The Medingen text production happened as part of textual exchange between the nuns of the convent and beyond; the modern equivalent is the exchange between scholars: as a follow-up from Carolin Gluchowski and myself presenting on the ‘Salve festa dies’ at the conference ‘Vom Hymnus zum Gebet’, Franziska Lallinger drew our attention to the Digitalisat of another Medingen manuscript containing the ‘Also heilig is der Tag’, a German variation of ‘Salve festa dies’.
I knew that the manuscript was due to be digitised but had not seen an announcement of its appearance. The last time I had seen it “in the flesh” was before I knew the Oxford prayer-book and therefore did not pay special attention to the paper snippet glued in – which in the microfilm with which I had to work for the last decades are hard to detect (apart from the text being only legible if you already know what you are looking for!)
Thanks to the in-depth cataloguing done according to the DFG guidelines by Härtel and Ekowski, we know that paper quires were added to the manuscript in the 16th century – a watermark in there is attested in a 1541 manuscript. This shows that the Medingen nuns still actively engaged with their prayer-books during the debate about whether and how to adopt the Lutheran Reformation. What the comparison of the Oxford and Hanoverian copies also shows is that the nuns did this as they had done previously: as a collective, creatively sharing best practice – and prints.
Catalogue
Handschriften der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover, Erster Teil Ms I 1‑Ms I 174. Beschrieben von Helmar Härtel und Felix Ekowski nach Vorarbeiten von Hans Immel, Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz 1989 (Mittelalterliche Handschriften in Niedersachsen H. 5), pp. 62-65.