The Scribes for Women's Convents in Late Medieval Germany


Book Description

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




Women as Scribes


Book Description

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.




The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen


Book Description

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




Ruling the Spirit


Book Description

Histories of the German Dominican order have long presented a grand narrative of its origin, fall, and renewal: a Golden Age at the order's founding in the thirteenth century, a decline of Dominican learning and spirituality in the fourteenth, and a vibrant renewal of monastic devotion by Dominican "Observants" in the fifteenth. Dominican nuns are presumed to have moved through a parallel arc, losing their high level of literacy in Latin over the course of the fourteenth century. However, unlike the male Dominican friars, the nuns are thought never to have regained their Latinity, instead channeling their spiritual renewal into mystical experiences and vernacular devotional literature. In Ruling the Spirit, Claire Taylor Jones revises this conventional narrative by arguing for a continuous history of the nuns' liturgical piety. Dominican women did not lose their piety and literacy in the fifteenth century, as is commonly believed, but instead were urged to reframe their devotion around the observance of the Divine Office. Jones grounds her research in the fifteenth-century liturgical library of St. Katherine's in Nuremberg, which was reformed to Observance in 1428 and grew to be one of the most significant convents in Germany, not least for its library. Many of the manuscripts owned by the convent are didactic texts, written by friars for Dominican sisters from the fourteenth through the fifteenth century. With remarkable continuity across genres and centuries, this literature urges the Dominican nuns to resume enclosure in their convents and the strict observance of the Divine Office, and posits ecstatic experience as an incentive for such devotion. Jones thus rereads the "sisterbooks," vernacular narratives of Dominican women, long interpreted as evidence of mystical hysteria, as encouragement for nuns to maintain obedience to liturgical practice. She concludes that Observant friars viewed the Divine Office as the means by which Observant women would define their communities, reform the terms of Observant devotion, and carry the order into the future.




Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe


Book Description

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.




Women's History in the Age of Reformation


Book Description

In his work The Book of the Reformation of the Order of Preachers, the Dominican friar Johannes Meyer (1422-1485) drew on letters, treatises, and other written records, as well as interviews, oral accounts, and his own personal experience, to record the blossoming of the Observant reform movement. The result is this sprawling, eclectic, yet curiously intimate account of the men -- but mostly of the women -- who devoted their lives to revitalizing the Dominican order in southern Germany. With his reliance on their accounts and archives and respect for their intellectual abilities and spiritual resolve, Meyer's treatment of medieval Dominican women provides a model from which today's historians stand to learn. The introduction contextualizes Meyer's celebratory work within a more objective historical background; it is followed by a full translation, making this remarkable history available to English-speaking readers for the first time.




The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West


Book Description

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.







Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe


Book Description

The present volume is the third in a series of three integrated publications, the first produced in 2013 as Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue and the second in 2015 as Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue. Whereas the first volume focused primarily on Northern Europe, the second expanded the range to include material in minority languages such as Old Norse and Old Irish and focused particularly on education and other textual forms, such as the epistolary and the legal. The third volume expands the range still further by including a larger selection of female religious, for instance, tertiaries, and further languages (for example, Danish and Hungarian), as well as engaging more explicitly on issues of adaptation of manuscript and early printed texts for a female readership. Like the previous volumes, 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. Contributors to this volume investigate the topic of literacy primarily from palaeographical and textual evidence and by discussing information about book ownership and production in convents.