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.