Middle Low German Primer written by the Medingen Nuns
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
Lecture for the General Linguistics Seminar, 9 February 2026 5:15pm – Linguistics Large Seminar Room, Faculty of Linguistics, 30.445 6:30pm – Reception in Linguistics Faculty Hub, followed by dinner at Mamma Mia. Sign-up sheet and further information What happens when
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
After having been available as a digital resource in preliminary form for a number of years, the definite version has now been published in a hefty but handsome volume by the altehrwürdig Tübingen-based publisher Mohr-Siebeck: Netzwerke der Nonnen. Kritische Edition
The ‘Song of Songs’ in Medieval Female Communities Lecture for the Training Group ‘Autonomy of Heteronomous Texts in Antiquity and the Middle Ages’ At the start of the ‘Song of Songs’, the choir of the young women sing ‘Draw me after