Marlene Zierke

• B4: The Aesthetics of Combinatorics: Personifications and Allegories in Medieval Art and Literature

Late medieval housebooks and calendars are multilayered objects that provide comprehensive knowledge of the world and life instructions. They typically relay this information via vernacular texts and a multitude of images, as well as complex cosmological visual programs. Vital to these works are representations of the ‘Children of the Planets,’ which illustrate the effects of planetary forces on humans. The research project examines depictions of the ‘Children of the Planets’ with their abstract and often diagrammatical visual arrangements. These arrangements assign textual and visual elements to semantically coded image locations, thus rendering new meaning by connecting them to overarching allegorical concepts. The focus lies also on their integration into the medium of the housebook as an intertextual and intervisual reference system. These specific relationships are unlocked through the model of combinatorics, which reveals the aesthetic reflective potential of combination, compilation, configuration, and visual arrangement.

• Astronomical and astrological knowledge in images
• Late medieval housebooks and calendars
• Incunabula