Jeffrey F. Hamburger

(On Leave: Fall 2023)
Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture
Medieval

Professor Hamburger's research addresses the art of the High and later Middle Ages, with a focus on illuminated manuscripts. Areas of special interest include devotional imagery, interrelationships among art, mysticism and theology, diagrams and the diagrammatic in medieval art and thought, the illumination of Latin and German vernacular literature, the relationship between images and issues of authorship and authority, and, more generally, the history of attitudes towards imagery. Beginning with his dissertation on the Rothschild Canticles (Yale, 1987), he has dealt extensively the art of female monasticism, a program of research that in 2005 culminated in an international exhibition, Krone und Schleier (Crown and Veil). More recent exhibitions include Unter Druck: Deutsche Buchmalerei im Zeitalter Gutenbergs (Munich-Vienna, 2015), Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections (2016), and Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, ca. 800–1500, which took place at the Morgan Library, NY, in 2021. Other recent work includes The Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin (Zürich-Dietikon, 2015), co-authored with Nigel Palmer (Oxford), Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–1425 (Münster, 2017), co–authored with Margot Fassler, Susan Marti & Eva Schlotheuber, The Liber ordinarius of Nivelles: Liturgy as Interdisciplinary Intersection (Tübingen, 2019), From Cross to Crucifix: Typology, Diagrams and Devotion in Berthold of Nuremberg's Commentary on Hrabanus Maurus' In honorem sanctae crucis (2020), The Birth of the Author Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century (2021), and Color in Cusanus (2021). The recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the NEH, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Humboldt-Stiftung, Prof. Hamburger was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2001, a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009, a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010, a corresponding fellow of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 2016, and of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen in 2021. He also holds an honorary degree from the University of Bern in Switzerland. From 2015 to 2020, he was the recipient of the Anneliese Maier Research Prize of the Humboldt Foundation, which he has used, in collaboration with Eva Schlotheuber (Düsseldorf) to fund a series of workshops and conferences on the libraries of female monastic institutions in Central Europe. The last of these workshops, dedicated to the libraries of the Augustinian nuns of Klosterneuburg (Austria) and the Benedictine nuns of St. George’s (Prague), will be held in 2022, and in the former instance will lead to an exhibition in 2024 dedicated to the art of female monasticism in Austria. In the Fall of 2022, Prof. Hamburger held the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library in London under the title “Drawing Conclusions: Diagrams in Medieval Art and Thought”. Forthcoming projects include a short book on Pietro Lorenzetti and two major exhibitions, one at the John Ryands Library in Manchester, the other at the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.