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The Codex in the Classroom: Practical Dimensions of Medieval Diagrams

The Codex in the Classroom: Practical Dimensions of Medieval Diagrams

Lecture by Jeffrey F. Hamburger

Given at the British Library on October 27, 2022

Abstract: Of all of the ideas and institutions the modern world has inherited from the Middle Ages, the university remains among the most durable. As demonstrated by a wide range of medieval schoolbooks, diagrams had a secure place throughout the curriculum, in which they served not simply as didactic aids but also as a means of inculcating enduring patterns of thought.

Diagrams had a pragmatic as well as a Platonic aspect. The very appearance of diagrams – their elementary abstraction and etiolated forms – stamped them as exemplifications of thought that stood at the boundary between what is visible and what is not.

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In the double character of the diagram – its liminal status at the boundary between the physical and the metaphysical, the rational and the irrational, the visible and the invisible – lay a large part of its appeal to medieval exegetes and artists.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger’s research focuses on the art of the High and later Middle Ages. He is the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture at Harvard University. Click here to view his university webpage.

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See also the other lectures in this series:

Maps of the Mind: Diagrams Medieval and Modern

Poetry Play Persuasion: The Diagrammatic Imagination in Medieval Art and Thought

Top Image: British Library Harley 3038 fol. 6v

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