This project brings together virtually the scattered late medieval library of the Cistercian nunnery of Medingen. Between the internall reform of the convent in 1477 and the advent of the Lutheran Reformation in the neighbouring town Lüneburg in 1526, the Medingen scriptorium developed into a major source of Latin and Middle Low German prayer-books. The nuns produced an astonishing wealth of manuscripts in which they expanded the Latin liturgy with vernacular prayers, lay-songs and meditations and which they illuminated - for themselves as well as for the noblewomen of the neighbouring town.

The Medingen reform was part of the Bursfelde reform movement that in the second half of the 15th century reached the 'Lüneburger Klöster' (Lüne, Ebstorf, Medingen, Wienhausen, Walsrode), the five convents located on Lüneburg Heath. In the reform of these convents, the old monastic injunction "to work and pray" was put into new practice. Each of the nunneries found a specific solution, for example the production of tapestries at the convent in Lüne. Medingen seems to have specialised in the production of individual prayer-books in manuscript production for the nuns and for lay women from Lüneburg.