Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Diagramming Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s Poems in Praise of the Cross. Chicago; London, The University of Chicago Press, 2020

Abstract

The case study is presented in the title: Hrabanus Maurus’s (ca. 780-856) In honorem sanctae crucis (ca. 810) and Berthold of Nuremberg’s two-part work Liber de misteriis et laudibus sancta crucis (1292) and the supplement Liber de misteriis et laudibus interemerate Virginis genitrices Dei et Domini nostril Ihesu (1294)) are confronted and dissected; and the use of the word “transformation” is key to the analytical and interpretive possibilities concerning the medieval formulas the author presents (both textual and imagetic). Close to five hundred years separate the carmina figurata of the Carolingian abbot and the text-images of the Dominican lector and both follow on antique traditions. With more than two hundred pictures of diagrams and illuminations from a multitude of codices, architectural details and religious objects, Hamburger furnishes our understanding of transformation in medieval visual cultures (largely beyond Hranabus and Berthold’s) and of the centrality of diagrams in artistic productions.