Nuns as artists1997
the visual culture of a medieval convent
by Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Jeffrey F. Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spiritually of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from an extraordinary and previously unknown group of devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses in unprecedented detail the distinctive visual culture of female communities.
The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity. Setting the drawings and related imagery - manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork - within the context of religious life and reform in late...