yet another instance in which life and legend converge. Considered in conjunction with the archaeological evidence, the Vita’s references to images permit a partial reconstruction of the choir at Trebnitz and its furnishings.*°* While the nuns assembled in the refectory, Hedwig stole into the choir where she kissed their stalls, venerating them as the literal seat of worship (figure 1.37). She then proceeded to the high altar, dedicated to the Virgin, where she prayed that she might participate in their good works. The stalls serve as stepping stones, the footprints of the nuns (their vestigia) leading Hedwig from the virgins to the Virgin herself and ultimately to Christ, embodied by the triumphal image of the crucified over the altar, who responds to her petition by extending his right hand in blessing.” Hedwig’s Vita teaches us that patrons had privileged access to enclosure. Contact between monks and nuns was more limited, with images often serving as intermediaries and intercessors. For example, the spiritual autobiography of the Saxon Cistercian Gertrude of Helfta describes a vision inspired by two images of the crucifix, one in a part of the convent to which she apparently had no access, the other in a chapel or cell, described as “the place where I pray.” To the first image, probably a _ sculpted corpus, she prays by proxy. In her words, “I made a certain person undertake to say for me each day during her prayers before the crucifix these words: ‘By your wounded heart, most loving Lord, pierce her heart with the arrow of your love.” After receiving Communion and retiring, she prays before an image “in folio,” presumably in a prayer book, which 102

ART, ENCLOSURE, AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF NUNS

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Figure 1.37. Hedwig Codex, court Atelier of Ludwig | of Liegnitz and Brieg, Silesia, 1353, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig XI 7 (83.MN.126), fol. 24, detail. (Photo: The J. Paul Getty Museum.)

in turns inspires her vision.*°° Each image represents a separate sphere of experience, the two linked by the nexus of female spirituality, the consecrated Host. The vita of the Beguine Ida of Nivelles (1197/99-1231), later a Cistercian nun at Rameia (Brabant), makes explicit reference to enclosure.*”” Praying “face to face” before a crucifix in a church (probably the Cistercian monastery at Villers, the abbey responsible for oversight of Nivelles), a monk identified only as a “certain religious” implores to be freed from temptation. The Christ Child replies that he will be liberated only if he prays with as much ardor as Ida, whose example is set before him in a vision. Comforted but not content, the monk sets out to see the holy woman in body as well as in spirit. The Vita carefully sets the stage for their encounter. The cleric’s visit coincides with the installation of an altar in the new church at Rameia. Entering at the moment of its dedication, he witnesses the community of nuns standing before him like the cohort of virgins in the Song of Songs 3.7, “as an army set in array” (ut castrorum acies ordinata), Ida in their midst as their standard-bearer. Able to recognize Ida on the basis of his vision but unable to speak to her, he waits until the nuns have retired to enclosure (“tandem regrediente con103

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

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imprint of their dual address. For example, at Kloster Liine a large candelabrum, of a type widespread in northern Germany, hangs between the choir and the nave and presents two images of the Madonna, back to back, once for the nuns, once for the laity. The two figures are virtually identical (figures 1.38 and 1.39). Illuminated with candles, the image would have seemed the living embodiment of the “woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” 105

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

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122

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describes how she engaged a certain person to say this prayer every day for me before a crucifix [comparable, perhaps, to the example that survives from St. Katharinenthal (figure 2.8)|: ‘By your wounded heart, most loving Lord, pierce her heart with the arrow of your love, so that it ma become unable to hold anything earthly, but may be held fast solely with 126

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

the power of your divinity’” Gertrude prays “Lord, I confess that | am not worthy through any merits of my own to receive the least of your gifts, but according to the merits and desires of all here present, I implore you of your goodness, to pierce my heart with the arrow of your love.” By her own account, there followed “certain signs which now appeared on the picture of your crucifixion. After I had received the life-giving Sacrament, on returning to my place, it seemed to me as if, on the right side of the Crucified painted in the book, that is to say, on the wound in the side, a ray of sunlight with a sharp point like an arrow came forth, and spread itself out for a moment and then drew back. It continued like this for a

while and affected me gently but deeply.’ Gertrude here openly admits that images play an instrumental role in the shaping of her vision. One crucifix aids in providing the initial (and vicarious) stimulation for her vision of Christ, while yet a second provokes the culminating vision. Eucharistic Communion triggers mystical union; reception of the vivifying Host in turn lends life to the image of Christ.5° One can even go so far as to suggest that Gertrude’s characteristic emphasis on the corporeality of the Host lends itself to a concomitant acceptance of the virtues of corporeal imagery.

Gertrude describes the image that prompts her vision as a crucifix “in folio,” “on the page,” words that suggest a miniature of the crucified Christ in a book of prayers or meditations.*? The image in Gertrude’s prayerbook may have been no more than a conventional crucifixion, activated in her imagination by the intensity of her devotions. It may, however, have resembled an extraordinary double miniature in the late thirteenth-century book of mystical meditations known as the Rothschild Canticles (figure 2.9).58 Rarely has the imagery of wounding love received more dramatic embodiment. Seated on a low bench, the Sponsa thrusts a lance toward the full-length figure of Christ, who turns toward her and, in the traditional gesture of the ostentatio vulneris, points to the wound in his side. The miniature need no more reflect a vision than Gertrude’s vision need rely on such a miniature. Nevertheless, the miniature’s visualization of the same commonplace metaphors of mystical union is intended to stimulate and encourage the kind of experiences recorded in the visions of Gertrude of Helfta.

Figure 2.9 (following page spread). Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 404, fols. 18v-19r.

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THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

transcendence of the Trinity in two ways: by placing it among clouds and in an architectural setting that not only differs from the schema used in the rest of the miniature, but that overlaps them as well. The Trinity belongs to a different decorative as well as ontological order; it quite literally transcends its physical boundaries. A series of small miniatures in the Rothschild Canticles provides a revealing commentary on the proper role of images in contemplative devotions. The miniatures, the majority of which illustrate a catena on the nature of love, both carnal and divine, are unambiguous in their assertion

of the propriety of image worship.** One depicts a monk, his glance , averted, kneeling in prayer before an image of the crucified Christ, whose jagged angularity and crumpled torso recall the actual forms of fourteenth-century sculpted crucifixes (figures 2.12 and 2.13). A miniature on the facing page goes so far as to associate, if not to equate, devotion to images with the love of Christ. A man and a woman who, according to the

text, represent immoral love (“ille qui turpiter amat”), shun Christ by shunning his image. They turn their backs on the altar, just as a righteous worshipper depicted in a miniature elsewhere in the manuscript turns his back on a pagan idol and directs his attention to Christ (figure 2.14). The line dividing pagan idol and Christian image has here been drawn very fine, especially when one considers that the image of the idol illustrates a summary of the Decalogue, headed by the commandment so flagrantly ignored throughout the remainder of the manuscript: “Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above....” Another miniature in the series depicts the loving soul in the guise of a man who reaches out to embrace an image of the suffering Christ in the ardor of his devotion (figure 2.15). It is but one short step to another miniature in which a monk reaches out, as if in a vision, to embrace not a crucifix, but Christ himself (figure 2.16). In these modest miniatures, images are employed to endorse the use of images in contemplative devotions. What would St. Bernard, the theoretician of imageless devotion, have thought of this series of illustrations? Indeed, what would he have thought of the numerous images of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which portray him in a similar pos-

ture, recast as an exemplar of the new, image-laden ideal of piety? A miniature of the early fourteenth century, probably from Metz, presents the Cistercian abbot together with St. Augustine flanking a full-length Man of Sorrows as an initial introducing “la lamentation saint bernare [sic]” (figure 2.17).°° Christ appears full-length, arms crossed as in the Imago pietatis, his body flecked with blood. Together with the miniature on fol. 19r of the Rothschild Canticles, the manuscript from Metz offers 134

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135

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St. Bernard, praying in front of a crucifix (figure 2.20). A second miniature depicts Christ alive in death, pointing out the wound in his side to Bonne and her husband, once again, as if in a vision (figure 2.21). Yet a third presents us directly with the arma Christi, the side wound gaping at the center (figure 2.22). Dispensing with intermediary or exemplary fig141

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ures, the artist brings us face to face with a view of the side wound, the entrance to Christ’s heart. The miniature presents us, just as it presented Bonne of Luxembourg, with the wound depicted “life-size” (in this case, 26 inches high).’° In spite of condensing the Passion into a nonnarrative devotional image, the miniature makes visual accuracy its standard of truth. Whereas the other arma function as symbols, standing pars pro tota 142

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

for the torments of the Passion, the side wound confronts us as if we could see it directly. The miniature aspires to the immediacy of a vision; the visual has become a simulacrum of the visionary. For all his boldness in the use of bridal imagery, Bernard stopped short of describing the union of Christ and the soul in the king’s bedchamber.

In his sermons on the Canticle, Bernard asks, “What can be said of the bedchamber? May I presume that I know all about it? Far from me the pretension that I have experienced so sublime a grace, nor shall I boast of a privilege reserved solely to the fortunate bride.... The bedroom of the king is to be sought in the mystery of divine contemplation.””! Bernard’s reticence can be compared with the daring of the artist in yet another miniature of the Rothschild Canticles, an erotically charged epiphany more reminiscent of Bernini’s St. Theresa than of any medieval work of art (figures 2.23 and 2.24). The Sponsa looks up from her bed, her arms raised in ecstasy as the Sponsus descends to meet her. Christ is largely hidden by an enormous sun whose tentacles pierce overlapping bands of clouds which surge over the miniature’s tessellated ground like so many waves breaking

on a beach. The adjoining text incorporates the invocation to the final book of the Confessions (13.1) so that the reader may cry out with Augustine, “I call you, my God, into my soul, that prepares to seize you out of

the desire you have inspired within it,” a formulation that neatly summarizes the reciprocal nature of contemplative devotion. The reader calls on God for inspiration, yet speaks out of a desire that God has already

inspired. The miniature accurately captures this dual movement. The soul’s gesture of upraised arms mirrors the gesture of the descending Christ. God’s declination necessarily precedes the elevation of the soul. The Rothschild Canticles’ extraordinary depiction of the connubium spirituale is matched less closely in devotional art than in the extensive body of contemporary visionary and chronicle literature, the majority of

which comes from Cistercian and, above all, Dominican convents.” It thus comes as something of a surprise to find one of the most striking parallels to the image in the recently discovered “biography,” or Gnadenleben, of a man, Friedrich Sunder (d. 1328), chaplain at Engeltal near Nurem-

berg to the nuns who later compiled his Life under the supervision of Konrad von Ftissen, a Dominican adviser.73 Sunder’s Life recounts the chaplain’s spiritual biography in terms of paradigms and conventions generally if not exclusively reserved for the lives of holy women, an unusual feature attributable to his participation in the cura monialium at a convent noted as a center of female mysticism. Rather than merely an anomaly, Sunder’s Life should be considered one of the rare exceptions proving the rule that the Gnadenleben is an essentially female form of literature.” 143

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Figure 2.24 (above). The Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 404, fol. 66r.

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THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

Sunder’s Life describes his visionary experiences in terms so explicitly corporeal that one must forcibly remind oneself that the visions and other supernatural events it describes rely on biblical metaphors.” Mary prepares the marriage bed in which the infant Christ, her son, consummates His love for Sunder: After he had received the body of our Lord, and the soul had been fed and comforted by the Lord our God, then spoke the infant Christ, the child of

| Our Lady: “Dear Mother, make a joyous bed for me and my beloved spouse where I and my much beloved bride can take our pleasure with each other.” Then the bed was made with lots of beautiful flowers (which were noble

spiritual virtues), then Jesus advanced to the little bed, and Mary, his holy mother, joined the holy soul with the little Jesus. And they had such loving joy and pleasure with one another of embraces and kisses, with laughter and

with all divine pleasure that the angels and the saints, who were gathered about, were altogether amazed that such a man still on this earth was living with body and soul, with which our Lord worked such a wonder.’®

Christ refers to Sunder’s soul as his bride in the conventional language of bridal mysticism; the mystical marriage is consummated in the lectulus noster floridus (Song of Songs 1.16), whose flowers, according to the text, stand for Sunder’s spiritual virtues. The author also invokes social conventions: Mary, the angels, and the saints surround the bed like the witnesses at the consummation of an actual medieval wedding.’” Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising that the author — or perhaps one of the editors — felt it necessary to add a note of explanation at the end of the immediately preceding chapter, an account of a vision in which Christ suckles at the breasts of Sunder’s soul: “What the suckling at the two breasts means, that must be shown to our senses with bodily things: when we cannot imagine how it has passed between God and the soul in an inexplicable inand outflowing of divine sweetness in which God has offered himself to the soul, and has thus drawn into himself her desire, her body and all of her powers.’’8 The crucial phrase is the first: “What the suckling... means, that must be shown to our senses with bodily things.” The artist of the miniature in the Rothschild Canticles also illustrates the mystical marriage with bodily images. Not only does he aspire to the mysteries that remain hidden to St. Bernard, he even dares to portray them. The justification of corporeal images in Sunder’s biography offers striking evidence of a transformation in monastic attitudes toward imagery of all kinds, whether visionary or artistic. Written in the form of a brief “apology,” its presence in itself is an indication of an awareness that 146

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

old taboos are being broken. Bernard had hedged his innovative reading of the Songs of Songs with many cautious provisos. For example, he warns

his readers to “be careful...not to conclude that I see something corporeal or perceptible to the senses in this union between the Word and the soul....] try to express with the most suitable words I can muster the ecstatic ascent of the purified mind to God, comparing spiritual things with

spiritual.’ In monastic writings of the late thirteenth century such cautious language gives way to more positive affirmations, for example, a passage from the Herald of Divine Love by Gertrude of Helfta. Gertrude places a defense of corporeal images in the mouth of none other than Christ: But when she wondered why the Lord, on this and on so many other occasions, had instructed her with so corporeal a vision, the Lord reminded her of what is sung on that feast about the closed door foreseen in spirit by the prophet Ezechiel, and He said to her: “Just as formerly the manner and progression of my Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection were revealed to the prophets by mystical images and similitudes of things, so also in the present spiritual and invisible things can only be explained to the human intellect by means of similitudes of things perceived by the mind.” And that is why no one

ought to despise what is revealed by means of bodily things, but ought to study anything that would make the mind worthy of tasting the sweetness of spiritual delights by images of bodily things.®°

Gertrude’s affirmation of the value of bodily things appears to contradict Bernard’s strictures against corporeal imagery. What could be more carnal than Gertrude’s recommendation that we “tast[e] the sweetness of spiritual delights through the likeness of bodily things,” or than the abandoned imagery of full-fledged bridal mysticism? We should keep in mind, however, that whereas Bernard might have perceived Gertrude’s theory and use of images as an unwarranted extension of his thought, Gertrude cites Bernard as an authority and sees herself as following his example.*! The contrast between Bernard and his late medieval followers provides one measure of the degree to which monastic attitudes and aspirations had changed between the mid-twelfth and the late thirteenth century. For Bernard, as for his contemporaries, vision was closely linked to the process of reading, in particular, reading understood as meditation on the Bible.*? This is because by “vision” was meant primarily intellectual or spiritual vision and by “reading,” an understanding that probed beyond the literal sense of the text. True vision was identified more closely with insight than with sight itself. To read literally or not to see beyond the mere shell of surface appearances was the equivalent of blindness. We 14]

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

should remember that when Bernard speaks of contemplative union, he speaks of the union of the soul with the “Word.” For Gertrude and her contemporaries, the meaning of vision and union had undergone a subtle transformation. Her reference to the prophets indicates that her justification of vision remains wedded to Scripture. The phenomena of visions and apparitions, however, have assumed a new importance.*? In the intimate and subjective visions of late medieval nuns, the visions serve as a stamp of personal sanctity, confirmation of a privileged relationship with the loving Savior and bridegroom. As we have seen, many of the visions are rooted directly in the metaphorical imagery of the Bible and the liturgy.** Rather than spiritualizing biblical images, however, or appropriating them as symbols of spiritual states, in the manner of St. Bernard, the nuns visualize the metaphors of the Bible, in particular, the images of the Song of Songs.®> More than mere rhetorical embellishment, the images of the Song of Songs provide the underpinning both of the Vitae and the visionary events they recount.®* The process of vision is detached from the process of reading, even if what is seen with the “inner eye” remains wedded to what has been read (or heard, if one includes the texts of the liturgy). The images of the Bible have been assimilated to experience, a process manifested in the visions themselves.®’ The literature of female spirituality underscores that the use of topoi and stereotypes need not preclude expression.*®

In another context, Beryl Smalley spoke of the thirteenth century as one in which “what had been seen as secret and holy ceased to be secret and by familiarity became less holy. The tabernacle served as the kitchen cupboard.’®? What remained extraordinary to St. Bernard and his contemporaries became customary or ordinary in the monastic culture of the later Middle Ages. Visionary experience, once restricted to an exalted elite, became a commonplace aspiration. As has been well documented, the aspiration to vision was inherited by the laity; many fifteenth-century paintings — for example, the devotional diptychs of early Netherlandish painting and the miniatures in contemporary Books of Hours —actualize

such visionary expectations.” The transformation of attitudes toward imagery and its proper place in devotional life should not, however, simply be attributed to a process of social adulteration, an assault by the laity on the spirituality of the cloister. Rather than a concession to a debased form of religiosity, late medieval devotional imagery should be seen as a response to a new set of religious aspirations in which the image plays a central role. These aspirations were manifested in the monastic as well as in the secular sphere.

148

CHAPTER THREE

Before the Book of Hours: The Development of the

Illustrated Prayer Book in Germany

A comprehensive history of medieval prayer and the medieval prayer book has yet to be written.’ For all the attention that has been lavished on Books of Hours, they remain in many respects anomalous, especially when considered in relation to the vast number of unillustrated prayer compendia, whether of earlier or contemporary date.” We take for granted that images formed an indispensable part of prayer: a Book of Hours without miniatures, no matter how humble, seems as unnatural as a Christmas

card without a Nativity.’ The integration of pictures into prayer, however, was only a late development in the history of medieval piety and practice, and one whose causes remain largely unexamined. During the first Christian millennium and well into the second, at least in the West, pictures played little if any role in prayer and meditations. Prayer books with pictures of any kind, let alone narrative illustrations, were few and far between.* For once, the small number of surviving manuscripts with figural illustration — the majority imperial or episcopal commissions — do not represent the proverbial tip of a once extant iceberg. Whether psalters or the miscellanies known as libri precum, most early illustrated exemplars contain no more than a handful of images.° Their illustrations, moreover, draw from a narrow repertory of pictorial types: author and donor portraits, Christ crucified or in majesty, and, occasionally, effigies of saints. Narrative imagery occurs infrequently, if at all. Still more striking than the scarcity of illustration is the scarcity of illustrated manuscripts per se. The number of illustrated exemplars is tiny, almost insignificant, compared with the surviving body of unillustrated books of comparable content.’ Art historians should keep this lopsided ratio in mind. Well into the High Middle Ages, illustrated prayer books were genuinely rare. In retrospect, the success of the genre appears inextricably linked to the growth of lay piety, in which images came to play an indispensable role. So broadly defined, however, lay patronage cannot account for the 149

THE VISUAL AND THE VISIONARY

efflorescence of the illustrated prayer book that occurred in the course of the twelfth century. Neither can traditional male monasticism.’ Instead, the surviving manuscript evidence strongly suggests that, in the twelfth as in later centuries, women played a seminal role in the development of novel habits of prayer.’ Richard Southern once remarked that it was P

“the conjunction of monastic piety and the religious impulses of great ladies which chiefly fashioned the private devotions of the Middle Ages.” !

Southern referred to texts, but his observation extends to their illustration as well.

A newly discovered prayer book in Sélestat (Bibliotheque Humaniste, MS 104) not only confirms this hypothesis, but also allows it to be elabo-

rated in an unanticipated fashion (See figures 3.1, 3.3-4, 3.7-9, 3.12, 3.15-16, 3.22, and 3.24-25). Dating to ca. 1150, but based on models reaching back to the previous century, this prayer book originally contained a minimum of twenty-one miniatures and drawings, the majority

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150

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