Thursday, April 30, 5:15 p.m.

The University of New Mexico Early Music Ensemble, directed by Colleen Sheinberg

"Musical Visions in the Medieval World"

Medieval composers have given us visions of sin and worldly vices, visions of beauty, and visions of the divine and the hereafter. This concert will present music from a variety of medieval sources, including the Cantigas de Santa María, the Llibre Vermell, and the Roman de Fauvel, as well as songs by visionary composers Hildegard of Bingen and English hermit St. Godric. The UNM Early Music Ensemble is a class in which students learn to play period instruments in order to better understand how music from earlier times would have sounded to contemporary listeners. This concert marks the fourth time the ensemble has performed as part of the Medieval Spring Lecture Series.

Performers

• Mandy Brown—voice, flute, recorders, percussion
  
• Bill Burns—voice, recorders, dulcimer, percussion
  
• Yuval Carmi—voice, recorders, percussion
  
• Gwen Easterday—voice, organ, hurdy gurdy, harp, percussion
  
• Zack Kear—voice, harp, organ, recorders, saz, percussion
  
• Elena Maietta—voice, vielle, viola da gamba, percussion
  
• Rikk Murphy—voice, vielle, recorder, viola da gamba, percussion
  
• Don Partridge—voice, recorders, percussion
  
• Colleen Sheinberg—voice, recorders, vielle, viola da gamba, percussion
  
• Krystal Tuning—voice, rebec, vielle, percussion
  
• Kathy Wimmer—voice, harp, saz, recorder
  

Colleen Sheinberg is a lecturer in early music performance at the University of New Mexico Department of Music, where she has been involved in directing the UNM Early Music Ensemble since 1995. In addition to coaching the Early Music Ensemble, Ms. Sheinberg is also a founding member and director of the acclaimed professional early music group, Música Antigua de Albuquerque. Música Antigua performs regularly in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and has given guest performances throughout the state. The group has also performed by invitation on the PSALM concert series in Houston and on the Early Music Now! series in Milwaukee and was the recipient of the Albuquerque Arts Alliance's 2002 Bravo Award for Excellence in Music. Ms. Sheinberg has recorded three CDs with Música Antigua (including two on the Dorian label of New York): A Rose of Swych Virtu, The Sport of Love, and Music to the Max: Music at the Court of Maximilian I.

Barbara Newman

"Love Was His Meaning: A Dramatic Performance Based on the Writings of Julian of Norwich"

Julian of Norwich (1342–ca. 1416) is medieval England's most famous visionary and the first known female author in the English language. She recorded the fruit of her visions, the Revelation of Love, after living for years as an anchoress in a cell attached to the church of St. Julian at Norwich in eastern England. Her book reveals her to be a profound and daring theologian—writing of the Trinity in domestic terms, for example, and comparing Jesus to a mother who is wise, loving, and merciful. Barbara Newman will bring Julian's career and influence to life through a multimedia performance that will offer an extraordinary climax to this year's lecture series. She will present readings from the Revelation interspersed with other medieval texts, liturgical chants, images from Julian's visual and artistic world, and modern poems about the mystic, in order to convey an in-depth portrait of the woman to whom Christ promised, as she lay dying in May 1373, that "all shall be well, and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well." Professor Newman will be assisted by actors Bill Burns and Kathy Wimmer, and by a plainchant choir featuring members of Música Antigua de Albuquerque: Hovey Dean Corbin, Jr., Dennis Davies-Wilson, Ruth Helgeson, David McGuire, and Colleen Sheinberg.

Barbara Newman is Professor of English, Religion, and Classics and John Evans Professor of Latin at Northwestern University. She is widely recognized as an international expert on female religious figures of the Middle Ages and their mystical and visionary experience. She has held Fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her many influential books include Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (1987); From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (1995); Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (1998); and God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2003). The last-mentioned title recently received the Medieval Academy of America's Charles H. Haskins Medal, which recognizes especially significant and innovative publications in the field of Medieval Studies.

Wednesday, April 29, 5:15 p.m.

Katherine H. Tachau

"Light and Color, Optics and Alchemy in Thirteenth-Century Paris"

Of all the sciences that developed in medieval European universities, that of optics (perspectiva, or "seeing through") has had the most long-lived effects, both for the history of art and for physics today. The efforts to explain light and its workings, the geometry of its transmission, the nature of colors, and vision, gained contributors and audience in part because of the intellectual context within which the science was interwoven. Some of this context was theological, some experimental—a realm where alchemists and such artisans as those who produced the illuminated books of Paris, the Bibles moralisées, could meet. Among those who studied optics in the thirteenth-century universities was one of the most intriguing characters of the entire Middle Ages, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, known to his contemporaries as the doctor mirabilis. Revered by some modern scholars as a founder of the experimental method and a significant influence on later scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Bacon skirted controversy in his own time and was suspected of sorcery and practice of the black arts. His contributions to optics are especially revealing of the underlying assumptions and inner dynamic of medieval science.

Wednesday, April 29, 7:15 p.m.

Christopher Kleinhenz

"Dante's Vision of the Afterlife"

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy has justly been termed the supreme masterpiece of medieval civilization. Offering a panoramic perspective on human life on earth as well as on the afterlife in its three realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, the Comedy abounds in poetic insights that dazzle the imagination. In this lecture, Christopher Kleinhenz will first discuss the various sorts of "visions" and "ways of seeing" present in the medieval world in general before looking specifically at the ways in which Dante represented the afterlife in the Comedy. He will examine the afterlife both as a real and traversable place/space and as a moral and spiritual construct. He will also consider the meaning and functionality of the afterlife in the Comedy, examining in particular how the poem represents the operation of Divine Justine through the nature of the punishments in the Inferno, the purgation process in Purgatory, and the concept of beatitude in Paradise. The lecture will incorporate discussion of the artistic sources of Dante's rich poetic language and imagery, and of the lively illustrative tradition that his poem generated in manuscript illuminations and book illustrations. The lecture will be accompanied by many fine visual images.

Christopher Kleinhenz is the Carol Mason Kirk Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, and one of North America's most distinguished experts on medieval Italian literature and culture. A former President of the American Association of Teachers of Italian and of the American Boccaccio Association, he has received the City of Genoa Medal for the Promotion of Italian in North America (1998), the Leonard Covello Educator of the Year Award (2005), the Medieval Academy of America's Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies (2008), and the WisItalia Lifetime Achievement Award. His numerous publications include The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (1986) and Movement and Meaning in the "Divine Comedy": Toward an Understanding of Dante's Processional Poetics (2005). He is editor of The Dante Encyclopedia (2000) and of Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia (2004). Professor Kleinhenz is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

Tuesday, April 28, 5:15 p.m.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger

"'As It Were': Mysticism and Visuality"

By definition, the ineffable—that which surpasses the powers of human expression—lies beyond representation of any sort, be it visual or verbal. In its root sense, the word "mysticism" derives from the Greek myein, "to remain silent" or "to close the lips or eyes." What place can there be for any discourse on the visible in the context of a system of thought that, by definition, is predicated on obscurity and blindness? The paradox extends from sight to speech: were mystics to fall silent, there would not be any mystical literature. Yet when they speak, they very often are called to describe what they see. The description of mystical vision might seem to rest upon the assumption that—in defiance of the aphorism to the contrary—a thousand words are worth a single picture. The visible, however, is often said to defy verbal description; one must therefore ask what, and how, mystics "see," and why "vision," however defined, is so indispensable to their way of framing the world and their experience of it. Perhaps the ultimate paradox, when speaking of mysticism and visuality, is that a discourse that by definition shuns the senses came, over the course of the medieval millennium, not only to legitimize but even to redeem the senses. Given the incarnational emphasis of late medieval piety, one must use the word "redeem" advisedly, if cautiously, given that mysticism's sensory and, at times, sensual side was never without controversy. The sensory was integrated into the spiritual. In the spirit of "as it were," illusionistic strategies, some driven by the desire for divine presence, only served to make images more persuasive. Changing attitudes towards works of art form a part of this picture. As Jeffrey Hamburger will show, not even the Reformation was able to undo the effects of this affirmation of the visual.

Tuesday, April 28, 7:15 p.m.

Katherine H. Tachau

"Illuminating the Science of the Stars in the Thirteenth-Century Bibles Moralisées"

The Bibles moralisées, a series of Bible picture books produced for members of the French royal family during the thirteenth century, present a feast for the eyes, being the most sumptuously illustrated codices of the medieval period. Each Bible moralisée manuscript contains several thousand images which not only picture scenes from the Old and New Testament but also establish typological parallels between the two Testaments and contemporary medieval life. As Katherine Tachau will show in this lecture, the text and images of the Bibles moralisées reflect the intellectual world of the thirteenth-century University of Paris and of theologians active within that context. They also cast intriguing light on the medieval study of astrology and logic. Scholars have often wondered why, when Heloise gave birth some time before 1120, she and the father, Abelard, made one of the odder choices of baby name by calling their child "Astrolabe" after the astronomical instrument that represents the movements of the planets and stars. Nothing written by or about either parent tells us why. The Bibles moralisées, however, produced about a hundred years after Astrolabe's birth, offer clues to the solution of this mystery and others. Professor Tachau's lecture will delve into these clues.

Katherine H. Tachau is Professor of History at the University of Iowa, where she has taught since 1985. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and spent two years at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, before taking up faculty positions at Montana State University and Pomona College. Her interests in medieval history span the fields of science, religion, and art. Her study of the medieval science of optics, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics, 1250–1345 (1988), received the Medieval Academy of America's John Nicholas Brown Prize for the best first book in the field of Medieval Studies. She has also received the Medieval Academy's Van Courtland Elliott Prize for the best first article on a medieval topic. Her recent work on the Bibles moralisées is embodied in a forthcoming book to be titled Bible Lessons for Kings: Scholars and Friars in Thirteenth-Century Paris and the Creation of the Bibles Moralisées. Professor Tachau has received Fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Monday, April 27, 7:15 p.m.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Harvard University

"Openings"

Jeffrey Hamburger will get this year's lecture series under way with a presentation examining the key visual unit that structured the manner in which medieval scribes and artists presented their work, and in which their readers perceived that work: the opening—that is, the two pages that faced one another when a medieval book was opened at any point. In an age of mechanical, and now virtual, reproduction, it is perhaps too easy to lose sight of the importance of this basic visual unit. From the origins of the bound book in Late Antiquity, and in contrast to the scrolls used in the ancient world, the confrontation of the verso of one leaf with the recto of the following leaf provided the field of opportunity within which scribes and artists operated, often with consummate skill. Openings made possible the visual elaboration of the words of the text with figured initials, frames, and full-page miniatures. Professor Hamburger will explore the complex semantics and literally revelatory possibilities of this new medium of the opening as it developed over the medieval millennium, from the fifth to the fifteenth century.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger is the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and taught at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto before moving to Harvard in 2000. A distinguished expert on the art of later medieval Germany, Professor Hamburger has a special interest in the work of female artists and in the pictorial representation of mystical visions. He has been the recipient of Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His many publications include Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (1996); The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (1998); and The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West (2005). He has received five major national book awards. In 2005 Professor Hamburger played the leading role in compiling an international exhibition, Krone und Schleier ("Crown and Veil"), which centered on the art of female monasticism and was sponsored by the German government. Professor Hamburger is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

This week, the Institute for Medieval Studies will be hosting its annual spring lecture series. I will be posting information from the program about the presentation and the presenters through the week.

Dr. Paul Acker, currently a Visiting Professor of Viking Mythology at UNM, presented today on the Viking influence on the Pre-Raphaelites. His presentation considered the artwork of Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Frank Bernard Dicksee, and Frederick Sandys.

Here's an interesting image from F. Dicksee, called "Startled." Can you find the Viking ship?