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.