The Scribes For Women S Convents In Late Medieval Germany

Cyrus demonstrates the prevalence of manuscript production by women monastics and challenges current assumptions of how manuscripts circulated in the late medieval period.

This study examines the post-medieval reception of Vienna's women's monastic institutions. Through analysis of the physical and historical place such women's institutions held in an important urban and political center, this book provides a new picture of the ways in which the medieval shapes later understandings of women's role and agency.

Professor Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria - a full-length study of the role of women copyists in the Middle Ages - is underpinned by the notion that the scriptorium was central to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. The author examines the exceptional quantity of evidence of female scribal activity in three different religious communities, pointing out the various ways in which the women worked - alone, with other women, and even alongside men - to produce books for monastic libraries, and discussing why their work should have been made visible, whereas that of other female scribes remains invisible. Beach's focus on manuscript production, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which shaped that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest not only to palaeographers but also to those interested in reading, literacy, religion and gender history.

This volume explores the extraordinary life and works of Hildegard of Bingen, medieval writer, composer, visionary, and monastic founder.

This sourcebook presents editions and translations of seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that advance our understanding of gender, sexuality, and class in the late medieval German-speaking world. Three of the translated texts are fiction. Additionally, there is a religious treatise, a religious legend, an inventory of books, and a legal document. While each of these texts is instructive in and of itself, they gain in complexity when brought into dialogue with one another.

The present volume is the second in a series of three integrated publications, the first produced in 2013 as Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue. Like that volume, this collection of essays, focused on various aspects of nuns' literacies from the late seventh to the mid-sixteenth century, brings together the work of specialists to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts that were read, written, and exchanged by medieval nuns. It investigates literacy from palaeographical and textual perspectives, evidence of book ownership and exchange, and other more external evidence, both literary and historical. To highlight the benefits of cross-cultural comparison, contributions include case studies focused on northern and southern Europe, as well as the extreme north and west of the region. A number of essays illustrate nuns' active engagement with formal education, and with varied textual forms, such as the legal and epistolary, while others convey the different opportunities for studying examples of nuns' artistic literacy. The various discussions included here build collectively on the first volume to demonstrate the comparative experiences of medieval female religious who were reading, writing, teaching, composing, and illustrating at different times and in diverse geographical areas throughout medieval Europe.

"This collection of essays...brings together specialists working on diverse geographical areas to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts nuns read, wrote, and exchanged, primarily in northern Europe form the eighth to the mid-sixteenth centuries....Drawing especially on the rich body of scholarship that currently exists about nuns and books in England, Germany, the Low Countries, and Sweden, these essays investigate the meaning of nuns' literacies in terms of reading and writing, Latin and the vernaculars."--Back cover.