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