NUNS AND THEIR TEXTS: RELIGIOUS WRITING FROM NORTH GERMAN MEDIEVAL CONVENTS
Religion and writing are closely linked in the late fifteenth-century reform movement which swept through North Germany, building on the earlier monastic tradition and expanding them with added colour, enthusiasm, and bilingual learning. My paper looks at what can be learned from the material and textual culture surviving in a group of convents around Lüneburg, their devotional manuscripts, images, sculpture and the implements of their daily engagement with religious writing: from styli to parchment scraps sewn up as hem stiffeners into dresses for the statues. My talk will survey the material culture of Wienhausen and link it with the textual evidence from two of my ongoing research projects: The Nuns’ Network (Letters by the Benedictine nuns of Kloster Lüne, http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000248/start.htm) and Medingen Manuscripts (Devotional manuscripts by the Cistercian nuns of Kloster Medingen, http://medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk/).
