Diagrams, of which Isidore's cosmological rota is perhaps the best example, are marked by their potential for abstraction. This same potential means that they lend themselves to a distinctive way of referring to a world that is complex and, in its complexity, ultimately defies comprehension and description. Diagrams allow basic structures of its order to be isolated and thus made graphically perceptible, with the 'natural' (naïve) view of the world giving way to a new, self-aware one in the process. The diagram is a cue to appreciate analytically certain features of an order that has been abstractly discerned in the natural form of the world, to recognize those features 'again' in it, and thus to 'see through' the world in distinguishing particular aspects of the order behind it. The diagram at the same time makes it possible to grasp the fact that the 'artificial' (scholarly) accomplishment of abstracting serves its purpose only if the tension between abstraction and the fundamental unfathomability of the world as creation is accepted, and the intellectual motion between the two that leads to comprehension is embraced. The aim of the intended processes of comprehension here is a view (contuitus) that brings together those aspects that were initially singled out in the course of abstraction. The structures that appear in diagrams of this kind also give a glimpse of their maker's nature , are media for knowing God.
The theme of the colloquium whose findings are presented here was directly grounded in literary history: the central interest lay in the literary (in a broad sense) mediation of scholarly knowledge in a courtly context. The aim, however, was also to extend this interest by including analogous material from other contexts, so as to cover both the description of other forms in which diagrammatic thought manifests itself and theoretical reflection on it. The scope of the contributions ranges from the diagrammatic legacy of Antiquity to various forms of a w
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