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
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
Since the publication of ‘The Life of Nuns’ which is open access available via Open Book Publishers, there have been a number of reactions to it from a wide variety of people, academic colleagues as well those interested in the
Am 25. März 2025 wird die Taschenbuchausgabe der ‘Unerhörten Frauen’ bei Ullstein erscheinen. Darin wird auch das zusätzliche Kapitel zu ‘Liebe und Freundschaft’ erscheinen, das für die englische Version erstellt wurde. Im Vorgriff darauf erscheint hier alsAuszug der dritte Teil