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The Scribes for Women's Convents in Late Medieval Germany

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXV; Issue: 517 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/ceq320

1477-4534

Samuel Mossman,

Early Modern Women Writers

This work joins a small but rapidly growing number of publications in English on the religious culture of late medieval Germany to have appeared in recent years—the result, in part, of an increasing consciousness among anglophone medievalists in all disciplines of the vast scale of the extant material which the German-speaking regions have to offer in this field. The thousands of manuscripts which survive from German women's convents, and in particular the several hundred which are known with certainty to have been copied—and, in many cases, signed—by female scribes serve as the material basis for this work. Cynthia Cyrus presents a study which sets out to locate the position of book production and scribal activity in the world of late medieval female monasticism, and to offer analyses of the nature of that book production and of the colophons with which those scribes augmented the texts that they copied, and thereby left personalised traces of their individual activity. The broad conclusion, that the women of the German convents in the later middle ages were somewhat more involved in the production of their own books than has generally been thought, will perhaps surprise the wider readership more than the specialist audience; but it is nonetheless valuable to have a study which now actually demonstrates this.