In this lecture, Jeffrey Hamburger (Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University), talks about diagrams as spaces of knowledge, using the unexplored history of the diairesis (division) diagrams in manuscripts and printed editions of the Corpus Areopagiticum from the 6^th to the 16^th century as a case study. Rooted in Platonic logic, these diagrams visualized Neoplatonic structures of thought and being. Far from illustrations, the diagrams fill in an unwritten chapter regarding the origins and development of diagrams as a mode of visual thinking.

Images: Divide, Ps.-Dionysius Areopagita, Stift Heiligenkreuz, Cod. 111, fol. 83r and 83v, details.