This is the culmination of a six-year project funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung to make the letter books of the Benedictine nuns of L\u00fcne accessible. The edition of the first of three volumes, comprising overall more than 1800 letters, is also available as a side-by-side facsimile with both a diplomatic transcription and a critical edition and an extensive commentary in the Digital Library of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenb\u00fcttel<\/a>. There is also a Documentary “The Nuns’ Network”<\/a> of the project in six episodes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The letter books of the Benedictine nunnery of L\u00fcne represent a rich source for exploring late medieval devotion, scholarship, and communication networks. The women vividly recount both everyday life and feast days in the convent, their relationships with the provost, their families, and the councillors of L\u00fcne, as well as spiritual friendships with women from neighbouring convents. A particular feature is the preservation not only of letters from office-holding nuns but also from all members of the convent, including the convent schoolgirls. For the first time, it is also possible to trace the community\u2019s internal grappling with emerging Reformation ideas from the perspective of a Benedictine convent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The edition comprises over 450 letters written in Latin, Low German, and a distinctive code-switching language used particularly for internal communication between the women. It illuminates the social, linguistic, historical, and rhetorical context of these learned nuns and their communication networks. The L\u00fcne letter books significantly expand the corpus of texts independently authored by women in the late Middle Ages. In doing so, the nuns developed a language tailored to their needs\u2014one capable of expressing both their monastic daily life and their religious aspirations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photograph: The monograph in the cloisters of L\u00fcne; photographed by Am\u00e9lie Gr\u00e4fin zu Dohna, Abbess of Kloster L\u00fcne<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 altehrw\u00fcrdig T\u00fcbingen-based publisher Mohr-Siebeck: Netzwerke der Nonnen. Kritische Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1852,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[75,35],"class_list":["post-1850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-content","tag-lune","tag-nuntastic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1855,"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions\/1855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Luene-Monographie-Kreuzgang-1024x768.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n