Republished with thanks from The Historian. The magazine of the Historical Association. Issue 169, Spring 2026, pp. 58-62. Read the full pdf here. The Life of Nuns: love, politics, and religion in medieval German convents In The Life of Nuns:
For anyone who has worked with the manuscripts from Medingen, a newly recognised book is never simply “another manuscript”. It is another voice from a community whose books travelled much further than their makers could ever have imagined. The late
Transparent Textile Curtains and the Experience of Revelation in Medingen Manuscripts Mina Miyamoto BE1, fol. 173v © Staatsbibliothek Berlin (Photo: Mina Miyamoto) When I first began working on textile curtains in medieval manuscripts, I was struck by how easily they
In March 2026, I had the opportunity to spend a week in Copenhagen as part of a Short-Term Scientific Mission at the Royal Danish Library. The aim of this research stay was to work on a group of Middle Low
Yesterday I swapped my desk in Hamburg for a snowy train journey to Kloster Wienhausen. At minus five degrees the landscape between Hamburg and Celle was white and strangely quiet; when I arrived, the convent buildings and church were dusted
On a New Year’s Eve in the first half of the 1480s, two young nuns in the convent of Lüne sat down to write to a woman they admired (letter no. 260 in the first letter book, edited by Eva
What happened to books when religious houses reformed?—Historians have long told a dramatic story: reform arrives, old books become obsolete, and manuscripts are discarded, sold, or cut up for reuse. Yet the surviving manuscripts from the Cistercian nunnery of Medingen,
A Medingen Abbess As Owner of a Vernacular Sermon Manuscript? Duth boeck hort Margareten Stoterogge—“This book belongs to Margarete Stöterogge.” On the last page of a fifteenth-century book of Middle Low German sermons, someone has written a brief note: Duth
oder: Liebe und Freundschaft in den Lüner Briefen A special lecture for the Old Frisian Summer School in Groningen 2025 on ‘Code-Switching between Latin and the vernacular’. More features available via the panopto recording of the talk here, see below
The Materiality of the Medingen Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library Blog post for the conference ‘ZwischenRäume. Geistliche Frauen des Mittelalters zwischen Memoria und Materialität‘, organised by Gisela Muschiol in Bonn 26–28 June 2025 Liminal Spaces: Religious Women in the Middle