Last week, I spent a week as a fellow at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK). While in Lund, I wanted to take the opportunity to visit a manuscript I already knew well from its digital facsimile.
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
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
Que scripsit scripta, sua manus sit benedicta.Anno domini M°CCCCC°xxiiij scripsi ego, soror Cecilia Hughen, hunc librum cum fauore venerabilis domine nostre A R, anno etatis mee XXIII°.Que librum istum post obitum meum possederit, oret amore Ihesu et Marie pro scriptrice
Carolin Gluchowski writes: I am pleased to announce that my poster, “Female Spaces of Learning: A Glimpse Behind Medieval Convent Walls,” was awarded first place at the conference “Women and Worlds of Learning in Europe: From the Medieval to the