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&#160;[caption id="attachment_492" align="alignleft" width="235"] Matfre Ermengaud de Beziers, Breviari d’amour, French, mid-14th century British Library, Harley MS 4940, fols.44v and fol. 28r[/caption][caption id="attachment_491" align="alignleft" width="223"] Matfre Ermengaud de Beziers, Breviari d’amour, French, mid-14th century British Library, Harley MS 4940, fols.44v and fol. 28r[/caption]&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;This fourteenth-century manuscript is a copy of the Breviari d’amour, originally composed by Matfre Ermengaud de Beziers between 1288 and 1292 (British Library, Harley MS 4940, fols. 44v and fol. 28r). The text is written in Old Occitan, and seeks to demonstrate that the entire world is an emanation of love. The miniature on f. 44v is a diagrammatic representation of the cosmic spheres. Medieval cosmology followed a Ptolemaic model, with earth as the motionless center of the universe, surrounded by various rotating spheres, represented here as a series of concentric circles. Because this particular manuscript was left unfinished, the spheres in this miniature are missing the labels that would presumably have been written in the blank v-shaped section at top. The sublunary spheres, made up of the planet earth and the four elements (earth, water, fire, and air) were understood to be materially corruptible and changeful, while the spheres of the celestial region above were incorruptible, immutable, and perfect. The celestial region contained the seven planetary spheres, the sphere of fixed stars, the crystalline ninth heaven, and the tenth heaven, also called the primum mobile. This tenth heaven was the sphere that initiated the motion of all the spheres below it, hence its label as the primum mobile or First Mover. Beyond the primum mobile was an unmoving sphere called the empyrean heaven, which was understood to be the dwelling place of God and the angels. The relationship between the empyrean heaven and the primum mobile is represented in a miniature on fol. 28r, wherein angels hover outside the abstract geometric rendering of the cosmos and turn hand cranks in order to set the spheres below them into motion. In both miniatures, the abstract geometry of the cosmological diagrams is set off by the figural representations around them (the angels, the vine scrolls) . This contrast between figurative representation and abstract diagramming reinforces the unknowableness and unrepresentability of the cosmos.After all, how could artists represent something that they could never see for themselves? What other kinds images juxtapose the representational and the abstract, and to what effect? How do medieval diagrams make use of abstraction to communicate complex ideas?- Aimee Caya