The Scribes For Women's Convents in Late Medieval Germany 9781442689084

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables
Acknowledgments
Caveats and Terminology
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Of Monasteries and Their Scribes
2. Structuring Scribal Relationships
3. The Content of Convent Manuscripts
4. Scribe as Individual
5. Why Scribes Serve
Conclusion
Appendix A: Distribution of Known Scribes and of Surviving Manuscripts by Monastic Order
Appendix B: Forty-eight Women’s Convents with Active Scriptoria in Late Medieval Germany
Notes
Bibliography
Index of People
Index of Convents
Index of Manuscripts
General Index

Citation preview

THE SCRIBES FOR WOMEN’S CONVENTS IN LATE MEDIEVAL GERMANY

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CYNTHIA J. CYRUS

The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

UN IV E RS IT Y O F TO RO N TO PRE S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN

978-0-8020-9369-1

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cyrus, Cynthia J. The scribes for women’s convents in late medieval Germany / Cynthia J. Cyrus. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9369-1 1. Scribes – Germany – History – To 1500. 2. Women in Christianity – History – Middle Ages, 600–1500. 3. Monasticism and religious orders – Germany – History – Middle Ages, 600–1500. 4. Manuscripts, Medieval -- Germany. I. Title. Z106.5.G3C97

2009

091.0943

C2008-906055-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Amen. Finitum per manus et non per pedes per me … 2008.

With apologies to G. Hafftner, scribe from Laibach, Slovenia, 1465. CMO #4660, CMO II/138; discussed in KramerScriptores. The colophon adapted here stems from SchläglStiftsB, 133. Cpl. (816.b.) 162, fol. 230v, a manuscript G. Hafftner copied in Felden, Austria

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Contents

List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi xiii

Caveats and Terminology List of Abbreviations Introduction

xvii

3

1. Of Monasteries and Their Scribes

18

2. Structuring Scribal Relationships 48 3. The Content of Convent Manuscripts

90

4. Scribe as Individual 132 5. Why Scribes Serve

166

6. Conclusion 203 Appendix A: Distribution of Known Scribes and of Surviving Manuscripts by Monastic Order 215 Appendix B: Forty-eight Women’s Convents with Active Scriptoria in Late Medieval Germany 217 Notes 221 Bibliography

303

viii Contents

Index of People

345

Index of Convents

357

Index of Manuscripts General Index

371

363

Tables

Table 1.1. Named and unnamed women scribes from women’s monasteries 35 Table 3.1. Liturgical books for late medieval women’s convents 96 Table 3.2. Distribution of manuscript production 121 Table 3.3. Sample of library inventories from women’s houses in German-speaking regions 127 Table 3.4. Known German women monastic scribes by generation, 1300–1425 129 Table 3.5. Manuscript holdings from women’s scriptoria: genre versus generation 130 Table 4.1. Scribal signatures by genre 157

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Acknowledgments

It is my joy and pleasure to acknowledge a few of the many persons and institutions who have helped with this study. The staff of the Blair Music Library: Sara Manus, current head librarian Holling Smith-Borne, former head librarian Dennis Clark, Catherine Gick, Michael Jones, and most especially ever-patient Robert Rich, who nagged me to return things and laughed with me over the funny ones. The patient, hardworking, resourceful, and very busy staff of the Vanderbilt University Interlibrary Loan office, and most particularly Jim Toplon, who was indefatigable in chasing down the most obscure references. Various librarians from the Vanderbilt Central Library and Divinity Library, especially Yvonne Boyer and Amy Limpitlaw, but also Bill Hook and Scott McDermott, who helped with the early stages of my research. Krystal Grant, Kate Grindon, Olivia Carter Mather, and Stephanie A. Salyer, who assisted at various points with data collection and management. My supportive and detail-oriented colleagues at University of Toronto Press, particularly Miriam Skey, who appreciated my sense of humour and followed up on endless queries, ever-patient Ryan Van Huijstee, and of course Barbara Porter and Suzanne Rancourt whose support is gratefully appreciated. Conversations and electronic discussions with many friends and colleagues have been helpful over the years. I would like to single out for special thanks Elizabeth Randell Upton, Alice Clark, Alicia Doyle, Rebecca Garber, Barbara Bowen and other enthusiastic colleagues at Otto’s Group, Vivian Ramalingan, Douglas Lee, and Susanna Lang. My work would not have been possible without financial support from a number of sources. Vanderbilt University and the Blair School of

xii Acknowledgments

Music have both contributed generous publication subvention funds. The Vanderbilt University Research Council supported a year’s leave which assisted in research around the world. The PIMS Friends of the Library award facilitated a month of research at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies; this book would have been much poorer without that timely support. I am grateful too to the staff of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library; their willingness to deliver up to my carrel literally hundreds upon hundreds of microfilm reels has allowed me to develop a familiarity with monastic sources that would not otherwise have been possible. I was given two consortium fund grants to visit Newberry Library, where I had a chance to read secondary literature unavailable at Vanderbilt. Finally, my deep and heartfelt thanks go to Dean Mark Wait of the Blair School of Music, who assisted with research assistant funds, with collection development funds, with leaves, and with encouragement and support. I owe intellectual debts that extend beyond mere footnote citations to the teams of scholars responsible for the Matrix Monasticon, for Germania Benedictina, and for HKOL. I also have benefited from the work of the Benedictines of Bouveret, whose published collection of scribal colophons made possible much of the discussion in this book. I am especially grateful to Sigrid Krämer, whose careful attention to detail and eye for the broadest possible array of manuscript sources has provided unparalleled access to information on manuscript provenance. I owe a particular debt too to my mother, Women’s Studies scholar and mentor extraordinaire Virginia J. Cyrus, who told me for years that we needed more work on nuns. I hope that this book helps to fill that need. Finally, no set of acknowledgments would be complete without recognition of the time and support given to me by the members of my family, Tom Dowling and Amelia, Nathaniel, and Nissa Berle. I thank the kids for letting me join in games already in progress, for feeding me dinner when I needed it, and for putting up with short stories instead of novels at bedtime. But most of all, my heartfelt thanks go to Tom for all of the usual reasons and some unusual ones too. Tag.

Caveats and Terminology

In addition to the normal profusion of spellings common to medieval names, the medieval German woman had the option of using or dropping the feminine ending of ‘-in’ with her surname. Thus, for example Margareta Schleicher and Margaretha Schleicherin are one and the same person. When searching for an individual woman (or man), the reader should check variant spellings. Names of individuals are given a single standard spelling, but name clusters such as Elisabeth, Elizabeth, and Elsbet abound. I sometimes follow modern practice and anglicize names, especially for medieval authors who are well known enough to have standard names in English. For most of the scribes, however, I follow the manuscripts and designate individuals with ‘von’ or ‘de’. Thus, one finds author Elisabeth of Schönau but scribe Elisabeth von Nigendorp. Umlauts have been normalized insofar as presentation is concerned: the letter ‘u’ with superscript e (ue ), the letter ‘u’ with superscript o ( ů ), and a normal letter ‘u’ with umlaut ( ü ) may be represented here by the same character. Umlauts have not been added in every spot where modern orthography calls for them, however; I have preferred to adopt the medieval manuscript spellings with all their many idiosyncracies. I have adopted modern uses of u/v and i/j except in direct quotation from secondary sources. Punctuation in medieval documents (including colophons) might best be described as inconsistent; I have done my best to reproduce that which appeared in the document when making my own transcription but elsewhere follow the decisions of the many catalogue editors upon whose shoulders my own research rests. Convent names generally follow the designations in Sigrid Krämer’s Handschriftenerbe but major city names have been normalized to standard English usage. Thus, I refer to St Katharina (rather than St Catherine’s)

xiv Caveats and Terminology

in Nuremberg (rather than Nürnberg). References to Kirchheim, however, are to the Cistercian convent of Kirchheim am Ries unless otherwise noted. KrämerHandschriftenerbe 1:393–6 cites this convent as ‘Kirchheim (1)’ to distinguish it from Kirchheim unter Teck, a Dominican women’s convent in the diocese of Constance which she references as ‘Kirchheim (2).’ I have retained Krämer’s parenthetical numbering for the three Medingen convents, which were all vibrant intellectual communities in this period and possessed extensive convent libraries. Medingen (1) was Dominican and was the home of Margaret Ebner; it was located in the town of Dillingen an der Donau and was sometimes known as ‘Maria Medingen.’ Medingen (2) was a second Dominican women’s house that appears to have been a thirteenth-century off-shoot of Medingen (1); it was located in the nearby town of Lauingen.There is some confusion over which manuscripts, if any, belong to this latter convent. Medingen (3) was a Cistercian house located in Uelzen in the diocese of Verden and became a Lutheran foundation in 1559. See KrämerHandschriftenerbe 2:563–5. Library designations also follow Krämer’s convention of abbreviation; city (using its German spelling) is followed by an abbreviated library name (SB = Staatsbibliothek), and thereafter come the designations for fonds and shelf number. These sigla are expanded in the manuscript section of the Bibliography. My goals was to ease cross-references among the various published resources. Translations in this book are my own unless otherwise noted; the original text is typically provided in the notes. Finally, a matter of terminology. I consider a scribe to be any person who undertook entries of more than two pages in length in a manuscript book. Thus, the copyist for a particular section within a miscellany counts as an individual scribe, but a person who adds a few comments in the margins of a book does not. This is a matter of judgment; there is no clear and universal dividing line between literate users of medieval books and the people who copied them. Also, I consider scribal activity to be an umbrella term covering the tasks from the preparation of parchment (which gets scant attention here) through the copying of words, the entering of musical notation, the painting of pictures, the incorporation of illuminations, and the proofreading and correction that often followed as a final stage of book preparation. Both scribes and artists undertake scribal activity. I use the term ‘monastic’ as both adjective and noun, following both ancient custom and recent usage in monastic studies. The term is suitably inclusive, a stand-in for the longer listing of ‘nun, canoness,

Caveats and Terminology xv

beguine, and other religious individuals.’ I prefer the term ‘monastic’ to the related noun ‘religious’; the former covers women who live in community, while the latter also encompasses anchorites and other independent or quasi-hermetic individuals (including the single beguine). I sometimes distinguish between the choir nun or her social peer the canoness and the lay sister (or conversae) who also lived within monastic walls; the two groups typically had separate duties, took different vows, followed different rules of social contact under clausura and had differences of privilege and education. They could also be distinguished on the basis of social class, financial background, and political connectedness. Both groups, however, are encompassed under the term ‘monastic’ as used here. Note that convent servants are invisible in the story that I am telling, though they played an important role in the daily life of each individual monastery. I also use the terms ‘monastery’ and ‘convent’ in a loose sense of religious community, conflating the categories of Stift (endowed religious house typically inhabited by noble women), convent, abbey, priory, and beguinage under these umbrella terms. I reserve the term ‘cloister’ to the space within the convent that was at least theoretically limited to the women monastics themselves. I prefer the term ‘claustration’ or clausura to ‘enclosure’ because the former term seems to capture the sense of external agency that was often visible in the periods of imposition of Observant reforms.

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Abbreviations

2VL

Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, begun by Wolfgang Stammler, continued by Karl Langosch, 2nd edition, ed. Kurt Ruh and Burghart Wachinger together with Gundolf Keil, Werner Schröder, Burhart Wachinger, and Franz Josef Worstbrock (Berlin/New York: 1978–99).

CMO

Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au XVIe siècle, 6 vols, ed. Bénédictins du Bouveret, Spicilegii Friburgensis subsidia 2–7 (Fribourg, Suisse: Éditions universitaires, 1965–82). Citations include a reference to both item number and to volume/page, e.g., CMO #248, CMO I/31.

GermBen

Germania Benedictina. Bayerischen Benediktinerakademie München with the Abt-Herwegen-Institut Maria Laach. St Ottilien: Erzabtei St. Ottilien. Band I: Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal (1999) Band II: Die Benediktinerklöster in Bayern (1970) Band III: Die benediktinischen Mönchs- und Nonnenklöster in Österreich und Südtirol, 3 vols, ed. Ulrich Faust and Waltraud Krassnig (2000, 2001, 2002) Band V: Die Benediktinerklöster in BadenWürttemberg, ed. Franz Quarthal (1975)

xviii Abbreviations

Band VI: Die Benediktinerklöster in Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein und Bremen, ed. Ulrich Faust (1979) Band VII: Die benediktinischen Mönchs- und Nonnenklöster in Hessen, ed. Friedhelm Jürgensmeier and Franziskus Büll(2004) Band VIII: Die Benediktinerklöster in Nordrhein-Westfalen, ed. Rhaban Haacke (1980) Band IX: Die Männer- und Frauenklöster der Benediktiner in Rheinland-Pfalz und Saarland, ed. Friedhelm Jürgensmeier (1999) Band XI: Die Frauenklöster in Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein und Bremen, ed. Ulrich Faust (1984) Band XII: Die Männer- und Frauenklöster der Zisterzienser in Niedersachsen, SchleswigHolstein und Hamburg, ed. Ulrich Faust (1994) Helvetia Sacra

Helvetia sacra, ed. Rudolf Henggeler and Albert Bruckner (Bern: Schwabe & Co., 1972–).

HKOL

Manuscripta Mediaevalia: ‘Handschriftenkataloge ONLINE’ and ‘Handschriften-datenbank’; http:// www.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/. This site contains 203 digitalized manuscript catalogues and inventories, along with web-searchable data entries for 61,500 codices from Germany and neighbouring countries.

HMML

Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. References are to microfilms within the collection.

KrämerHandschriftenerbe

Sigrid Krämer, Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelalters, 2 vols, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz: Ergänzungsband 1 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989).

KrämerScriptores

Sigrid Krämer, Scriptores codicum medii aevi: Datenbank von Schreibern mittelalterlicher Handschriften (Nomina scriptorum, Signaturae codicum, Vitae) (Augsburg: Erwin Rauner Verlag, CD-ROM, and web

Abbreviations xix

access 2003). Consulted via web access at http:// www.erwin-rauner.de/umleitung.htm. Second edition published in 2006 as Scriptores codicum medii aevi: Ein Katalog von mittelalterlichen Handschriftenschreibern aus der Zeit um 500 bis ins 16. Jahrhundert ... Ad possessores codicum medii aevi – zu den Besitzern von mittelalterlichen Handschriften. LMLO2

Andrew Hughes, Late Medieval Liturgical Offices: Resources for Electronic Research, vol. 2, Sources and Chants, Subsidia mediaevalia 24 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996).

Matrix Monasticon

Matrix Monasticon [‘a repertory of profiles of women’s religious communities that existed between 400 and 1600 CE.’], ed. Lisa Bitel and Katherine Gill, assisted by Marie Kelleher; http:// monasticmatrix.org/monasticon/. Currently contains entries on 380 German communities as well as 7 Austrian, 138 Belgian, and 5 Swiss communities.

NecGer

Monumenta Germaniae historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quingentesimum: Necrologia Germaniae, vols 1–5, Gesellschaft für Ältere Deutsche Geschichtskunde zur Beförderung einer Gesammtausgabe der Quellenschriften Deutscher Geschichten des Mittelalters (Berlin: Weidmann, 1888–1920). Continued as Libri memoriales et Necrologia, nova series. Hannover: Hahn, 1979–.

RB

Saint Benedict, RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry, Imogene Baker et al. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1980).

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THE SCRIBES FOR WOMEN’S CONVENTS IN LATE MEDIEVAL GERMANY

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Introduction

Content of This Study The book that follows is a book about scribes. Specifically, as its title declares, it is about the many scribes, both women and men, who served women’s convents in late medieval Germany. Although the majority of scribes who can be affiliated with women’s monastic manuscripts were themselves, in fact, women monastics, a number of their male contemporaries also contributed to monastic manuscript holdings. This book, then, is a kind of social history of scribes that seeks to answer the question of how a monastic patron from within a women’s convent might identify the proper person to copy a book. The task is rather daunting, since relatively little specific biographical information for the individual scribes of this era survives. There are exceptions, of course; the lives of a handful of scribes and of a double handful of manuscript artists have been carefully resurrected through art historical studies and regional or institutional histories. These better-known scribes – Loppa von Spiegel of Cologne, Margaretha dicta Regula of Lichtenthal, Kunigund Niclasin and the other scribes for St Katharina in Nuremberg, Clara Hätzlerin from Augsburg, and others of their ilk – are joined by literally hundreds of individuals who are known to us through only a few penned lines or a brief mention or two in a convent document. This book conjoins standard biographical information about major figures whose artistic and scribal contributions are well known with the many small snippets of data that do survive about the men and women who served as convent scribes in a sort of collective biographical endeavour. It is, in essence, a prosopographical study, for although these scribes come from all over German-speaking lands and stem from a three-and-a-quarter-century

4 The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

period, they are linked by a common activity – the copying of books – and a common environment, that of the cloister. True, the scribes discussed here come from a wide range of monastic orders and from different social backgrounds. What unites them is their contributions to the libraries and sacristies of women’s convents; they participated in a tangible way in the creation of a written intellectual and spiritual tradition within convent walls. The women and men at the core of this book are the people who created the written legacy of thirteenth- to early sixteenthcentury convent life. I am interested in the lives of scribes, their work habits, their social engagement with colleagues, their experiences within the realm of book production. For only a few of these convent scribes do we have sufficient details for a substantive encyclopedia entry, let alone a full-length biographical account. Yet by piecing together the bits and pieces of lore from dust-gathering monastic shelves (lore now assembled in places such as library catalogues, codicological studies, scholarly surveys, and a whole host of other scholarly endeavours) we can get a picture of what a generalized ‘life of the scribe’ might be like. There are innumerable variations in the details of those lives, of course. Yet by examining the educational paths these copyists took, by engaging with the few private words they left behind, and by placing their endeavours in the broader context of book creation and book use at the convents in which they lodged, we get some hint as to what experiences might have shaped their scribal habits. This study, then, takes as its starting point the identification of roughly 580 named individuals and an additional fifty-five anonymous female convent members who served as scribes for women’s convents during the period extending from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the start of the Reformation. Drawing on colophons and other documentary evidence, on the secondary literature and library catalogues, and on my own investigations of women’s convent manuscripts,1 I have identified 416 women scribes who served German women’s convents, the vast majority of whom were themselves cloistered women. Of these, 361 can be identified by name or initials, and fifty-five by gendered endings and by labels such as ‘scriptrix,’ ‘soror,’ and the like. Moreover, forty-eight women’s convents are shown here to have had scriptoria, active communities that supported book production by many women.2 Book copying by monastic women proves to have been normative for this late medieval period, a finding at odds with previous assumptions about how manuscripts circulated in women’s convents of

Introduction 5

the period, for only recently have scholars come to recognize the significant role women monastics played in the expansion of their convent book collections.3 This book is, however, more than just a study of women scribes. Rather, it is a comparative analysis of how gender intersects with genre in the production of manuscripts for women’s convents. Hence, it also offers an analysis of what the 220 male scribes who have been identified in the manuscripts of these convent libraries chose to copy, and how their choices differed from those of their female scribal peers. Scribes are individuals who undertook the task of copying all or a significant part of a hand-written book. For purposes of analysis, the category of ‘scribe’ is distinct from ‘archivist,’ for the former deals with the monastery’s books, while the latter deals primarily with business matters of the convents and hence primarily with documents. Scribes were copyists, but they demonstrated various levels of erudition. Some of them were intellectual experts and offered up commentary on the texts they were copying; others may have themselves generated, translated, or compiled the text they share with their readership. These experts were the exception, of course; most scribes relied on others to create the texts they copied and so presumably saw their own role as assisting in the circulation rather than the development of texts. Hence, the majority of monastic scribes were knowledgeable workers, capable of making small emendations and adding or resolving the abbreviations of the model but working largely to reproduce faithfully the text or music of the exemplar (or exemplars) in question. Still others fall into a category that might be described as the ‘naive copyist,’ one whose literacy is not perhaps as firmly established as might have been useful for the task she undertook. Scribes were responsible for a variety of aspects of the composition of books: singly or as a team they designed page layout, made decisions about how many abbreviations might be used, copied the words and sometimes the musical notes, added initials and sometimes artwork, contributed rubrics, offered up content summaries, and sometimes helpfully named themselves as the person involved in creating this particular manuscript copy. Thus, we can deduce many scribal identifications from the legacy these men and women left behind in their colophons, which appear at the end of roughly one of every ten manuscripts of the period. Colophons vary a great deal in the amount of detail they supply. Some provide extensive information on the place the manuscript was copied, the person who commissioned it, the person who did the work, the date the

6 The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

copying was completed, and other details that the scribe found of interest, along with requests for prayers and exclamations of praise and worship. Other colophons provide a one-word conclusion: ‘finis,’ perhaps, or the date. The field of known scribes has been enriched through identification of such individuals by the many scholars who have worked on women’s convents and their written legacy. Some scribes can be found through convent documents such as obits, necrologies, payment records, book inventories, and the narrative biographies of individual nuns found in convent chronicles and sister-books. In 1354, for example, the convent register from the Cistercian monastery Bersenbrück lists Gysela von Beysten as a ‘scrittorix,’ though no manuscripts in her hand are known to have survived.4 Likewise, a convent document from Wienhausen in 1478 cites Gertrud Bungen as having copied a book of responsories.5 Similar information can sometimes be drawn from cloister obits, those records of death that served as a reminder to the living of the deceased person’s need for prayer in the annual cycle of remembrance. These records often record simply the day or year of someone’s passing, but occasionally they signal her performance in a monastic office. Thus, the necrology from the Benedictine house of Marienberg bei Boppard (TrierStadtB 355) lists three scribes. It is signed by the scribe who started the document (Margaretam) and provides obits for two sixteenthcentury scribes, both described with the term ‘scriba.’6 In the same vein, a Cistercian scribe from Rulle (near Osnabrück), Christina von Haltern, had, according to her death notice, ‘written many other books’; she is probably the copyist of a two-volume Old Testament now found in the Osnabrück Domschatz.7 And so on. Since the emphasis in this book is on biographical and prosopographical considerations, precedence has been given to documentary evidence; codicologically based identification of monastic scribes founded on comparisons of scribal hands has not been a central methodological concern. Close palaeographical analyses can expand our list of known scribes dramatically, of course. Handwriting and codicological quirks have been used successfully, for example, by Albert Bruckner, by Alison Beach, and by Karin Schneider, each of whom has combined archival sleuthing with careful palaeographical analysis to determine a pool of named and unnamed schreiberin.8 Indeed, Bruckner has argued that for Swiss convents at least, there are more manuscript scribes identified through archival comparison than through colophon, and the same may eventually be true for German women’s houses as well.9 For the

Introduction 7

later Middle Ages, however, such codicological research has largely been used to link a known scribe to one or more additional manuscripts in his or her hand, and that has been my strategy here. To date, only a small handful of anonymous ‘second monastic scribes’ have been identified as working within women’s monastic communities of this later period, and those included as part of the current data set can generally be linked to gendered terms: scriptrix or scriptor, Schreiberin or Schreiber, Schwester or Lector, and the like. Thus, the scribes identified here may be only a small portion of those who will ultimately prove to be ‘recoverable’ from the manuscript legacy for women’s convents; the numbers here stand as a statistical minimum. In addition to the recovery of biographical details, attention has been given to the intellectual context for convent-based scribal activity through scrutiny of the manuscript legacy of women’s convent libraries. To date, approximately one fifth of the surviving books from women’s monastic libraries can be connected with an identifiable scribe; many – most – books of the late Middle Ages, like those of earlier periods, went unsigned. Details of specific scribal activities, therefore, are grounded in a broader understanding of convent library holdings. An assessment of the content and language of the surviving manuscripts that stem from libraries for women’s convents in the late Middle Ages forms a backdrop to the investigation of individual scribes that is the core of this study. Similarly, the work of an individual copyist is assessed against other scribal contributions within and across generations to seek out evidence of a formalized scriptorium within cloister walls dedicated to book production, since institutional commitment to programs of book copying can shape the scope as well as the content of monastic endeavours. A clear pattern emerges from the materials examined here, one that shows women monastics taking an active role in the creation as well as the circulation of convent manuscripts. Where possible, scribes are linked to specific women’s convents and particular time-frames in which the copying of manuscripts occurred. Their relationship to a particular abbess or affiliation with a given monastic order is also tracked. The presence of so many known scribes in the relatively circumscribed world of women’s monastic life allows comparisons across time and monastic order that reveal important patterns in the circulation of ideas and texts. Indeed, the presence of so many women among the scribes for women’s convents stands rather at odds with the previous assessments of women’s contemplative lives. Much of the work on scriptoria and book production

8 The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

for the later Middle Ages has focused on the larger male establishments that flourished during this period. An unintended consequence of this strategy for investigation, however, is that women’s roles in the circulation of books have been underestimated. Rather than being incidental to library production, women are central to the creation of books that fill cloister coffers and enhance convent liturgical practice, for more women than men are known to have copied books that stem from women’s convents. As an adjunct to the study of scribes, this book is also about a particular genre: the genre of the colophon. The colophon is an odd genre, invariably paired with some other written work. It comes typically at the end of the manuscript, and stands apart both in content and in authorship from the work that it accompanies. Colophons have been simultaneously seen as profoundly useful and, at the same time, as incidental to the books in which they are found. They are useful because they give clues to the provenance of the copy, to the circumstances of the copying, and to the ownership of the copy of the text. They are incidental because they are rarely polished examples of eloquent literature. Scribal colophons tend to rely on a stock of verbal formulas, to be limited in scope to a mere handful of lines, and to reveal little of the elegance sought in more central literary genres. Colophons have been assessed en masse in several publications. Marc Drogin’s book on scribal anathemas, for example, takes a cross-section of colophons from several centuries, particularly those that adopt a protective stance towards the ownership and treatment of the book in question.10 The kinds of concluding remarks central to the colophons he takes as his focus are those that threaten or curse those who would abscond with or deface the book. ‘Whosoever removes this Volume from this same mentioned Convent, may the anger of the Lord overtake him in this world and in the next to all eternity. Amen.’11 While Drogin’s study tends to regard the colophon as a treasure trove of anecdote and so occasionally downplays the more conventional scribal signatures, it is also an eminently readable and cogent study of manuscript production, and has provided inspiration for some of my own thinking about what scribes thought they would accomplish in those appended bits of autobiographical material. The study of Lucien Reynhout has been less useful for the purposes undertaken here.12 While its statistical assessment of scribal formulas is helpful for providing a context for particular turns of phrase within colophons, remarkably few of the Latinate formulas he cites were included in the colophons from women’s convents. Of

Introduction 9

course, roughly half the surviving colophons adopted the vernacular or mixed Latin and vernacular phrases, but the absence of the majority of the formulas he studied from manuscripts for women’s convents is striking. Only ‘finito libro’ and ‘feliciter’ appear with any regularity.13 This suggests strongly that gender should be included as a category for analysis in future work on scribal colophons, as practices in women’s houses seem to diverge sharply from those in the larger body of manuscripts from male circles. The colophons I examine here are, of course, limited to a particular region – German-speaking lands – and to women’s convents. Like most scholars, I analyse the content of these colophons for the rich array of information (social, chronological, geographical, institutional) that they volunteer. Where I differ from other scholars is that I believe that colophons have something significant to tell us about the social and intellectual world of the people who penned them. Thus, I examine the data that colophons provide, but I also attend to the formulas and clichés that appear and reappear in them to determine what meanings those imbedded phrases and practices of allusion might have had for the men and women who penned them. This book centres on monastic libraries and the people who work for them. Less so is it an account of the books they produced. Other scholars’ studies concentrate on the way in which a scribe or compiler gets hold of a repertory or on the materials and methods through which she or he commits those repertories to the page. I am, in contrast, interested in how a patron gets hold of a scribe. Readers therefore should be warned that this is neither a codicological investigation nor an art historical one, though it relies heavily on many important studies in both areas. Neither is it a book strictly about ‘pretty books’; many, perhaps even a majority of the manuscripts under consideration here, are inelegant, functional, workaday legacies of the monastic past. This book addresses with equal relish the ratty, unlovely manuscripts that were cheap, useful, and akin to a modern-day paperback, and the deluxe display manuscripts that have been the centrepieces of art-historical exhibitions. Each kind of manuscript was generated by a scribe or a team of scribes, and each had its place in the monastic ‘economy of information.’ Thus, as a corollary to the focus on scribe’s social positions, this book moves its focus from the plane of the ‘great works’ of manuscript production that are the collector’s dream to questions of what kinds of concerns and issues shaped the way in which a given book was crafted and used.

10

The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

Scope and Limitations Although most monastic studies focus on a particular community, region, or diocese, a comparative project such as the one undertaken here requires broader boundaries. Hence, my approach takes advantage of the partial but generous survival of several significant monastic libraries from women’s houses in German-speaking lands – the scores upon scores of manuscripts that still exist from Dominican cloisters such as St Katharina in Nuremberg, Adelhausen and other houses in Freiburg in Breisgau, and Unterlinden in Colmar; from the Cistercian abbeys of Wöltingerode, Lichtenthal, and Kirchheim;14 from the Benedictine abbeys of Nonnberg and Essen. Women’s convents from German-speaking lands clearly once held a significant corpus of manuscripts that invite investigation. For the project at hand, however, consultation of manuscripts from a broader array of convents proved more useful than a spot-check of library remnants from a handful of significant convents. Rather than merely a ‘top ten’ or ‘top fifty’ sort of investigation, limited to those collections with the highest manuscript survival rate, this study assesses all monastic library materials stemming from women’s convents in late medieval Germany. References to all surviving manuscripts from women’s convents were gathered, and scribal identity for each manuscript ascertained whenever possible. The total pool of surviving manuscripts from women’s convents in German lands numbers roughly 4,000; those manuscripts emanate from approximately 450 women’s convents. All of the convents under consideration here existed in Germanspeaking areas; their church leadership would likely have been seated with the ‘German nation’ at the Council of Constance, for instance. This is a linguistic grouping rather than a political one, of course. Swiss regions were as conscious of their differences with Rhenish practices as were the Hamburg residents. Of course, it is also a loose linguistic grouping, for there was no one uniform German language, and dialects abound. Still, an effort has been made to separate out and exclude Dutch experiences in order to focus primarily on the German ones, in part because of the differing impact of various reform efforts in the two regions over the fourteenth and especially fifteenth century. Within this common language grouping, the books produced by scribes have been considered regardless of their linguistic focus. That is, books of whatever language have been included in the tally. These include Latin service books, vernacular prayer books, translations, and a wide array of macaronic and multilingual resources. German women’s

Introduction 11

convents in particular are famous for having privileged the vernacular, and that characteristic is borne out at least in part in the patterns of manuscript survival. Vernacular manuscripts do outnumber Latin ones in the genres of devotional and mystical literature. The interpretation that should logically stem from that observation, however, is less self-evident. Were German scribes capable – literate in the medieval sense – of reading and writing in Latin? Certainly some of them were. From these same convents stem translators and authors of texts both Latin and vernacular. Letters by women religious too show facility in both the Latin and the vernacular linguistic arena. Were all nuns and sisters well versed in Latin? Probably no more so than in our modern-day institutions. Issues of the balance between vernacular and Latinate texts will be addressed in passing in this book, but the reader should be alert to that linguistic concern. Temporal considerations are also important. This book has adopted as a time frame the period spanning from the start of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the Reformation, some three and a quarter centuries in scope. To my eye, the thirteenth century differs in some important ways from the twelfth century. First of all, the number of surviving manuscripts is much higher for the thirteenth century than for the twelfth. This is in part attributable to the rise in private manuscripts. It also signals a period of relative financial plenty; there were quite simply more resources available at women’s convents to be invested in book production. The shift in monastic efforts that resulted in increased book production also paralleled a resurgence of women’s monastic callings, as measured by the increase in new foundations and the rapid increase in the number and size of women’s convents. Waves of spiritual renewal spread across German lands over the course of the thirteenth century.15 In addition to traditional foundations for nuns and for canonesses, the beguinage became the locus of spiritual life for a number of women, particularly in the regions surrounding Cologne and Basel.16 The ferment of religious activity, witnessed in the rapid spread of Dominican and Franciscan orders, for instance, created both a demand for the practical books of convent life and encouraged a degree of religious fervour that called for new spiritual texts and resources. The fourteenth century too saw efforts at spiritual renewal, such as those reflected in the vitae of the sister-books, dated by Rebecca Garber to the period from 1305 to 1350.17 These fourteenth-century renewals do not fit as tidily into categories as the more sweeping reform movements of the fifteenth century, but like the latter movements, fourteenth-century calls to piety often correlated with increased book exchange. Henry of

12

The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

Nördlingen, for instance, sent translations of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead to several Dominican women’s convents,18 and the efflorescence of mystic thought and authorial activity provided impetus for the creation and circulation of a range of spiritual literature.19 Fifteenth-century reforms, on the other hand, were both more systematic and often more directly aimed at library holdings and at bookcopying activities. Melk reforms, for instance, involved a simplification of the liturgy and attendant correction and production of liturgical books,20 while statutes from Marienberg bei Boppard for the Bursfeld reform likewise separated out book production as part of the ‘handiwork’ suited to the newly Observant nuns.21 Similarly, the reform stories from Ebstorf and other Observant communities are filled with tales of book creation, leading Anne Winston-Allen to characterize this late fifteenth-century a ‘Renaissance’ in terms of nuns’ libraries and literary activities.22 The Reformation serves as a logical end point for an investigation of manuscript-based production. The fifteenth century led to an enormous growth of library size. The production of unique manuscript books continued apace as incunabula increasingly found their way onto convent shelves. In the sixteenth century, however, many convent libraries were culled, many monasteries closed all together, and destruction takes precedence over growth as the narrative theme as city and region grappled with the impact of the Reformation. Sheer numbers alone become daunting as libraries of the sixteenth century grew, merged, and dispersed or disappeared on a scale in which a single decade of evidence has as many details as a century had before. The increased emphasis on the printed circulation of ideas and of texts also changed the intellectual context in which monastic ideas flourished. The period of the Reformation has much to tell us about the ways in which scribes functioned, but that story must await another investigation. In keeping with the comparative approach taken here, this book treats women’s convents from across all monastic orders. The women studied here are not just nuns and canonesses, but any women religious living in community. This is largely a pragmatic decision; women’s houses had remarkably fluid identities during the later Middle Ages. Beguines might become canonesses; canonesses frequently adopted Benedictine practices; a convent might belong to the Clarissan order but be served by Dominican friars. For women’s houses, monastic identity appears to have been attributable more to local experiences, practices, and customs than to a broader corporate practice. Many self-identified Cistercian houses, for instance, were never formally incorporated in the order. For the

Introduction 13

purposes of evaluation here, the practical criteria of daily practice – a combination of rule and statute mixed with community habits and assumptions – has been considered more important for identity than political affiliation and formal recognition by an order. Essentially, if the community tried to follow the practices of a particular order, I have considered the community to be a member of the order, regardless of what legislation (or indeed financial structuring) might claim. History of the Project The work here bears a special debt to Sigrid Krämer’s Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelalters, a work that indexes known manuscripts against the German convents to which they once belonged.23 Handschriftenerbe also gives brief four- to five-line convent histories that include the dates of foundation and of closure, gender affiliation, and order that have proved invaluable for my own study. I have largely adopted Krämer’s conventions for naming convents and her citation of city and library abbreviation as convenient mechanisms for condensing the often lengthy manuscript names. I have also used her listings of women’s convent manuscripts as a launching point for my own data gathering. I refer to this work as KrämerHandschriftenerbe. My research also encompasses an extensive array of primary source material, particularly that of the scribal colophon, including the 23,774 colophons gathered by the Benedictines of Bouveret in Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux (CMO).24 I have called from it all references to women monastics both as scribes and as owners or dedicatees of manuscripts. Such entries can be identified through a variety of strategies: • • • • •

monastic or worldly identity such as abbess, ‘soror,’ ‘schwester,’ wife, or widow feminine endings on such self-reflexive labels as ‘cantrix,’ ‘scrittrix,’ or ‘peccatrix’ gendered names such as Anna or Margaretha or Ursula convent names including the likes of Inzigkofen or the Munich Püttrichhaus the various gendered endings for monastic order such as ‘Benedictinerinnen,’ ‘Dominikanerinnen,’ and so on

No single listing of women’s convents in German lands was extant when I began my research, and the CMO format does not typically include

14

The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

references to convent gender, nor does it list manuscript contents. Nevertheless, this investigation into women’s commissions and women’s scribal activities generated a lengthy list of scribal candidates for further investigation. Moreover, the survey of colophons allowed the creation of a provisional listing of women’s monastic libraries with one or more surviving manuscripts, a list that allowed an additional entré into the secondary literature on scribal activity. A second arena of scholarly investigation came from the chronicles and published documents from specific women’s convents. The various convent chronicles and so-called sister-books provide glimpses into the lives of some convent scribes. Likewise, stories of convent reform may single out the efforts of the nun who requests a revision of convent books or the nun who complies with such a request.25 Occasionally, other convent documents – necrologies, inventories, accounts, and so on – also provide a hint of the men and women who created the materials for the convent library. Such references are more readily accessible to the scholar studying a single monastery or complex of monasteries who has time and resources to comb through archival resources than to a scholar attempting a broad survey such as this, but chance encounters with edited materials of a variety of sorts have frequently led to the identification of one or more ‘new’ scribes to be added to the list.26 A third arena for the collecting of information can be found in the dozens upon dozens of modern-day published library catalogues. It is upon those experts’ foundations of scholarly knowledge put forth in library catalogues that my current scholarly endeavour is built. In addition to the catalogues consulted in printed format over the last decade,27 on-line resources such as HKOL have proven invaluable for the collation of entries.28 It is the author of the library catalogue who is most likely to identify scribal contributions in unsigned manuscripts or manuscript sections, allowing through codicological comparison a broader-based reckoning of the scope of an individual scribe’s task than mere signed work would allow. No matter how thorough and systematic one may attempt to be in such catalogue-based investigations, luck plays a role. A single name that emerges from the listing of colophons might lead to a search of the affiliated convent, which may lead to yet further names of known scribes. There are likely to be other scribes mentioned by cataloguers whose names have not yet come to my attention, for no systematic principles for indexing by gender of scribe or of recipient have yet emerged. The lacunae, however, are my own, and I stand indebted to the careful scholars who trod this territory before me.

Introduction 15

The almost monolithic investigations of convent life undertaken in Germania Benedictina, Germania Sacra, and Helvetia Sacra have shaped my knowledge of women’s convents and their financial underpinnings in the later Middle Ages. Germania Benedictina (GermBen) in particular provides a useful cross-check to what is known of libraries, scriptoria, and scribal and artistic activity at a wide range of women’s houses in German-speaking lands. It is complemented by the collaborative webbased Matrix Monasticon, a site that seeks to index all documented women’s convents of the Middle Ages.29 To these encyclopedic endeavours should be added the wealth of German research into individual convents and houses, studies that often contain interesting minutiae that can be revelatory. In addition to these basic cataloguing and indexing tools, my research draws heavily on the secondary literature in art history, the history of the book, monastic studies, and regional history. Two web-based listings of women scribes came online during my decade of research. The first of these is the Women Copyists Database, which offers listings for 203 European women scribes from before 1500. This site, though interesting, largely duplicated information I had already located elsewhere. The second resource, however, instantaneously became a daily reference guide in my own journey towards a better understanding of women’s convents, libraries, and scribes. Sigrid Krämer’s published database of scribal biographies, Scriptores codicum medii aevi, has only been available to me in the last eighteen months of this project, but wherever possible I have performed a cross-check of her scribal information with my own.30 Our interests are complementary; she has provided access to manuscript data and biographical assignments that include both men and women scribes, allowing for comparative studies with a codicological perspective. My own interests have led me to amass different kinds of information, for I focus principally on women’s convents and attempt to assess the verbal legacy of women both as manuscript patrons and as manuscript scribes.31 The backdrop of research undertaken for this study has allowed a rich investigation of the scribal activity commissioned by and/or undertaken by convent women. The discussion that follows comes in six chapters. The first chapter reviews the need for books within women’s monasteries and the resulting efflorescence of scribal culture within those houses during the later Middle Ages. The administrative structure of the woman’s monastery affords women monastics themselves control over manuscript production; it was women who decided whether

16

The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

to request book copying of their own convent sisters or whether to turn to outsiders. More often than not, to judge by surviving signed manuscripts, they kept scribal commissions in-house, and women scribes prove to be vastly more prevalent than has heretofore been assumed. Chapter 2 reviews the kinds of social networks that resulted in scribal relationships. Women monastics could relate to appointed scribes in one of four ways. The commission might go to an external individual, an external group, an internal individual, or an internal group. The kinds of outsiders who worked for women’s convents turn out to be largely persons already connected to the convent in some way. Internal candidates for the role of scribe included both the self-motivated copyist and the copyist who worked out of duty to create manuscripts at the request of the abbess. In that latter category would fall the members of the many convent scriptoria stemming from this late medieval period, and so the evidence of scriptorium life in women’s convents is reviewed. The third chapter investigates the range of genres copied for women’s convents. These include practical administrative resources, the dozenplus genres of liturgical books, the spiritual literature, and the erudite collections. The last portion of this chapter assesses how the genre of books might have affected the choice of scribal gender. Both in-house and outof-house copying efforts are weighted somewhat differently among the surviving manuscripts, an observation with significance for the control over the intellectual and spiritual life on the part of women monastics. Chapter 4 turns from the details of what was copied to the texts generated by the scribes themselves, and begins to ask questions about what kinds of information scribes chose to include in colophons and what that colophon was designed to accomplish. The late medieval colophon is less often a scribal anathema threatening the person who might mistreat the book and more often a tool of authentication, which provides the codex a status as an approved text. This latter function explains why a scribe might forego self-identification yet name the abbess in charge of the monastery at the time that the copying took place. Chapter 5 continues this assessment of the scribal point of view to ask why scribes served these women’s convents. It reviews the multivalent motivations that may have stood behind the scribal endeavour. The parameters of duty and community need form one kind of emphasis; the rewards of intellectual and of artistic/creative contributions form another. The principle claim of the scribes themselves, however, is the idea of spiritual exchange: the scribe’s labour serves as payment for the reader’s prayerful remembrance.

Introduction 17

The concluding chapter places monastic scribes back into the context of the community which they served. It resituates them in terms of the monastic hierarchies and briefly examines the worthiness of the scribal undertaking. The books produced by the many men and women who worked on behalf of women’s convents formed an important part of the intellectual and spiritual life of those communities. Scribes were, in short, connected to the convents for which they worked in multitudinous ways.

1 Of Monasteries and Their Scribes

In the era before print, women’s convents were necessarily served by scribes, the men and women who copied out the manuscripts that formed the intellectual and spiritual nucleus of the monastic experience. These scribes, many in number and often unacknowledged, served the intellectual endeavour of preserving, transmitting, and occasionally even creating the texts at their command. The books they left behind – whether given to the sisters of the convent, dedicated to the abbess or prioress, or given or sold to the broader community – are one of the central legacies of medieval convent life. The creation of manuscript books belonged to the internal business of the monastery and, as such, was under convent control. Indeed, women’s monasteries needed books to support a range of convent activities. Many kinds of books functioned as part of the material apparatus for the cycle of liturgical services that formed the core of monastic daily life. Books also supplied texts for study and for contemplation. Such texts could be shared through table readings or could function as companions to private devotions1 by offering up the words of prayers or advice on achieving the proper spiritual state. Books could be guides to the world of ideas and so become part of the educational goods of a monastic environment. They might also provide records of the business and financial concerns of the convent; address the history and the attendant moral and spiritual obligations of the community; or chart out prospective advice on how the community should attend to its daily life. In short, monasticism was predicated on literate involvement with and production of books, and the women of a convent had cause to order books in a variety of genres. Anyone familiar with medieval convent libraries and with books of the historical past will be familiar with stories of loss, destruction, and

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 19

defacement as manuscripts were lost over the course of history. To that story, this book attempts to add to the story of the creation of manuscripts by assessing, on the one hand, the lives of the individuals who contributed to convent libraries, and by querying, on the other, the surviving evidence to speculate about the various reasons those books came to be made. One fifth of the surviving manuscripts were copied by scribes whose identity is in one way or another known. Many of these were copied by the women of the convent itself, created within the convent for use within the convent’s walls. Others were copied by scribes external to the convent: by fellow monastics from other houses or by professional scribes. It is these people who copied manuscripts for use in women’s convents that form the focus of this book. Before we can address the lives of individuals, however, we must have some understanding of the milieu in which they worked. Accordingly, the early portions of chapter 1 address the institutions and their monastic hierarchy in order to review the context for both monastic book ownership and its corollary, monastic requests for book acquisition. The Institutional Need for Books Women’s monasticism in late medieval Germany centred on the community experience of and participation in worship and prayer. The experience of that worship was variable from one monastery to another. Not only differences of calendar that stemmed from local choices regarding feast days but also habits of ritual action and even expectations of the components of daily life might contrast greatly from one community to another. Monasteries of this period were largely guided by rules – Benedictine, Augustinian, Clarissan, Brigittine, and so on – that articulated the large principles upon which a monastic community’s life might be founded, but those rules were always adapted and expanded to suit local practices. Localized tradition played a large role in the experiences and choices made in the context of liturgical practice as well as in the broader context of a monastic’s daily life. Monasticism was as much a way of life communicated through the modelling of a lived practice as it was an experience to be codified in rule, statute, and ordo. That said, certain features of late medieval monasticism were common across the vast majority of women’s houses, and the community experience of the daily liturgical cycle was certainly at the core of those experiences. Life in a women’s monastery involved a daily cycle of prayers, from matins and lauds through the so-called little hours of prime, terce, sext, and

20

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

nones, on through vespers into compline. Layered over top of this cycle of community readings, prayers, and song was the celebration of the Mass with its own attendant liturgical actions, along with the daily cycles of eating and sleeping, work, reading, and contemplation that were also part of monastic existence. One could in fact describe monasteries as ‘liturgically centred.’ The practices of the liturgy, the corporate group prayer, were the central function of monasteries in late medieval social expectation. The community of the monastery gathered together to offer up prayers on behalf of both the living and the dead. The nuns prayed for men’s souls while other people attended to the fighting and the labour that were part of the social structure, as well as to the mercantile and intellectual undertakings that had already begun posing challenges to the divisions of society into clear-cut estates. As women, of course, the members of monastic communities fell somewhat outside of normative structures; they were more likely thought of by contemporaries as ‘virgins’ (as opposed to wives and widows) than as working members of the first estate. Yet their duties formed a direct parallel with those of their male monastic counterparts; they offered up salutary prayer, that is, prayer that might help to bring about salvation, on behalf of a wide array of individuals. From a medieval perspective, this was indeed important work. Within the experience of monasticism, of course, many details of daily life might vary from person to person as well as from convent to convent. Many monastics participated in the literate experience of liturgical practices; they may have read from the books, followed along with the liturgy in small private manuscripts for the service, or observed from a distance the larger display volumes that were symbolically and materially part of the worship services, or they may even have participated as Wochnerin, the weekly reader who read assigned passages within the service. Other individuals of the convent community were less thoroughly literate. While all monastics were centred on the written word of God, the lay sisters were often less well versed in Latin as a language and in the arts of reading and writing than those who served as choir nuns. Thus, for lay sisters, the written word might be deciphered by others and read out as an orally delivered text that had variable degrees of meaning, depending on their knowledge of or fluency in the language of the text. Likewise, levels of Latinate literacy might vary over time. The addition of a Latin teacher in Ebstorf was noted with pride in the convent documents; a corrective impulse may have been behind the copying of the many Latin vocabularies that survive from women’s houses.2 So too, some convents were models of the intellectual community

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 21

undertaking a life of prayer while others seem to have prized learning relatively little and come in for condemnation in visitator’s reports. That said, women monastics of the late Middle Ages generally privileged the divine office and its literate material goods as the central concern of their community environment. In addition to worship and prayer as part of the divine office and the Eucharist, women monastics of the late Middle Ages were frequently devotees of study and of reading. The community itself could be seen as broadly literate, even if not all individuals within that community were able to decipher letters or words on the page. Most communities seem to have had table readings integrated into their daily existence, though the balance between Latin and vernacular readings might change over time.3 Such readings are called for in the monastic rules that provided idealized guides to what monastic life should be like. The Augustinian rule, for example, required attentive listening during mealtime: From the beginning of the meal to the end listen to the customary reading without noise or protest against the Scriptures, for you have not only to satisfy your physical hunger, but also to hunger for the word of God.4

While one obtained food for the body, one might similarly obtain food for the mind. Benedict, too, prescribes readings which should ‘always accompany the meals,’ and he describes in detail the attention which should be lavished on the reader: ‘Let there be complete silence. No whispering, no speaking – only the reader’s voice should be heard there … No one should presume to ask a question about the reading or about anything else, lest occasion be given [to the devil].’5 The person selected to provide the table readings should be an articulate speaker, well versed in the material, able to deliver it in better-than-monotone recitational style. Those sitting at table were to listen in devoted silence and were admonished to attend diligently to the words that the speaker had to share. All members of the community, then, shared access to the studious and spiritually enlightening texts contained in the monastery’s collection(s) of table readings. Women monastics were also called upon to undertake private devotions, and these devotions might well involve the diligent study of suitable written materials. Several of the rules expect an individual monastic to take up a book each year for special study. In the Benedictine rule, perhaps the best known of these, an annual book exchange ceremony occurred each year during Lent and members of the community were

22

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

encouraged to assess their own progress in study and understanding.6 Private devotions, of course, did not have to be book centred. One could contemplate images or undertake prayerful experiences reflective of one’s own spiritual development. But in late medieval women’s monasticism, private devotion was often given form in written documents – in collections of prayers, in private devotional books, and in other collections of texts suited to the individualized task of ongoing spiritual growth. Women’s communities, like their male counterparts, involved lively intellectual life centred on the experience of Christian worship. The liturgy, study, readings, and daily life experiences of all members of the monastic community involved various forms of written and oral communications. Women’s monasteries were, however, more than just intellectually proficient and spiritually motivated communities; they also had strong regional and urban identities. They were part of a larger social and economic network and shared across their (infamously) porous boundaries common interests in business, agriculture, labour and finance with their regional contemporaries. A monastery was, ideally, to be financially independent. To maintain such independence, it required an endowment, a financial plan, and a working model of productive labour in order to maintain a lifestyle suited to its inhabitants. Women’s monasteries were frequently funded through the gifting of agricultural and urban properties. Such convents drew on the agricultural products and rents from properties deeded to them over the course of generations. They ran these properties through a business office that could be a single person in a smaller convent up through an entire complex of associated managers in some of the larger and wealthier women’s convents. They also relied on dowries and financial stipends, many of which were settled on the individual monastic rather than the convent per se and so needed to be tracked in the convent’s ledgers. All of these legal and financial entanglements, of course, required documents and written business materials of various sorts. The attendant collection, organization, and record-keeping process of any convent was therefore an important – even vital – part of that convent’s literate activities. Moreover, women monastics of this late medieval period remained connected to the local citizenry in their environs. Local citizens served as patrons to such convents, or as advocates at the city council level. Local citizens could also be involved in management decisions or might contest such decisions with the monastic community. Women within these convents also retained ties to family members. The women were recognized as daughters, mothers, widows, aunts, sisters; these multiple

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 23

identities in their birth family often remained active influences on their lives within the convent. Letters, gifts, written exchanges, petitions for funds: a variety of documents attest to the ongoing maintenance of community ties on the part of the monastic inhabitants. Women monastics too served as a community resource. They were an intellectual elite, available for consultation, adjudication, and leadership within the decision-making processes common to late medieval culture. They were also an academic resource, educating the daughters of the local citizenry or providing materials for that education to take place. Women’s convents were also producers of other valuable services: some provided hospitality for guests; others pursued charitable undertakings such as caregiving to the poor and needy or care for the sick. They also crafted useful merchandise, and might specialize in products that were desired greatly by members of the surrounding community. Women’s convents have long been recognized for their production of handwork items, for example. Tapestries and other embroidered goods from women’s convents were a central part of the material goods of liturgical undertakings not just within the women’s convents but also within local churches, in nearby male monasteries, and in other quarters where patrons or leaders had chosen to exchange monetary rewards or bartered goods for the high-quality textiles and other goods produced by the local women’s convent. Indeed, some of these products might in fact be manuscript books created by the monastery’s inhabitants for the regional market in which they dwelt. In all these areas, women’s communities were literate communities. The actions they took on a daily and a cyclic basis – study, readings, negotiations, correspondence, and the like – involved literacy and documents. At a fundamental level, of course, much of the life of the monastery was founded on book-based activity. The Gospels were, of course, central; the other books of the Bible important; the psalter fundamental to educational practice in women’s communities. What links women’s monastic communities across a broad array of orders, rules, and habits of doing business is the import of books for liturgical and devotional practices. Women’s convents, that is, are unified by the need for books. The women lived in a literate world and followed a book-centred existence. That is not to say that all nuns could read. But central to Catholic worship practices of the late Middle Ages is the presumption that some members of each convent community that gathered together in worship would in fact be able to read the word of God. As a religion of the book, Christian faith emphasized the literate reenactment and recollection of the words as gathered together in the Bible.

24

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

Even those nuns who could not read followed – by listening, observing, considering – the words that were part of the worship service. So too, monasticism of the late Middle Ages was grounded in a devotional practice that centrally involved book learning.7 Convents were in essence communities of readers in which books informed the lives not only of the literate but of the illiterate as well. In this way, women’s monasteries were part of the world that Brian Stock has characterized as ‘textual communities,’ groups whose actions are predicated on the presence of written texts. Stock describes this phenomenon in reference to eleventh- and twelfth-century communities, but his observations are relevant for later medieval communities as well. As he describes this phenomenon, ‘on many occasions actual texts were not present, but people often thought or behaved as if they were. Texts thereby emerged as a reference system both for everyday activities and for giving shape to many larger vehicles of explanation.’8 Women’s communities of the later medieval era likewise drew on literate texts to inform the lives of their inhabitants. Those literate texts were shared through both aural and visual means; they were read out loud in community and they were contemplated in quiet private devotion; they were borrowed and loaned in physical form and copied to become part of the monastery’s permanent collection. Such texts and their manuscript copies became points of reference even when they were not physically present. Indeed, we repeatedly see in these late medieval women’s convents the establishment of a library of approved materials that might be accessible – orally or visually – to all the inhabitants of a given convent. Individual monastics call for the creation of this or that manuscript, or even undertake a more organized campaign to reproduce a set of manuscripts deemed suitable for the convent. The question of individual literacy within a woman’s convent is, of course, more open-ended. It is clear from the documents that not all members of a monastic community were literate, either in the vernacular or in the more tightly defined world of Latin literacy.9 And yet some members of each monastic community were of necessity literate or at least trained to function in literate ways, and women’s communities relied on these central teachers of the convent in order to conduct their daily business. The Practice of Women’s Monasticism in Late Medieval German Lands A women’s monastery is an enclosure for women who pursue a community life devoted to the service of God. The terms ‘convent’ and ‘monastery’ are

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 25

used here interchangeably (and include under these labels the Stiften, largely aristocratic foundations); all are communities of individuals dedicated to the service of God through prayer and worship. (The modern distinction of male monastery and female convents was foreign to the monastic experience of the day.) Nor do I make hard and fast distinctions between the various categories of women who were housed in these convents. Nuns, canonesses, sisters, and beguines who were gathered in community are treated in this volume as monastics. For Germany, as for the Netherlands, there was a particular emphasis on the beguinage, housing for lay women who wished to live together in pious devotion. Yet these women in community followed many of the same principles and modes of behaviour as their professed sisters who had taken the vows of a nun or canoness. Women’s monastic houses very often changed their identity. Whether for nuns, canonesses, or beguines, most of them followed a particular rule and belonged to a particular order. As with male monasteries, the rule formed an abstract plan, a statement of general principle by which the women within the house abided. In conjunction with the rule, sets of statutes and constitutions described in idealized form the practices, the devotional circumstances, and the daily business operations of the convents. But for women’s monasteries, in contrast to men’s, the idea of affiliation with a particular order was problematic. Women’s convents, much more than their male equivalents, shifted identities during the three and a quarter centuries under consideration here. Many convents shifted from one rule to another, and shifts from one order to another were also frequent. The Cologne Weiherkloster, for example, began as a Premonstratensian convent in 1198 and then became Augustinian some time around 1445. Inzigkofen too switched from one order to another, beginning as Franciscan Tertiaries in 1354 but becoming Augustinian canonesses in the following generation, making the switch in 1394. Convents that began as Kanonissenstift likewise adopted new identities over the course of centuries, and were often incorporated into formal monastic orders. Lamspringe experienced the shift early, becoming Benedictine in 1119. Münster’s Liebsfrauenstift, on the other hand, maintained its status as a chapter of canonesses until the fifteenth century, and then it too became Benedictine thereafter.10 The practices of women’s monastic communities, then, were more prone to radical reform through shift of order and identity than were those of their male counterparts.11 This variability in affiliation is significant for book copying because shifts of order or of rule frequently brought the need for replacement, correction, or outright expansion of texts in the monastic library. The

26

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

same phenomenon occurs when a cloister undergoes spiritual renewal or internal reform, as for example when it was headed by a particularly zealous abbess,12 or when a convent became Observant or joined in any of the fifteenth-century reform movements, movements which were often named after the abbey of origin: Melker, Bursfelder, Windesheimer.13 Such periods of spiritual fervour often demand the addition of new texts to guide the women religious in their new endeavours. Requests for book loans and orders for copies of suitable texts linked one reformed house with another in a network of book exchange. Those periods of internal reform might also lead to revision of liturgical practices, which would occasion the need for new liturgical resources. Change of monastic identity, then, might lead to a need for production of new manuscripts on several fronts. Of course, reforms of monastic lifestyle did not always go smoothly. The story from St Katharina in Nuremberg serves as a warning of what could go wrong in the reforming process. Evidently, the reformers were more eager to impose Observant practices than the women who were to take on those practices, for when they arrived, the nuns ‘fended off the first wave of male reformers by brandishing a large crucifix at them.’14 Similarly, at Gnadenzell, reforms met with resistence. The account on Matrix Monasticon summarizes events: It took three attempts before the community accepted reform. In the first attempt, five Dominican sisters arrived from Pforzheim. They found that the sisters had removed everything moveable from the cloister, so that it was nearly uninhabitable. After a month, the reforming nuns left, having failed to overcome the passive resistance of the community. In 1478, the nuns of this house frustrated the efforts of the reformer Johannes Meyer. The nuns placed pans and plates on the darkened stairs to trip him up and warn of his approach. In 1480 a third reform party from Sylo succeeded.15

One of the causes of resistance was a preference for the ‘old way’ of doing things. Many women monastics had a love for their familiar liturgical practices, for instance, and might well decry demands that they shift from one repertory and its dramatic and visual corollaries to another. They could disagree intellectually as well with the premises on which the reforms were based. Legal concerns were voiced by some nuns, for the Observant reforms often posed more limitations on monastic women’s independence than had been in place when they had taken their vows. Some such women were allowed to leave communities

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 27

when reforms were imposed, and when they did, they often took with them books and other goods from the convent supplies that subsequently needed to be replaced and replenished.16 There were often conflicts between the monastery’s self-declared identity within a particular order and the formal rulings on that convent’s status by the order’s hierarchy, for the politics of the church were as grimly competitive in the late Middle Ages as they can be in modern experiences. Male monastics were not always eager to serve their female colleagues in nearby locations. The question of Cistercian nuns, for instance, has drawn a good deal of scholarly attention. If the male Cistercians denied access to many of the women who adopted Cistercian dress and Cistercian rule, were those women’s monasteries then technically Cistercian? Since the lived experience of such women’s houses was in line with the expectations of the order, and since the women in those houses often identified themselves by a particular designation, the study here opts for the simple solution. We have here accepted the identity that the monastery provides for itself; a declaration that a monastery is Cistercian is accepted whether or not the house was formally received into the Cistercian order. In addition to the problems of hierarchical identity within the monastic bureaucracy, women’s convents faced a second layer of complications in their own monastic practices. Because women’s convents needed male clerics to perform the sacraments, to serve as confessors, and to provide spiritual guidance, they were dependent on men who often came from establishments external to the convent itself. The Brigittine order sought a solution by incorporating males into the order, but other women monastics were dependent on some priest or male cleric who would perform the functions reserved to men under medieval Catholic traditions. Under these circumstances it was entirely possible for a Cistercian house to be served by a Dominican cleric, or for a Benedictine house to be visited by a Franciscan brother, eager to serve yet somewhat at odds with the local monastic practices. Even when a cleric of the same order could be found to serve, the conventions of a nearby male house might differ markedly from the female house with which it was linked. Thus, in Salzburg, for example, we can distinguish between those liturgical sources intended for the male clerics and those that belonged more properly to the women in their keeping. The manuscript sources belonging to the cathedral and those belonging to St Peter’s Abbey are both distinct from the tradition of Nonnberg Abbey.17 Thus we find that liturgical resources for the

28

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

women’s convent might be at odds with the liturgy provided in the manuscripts belonging to the convent’s confessor. The issue of affiliation is an interesting one, for the individual monastic rules had encoded within them different expectations of how liturgy was to be performed, how manuscript books were to be utilized by the members of a convent environment, and what should be done to educate literate monastic novices and to train the many others who aspired to a holy life in a monastic community. Though these differences largely fall outside of the scope of this study, they inform some of the choices that were made in women’s convents in late medieval Germany. This book investigates scribes for women’s convents across all orders to allow a comparison of the kinds of manuscripts copied, the scope of copying effort, and the relative prevalence of women monastics who served as copyists for their own convent sisters. The story of German women’s convents and the attendant story of their libraries can be told more easily than those of other regions because so many books survive. More than 4,000 manuscript books survive from women’s convents of late medieval Germany. This contrasts with the 144 manuscripts that survive from English women’s houses studied by David Bell in his epochal study, What Nuns Read,18 for instance. Moreover, book survival in Germany covers many different convents; in total, 459 individual women’s communities have one or more surviving manuscripts from our period. Some of those convents are particularly blessed with many surviving manuscripts. Ninety-nine houses have ten or more surviving manuscripts, and thirty-nine houses have twenty-five or more. While this is but a small proportion of the manuscripts that originally existed, it is nonetheless a sampling large enough for patterns of manuscript creation, ownership, and use to be spotted. German library history is also particularly well served by modern scholarship. Indexing and cataloguing of medieval monastic collections has been facilitated in German lands by the many urban and regional library catalogues, particularly those now being retrocatalogued via HKOL. (Indeed, the catalogue publications of the Harrasowitz publishing firm single-handedly make available more information on medieval manuscripts than that yet published for any other European country.) The large monastery-focused studies of Germania Benedictina and of Matrix Monasticon also assist in the processing of data regarding the library holdings of individual monastic houses, as do the many individual studies of houses in a variety of monastic orders. In short, the data is available to sustain a study of this scope.

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 29

The Monastic Hierarchy and Book Production As with bureaucracies of any sort, the medieval convent comes with a particular administrative set-up. There are leaders and hierarchies that are normal across convents of many different orders. The titles may vary, but the kinds of personnel largely stay the same.19 Within the German monasteries studied here, a few offices are particularly significant for their involvement with book production. At the top of most women’s convents is a woman who is in charge: an abbess, a prioress, a Meisterin. Whatever her title, that individual is granted the power to determine the priorities, both sacred and budgetary, that were instrumental to the success of the convent. These were largely elected positions, though occasionally, an external force such as a local bishop or a powerful local family might challenge or alter the decisions of the voting members of the convent. These leaders were often the officers who commissioned manuscripts. Take the case of Agatha Haunsberger (1446–84), abbess of Nonnberg Abbey, for instance. She directly commissioned at least nine manuscripts, sharing those commissions among the Nonnberg chaplain Udalricus and the local professional scribes Christian Hofhaymer, Leonhard Waizhofer, Leonhard Zeilhofer, and Jakob Wolgmuet; other manuscripts of the same period may well have also stemmed from her commitment to expand the Nonnberg library collection.20 A reforming abbess such as this might well transform a library into a significant convent resource. As will be discussed below (see p. 142), the convent’s leadership often featured prominently in the colophons to manuscripts for women’s convents, either as direct sponsor of the particular manuscript or as the leader during whose tenure book copying took place. Under the abbess were a number of women who held a range of offices. Depending on the size of the convent, the number of such subsidiary officers could extend to fifteen or twenty individuals at the largest monasteries but might be a mere handful at the most intimate of these women’s convents. For the purposes of manuscript investigation, key positions might be found in four categories. Chief among these is the role of the cantrix, also known as the Sangmeisterin or Sengerin, the female singer charged with leading the convent in its vocal liturgical performance. The cantrix is frequently charged with maintaining and updating the liturgical manuscripts that are held in her possession. She also establishes weekly routines, assigns the different roles within the liturgy to specific members of the monastic community, preparing, as it were, the slate of monastic individuals charged with carrying out the Opus Dei.21

30

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

Another title held in some, but not all, women’s convents is that of armaria or Bibliothekarin. The role of librarian, the person formally charged with indexing and organizing the books of the monastery collection, was typically assigned to someone with a fair degree of erudition. The armaria might be asked to provide summaries of the contents of the manuscripts or to categorize and organize the books by shelf number. She would also be the person responsible for assigning books on an annual basis to the nuns or canonesses within the convent for their study and self-improvement. Should books from the convent be lent, it was again the armaria who signed them out, received the pledge against their safe return, and arranged when necessary for other copies of books to be made. Adelheid, a thirteenth-century librarian for the Austrian convent of Admont, for instance, is also known to have served as scribe, as did the early sixteenth-century librarian for the Munich Püttrichhaus, Euphrosina Gärtnerin.22 More often, however, the librarian’s presence can be determined from the ownership inscriptions or the entry of shelf-marks or related information on books copied by others. The late sixteenth-century hand of the Nonnberg Abbey librarian, for instance, appears on dozens of convent manuscripts, though she is not known to have copied any manuscripts herself. The archivist was often charged with much of the paper and parchment document making central to convent administration. Many convents relied upon a central archivist whose hand appears in the majority of documents of her day until she is replaced by another person with similar scribal skills. Yet her role is somewhat different from the kinds of writing that are principally under consideration here. Just as archives are typically held to be distinct from libraries, so too the task of the archivist was typically framed in the scope of the single document, while that of the scribe, more properly speaking, was gathered up in larger units. A few nuns crossed the boundary from the preparation of the single document to the more extended task of copying complete books. Dorothea Schermann (fl. 1490–1534), a nun from the Basel Clarissan convent of Gnadental, for example, copied books for the monastic library, including a Psalterium Marianum, but she was also the convent’s archivist and copied the so-called Rote Buch, a compendium of abbey correspondence.23 A last category of administrator central to the understanding of the functioning of the literate side of convent life is the sacristan. The sacristan is charged with ensuring the readiness of the convent to undertake those sacred actions that are central to monastic experience: the preparedness to perform Mass and to undertake the daily cycle of prayer,

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 31

psalmody, reading, and singing that formed the core of the Opus Dei/ divine office. The sacristan prepared the paraphernalia associated with liturgical action within this late medieval environment: the copes, hangings, paten and other liturgical vessels, the candles, and the host and wine needed for the Eucharist, in short, all those items that were necessary to the good functioning of liturgical action. Among these items, then, would have been those books used for display and for ceremonial within the course of monastic worship services. Curiously, amid the broad array of monastic titles, that of monastic scribe is only occasionally included among the named offices. That is in part because the duties of scribe might well be folded into another convent office.24 The cantrix, for instance, sometimes serves as the principal scribe for monastic communities. Her responsibilities for maintaining the books necessary to the proper functioning of the liturgy make her the logical agent for the creation of the books necessary to that liturgy. Similarly the librarian is often associated with the ordering of the books necessary for convent use. Not only does she index the books but she may also herself participate in copying them. The position of scribe, then, might well be accorded the status of an additional duty, one that did not take full-time work and so did not always merit a separate label as an assigned convent office. In other instances, however, the title of ‘Scriptrix’ or ‘Schreiberin’ was proudly appended to monastic documents; the Admont necrology, for instance, lists several historical women scribes,25 and numerous colophons speak to the self-identity of a female as scribe. In short, the need for scribal duties was obvious, but the mechanism by which those duties might be filled was more variable. In addition to the women specifically associated with books, other important convent offices might be held by the members of the convent elite. The positions of cellarer, who ran the business end of convent life, and that of cook were central to the daily functioning of the convent community. From the perspective of library and book use, however, these officers typically joined the broader group of educated nuns or canonesses in following the rounds of prayer and worship; they did not typically have recourse to their own private book collections except insofar as other nuns might also have private or personal books. A slight exception can be found, however, in the role of infirmaria, who typically had one or more medical or herbal texts that might be housed in the ‘medical wing’ of the convent establishment.26 In the medieval period under consideration here it is likewise important to note that there are two distinct categories of nuns in many of the

32

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

convents under consideration. The first and more prestigious of these is the choir nuns. These were individuals typically from wealthy backgrounds from the powerful families in town. These women were advantaged; they came from further up the social scale, and indeed many, though by no means all, were from noble families. They would have been educated through convent mechanisms, and brought to full literacy and great familiarity with the texts and practices of devotional materials common to late medieval monasticism. As an adjunct or support system to these choir nuns were the lay nuns or conversae who would have been less active in the literate side of convent life. They frequently had little knowledge of Latin. Indeed, the sister-books, when discussing these individuals, remark with astonishment if a lay nun should come to understand the spoken word of the chants for office or have an understanding in her heart of the meaning of the words of the Latin liturgy. Johannes Meyer, for instance, speaks of the accomplishments of Adelhaid Vögtin, a lay sister of Schönensteinbach, whom he claims (with some astonishment) ‘reads German and Latin and writes.’27 In several of the orders, arrangements were made for lay nuns to have their own worshipful actions during the performance of the holy rite. In Clarissan practice, for instance, the nuns who lack the ability to read or the knowledge of Latin necessary to the proper performance of the service are directed to undertake a series of prayers that are a substitute for and a parallel to the liturgical action of the service. They are directed in chapter 3 of the Rule say twenty-four Pater Nosters for matins, five for lauds, and so on.28 Thus, most convents had both an educated elite and an array of devoted but less intellectually accomplished nuns, each of whom served the greater mission of the convent in its task of prayerful devotion to God. There were in many convents as well male bailiffs and other support personnel who assisted the women in their business ventures and maintenance of convent property. But central to the literate functioning of the monastery were the women inhabitants themselves, and it is from this pool that many of the convent scribes were typically drawn. The convent’s need for books was met in a variety of ways. The abbess might call on the services of a professional to have one book made, accept another book from an outside donor, ask the brother of a nearby monastery to copy a third, and direct a member of her own community to copy yet another. Books for convent purposes might be purchased ready-made. They might also come into the community through inheritance. Convents

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 33

often received gifts of books and money to buy books; such gifts were typically recorded in account registers and sometimes on the flyleaves or the pages of the book in question. In 1441, for instance, a chaplain from Ellerbach gave a row of books to the women’s convent at Urspring.29 Similarly a testament from 1353 paid for a missal for the Benedictine convent of Isenhagen, while the 1450 testament of Provost Heinrich Gärnter left the Sangmeisterin of the same convent 20 marks to buy books.30 Such books deeded via gift or inheritance came to the convent, as it were, second hand. The convent is neither the intended initial recipient nor necessarily the group for whom the book was conceived. Yet these manuscripts were an invaluable repository of texts and resources for convent libraries overall. Another group of books consists of those that the abbess ordered herself. These books belonged centrally to the resources of the convent. Many of them give explicit credit to the person who commissioned them as the instigator of the creation of the text, assigning as much a role to the request for the book as to the act of physical labour involved in copying out the words, the images, or the notes on the page. Ordering books led to the systematic expansion of monastic libraries and allowed for directed scope and careful planning as to which books, texts, and authors were circulated and which resided in relative disfavour. The woman monastic who ordered the book then shaped the direction that the convent’s intellectual heritage might take. A third way the convents could acquire those books so necessary to daily life was to copy them in-house. Book copying became the established norm in late medieval Germany. While Alison Beach’s study of twelfthcentury women’s monastic practice suggests that high medieval book copying could, exceptionally, be localized in scriptoria in several specific German women’s convents, by the thirteenth century, and extending in an increasingly rapid growth curve through the fourteenth, the fifteenth, and on into the sixteenth century, women’s convents relied on the services of women scribes. That is not to say, of course, that every convent had a scriptorium. Many demonstrably did not. Nor should we assume that convents always had someone on staff capable of copying the books that were needed by the convent. Again, many convents relied on services external to the monastery for book production. Nevertheless it is clear from the patterns of manuscript production that women of the convent were actively shaping the book-based legacy that comes down to us today. The focus of my investigation, then, is on books that were ordered and books that were made: on those books, that is, for which the convent was

34

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

the primary initial owner and for whom the scribes worked, either as contractors or as community members. The question, then, is how those books came to be copied and by whom. The Prevalence of Women Scribes in Women’s Houses The presence of at least a few token women scribes in the late Middle Ages has long been recognized. The nineteenth-century study by Wilhelm Wattenbach,31 for example, listed a double-handful of women, mostly nuns, who were involved with what he dubs ‘Schriftwesen.’32 So, too, scholars who work on sermon literature have long acknowledged that women monastics played an important role in the creation and reproduction of late medieval sermons. As library historian Karl Christ recounted in the mid-1960s: During the fourteenth century, convent scriptoria [in women’s houses] gained new significance by producing manuscripts with a new, more congenial content – books on women’s piety and mysticism written in the vernacular languages … Since most nuns understood no Latin, their leaders had to preach and minister to them in the German language. The young women wrote down the sermons, corresponded with the teachers, and exchanged books among their cloisters … It became a literature of personal expression and experience employing the German language.33

Christ acknowledged the presence of women scribes, but the context he evoked was one of relative ignorance. These nuns, he asserted, ‘understood no Latin,’ and their (male) leadership was required to use the vernacular to provide them with instruction. Christ implicitly suggested that women’s lack of learning necessitated a dumbing down of the materials being copied; the vernacular ‘literature of personal expression and experience’ seems in context to be judged less valuable than the kinds of works copied in male convents. Given the relative paucity of names in the Wattenbach account and the relative ignorance of the women scribes in Christ’s description, the casual reader can be forgiven for assuming that scribal accomplishments on the part of medieval women were exceptional. This, however, proves not to be the case; women scribes abound in the monastic milieu of the late Middle Ages. Indeed, women scribes were vastly more prevalent that we have heretofore assumed. There are 361 named women scribes who worked for women’s convents, and an additional fiftyfive unnamed but female ‘Schreiberinnen’ who contributed to book

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 35 Table 1.1 Named and unnamed women scribes from women’s monasteries Number of women scribes From identified monasteries From unidentified monasteries Total women scribes from all women’s monasteries

Number of named women scribes

Number of unnamed women scribes

350

303

47

66

58

8

416

361

55

NOTE: This table provides numerical tallies of the named and unnamed women scribes. The column for named women scribes includes women for whom only initials are known. Unnamed women scribes are anonymous but may be self-identified as ‘Schreiberin,’ ‘scriptrix,’ or ‘Soror’ in scribal colophons or in other monastic documents.

production from women’s convents in late medieval Germany, as can be seen in the bottom row of Table 1.1. Together, these 416 women contributed to 561 manuscripts that have survived to the present day. Some of them copied only a segment of the manuscript with that they are affiliated, but many others were the principal or the sole scribe for the manuscript in question. Their activities are significant. Given the large number of women scribes who have been identified, it is not surprising that many women’s houses employed women scribes. For the late medieval period, a total of 133 women’s convents are known to have used women as scribes. To frame the same statistic another way, 30 per cent of the late medieval women’s convents in German lands for which books survive have at least one documented female scribe whose work can be identified.34 Convents with women scribes stem from each of the major orders, with roughly equal distribution among the top four groups: Dominicans, Cistercians, Clares/Tertiaries, and Benedictines. (Distribution of manuscripts and of scribes across orders is summarized in Appendix A.) Augustinian women’s houses have somewhat fewer women scribes, and the Brigittine and Premonstratensian orders have only nominal representation in keeping with their relatively sparse representation among women’s convents overall. This broad-based distribution of scribal activity across all of the major orders is significant, for it demonstrates that as a group women’s monasteries sponsored some kind of scribal production regardless of rule or affiliation. This is not to say that every generation in every monastery

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

supported qualified women scribes. Indeed, the continual presence of scribes in every house in every generation is an unlikely scenario at best, given the vicissitudes of finances, convent size, and the waxing and waning of educational attainments during the three and a quarter centuries in question. Nevertheless, there is a relatively constant flow of manuscripts produced within women’s convents of every order and affiliation during the late medieval period. Women habitually produced at least some of the manuscripts needed for convent life. The number of scribes who can be identified for an individual convent is, of course, highly variable. Nearly half of the houses known to have sponsored women scribes yielded two or more women scribes.35 Some of these are among the more famous. The most significant of these, by virtue of its virtually intact surviving library collection, is the Dominican cloister of St Katharina in Nuremberg, which produced a total of thirty-nine women scribes. Other Dominican convents, including Esslingen-Weiler, Medingen (1), and Unterlinden, also sponsored a significant number of women scribes.36 But significant scribal activity was not confined to the Dominican order. The Nuremberg Clarissan house produced at least sixteen women scribes, the Villingen Clarissans and the Munich Püttrichhaus each had seven, and the Tertiaries of Inzigkofen had six women who are known to have participated in manuscript production. The Benedictines are perhaps best represented by the copying activity of the Salzburg Petersfrauen, where fifteen individual nuns are known to have served as scribes. Likewise, the Cistercians at Woeltingerode sponsored at least seven women scribes. Such figures reflect a monastic minimum: these women scribes are known through the surviving manuscripts, which are in turn only a small portion of some of the original collections being judged. The presence of so many convents with several scribes suggests that at least in some instances, women’s convents, like male monasteries, housed scriptoria and were responsible for the systematic production of manuscripts for one or more generations. This supposition is supported by the record of book sales from a few women’s convents (see page 180). It is also supported by the presence of scribal teams (see chapter 2), where copying is shared by two or more partners. The presence of scriptoria in women’s convents suggests that scribal activity was organized, repetitive, and professionalized. Such scriptoria are not necessarily physical rooms in women’s convents. We know from a few convents that copying took place in the general workroom, for instance, rather than in a separate space. In other convents, such labour might have been

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 37

housed in the library or in a convent office. Scribal production might even in some cases have shifted to the convent cell by the fifteenth century.37 Nevertheless, the presence in a single cloister of two or more women who took up the production of manuscripts is unlikely to have been mere happenstance; there was presumably an ethos of literate labour that supported such book production. Thus, it is in that broad sense of a literate community of copyists that I use the word ‘scriptoria.’ Appendix B lists forty-eight women’s convents which, by these criteria, had active scriptoria in late medieval Germany. Even in convents for which little written material survives, women appear to have undertaken an active role in book copying. Scanning all of the surviving manuscripts from convents for which only a single book survives yields a surprisingly high percentage of identified women scribes: 13.9 per cent of the manuscripts from these drastically limited collections (limited, that is, in what survives, though not necessarily in what was originally created) come from women’s hands. This fits with the overall percentile of manuscripts directly attributable to women scribes; 13.4 per cent of manuscripts from the thirty-nine largest collections likewise stem from women’s hands. In all, 562 manuscripts of 4144 (13.6 per cent) can be associated with a woman scribe. The consistency of such figures across surviving collections of all sizes suggests the consistent presence of women scribes across all women’s houses.38 In sum, an astonishing number of women monastics served as scribes in late medieval Germany. Their presence across a wide range of monastic orders, documented over the course of several centuries, suggests that in late medieval convents, women’s scribal activity was normative. The individual women who served as scribes, as we shall see later in this study, formed a sort of bell-curve representation of monastic ranks; a few of the scribes were abbesses, a few were lay sisters, and a few were beguines, but the majority of scribes were somewhere in the middle of the group, serving simply as choir nuns or sometimes in various convent offices. A range of titles appears when the monastic women do make claims to an office beyond that of scribe per se. Predictably, some scribes belonged to the administrative structure, serving as abbess, prioress, subprioress, or Meisterin. Other scribes had offices that demanded attention to manuscript procurement and so identified themselves as singerin/kantorin and as bibliothekarin/armaria. Some of the offices held by convent women who functioned as scribes include the relatively busy roles of sacristan, novice mistress, and school-mistress; these are convent women whose roles put them in touch with books on a regular basis but

38

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

whose duties appear normally to preclude a central role as scribe. A few unusual claims appear; several scribes had the additional role of portress (Schaffner); one served as convent accountant; and one functioned as Seelmeisterin, the convent woman assigned to watch out for the souls and beliefs of convent membership. By far the majority of scribes, however, were simply identified as Soror, Schwester, or Nonne if they were provided with any convent identity beyond that of scribe in the documents that survive. Of course, not all scribal activity for women’s convents was undertaken by women. One hundred and eleven women’s houses are known to have employed one or more male scribe during the period in question. These houses too range over the monastic orders: Dominican, Cistercian, Clarissan/Franciscan, and Benedictine houses support male scribes. The relative underrepresentation of women scribes for women’s Augustinian houses is balanced by a slightly higher portion of Augustinian women’s houses that have manuscripts signed by men. Augustinian houses were among the wealthier monasteries in late medieval Germany, so the shift of scribal gender for the order could possibly reflect an increased ability among these convents to invest in manuscripts produced outside the convent walls. It is equally possible, however, that the prevalence of male copyists serving Augustinian convents is merely the result of manuscript survival patterns, for the Augustinian library collections have been particularly denuded by the predations of history, and a higher portion of those houses have only one or two surviving manuscripts in comparison with convents from other orders. Notwithstanding these slight variations, it is clear that women’s convents from each of the monastic orders employed both male scribes and female scribes as need and opportunity intersected. The total number of houses known to have employed men (111) is, however, fewer than the number of houses that are known to have employed women (133), just as the 220 known male scribes are fewer than the 416 women scribes currently known to have worked for women’s houses.39 Clearly, men contributed actively to women’s convent libraries, but women contributed even more actively than men to their own convent collections. Though the prevalence of women scribes for products intended for women’s convents makes sense from both institutional and financial perspectives, it contradicts some of the prevailing assumptions about limitations on women’s roles in the world of book circulation in medieval life. From the available evidence, it appears that as a rule, women, not men,

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 39

were the principal agents for creating the written resources necessary to convent life in women’s houses in late medieval Germany. Service as a Scribe The scribes of either gender who served women’s convents did so through the production of manuscript books. In this, their role might be seen as more substantial than that of archivist, for the scope of copying is larger.40 The books they produced ranged in length from a single gathering to several hundred folios. Larger projects, such as antiphonals, might even extend to multiple volumes. Books in a smaller idiom might be akin to notebooks or to small chapbook volumes. Indeed, the size of manuscripts ranged from small pocket size through large display volumes. Manuscripts as small as 10.5 x 7.5 cm were copied as private books for monastic nuns.41 In contrast with these minute and intimate copies, large display manuscripts measuring up to 45 x 28 cm were also copied for women’s convents.42 Most manuscripts, of course, fell somewhere in between; sizes of 20 x 14 and 30 x 21 are common among the collections. In fact, quarto and octavo volumes appear to be roughly equal in popularity, with slightly fewer folio format books.43 Thus, the books produced by convent scribes range across a wide array of sizes, formats, and styles. The quality of manuscripts for women’s houses varies widely too. Books produced by scribes for women’s houses ranged from the ratty to the deluxe, again signalling a range of functions and of readership for the books of the convent collection. Scribes of either gender might be called upon to create books ranging from the unrefined to the elegant depending on the purposes to which those books would eventually be put. Some of these monastic manuscripts reveal the workbook-like activities of less practiced copyists, with malformed letters, irregularities of spacing, and an abundance of erasures, line-throughs, and other visible signs of correction. These manuscripts are often personal collections, idiosyncratic in content and in presentation, and may reflect private study or authorial invention. Next come the many workaday sources, which lack pictures and sometimes appear to be hurriedly made, but which carry the texts deemed necessary for these women’s spiritual lives. This middle-ground category, pragmatic sources of liturgical, contemplative, or, most often, prayerful texts, embellished perhaps with capital letters in blue or red but generally unaccompanied by any elaborate devices, were often the working manuscripts of daily life. These

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

plain and sometimes homely manuscripts invite the reader to become a user, to turn the page, to write in the margin. These are personal books, not formal wear. Although they are often neglected in favour of their more beautiful shelf-mates, these are the core of the normal monastic life. At the top of any library’s list of desirables are those manuscripts that function as things of great beauty, possessing glints of gold and an assuredness of text hand that is a pleasure to behold. These luxury volumes of the monastic library were of a different class of book altogether and might in fact be listed separately from their less beautiful shelf-mates in convent inventories. Just as our era reserves coffee table books for display and light browsing, the illuminated manuscript of the past served more often as a symbolically significant prop than as a book for reading and contemplation. Images, of whatever sort, drew the eye away from the text, though not, if the book was well designed, from its content.44 Similarly, the deluxe volumes employed in the Mass or the procession bore not so much words to be read as symbolic representations of the word of God, whatever their pragmatic liturgical value. That is not to say that such high quality manuscripts were always ‘community’ resources. High-end books were often created for the use of particular choir nuns from wealthier families. They could own, and even deed, such books to other members of the cloister, with the superior’s permission. These books were, for all intents and purposes, private property, and so an arena in which wealth could be flaunted. Even under these circumstances, however, the high-end book serves to signify something other than itself – here social status – no matter how useful its text might be. What this range of sizes, styles, and quality tells us is that the scribes who created books served many purposes and often many constituencies. One book might be intended for study, another for reading out loud, a third might function as a service book, and a fourth be put as a display manuscript on the altar of the church during service. Each of these books carried its own manuscript conventions, and the scribes of either gender who worked for women’s convents were cognizant of these differences and adjusted their labour accordingly. In short, the work produced by women and men who wrote out books for monastic libraries ranged in quality across the entire spectrum of the book trade. A scribe for a women’s convent might take sole responsibility for crafting the volume or might share those duties with one or several colleagues. In the latter instance, the question of which contributors are truly scribes and which merely literate readers of a given volume can be

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 41

a grey area. Clearly, any section of a manuscript that ends with a scribal colophon was deemed by its copyist to have a need for closure or attribution of some sort, and we should probably accept the scribe’s claim as a claim of full scribal responsibility. When there was a colophon, in other words, there was a scribe who created it. Shorter sections, however, particularly sections in which scribes forego the formula of closure, may be more ambiguous. When a reader adds an extra prayer, is she participating as a scribe, or is she merely encoding notes for her own personal use of the manuscript? The matter is one that calls for judgment. In this, the contrast between archivist and scribe again seems useful. An archivist focuses on the single page in her writing endeavours, while the scribe focuses on the section or the whole. A parallel level of work within the pages of a codex might then be a useful measure of evaluation to judge the difference between a note-taking reader and a scribe more properly speaking. By these standards, a few pages of scribal activity are necessary for the work to ‘count’ as full-fledged scribal labour. The reader who adds a few marginal notes and a paragraph on the concluding flyleaf, then, remains a reader, for her focus is largely upon the single page, and issues of planning and layout have little play in her undertaking. The nun who adds a five-page sermon to a volume, on the other hand, must make judgments about page format, spacing, and presentation. She will typically familiarize herself with (and match) the general principles of presentation and layout used elsewhere in the volume. The copyist for a larger section of the manuscript, then, functions as a scribe. Indeed, modern-day cataloguers of medieval manuscripts have typically assumed a distinction between scribal hands and ‘later additions,’ the latter almost always being code for reader’s notes of the type discussed here and the former referencing those individuals who contributed substantively to the volume at hand. Scribes and readers may both enter words into a manuscript, but the former offers up a substantial collection of words which run for several pages while the latter might be seen as merely amending what is already present in the codex. What makes the scribes for these women’s monastic manuscripts unusual in comparison with their contemporary peers is that their identity is known. The majority of manuscripts for women’s convents – like the majority of manuscripts from the period – were copied by persons unknown; close to 80 per cent of manuscripts cannot be linked to any particular scribe. But for the 20 per cent of manuscripts under consideration here, one or more gendered individuals contributed time and labour to bring the book into existence. We can identify these scribes in a

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

variety of ways. The central clue to scribal identity is, of course, the colophon. The convention of self-naming at the end of a manuscript or manuscript section is by no means common; only a fifth of convent manuscripts contain colophons, and many of those are less explicit than the modernday cataloguer might wish. The ability to identify a scribe by name, gender, or at least generation or location, however, provides powerful tools for understanding the ways in which those books came to be copied. Internal manuscript evidence too can sometimes suggest a scribal identity. A picture of ‘Adelhaidis,’ for instance, adorns a page in a fourteenthcentury antiphonary,45 just as an as-yet unidentified Cistercian nun adorns the pages of a Liber usualis of the same century.46 Codicological comparisons can lead to the identification of scribes, especially when manuscript hands are compared to (signed) convent manuscripts and documents. Four or five manuscripts may be attributable to a single scribe who only signs his or her name to one manuscript or to a small handful of convent documents. Several scholars have similarly pursued the identification of anonymous scribal hands across numerous convent manuscripts on the quite logical assumption that members of the monastic community were the individuals most likely to write in convent manuscripts since the manuscripts rarely left the convent environs. This methodology, which was one of several strategies used successfully by Alison Beach to identify women scribes of twelfth-century Germany,47 is potentially revelatory for the 80 per cent of unsigned convent manuscripts. We also know of some scribes through narrative accounts of their activities and through other kinds of evidence. Stories of women’s roles as scribes may be mentioned in passing in sister-books and in convent chronicles. Obits too may say ‘scriba’ after a name; Christina von Haltern’s work in the Rulle Bible of 1278, for instance, is acknowledged in an obit added to the first volume on fol. 255v, noting that ‘she had written many other books.’48 Lists of convent personnel include the occasional scriptrix. Scribes also appear in payment records and are occasionally listed in book inventories;49 they might also be mentioned by name or in abstract in correspondence. One ‘Peregrinus’ is described as the ‘scriptor of Oelinghausen’ in a convent document of 1220,50 for instance, while Anna Flötzerin, abbess of Gnadental, is described in a cloister document of 1438 as ‘scriptrix superior’ for her Clarissan convent.51 Correspondence that accompanies a book loan or gift might mention the convent’s participation in the process of copying (‘this book which we had made’), implying that a convent person or persons had taken responsibility for the reproduction of the text. For all of these document-identified scribes, we have a scribe’s

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 43

gendered identity; we sometimes have additional knowledge of his or her assigned task (providing words, images, music, rubrics, and so on). But for scribes identified through documents, we may have no residual manuscript legacy against which that listing might be judged. In this investigation of scribal identity, those traits that distinguish women scribes from their male counterparts are typically differences of feminine and masculine grammatical endings, of labels of office and duty that reflect gendered categories of service, and of identity as internal or external to the membership of the convent properly speaking. In these features, shaped by social and community practice, gender is, of course, a central division. Except in the case of a grammatical mistake, a woman scribe is unlikely to adopt masculine endings or to assert a position within the hierarchy of offices staffed by men. The fifteenth-century Brussels Clarissan Margarethe de Meerbeke, who mistakenly calls herself ‘Monachus domicella sanctimonialis et cantrix monasterii sancte Clare Bruxellis,’ has no parallel in German-speaking lands.52 Similarly, we know that a cantrix or Meisterin or even a peccatrix (sinner, with the specifically female -ix ending) will be female, but that a confessor will be a male; that a soror is female but a frater male, and so on. We can guess by name that Anna will be female and Nicolaus male. Similarly, possessive assertions such as ‘our convent,’ ‘my convent,’ and ‘fellow sisters’ can be taken as evidence for gendered affiliation in which the gender of the scribe is likely to accord with the gender of the monastic establishment. But in consequential matters such as handwriting style, book layout, and content, differences of gender mattered remarkably little. Indeed, the woman scribe does not differ substantially from her male counterpart in her service as a scribe. She holds the quill with the same grip, mixes her ink following the same recipe, lines her page with the same kind of ruler, and, in some instances, even copies out the same treatise, poem, prayer, or chant as her male contemporary. The scribe, female or male, may work alone or with a team of collaborators; in either case she or he serves as the creative force behind book production, wielding decision-making power along with feathered pen. The scribe chooses the layout of both page and gathering, and in so doing decides which elements deserve prominent placement at the top of the page or the start of a gathering, which deserve the visual markers of manuscript navigation such as capital letters and illustrative images, and which deserve changes of script type, ink colour, or underlining.53 Thus, the person who copied a manuscript had tangible control over what we as readers see. It is the scribe too who takes responsibility for

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

the choice of whether to abbreviate words or write them out, whether to comment on or to leave unadorned the text from which he or she works, whether to make changes to the text or to copy the exemplar faithfully. These choices are framed by some limitations posed from outside: the number of parchment (or paper) leaves available, the size of handwriting needed for the books’ projected use, the length of the text to be copied, the instructions of the abbess or the compiler that need to be heeded. In spite of these strictures, scribes at their best work creatively, not mechanically, and serve at the heart of book production. Yet their efforts are for the most part gender-neutral and the resultant books are not inherently gender-coded. Given that a woman’s hand can be indistinguishable from that of her male fellow’s, and given that the quality of her manuscript might range every bit as widely as the productions of her male fellows, why should her gender matter? Why Gender Matters At one level, the gender of a scribe matters hardly at all. Even if there had been no women scribes to serve the women’s convents of late medieval Germany, it would still have been the women monastics themselves who controlled production of monastic manuscripts. The leadership of a given monastery had both the freedom and the obligation to decide where convent resources and convent spiritual best interests lay. In times of financial plenitude, the investment of a convent’s resources in manuscript production might well assist with the spiritual growth of the entire monastic enterprise. Indeed, even when the cost of manuscript production was high, reforming abbesses might well choose to take both time and convent energies and use them for the production of books. It lay within the purview of these convent superiors to decide whether a given book order might best be placed within the convent community or outside with a scribe who was only indirectly affiliated with the monastery. Chapter 2 will explore in more detail the choices of scribes available to these convent leaders. It was women who placed the order for manuscript books and so, presumably, women who chose the content or genre of manuscript produced under their oversight. It was women who made the choices about what should be copied, and by whom. But women monastics had more than just this organizational role in the propagation of monastic library collections. More than 400 individual women of late medieval Germany set to the task of putting ink on paper and functioned, thereby, as monastic scribes. These women came

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 45

from many different backgrounds. The nominal poverty of the Clarissan, the relative wealth and social precedence of the Augustinian, the resolutely educational Benedictine, the devout and often Observant Dominican: women from these and other convent experiences seated themselves in front of paper or parchment for the hours, days, and months that might be necessary to complete a manuscript book. These women and their sisters toiled diligently to produce the written legacy that served the convent library and the convent liturgy. We cannot tell the woman scribe through her adoption of a typically female handwriting style, though we may in some instances be able to identify her individual script. The woman scribe, like her male counterpart, had individual idiosyncracies that might make her hand different from any other given scribe, but there was no single women’s approach to handwriting in the late Middle Ages. Nor was there a single universal decision about layout and presentation that reveals itself to have been a ‘woman’s monastic approach’ to manuscript production. We see in the work of these women scribes the same individualized approach to manuscript production seen elsewhere of any scribe under any circumstance, regardless of gender or even affiliation. Yet we have amid the rich legacy of manuscripts copied by women resources for the investigation of individual monastic communities; we can seek out conventions belonging to a single monastery, to an order, or to the interconnected network of women’s houses who shared their individual exemplars with one another. Art historians Jeffrey Hamburg and Judith Oliver, for instance, have traced in German and north French sources the importance of Nonnenarbeiten imagery – visual representations that were shaped by women’s handcraft, skills that were normative to these late medieval women’s convents.54 Such images, and indeed the choices of manuscript layout and presentation that allowed for their inclusion bespeak an aesthetic that influenced a network of women’s monasteries. Similarly, Walter Lipphardt has elucidated a tradition of red staffless notation found in eighteen manuscript orationales and a common (but evolving) repertory of sacred song originating at the women’s convent of Medingen.55 One might well seek among the other manuscripts copied by women’s scribes for other habits of convention in presentation, layout, and representation for ideas that circulated within women’s orders rather than through male intermediaries. Through such an examination, one might perhaps be able to assemble sets of meanings attributable to women scribes. It has been said that a performance of a piece of music is an interpretation of that piece. The

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

choices of emphasis, the shaping of line, the shifts of colour and intensity of an individual performance provide the musician’s thoughtful reflections on the music being played. The scribe’s relationship to her text might perhaps be seen as parallel in function to the musician’s relationship to the music. The individualized copy of a given text made through manuscript labour might therefore provide similar clues to the scribe’s reading of those texts. We might look here for choices of text size, for pictorial reinforcement, and for the relative care and clarity or speed and efficiency of the copying of a given text. Such comparative work might help to elucidate the understanding that a scribe brought to the work that she copied. This kind of work, however, lies largely in the future. To return once again to the matter of scribal gender. It matters that so many women served as women scribes because it suggests a world in which women of the convent controlled their own intellectual destiny. Women chose what and who might copy, and the women monastic assigned the task might make decisions about how the text would be presented. The mere presence of so many women scribes in the monastic communities of the late Middle Ages serves as documentary evidence of educational attainments: women demonstrably had access to training and to sorts of literacy that extended beyond the reading of texts to their written reinscription. There were intellectual benefits to be gained from this women-sponsored and women-instituted copying. The women scribes working in a convent milieu might choose to copy texts other than those that their male advisors, confessors, and chaplains might have chosen and in so doing preserve texts that suffered from relative neglect in a male monastic environment. The ‘problem’ of finding women scribes as copyists of a largely vernacular sermon literature might not, then, be a sign of women’s lack of general learning; the decision to copy sermons might instead stem from positive reasons, a seeking out of texts that suited women’s interests. Indeed, the copying of texts in the vernacular alongside those of the Latin service tradition and other texts in Latin suggests a dual fluency on the part of some (though not all) late medieval women religious. The use of the vernacular was an option for the women scribal elite of this late medieval culture, but their adoption of the vernacular did not preclude Latin literacy. The prevalence of women scribes amid these convents had financial as well as intellectual benefit, of course. The presence of a female scribe, or of an in-house scriptorium, had a solid and beneficial impact on the monastery’s economic well-being. First of all, it is generally cheaper to produce a book in-house than to buy a book ready-made, so when nuns

Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 47

copy texts they free up financial reserves for other functions. A convent which could rely on its own membership to produce manuscript copies of necessary books could retain its financial resources for use elsewhere. Second, in some scriptoria, talent was such that the nuns could prepare books for outside patrons; this too added much-needed income to the monastery’s financial bottom line. The colophon from the now destroyed fourteenth-century manuscript MünsterUB 366 (291), for instance, reveals that sister Druda de Elfenhusen copied a book at the request of brother Iacobi de Duzenberg.56 Jutta, a Cistercian nun from Alzey, made a copy of Voragine’s Golden Legend ‘at the request of Henrici, priest of Schimscheim’ in 1294.57 The Salzburg Petersfrauen prepared a psalter for their patron, the abbot, in 1404.58 The labour of manuscript copying directly benefited the monastery, even if the end product was soon given away as a gift or for purchase elsewhere. Indeed, as Gertrud Jaron Lewis discusses, this outpouring of scriptorium goods copied by women monastics so troubled the church hierarchy that at Trier the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers (1249) forbade the friars to have psalters and other books copied by female scribes,59 legislation that was clearly honoured in the breach and not the observance. Such copying activity came with some sort of quid pro quo, in the form of either financial remuneration or some other tangible goods. The nuns’ scriptorium, in short, became a professional shop for book creation, just as the scriptoria of male religious houses did. In other words, the work of these convent scribes contributed a material good to the convent in which they resided. Perhaps the most profound reason that the gender of these women scribes matters is that it suggests that women monastics had choices in how their manuscript collections might be expanded. They did not need to turn to male outsiders out of a sense of ineptitude, nor were they obligated to their male brethren for the production of spiritual or liturgical codices. Where a woman has copied one book, she can generate others. This gives a degree of control over the monastic library contents – over the intellectual and spiritual heritage of the convent – to the women residents themselves. They can borrow, copy, and share books as needed. Women monastics participate, whenever there are scribes involved, in the circulation of ideas, texts, creative products. The choices that they made were to have intellectual, artistic, and financial ramifications, but that women monastics did have choices to make in who should do the copying, as well as what they should copy, cannot be ignored.

2 Structuring Scribal Relationships

Conceptualizing Scribal Relationships When faced with a need for a book, the abbess of a medieval convent had several choices. Within her own convent, she could encourage (or demand) book production by arranging for materials to be made available or by tasking the nuns in her care with scribal activities as part of their monastic duties. She could also seek another source for books. If a book was not readily accessible from a donor or a bookseller – if gift or market purchase were not satisfactory options – the abbess might place an order for a specific book or book genre. In so doing, she could also seek a copyist from outside of the enclosed community. Such administratively generated requests for books could accrue gradually, as need or opportunity arose, or they could descend in a cluster and result in a flurry of copying activity as frequently happens, for instance, in periods of monastic reform. In short, the abbess and her representatives controlled the pacing and scope of the copying efforts for a given convent. They also controlled the mechanisms by which those books came to be copied. An abbess who ordered books for her convent might turn to two groups of outsiders: individual private contractors or scribal workshops or ateliers. That is, she could place an order with one of the many individuals, secular or lay, who served women’s monastic communities in a nonresident capacity. Chaplains and confessors, family members, friends, visitors, and a broad network of monastic individuals could support the library-enhancing endeavours of an activist convent leader. Alternatively, she might turn to a larger established institution like a scribal workshop or a monastic scriptorium to acquire a broader book collection. Indeed, often these larger institutions produced the luxury volumes that adorned

Structuring Scribal Relationships 49

many a wealthy convent. Specialists often worked in teams to copy these beautiful manuscripts, which were valuable for their artistic import as well as their verbal legacy. The resources of the external world provided practical and focused support for the growth of the convent library. The abbess who chose to expand the library holdings had other resources on which to draw, however: the monastic inhabitants whose intellectual and spiritual growth she sought to foster. As with external scribes, it can be useful to think of the internal scribes of a women’s monastery as falling into two categories: the individual and the group. The individual monastic might undertake copying, either of her own volition or at the behest of her monastic superior. She might create a book that would support her own liturgical or spiritual undertakings – a private liturgical book, for instance, or a prayerbook or spiritual treatise for study and contemplation. Alternatively, she might simply copy what was needed at the moment, as when the nuns borrowed a manuscript from elsewhere in order to make a copy. Similarly, the women of the monastery might gather together as a scribal team, producing within a monastic scriptorium the manuscripts intended for the monastery’s own use. (This parallels the presumptive arrangement in male monasteries in which the monastic institution is often served in part or in toto by a scribal community – a scriptorium – within the monastery.) A number of women’s convents housed active and often professional-calibre scriptoria.1 St Katharina in Nuremberg, of course, has the largest surviving corpus of internally generated manuscripts and sponsored, at a minimum, thirty-nine named women scribes during the late medieval era. The Nuremberg Clarissan convent and the Salzburg Petersfrauen also engaged in significant and extensive scribal activity. Significantly, at least four dozen other convents – forty-eight individual women’s monastic communities – are also expressly known to have crafted large numbers of manuscripts or to have engaged in book sales or book exchanges with other monastic communities. (A list of such convents is found as Appendix B.) Both the numbers of women scribes and the records of their scribal activities speak to a new presumptive norm for the later Middle Ages: at women’s convents, as at men’s, the monastic leader might well be able to call upon an active scribal community from within her own convent walls for whatever book copying she needed to undertake. At its simplest, then, we could use a four-fold schema to understand the relationships between a women’s convent and the scribes in its service. The convent leadership could choose to draw on people who stood in any of the following relationships to the monastery:

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External Individual individual scribes (private contractors) Group

Internal individual scribes (the monastic him- or herself)

a community of scribes a community of scribes (the atelier or external scriptorium) (the convent’s own scriptorium)

We have typically sought the scribes for women’s convents among the individuals in the first column: we have assumed that women’s houses were served generously by men and women from outside the convent walls. Indeed, judging on the basis of surviving manuscripts, those outside servants of a community’s need for books do form an important facet of the scribal culture of these women’s monasteries; such outsiders – men and women, lay and monastic, individuals and groups – contribute one or more manuscripts to each of 111 of the roughly 450 convents studied here. Significantly, however, it is in the second column, among the individuals who undertake the community life of a given convent, that we find the majority of the scribes who served these convents. Put simply, more women’s convents can be linked to scribally productive inhabitants than to external scribes: 132 convents demonstrably employed women scribes.2 Not only are there more convents with women scribes, but the number of internal scribes who can be identified also outstrips the number of external scribes who served women’s convents 3:2, and the manuscripts produced by these women outnumber those produced by their external counterparts almost 2:1.3 The available evidence thus suggests that monastic women not only had control over external resources by choosing with whom to place their book orders but also typically had an internal means of generating the books they needed. Women ordered books, yes, but they also made them. The four categories of copyists, then, help us to conceptualize the network of support for book production from women’s monastic communities. Like any such scheme, this set-up disguises the nuances of personal interaction that were, then as now, central to lived experience. Permutations of gender and of personal social identity (was the individual monastic or lay? noble or non-noble? professional or informally trained? and so on) presumably shaped the interaction of monastic leadership with the scribes in their employ almost as much as do the boundaries of convent walls and the habits of individuals and of institutions. Nevertheless, this schema reveals the variety and range of resources these nominally enclosed women had when it came time to have books made. Although they lived within walls and communicated

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with the world through the grill and by way of intermediaries, they could call on both internal and external individuals and teams to craft the materials of contemplative learning. Some of these scribes gave freely of their work, and others worked for hire. But regardless of financial considerations, the scribes of all sorts who produced books worked for the spiritual and intellectual well-being of the convent and its inhabitants. Turning to Outsiders It has long been recognized that women monastics sought scribal support from outside the convent walls. The monastic superior frequently established professional relationships with what might be described as private contractors: individuals or sometimes small teams. This includes some of the people responsible for the ratty, unlovely manuscripts that were cheap, useful, and akin to modern-day paperbacks in quality, but it also includes others who provided aesthetically pleasing manuscripts that were a visible sign of convent wealth. In either instance, this category involves people – individuals rather than institutions – acting as scribes, sometimes under contract, but sometimes out of love. Among these various private contractors of the monastic scribal world are individuals with a variety of relationships to the convent and its inhabitants. When arranging for male scribes, the nuns frequently made use of the services of men already associated with the convent. Men, variously identified as chaplains, confessors, and lectors, copied a wide range of manuscripts, particularly during the fifteenth-century.4 These men were attached to the monastery, of course, but lived and worked in spaces segregated from the nuns. When the male cleric served as convent scribe, he crafted goods to be passed across physical and psychological barriers into a space reserved for women. Thus, his position as outsider was assured by gender. Even when he was acting under the abbess’s orders as a member of the community copying for that same community, his scribal activities could not be linked to the monastic scriptorium as it was normally conceived, for that was an institution internal to the monastic life, and men were by rule and by convention external to that life. Nevertheless, ties of kinship, friendship, or spiritual obligation could connect some of these individuals to the communities they serve. The men who had organizational ties to the women religious they served bear a number of different titles. An early exemplum is the ‘Peregrinus scriptor’ identified in a document from 1220 as the official scribe for the Premonstratensian convent of Oelinghausen.5 Similarly, fifteenth-century

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scribe Johannes Seybolt identifies himself as ‘klosterschreiber’ for Seligenthal in Landshut in a colophon to one of his surviving manuscripts.6 These men are defined by the work that they provide, suggesting that their central connection with the women’s convent might well have been their scribal labours. Other men, however, bore a variety of titles. Some male clerics currently identified as scribes for women’s houses stem from the later Middle Ages. Udalricus, chaplain at Nonnberg Abbey, copied two volumes for the Nonnberg nuns, a Lives of the Saints, for which the winter volume survives with his dated colophon from 1453, and a copy of Of the Ten Commandments and of the Love of God, a book which the Nonnberg abbess Agatha Haunsperger (1446–84) claimed as her own.7 Similarly, the chaplain for Sonnenburg Abbey, Johannes Würzburger, copied a collection of letters for Abbess Verena von Stuben (1440–58).8 Lectors too might serve as copyists. In 1477, for instance, the scribe Johannes Höfflin, who identifies himself as a lector for ‘Thuricensis’ (in Zurich) but also as a member of the Fribourg convent, copied a directorium monialium (a so-called ordinarium or ceremoniale) in the vernacular for Dominican nuns, presumably for the use of those in Fribourg.9 Likewise, nuns’ confessor Martinus Vissegradensis copied a manuscript for the nuns of St George in Prague in 1409,10 and confessor Johannes Swarcz provided rubrics for an Adelhausen manuscript in 1472.11 In fact, confessors were particularly common among the men who functioned as scribes for women’s convents; at least forty nuns’ confessors are known to have undertaken scribal activity.12 Reforming confessors seem to have been particularly active in generating volumes for the use of the nuns under their care. The Basel Dominican Johannes Meyer, sent as director and confessor to reform the Adelhausen monastery in 1465, copied several manuscripts for the Adelhausen nuns.13 He also offered up several volumes extolling the virtues of reform, including the Ämterbuch, which gives practical suggestions for convent organization. That kind of self-consciousness of an ongoing reform effort extended to other scribes as well. Brother Sebastian Fabri, for instance, made special note of the reform of the Clarissan monastery in Nuremberg when he copied a diurnal in 1501.14 Of course, the efforts of reformers could be of particular importance for liturgical books; Fabri’s remarks presumably reflect the imposition of a new liturgical practice as part of the reform movement. Chaplains and confessors were known figures with established relationships to the monastic community.15 Their scribal abilities would be known to the nuns, and they would be readily accessible for hire. These

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men too had a spiritual obligation to the nuns they served; the books they copied would help to complete their instructional role.16 When on monastic grounds, they could offer advice and transmit information by word of mouth. In their absence, the written word might continue to serve as spiritual teacher for the nuns in their care. Thus, the books copied by chaplains and confessors provided not only a fiscal increase in material goods for the convent but also a potential force for good in the convent members’ spiritual lives. Chaplains – or, indeed, other members of the monastic community – might also serve as a scribal amanuensis, assisting a female monastic author with the production of her written legacy. Various roles within a collaborative model of book production have been elucidated, for instance by Hans Fromm, who articulates categories including client, author, scribe, examiner or redactor, reciter, addressee, and public in the production of written texts.17 Several recent studies on medieval authorship have turned to an examination of the role of male-female collaboration in the creation of late medieval texts within monastic circles. For scholars such as John Coakley, Kimberly Benedict, and Jodi Bilinkoff, scribal activity is treated as part of the process of authorship, related to and overlapping with the functions of dictation/inscription, editorial redaction, and reception.18 Given their focus on authorship and with the teasing out of collaborative roles, these scholars treat scribal activity as static in time and focus their attention on what might be characterized as the ‘long moment’ of text production, from initial insight through finalized inscription. As a result, they generally do not see the work of the scribe within the broader process of book circulation; their focus is on the creation of an exemplar (or, in fairness, multiple exemplars in the case of translated materials). These important studies elucidate the multifaceted relationships these male scribal partners had with their visionary monastic colleagues. Coakley, for example, finds that the male role within author-scribe pairs may range from that of spiritual director (e.g., Ekbert and Elisabeth of Schönau), to collaborator (e.g., Guibert of Gembloux and Hildegard of Bingen), or collaborator and editor (e.g., Henry of Nördlingen and Margaret Ebner), to devotee and colleague (e.g., Angela of Folino and Brother A). In each of these author-scribe pairs, however, the two individuals, male and female, share in important ways the thinking, writing, and word-craft that go into authorial production; they are linked, in other words, by their reliance on collaborative modes of working. The view of the scribe as inscriber of dictated material, as collaborative colleague in the redaction of the written work, and as helpmate in

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the task of writing is a significant one, but we should beware of treating that role as summative. From the perspective provided in this book, the collaborative dialogue between male chaplain and female author might best be shaped within an understanding of the reverse of these roles, perhaps, for instance, in the evocation of the woman religious as producer of sermon texts as spoken by a male colleague.19 Author-scribe collaboration might well serve as one of the models of textual agency in this late medieval monastic environment, but it lacks a uniform gendered direction of woman-with-inspiration and male-with-scribal-expertise, for the gender roles can easily be reversed, depending on circumstances. Moreover, this activity of shared creativity, with its seemingly empowering role for the scribe in the shaping of the text fits within a broader system of scribal self-reliance, which extends from the emendation, paraphrase, and summarizing of existing texts to the collation, reordering, and genuine text production that might go into the assembly of any monastic volume. Margaretha dicta Regula’s own role in editing the legendaries she copied for Lichtenthal (currently under examination by Astrid Breith), for instance, suggests that the scribe’s role as editor might range beyond the period of textual production into the temporally extended period of text circulation. In short, the books prepared by a chaplain as guidance for women religious might differ in both purpose and function from a redaction produced by that same cleric as a collaborative venture with his female scribal partner. Nevertheless, his social position vis-à-vis the women religious under his care and his status within the spiritual leadership of the convent could in either instance have influenced both the mechanisms of scribal selection and the respect accorded by the reader to the written products of his quill. In addition to the cleric-in-residence, other external individuals also served the convent. The category of external scribes would encompass those who served for private ends as well as corporate benefits, for instance. The author or translator copying his or her own work for monastic circulation had a personal stake in the reception of the written word. The author gained a personal advantage in the form both of influence over the ideas and discussions that ensued and of personal reputation. The convent, on the other hand, gained a material benefit in the addition of a commodity (the manuscript as material object) and of intellectual content. This form of copying was, in modern terms, a winwin relationship: both the author and the convent benefited from the exchange. The authors of sermons and other hortatory literature seem

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to have been prone to a bit of self-promotion in the crafting of more permanent copies of what purported to be a spoken genre. Heinrich Krauter, for instance, copied two collections of his own writings for the nuns of St Katharina in Nuremberg, one of which included the Contemplation of the Sufferings of Christ (undated) and the other containing Instructions for Confession (dated 1434).20 Similarly, Johannes Meyer copied his Ämterbuch, a book describing convent offices, for the Adelhausen nuns in Freiburg im Breisgau, as well as two other volumes for the same nuns. Henry of Nördlingen, who translated Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead in what he described as ‘two years of sweat and effort before we could put it into our own language,’ and then sent a copy to the Medingen (1) nuns – the same convent where mystic and author Margaret Ebner resided.21 The author who copies his own text reaps tangible benefits of reputation and influence accruing from the scribal production of those texts for a monastic audience. But whether these scribally active authors were providing for the women at the nuns’ request or were preparing manuscripts from personal initiative, they were adding to the wealth of knowledge and spiritual instruction available to the nuns. If authors reaped primarily intangible benefits, a more directly remunerative benefit accrued to the person capable of producing books for sale. This group included those who might copy ‘on spec’ and those who fulfilled commissions, as the case may be. In a sense, this is simply a mini-atelier. The better-known scribes could produce work on contract under their own volition. Clara Hätzlerin, for instance, was an independent scribe in Augsburg. While she is best known for the Liederbuch that she produced as a ‘temporary employee of an Augsburg patrician, Jörg Roggenburg,’ she was also – as Shiela Edmunds elucidates – commissioned by another Augsburg individual, the archdeacon of the cathedral Hans Wildsgeferd, to produce a two-volume collection of vitae for ‘the religious sisters, prioress, and convent of the church of Saint Peter at Salzburg.’22 While Clara’s product was professional quality,23 the same cannot be said of all of the other individuals who copied manuscripts from outside the convent walls. The ‘workshop of one’ might be a far cry from those professional workshops that produced high-end goods. We have the occasional blotched and blotted manuscript that appears to have been copied in a single hand, suggesting that the worker might have been copying on a one-time basis material that was beyond his or her area of expertise.24 When one ordered prayerbooks, devotional miscellanies, or mystical treatises from an individual from outside of the

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convent, it was all too likely that one got what one paid for: a cheaper scribe often came with a less elegant hand.25 Whether the monastery sought a high-quality book or an inexpensive volume, the book order could be placed on a fee-for-service basis, and numerous account ledgers reveal one-time payments to external scribes. Some of the individuals who copied manuscripts for convent women did so neither for fame, like the authors, nor for fortune, like the scribal professionals; they presumably did so out of love, or at least out of a sense of family connectedness, for they can be found among the members of inhabitants’ birth families. Just as older books were handed down from one family member to another, as attested in wills and booklists of the period, so too newer books might be copied by one family member for another. According the the Gelhofer-Ranschburg sales catalogue from 1932, for instance, the monk Wilhelm Kechetter from the Cistercian convent of Herrenalb in Württemberg copied a manuscript in 1460 for his sister Dorothea Kechetter, who was professed at Lichtenthal in Baden-Baden.26 Another Herrenalb monk of the same period, the better-known scribe Bernhard Brantz, copied a processional that was owned by Dorothea Brantz, presumably his sister; this manuscript too wound up in the Lichtenthal collection.27 Similarly, Georgius Beyttinger, a ‘frater’ whose affiliation has not yet been determined, copied a Gebetbuch for his sister, Berta Beyttingerin, a Cistercian from Kirchheim in the late fifteenth century.28 The motivation for such copying might be the improvement of a family member’s spiritual life, but the gift might also have broader ramifications. In the early sixteenth century, the bachelor of arts candidate Johannes Hising copied Heinrich of St Gall’s Passionstraktat for his sick sister, Eva, thought to be a nun at Lichtenthal;29 his book-gift might have been intended both as consolation and as hortatory. By reading the text, she might better prepare herself for the world to come. This phenomenon of family-based book copying fits into the broader context of family gifts. In taking monastic vows, one officially severed one’s ties to the world. Nevertheless, in wills, in donations, and in gifts of books and other tangibles, families often maintained their ties to the women housed within convent walls. Some of these ties are of blood kin, others of broader family groupings. As Bridgit Degler-Spengler has shown, Ludwig Ber gave two ‘missalia’ to his sister Katharina Ber who was a nun in Gnadental (Basel) sometime before 1507.30 Likewise, Kaspar Waldner left several books – not newer books but rather older books from his collection – to ‘seiner fraun zu Closterneunburg.’ Since he himself was likely a religious, this woman is presumably his former housekeeper.31

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Similarly, men and women left books to their daughters and sisters who lived apart from the world in a monastic existence; this kind of giving is attested in wills, in convent registers, and in flyleaf ascriptions and parallels practices in medieval England and France.32 Thus, the practices of book copying and of book giving frequently acknowledge and honour pre-cloister relationships. This family connectedness, of course, follows the pattern of previous centuries. In the twelfth century, Elisabeth of Schönau called on her brother for scribal and editorial services; they worked together to produce her volumes of visions.33 So too, the correspondence between nuns and their family members can attest to ongoing literate relationships between family members. Book copying of any century might be initiated from within the convent or might originate with the family member as a planned gift; in either case the end result is an increase in the size of the monastic library collection. Another way to access scribes was for the monastery to commission a professional atelier. Many books, especially service books, had symbolic meaning as well as a functional role in the monastery’s daily spiritual practices. These books, meant to be carried in procession or displayed on the altar, demanded an extra effort from the men and women who copied them. These are the volumes that would become part of the monastic treasury rather than simply books per se. For professional-quality books, many monasteries turned to professionally trained scribes and artists. These are the scribes we think of as experts – those with the finely trained technique, the ready access to gold leaf, the team of specialists who divide or even subdivide the copying of text, the painting of miniatures, the insertion of capitals, and other tasks in a workshop environment of collaborative production.34 These are the scribes who work for pay, contracting out to produce goods for the local nobility, the nearby monastery, and the well-heeled private bibliophile in turn. Some ateliers have patrons, a core relationship that brings in the central workload to which other copying serves merely as an adjunct, but others are free-standing shops that serve each client, monastic and noble, secular and sacred, readily and in turn. One should not confuse the professional with the secular. Some of these professional bookshops for producing luxury volumes were indeed located in secular environs, but some were housed in monasteries. Both secular and monastic institutions – atelier and scriptorium, in modern scholarly parlance – provided books copied by practiced hands in an institutional environment with its own habits of production. The abbess who ordered a book from thence likely knew ahead of time the

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quality of book she would receive. Indeed, if the women of a particular convent felt the need to look beyond their immediate environs for assistance, they might call on the broader network of monasteries for book production, for one set of monastics frequently copied books for another, and books for pay involving teams of copyists had a long history within cloister walls. The Augustinian men’s cloister of Ewig, for instance, produced a set of mystical treatises in 1488 for the sisters in Rüthen, part of a broader circulation of written materials through convents affiliated with the devotio moderna.35 Similarly, a scribe from the Benedictine priory of Wislikofen in Aargau prepared a psalter for the Benedictine nuns of Amtenhausen.36 In another example, the local ‘abbey scribe’ Johannes Burgtor was described by Prioress Caecilie of Oetenbach as ‘unser schriber’ in a document of 1 Feb 1332.37 The presence of professional-grade scriptoria among medieval male monasteries is a commonplace; the reliance of women monastics upon their services is unexceptional and supplements a vibrant second-hand trade in books.38 Clearly, at times, monastery-to-monastery book copying reflects merely a professional relationship. Monastic scriptoria could produce professional-quality manuscripts that competed for share in the book trade with the works of the secular professionals involved in book production. These manuscripts, then, would best be considered as institutional products. In other cases, however, the intent of the copying falls more clearly along spiritual than financial lines. When a reformed monastery, for instance, copies books for a convent that has newly joined that reform movement, the intent can be to provide spiritual leverage in matters of faith rather than to provide a financial benefit to the sister community.39 The Dominican scribe Elisabeth Muntpratin from St Katharina in St Gall, for instance, copied a collection of edifying texts for the nuns of Inzigkofen in 1484. Among the texts she prepared was a 37-strophe poem on the rewards of clausura written by their local confessor. So too, one of Elisabeth’s fellow nuns prepared a copy of Johannes Meyer’s Book of the Reforms of the Dominican Order for inclusion in the same codex. Clearly the intent here was an attempt by the recently reformed Dominican nuns to encourage the Augustinian canonesses in their spiritual endeavors.40 In other cases, the reforming convent sent along a scribal expert, presumably to help with the preparation of appropriate volumes for the newly reformed sister convent. For instance, the respected scribe Margareta Kartäuserin was among the ten sisters from Schönensteinbach sent to introduce Dominican

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reforms to St Katharina’s in Nuremberg in December 1428.41 Similarly, one of the Ebstorf nuns who reformed the cloister at Lüne in 1481 was a scriptrix.42 The integration of a trained scribe into each group of reformers suggests that she may well have had a leadership position in undertaking the liturgical reforms that accompanied the spiritual renewal at the time. This motivation sees books as a means of communication rather than a mode of economic exchange (though, of course, the book is both things). In this scheme, the position of the monastic scribe from one convent who copies for another can be ambiguous, for his or her position often proves difficult to categorize on the available evidence. In 1475, for instance, Carthusian Heinrich Höcher from Eppenberg prepared The Possessed Sister, a manuscript that he intended for a specific member of the women’s hermitage of Grünenberg but which the nuns corporately claimed as their own.43 Should this manuscript be counted among the individual gifts of one private individual to another intended to cross cloister lines, or might it be part of a convent-to-convent kind of exchange? Similar questions dog the identity of other offerings by individual, named monastics that cross through cloister walls. What, for example, should we make of the ‘Bruder Albrecht’ sort of figure? As his colophon articulates, Bruder Albrecht worked for Veronica Welsserin of St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’ in Augsburg in 1501, but he is otherwise unidentified.44 He and other scribes of his ilk can be hard to place in the scheme unless the colophon speaks to the context in which the individual came to copy books for the monastery in question. Does he work with fellow monks in a scriptorium? Does he work in the isolation of his cell? Is he working at the direction of an abbot or at the whim of personal desire? Is he an individual working for the nuns, or part of a group who are under contract to serve their book-based needs? These are things we cannot tell without additional evidence.45 Once a scribe proved effective, he or she might carry on a longterm copying relationship with the convent. Some of these scribes were significant enough to the cloister that they and their families came to be included in the annual cycle of prayer, as shown by listings of ‘our scribe’ and the ‘wife of our scribe’ in convent necrologies. The Seligenthal necrologies, for instance, include on 19 March an entry for Jutta, wife of ‘our scribe Rudgeri,’46 and two days later, one for Elizabeth Michlen, the ‘Klostersch[reibers] hausfraw.’47 Margret Schreiberin is likewise listed as the wife of ‘our scribe Johannes,’ presumably a reference to Hans Seybolt.48

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Other evidence for long-term relationships between scribe and convent comes from the manuscript legacy itself. Some of the scribes produced a large number of volumes that have survived to the present day. Johannes Felix, for instance, copied a six-volume Bible for the Dominican nuns in Pforzheim around 1458.49 Similarly, Johannes Tretter copied three pairs of diurnals for St Katharina in Nuremberg in the early sixteenth century, although one of those sets is now incomplete, missing its winter portion. In addition, Tretter copied a book of hours for the nuns.50 Likewise, Michael de Löwenburg copied four volumes for the Dominican nuns of Himmelskron; his efforts extended over twenty-six years, since he started the Quadrigesimale in 1437 and completed a copy of Humbert of Romans comments on the Augustinian rule in 1463. These multivolume copyists, whether monastic or lay, functioned as scribal professionals, able to produce multiple volumes on demand for the women’s libraries that needed new books. Among the multivolume producers were two who served more than one convent. Stephan May from Ulm copied first for the Kirchheim Cistercians in a volume from 1467. In later years, he copied at least two books for the Medingen (1) Dominicans, a volume of Hartwig von Erfurt’s Postille (in 1471) and a theological miscellany a decade later (1481).51 Similarly, Thomas Ritter von Hall, frater in Maihingen and deacon there from 1478 until at least 1499, copied four volumes. Three of these were for his home institution, the Maihingen Birgitten. They included two volumes of Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations, given in German translation; these volumes were completed over a span of two years (in 1487 and 1489). Thomas also copied a collection that contains Matthias of Sweden’s On the Apocalypse, which he finished another two years later (1491). There is then a gap in his copying record. He shows up at the end of the century with a volume probably prepared for the Cistercian nuns at Kirchheim (in 1499).52 Significantly, both of these scribes kept their copying efforts within a geographic range of no more than 75 km, and the two convents Thomas Ritter served are only about 12 km apart. Thus, it appears that in choosing clients, scribes would cross boundaries of monastic order rather than crossing geographical barriers. Perhaps, as suggested above, scribal arrangements operated most frequently on personal relationships and acquaintanceships. For the less luxurious volumes at least, the monastic contractor was more likely to hire someone personally known to herself or her convent community than to seek the assistance of someone more distant, no matter how impressive the far-flung candidate’s scribal or spiritual credentials.

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Copying within the Convent The third kind of scribal relationship also comes between monastery and monastic scribe, but the tenor of the copying is different. In some cases, monastic scribes produced books for personal use within the monastery, particularly prayerbooks or the occasional private liturgical volume. When the scribe is also the first possessor of the manuscript, the book becomes a kind of private property within the monastery. Such books can often be deeded to other members of the same community with the permission of the house’s leader. Various ownership inscriptions sometimes attest to personal possession; in a few cases – particularly at the end of the period – such possession and gifting can be documented through wills of convent women. Although this kind of ownership, complete with rights of alienation (even if qualified by the need for the superior’s approval), contradicts rules on monastic poverty and communal sharing, it has a practical benefit, for the individual monastic book owner can rely on continued consultation with a familiar volume to guide his or her contemplation of spiritual matters. The books copied for personal use, then, often signify a literate kind of devotion. It can be hard to distinguish between a book from the convent library and a personal book unless there is additional codicological information in the form of a comment in the book’s explicit, some kind of flyleaf inscription, or other extra-textual information. Nevertheless, the two categories are distinct and should be born in mind by the scholar who attempts to evaluate the book’s place within the monastic community. Some of the women who nominally copied for women’s convents actually worked on their own behalf. Chief among the genres copied by a woman for her personal use would be the psalter and the Gebetbuch. The psalter, which functioned sometimes as material for private study and sometimes as liturgical resource, could vary widely in language, in organization, and in quality. Psalters are found among some of the most elaborate of illuminated manuscripts, but they are found too among the most pedestrian and unlovely portions of a library’s collection. Sometimes scribal masterpiece, sometimes scribal training ground, the psalter must be judged by description and not simply by label. The nun wishing to contemplate these texts, so central to her liturgical life, might make her own copy. In so doing, she could shape the collection to her needs. She might find a translation useful, or might include some Latin and some German texts. She might divide the psalms according to their liturgical order, or adopt the so-called biblical presentation by dividing

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the psalms into five books.53 She might add a selection of prayers or a handful of spiritual writings to the collection. (The calendar, however, so often an adjunct to the monastic psalter in official monastic codices, was typically omitted from the private psalter). She could write the texts out long hand, or adopt the tightly abbreviated format which saved on space and so on parchment. She could make the codex as elaborate or as simple as she liked, including or omitting decorative capitals, miniatures, even gold leaf. Gebetbücher, on the other hand, tend largely to the quotidian. There are fewer ‘lovely’ prayerbooks than there are psalters or other private devotional books, for instance, and perhaps even fewer carefully written prayerbooks, proportionally, than among the sermon collections. A scribe working on her own behalf may adapt her style to suit her own needs and is not necessarily bound to create an elaborate display manuscript; she can and sometimes does opt for a relatively simple presentation style. She is nevertheless an important part of the mechanisms for book creation during the late Middle Ages. The reader who wants a book can, if the time and resources are available, copy her own. Other scribes from within women’s monasteries copied books for their convent sisters. This is part of a larger circulation of books attested to in flyleaf inscriptions. Books were frequently presented as gifts to the convent upon the acceptance of a particular woman monastic into the cloister, but books were also sometimes newly created and given to the convent library or to specific individuals within the cloister. Catharina Ingoltin, for instance, copied Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ for the penitents at her convent of St Maria Magdalena in Straßburg.54 Likewise, Dorothea Schermann, a nun at the Clarissan cloister Gnadental in Basel, copied a volume for her fellow sister Anna Lowlin.55 Books copied in order to be given to someone within the convent serve to connect the members of the community into a network of friendship and of spiritual ties; they also foster the convent’s sense of self-reliance. If some monastics copied for themselves and others copied for their sisters, by far the most frequently documented task enumerated within the scribal colophons of women’s monastic manuscripts is copying at the request of the abbess or other convent leader. One copied, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 5, because one was asked. Indeed, the presence of so many women copyists at women’s monastic institutions strongly suggests that scribal activity was a normal part of the functioning for women’s monasteries, just as it was for men. The monastic superior could turn to an internal candidate to have book copying done; she did not have to seek expertise from outside the cloister walls.

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In addition to the scribe who copied an entire volume, there were within women’s convents a number of other scribes – those who had the skills to copy texts and who may even have signed their names but whose contribution was limited to additions of a few pages. In some instances, the texts they added were not related to the original. In that kind of copying, the new section might serve as notes or jottings of the individual who was using the book merely as a space for recording private memoranda. More often, however, such additions by a later scribe prove to be a means for the monastic reader to personalize the volume she had before her. A collection of prayers from 1455, for instance, was updated with additions by a scriptrix from the Munich Püttrichhaus (a Franciscan house) in the early sixteenth century – a generation or two after the manuscript was originally completed. Curiously, this manuscript seems to have crossed the boundaries of monastic order as well as moving from one convent to another, for this section of the manuscript originated in the Benedictine women’s house of Niedermünster in Regensburg, where it was first owned by the abbess Ottilia von Absberg.56 A similar process of addition can be found in a fifteenth-century lectionary that possibly stems from Augsburg; this manuscript contains at its end a prayer added by a member of the Petersfrauen community in Salzburg, Schwester Anna Ammanin.57 When a manuscript comes into a new convent, it seems especially ripe for ‘updating’ and adapting; the greater a disjunct between the practices of the original convent holder and the newer one, the more likely there were to be changes added by the later owner. Hence, these individual women scribes from within monastic communities might have various end-readers and end-purposes in mind. They might copy for themselves, crafting books for private use. They might also prepare a codex with an eye towards furthering community bonds, and offer the end result of their work to a fellow convent member. They might also work in a more generalized way for the good of the convent overall, adding one by one to the shelves and cupboards where books were housed. The convent scribe might also work as a reader to update, maintain, or personalize the books in the convent collection. There were human connections between each book’s scribe and that book’s user, with these hand-copied books as intermediaries. The scribe might logically adapt her copying habits, as witnessed in the style and quality of the resultant book, to reflect those variable relationships, for hand-copied books are prepared for a particular person and purpose. Modern scholars have tended to seek among these women monastic scribes for the artists who represent this or that artistic tradition. The

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search for such artists has been valuable indeed; it has led us to a number of manuscript illuminators, including Gisela of Rulle, Loppa von Spiegel, Gertrud van dem Vorst, Barbara Gewichtmacherin, and their fellow sisters who brought talent and skill to the art of book decoration.58 Scholars of the like of Jeffrey Hamburger and Judith Oliver have likewise evoked and reclaimed the purveyors of the Nonnenbücher style as artists who were situated firmly inside a convent aesthetic and worship practice and so were important to these women’s communities. But the crafting of books, even of deluxe, ornate books, is not solely a matter of artistic endeavour. The texts – the music and the words – that these many women scribes put forth mattered to their communities too. Even the seemingly lesser efforts of the monastic scriptoria, the unillustrated, simple, even painfully plain manuscripts, were significant to the convents that commissioned them. Some scriptoria heeded the Franciscan and the Cistercian tenets that manuscripts were to be plain, shorn of unnecessary imagery and devoted instead solely to the words. Other scriptoria produced a mixture of beautiful and practical codices. The plain text variety may be an intellectual treasure trove, with unica and other important additions to our verbal heritage. At other times it may be a compilation of materials the scribe or commissioner thought fitted together. In either instance, the manuscript served a purpose; it was created in order to fill a specific and time-based need. The treatment of these putative lesser resources of the convent library, however, has demonstrated a less generous response on the part of the modern reader than the imagined joy that the medieval book owner might have had on acquiring such an object. To us, these are Cinderella codices, orphaned and unloved. They lack the artistic garb of their more favoured shelf-mates and so have received less attention.59 We turn to these less ornate manuscripts as ‘sources’ and value them principally for the words or music they contain. As ‘sources,’ they are evaluated and even judged on the basis of what the modern editor needs to know. A manuscript that omits the name of the author, composer, or poet, that truncates a section of a longer work, or that introduces new material that rests uncomfortably amid the ‘real’ text that an editor seeks to reconstruct is often viewed as a flawed or at least imperfect exemplar. In short, we evaluate these sources on the basis of what they offer us. Yet these Cinderella codices did, demonstrably, have value to the communities that produced them. They stem from scribes who sought to do a tangible good by putting words or music on the page. A plain or unadorned manuscript was not, first and foremost, one ‘lacking

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in ornament,’ but rather it was a manuscript designed to fill a different (and equally valid) function for the reader and the convent for which it was copied. Whether a manuscript falls at the deluxe or at the Cinderella end of the manuscript continuum, its copying by a woman scribe would have been significant for the convent in which she resided. Each copy of a text offers one more chance that its words might be available to the convent readership. Each manuscript gives one more site of written instruction available to teach in the quiet of the solitary cell or the community of table readings and of enacted liturgy. Each manuscript helped to forge an intellectual and spiritual profile for the monastery, one that would come to shape the kind of ideas that the community would know and value, the recruits that the monastery would attract, and the interactions the monastic membership would have with spiritual thinkers outside the convent walls. The women who copied manuscripts could be drawn from any level of the convent hierarchy, but most of them stem from the upper echelons of the community, probably reflecting those women’s access to education and training. Indeed, a woman who served as scribe could also hold other positions of authority within the monastery. Anna Ebin (d. 1485) of Pillenreuth, for example, must have been very busy, for she served as scribe and as prioress, and also found time to translate texts from Latin to German. She even took the time to enter chapter headings in some of the books that she read.60 Fifteenth-century Tertiary Anna Jäck also served as both scribe and prioress, though her focus was on German texts rather than on translations. Magdalena Becht, whose career took her into the turbulent years of the Reformation, served her convent of EsslingenWeiler as scribe and as subprioress. In their dual roles as convent officer and scribe, these women would have needed to balance a host of activities, from the administrative to the organizational to the pragmatic, all within a life of prayer. Such extended duties for convent officers may draw from twelfth-century practice, when a number of named women scribes held convent offices.61 In some senses, this practice demonstrates a practical extension of a leader’s duties. Since it is the convent superior who sets intellectual, practical, and spiritual goals for the community, it is she also who creates the demands for the materials to fulfil those goals. She can, and very often does, arrange to have books made. But these literate women, who corresponded with thinkers near and far, often had the skills, if not always the time, to undertake their own scribal activity.62

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But of course, not all scribes were involved in the convent leadership. Others merely served at the direction of those who wanted books made. Most of these identify themselves as ‘Schwester’ (or its more common spelling, ‘Swester’), or as ‘soror,’ ‘professed,’ or ‘Juncfrow,’ if they provide any label at all. In 1294, Jutta of Alzey calls herself a ‘discreta virgo,’63 and a few other women religious also call themselves ‘virgins,’ but the term is used more often by men to describe male activities (‘confessor to the virgins’) than by the women who signed the books they copied. Twelfth-century nuns used the self-descriptive term ‘monialis,’ but by the fourteenth century, the term is used more commonly as a modifier for the convent. An exception is found with the fifteenthcentury Görresbusch nun Elisabeth de Strabach, who describes herself in a collection of vitae as ‘ordinis Cistersteciensium monialis professe in Rubi sancti Georgij martyris.’64 It may be her identity as a professed nun that is of interest here, however, for numerous other thirteenth- to fifteenth-century nuns describe themselves as ‘professed at ...’ followed by a convent name. This may be a way for working scribes to distinguish themselves within the monastic schema; in the absence of a position as convent office holder, they cite themselves in this way as belonging to the elite of choir nuns rather than the pool of lay sisters. So too, this kind of description allies the scribe with a particular house, showing her loyalty and her place in the world. Alheydem Kalves, who describes her self both as religious and professed in a 1456 colophon (see p. 148), may have chosen to doubly emphasize her ties to Steterberg because the convent was in exile. In summary, the class hierarchy within the convent appears to play a role in who became a scribe. The vast majority of scribes were choir nuns whose families were wealthy enough to have paid a substantial dowry at their daughter’s entrance. These nuns, as a group, tend to be better educated and more privileged than their lay sisters. Nevertheless, there are accounts of lay sisters working in the scriptorium. Meyer’s accounts of the sisters of Schönensteinbach in his Book of the Reform of the Dominican Order, for instance, records several instances of lay sisters who serve in the scriptorium. Adelhaid Vögtin, for instance, could ‘read German and Latin and write,’65 proving that the distinction between choir nun and lay sister did not always revolve around literacy. From this historical distance, there is no clear dividing line between the individual monastic working at the behest of her monastic superior and the institutionalized efforts of a full-fledged scriptorium. We do not

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often know whether an identified scribe works in isolation as the sole purveyor of the book arts for her generation, or if she represents an organized literary team, capable of producing multiple manuscripts whenever need arose. Art-historical discussions of the Codex Gisle, for example, have revealed the presence of multiple musical and text hands as well as multiple artists. Gisela’s claims, then, that she ‘wrote, illuminated, notated, paginated, and decorated in gold letters and beautiful images this extraordinary book ...’ most likely speak to her position as leader of a scribal workshop, and her anonymous collaborators were quite possibly her fellow sisters.66 Some women monastics almost certainly laboured in scribal isolation, particularly in times of financial restriction when convent resources were needed elsewhere. But many women monastic scribes prove to have come from convents with several women scribes, and it is to a sampling of these we now shall turn. Significantly, we have evidence of scriptoria from forty-eight women’s monasteries in late medieval Germany. That evidence comes in a variety of ways. The most obvious indication that a convent once had a scriptorium is the survival of a collection of books crafted by scribes from that particular convent. Production as a measure of success cannot be our sole criteria, of course, for it is not always easy to determine how productive a convent was in the book arts given the loss of manuscripts over the course of centuries. Nevertheless, for some convents we can determine that a number of manuscripts were produced within a given generation bespeaking an active culture of book copying within the convent by several individuals assigned to the task by the convent’s monastic leader. The twenty surviving manuscripts from Medingen (3) described by Walther Lipphardt and now thought to date from the period shortly after the cloister’s reform in 1479, for instance, suggest a utilitarian approach to manuscript production on the part of the convent nuns, with a conservative approach to both script and illustration.67 A second kind of evidence for monastic scriptoria comes from the account books and other archival records of convent activity. It is clear from some convents’ registers that the women of the convent copied books for pay – on commission, as it were – and were therefore professionally active in the book-copying realm. A team of Oetenbach scribes saved that convent from financial ruin, for instance, for they garnered an income from book production of approximately 10 marks per year, as Gertrud Jaron Lewis has shown.68 In fact, the urge to reap the financial benefits from the book trade could, if left unrestrained, put the convent’s priorities out of balance, and regulations were sometimes drawn

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up to control the purpose of copying. One convent document, cited by Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, asserts limitations on copying books for hire: ‘The copyist should sit in a common room with the other working sisters, but they should not write for outsiders until the convent itself has the necessary books.’69 The implications of such legislation are manifold. The community’s scribe (or scribes) worked side by side with the other women religious, presumably using scribal endeavours as her contribution to the monastic labora. Her principal task was deemed to be the creation of the ‘necessary books,’ and someone within the convent would need to determine what that list might be. (The Cistercian Summa Cartae Caritatis, for example, stipulated a set of books that must be the same from convent to convent, including psalter, hymnal, collects, antiphonal, gradual, rule, missal.)70 Once the convent’s basic book needs had been met, the scribe might then turn her attention to copying manuscripts for outsiders, and this latter activity was desirable enough that the monastic scribe had to be cautioned about attending to the convent’s needs first before undertaking such copying. It could be a lucrative source of much-needed income. Participation in that feebased copying has here been taken ipso facto as a sign of a productive in-house scriptorium. The presence of several women scribes from a given convent also suggests the presence of at least an informal scriptorium. If a convent repeatedly turns to women from within the monastic community, there must have been some training and support for copying activities within the convent’s administrative structure. That is not to say that these houses were always prepared to copy large numbers of manuscripts, nor that the quality of copying would necessarily be on a par with the work of the great centres of monastic production. Nevertheless, if a convent could sustain several individuals in their pen-and-ink labours, it had a greater chance of intellectual control over the circulation of information within the community. Having such copyists matters because it shows the active role women played in the circulation of books within their own communities. That roughly a third of women’s convents with scribes are known to have been women’s convents with several scribes suggests that the practice of assigning copying to an internal group of women monastics may well have been a late medieval norm. Thus, women’s monasteries participated in book production in a regular and systematic way. The forty-eight women’s convents listed in Appendix B, then, sponsored a significant level of women’s scribal activity.71 These convents

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come from across the range of monastic orders that flourished in late medieval Germany. The Dominicans take the lead in sponsoring scriptoria for which evidence has survived, but Clarissan, Cistercian, Augustinian, and Benedictine convents can also be proven to have had active scribal circles. Of all of these convents, St Katharina in Nuremberg is perhaps the most obvious, for it has thirty-nine individual named women scribes and an astonishing 124 surviving manuscripts in women’s hands. The Nuremberg Clarissan convent too has had good luck in the survival of manuscripts produced from within the convent; sixteen women contributed to twenty-one different manuscripts that have survived to the present day. The Medingen (3) Cistercians evidently had a long and rich tradition of copying, for musicologist Walther Lipphardt has connected twenty manuscripts that share not only content but unusual notational features to this house.72 The Salzburg Petersfrauen might also be singled out for special mention; the fifteen known scribes there produced or contributed to twenty-four manuscripts. It is not without reason that these houses developed a reputation for learning; they participated actively in giving that learning material form through their manuscript-copying activities. Other centres can also be added to the list of women’s scriptoria based on numbers of surviving manuscripts alone. Esslingen-Weiler, Lichtenthal (Lucida Vallis), Medingen (1), Heiligen Kreuz in Regensburg, Reuthin, and Wöltingerode each have ten or more surviving manuscripts from their resident women. (This is a measure only of what survives, of course; we cannot, for the most part, tell what was copied within these women’s houses and subsequently lost.) Another eleven convents have evidence of five or more women scribes, again, a measure of the significant place of book copying within these women’s communities. The scriptoria for a few of the convents are attested to in the documentary evidence, though not as extensively in the patterns of manuscript survival. The Dominican sister-books, for instance, attest to the scribal activities of Oetenbach and of Töss, while Johannes Meyer regales the reader with stories of scribal activity from Schönensteinbach in his Book of the Reform of the Dominican Order.73 Other convents reflect information from other kinds of archival legacies. Rulle, for example, makes it to the list of convents with scriptoria not just on the basis of the manuscripts that survive – though the Codex Gisle is indeed a professional-calibre manuscript by any measure74 – but because the death notices from the convent make note of two further nuns who copied numerous manuscripts. Thus, Christina von Haltern (d. 17 June 1280) and Catharina von Barr (d. 1509) join Gisela de Kerzenbroeck (d. 1300) as representative of the

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monastery’s scribal community.75 The array of evidence, both codicological and archival, suggests that many women’s monastic communities from any of the orders might well have sponsored book copying for at least a generation or two during their late medieval existence. Only the Augustinians are underrepresented in female scribal population; a mere thirteen of the seventy-seven convents connected to the Augustinian order that have surviving library remnants have been shown to have manuscripts produced by women copyists. A few of those convents, however, had quite active scriptoria. Anna Jäck of Inzigkofen and Anna Ebin of Pillenreuth, for instance, each headed up a group of scribes in the fifteenth century, and the Kanonissenstift of Herzebrock too was active in the copying business in the same period. Thus, the relatively low number of Augustinian houses with known women scribes seems not to reflect a gendering of scribal expertise within the order. Indeed, there are relatively few male copyists known to have served the Augustinian women’s houses. Sigrid Krämer, for instance, just thirty-five manuscripts attached to male scribes in the pool of roughly 650 manuscripts that stem from Augustinian houses.76 Significantly, this is quite close to the thirty manuscripts she attaches to female scribes from these houses. Both numbers seem artificially low; taken together, no more than 10 per cent of the Augustinian manuscripts can be associated with a specific scribe of either gender. Augustinian colophons as a group were less likely to mention the scribe by name than colophons from other orders. The 1459 copy of the Malogranatum for St Maria Magdalena in Hildesheim (HildesheimDomB J. 38), for instance, has a colophon which gives the date, remarks that the book has been finished, and explains that the work was prepared for the use of the sisters at Hildesheim. But subsequently, the scribe only adds the standard request for prayers and salvation, requesting that his name be written in the book of life, without specifying what that name might be: A.D.1459 this present book is written and compared77 for the use of the sisters of blessed Maria Magdalena outside the walls of Hildesheim. Pray therefore for the giver of this [book] that his name be written in the book of life that is without end.78

Like the colophon given here, the colophons of many other Augustinian manuscripts use circumlocutions and pronouns in place of personal identity. The details given in the colophon might vary, but on the whole,

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Augustinian colophons are less revealing (and so less helpful to modern scholars) than those in the books of their contemporaries in other orders. Such self-effacing writing is fairly common, of course; it can be found in colophons for manuscripts of other orders and is practically normative for manuscripts of uncertain provenance. Yet even given the habits of generalized language and of frustrating imprecision in so many colophons, an examination of manuscripts from all women’s convents in Germany reveals that 17 per cent bear scribal names, and fully 22 per cent bear dates. In the Augustinian corpus, however, fewer than 10 per cent bear names, while 24 per cent bear dates. Given that slightly more Augustinian manuscripts bear dates than is the norm, the suppression of scribal self-identity seems to have been deliberate if not universal. The Augustinians, then, may have privileged the selfless contribution of the scribe known only to God over the signed colophon more common to other monastic orders.79 Whether the anomalous figures for scribal anonymity reflect historical happenstance or whether they have theological underpinnings, we still have the not insignificant figure of twenty-three named women scribes for Augustinian houses, several of whom copied many manuscripts. We also have a tradition that can be traced back to the twelfth century with the famous contributions of Augustinian women in manuscripts like the Guta Codex from Schwarzenthann and the Lamspringe collection of Augustine’s sermons copied by ‘Ermengarda.’80 In short, these women’s communities were communities of the book and as such took control over their own book production. They were not merely intellectual dependencies of the local male monastery which provided clerical and sacerdotal support. Rather, they were agents in their own intellectual agendas, choosing which books to copy and whom to have copy them. They fostered thereby a lively community in which the written word circulated in permanent book form. Jeffrey Hamburger has evoked the rich visual legacy that women’s convents might generate and has argued that the cultivation of book arts took place in a milieu rich with visual imagery.81 To his observations we must now add a second layer of women’s accomplishment in this late medieval milieu, one in which the book arts themselves stand as an organizing principle behind the structuring of many women’s convents. The scriptorium functioned as a production team to craft the manuscripts necessary to the convent’s spiritual life; at times that same scriptorium might also serve the needs of a broader community outside the monastery’s gates. Women’s endeavours in crafting and circulating written texts served an important function in this monastic environment.

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Scriptorium as Space When we see the word ‘scribe,’ many of us bring to mind an image of an individual sitting alone, hunched over a sloping board, working in splendid isolation. Usually the scribe is male, often he is monastic, always he brings an aura of intense concentration to the work at hand. There are no cups or nibbles nearby, no distractions, none of the clutter of modern life. There is only a sparsely furnished workspace with filtered light from above. The single scribe has aural isolation from worldly distractions as well. Girded from nature by convent walls, separated from fellows by expertise and duty, the scribe works without interruption, save for the tolling of bells which calls all to worship. Of course, this is fantasy. Real-world scribes might work from dictation, or chat with fellow convent members. They would walk forward to check references, or mutter as a book or a tool accidentally slipped from hand and crashed on the desktop or floor. Silence would be shattered by the arrival of carts, by the hum-drum conversations of everyday life, by the social bonding that comes as one person gets up to stretch and asks what another is doing, by the noise generated by others at their work. City convents faced the hurly-burly of urban activity; country convents contended with the many noises of nature. Convents often had rules, implicit or explicit, to minimize talking since the presence of idle chatter would be seen as a distraction from prayerful living, but humans of all eras were prone to those worldly involvements that keep one engaged with one’s peers and one’s environment. We know that monastic scribes took up their labours within the convent, but many of our clichés about monastic copying might bear a moment or two of considered reflection. One of the pressing questions about where and how manuscripts were copied involves the problem of finding a plausible architectural locale for that copying effort. Just as convent architecture could shape women monastics’ experience of the liturgy, the place for women’s work could potentially reveal connections and disjuncts between women’s work and women’s prayerful lives. For the books created within the monastery, we have perhaps relied too heavily on the detailed plans of the St Gall monastery as prototypical for all convent structures. Following the work of Walter Horn and Ernest Born, much of the discussion of convent scribal activity assumes that there was in every monastery a separate physical space devoted to the activity of writing that can be designated by the term ‘scriptorium.’82 That scriptorium, when it exists, is a space specially constructed, often with plenty of light, and dedicated to the writing,

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painting, and illuminating necessary to book production. The Oxford English Dictionary even defines ‘scriptorium’ not as a group of scribes, but as such a writing room, presenting to some modern readers unfounded assumptions about a single-purpose space that had been set aside for a specialist’s task.83 While it is true that some of the larger, more wellendowed monasteries that devoted a large portion of their creative efforts to the creation of manuscripts may indeed have set aside rooms – scriptoria in the architectural sense – for book-copying efforts, that was almost certainly the exception to the norm. Many if not most of the women’s convents in which manuscripts were produced would have relied on spaces with multiple purposes. Walkways within the cloister were an option for book copying; they had bench seating and, being exposed to the outdoors, had ample light. Marc Drogin evokes the monk who ‘sat at a desk between arches of the covered walkway that surrounded the center of the monastic community, the cloister,’84 and a few images of monks at work reinforce the positioning of the monk in this in-between walkway space. Yet, as Drogin also acknowledges (13), the continent moved sooner than England to an indoor space, and the inefficiencies of copying in the midst of a cold, cloudy winter must have discouraged year-round use of such an inhospitable locale. Monastic workrooms would be an obvious choice for a better space. They were well lighted and could serve as the production sites for tapestries and other handwork for which women’s houses were famous. Workrooms also tended to have large clerestory windows that let in adequate light even during winter months for the close work of physical copying efforts. Many workrooms may have had at least some form of heating, perhaps a large fireplace.85 Heating might also be supplied through braziers. If one nun were to take upon herself the task of copying a manuscript while her sister was engaged in the task involving small stitchery, both would have required the same level of physical comfort or, conversely, could have tolerated the same level of physical discomfort. The workroom, then, could host some if not all of a monastery’s copying endeavours. And, in fact, we know from chronicle accounts that manuscripts from women’s houses were sometimes produced in generalized workrooms. The reforming prioress Gertrude von dem Brake of Ebstorf called the nuns together in order to replace the outmoded liturgical sources destroyed in the process of convent reform in the year 1467.86 Her goal in setting them to task in the workroom was to provide them with a space in which she could oversee the production of the new manuscripts. In

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that public workspace she could presumably intervene if unauthorized materials were being incorporated in the manuscripts. She could also ensure that her fellow monastics remained suitably motivated. Moreover, the oral delivery of text taken as dictation by several nuns simultaneously would have been feasible in such a workroom environment. Even if the efforts of the entire literate portion of the convent membership were not being drawn upon simultaneously, the convent workroom could provide a happy space for the production of one or two busy scribes. The individual sister might undertake copying activities on the same work cycle and under the same conditions as the other sisters of the convent. In the thirteenth century, Dominican provincials ‘prescribed that the copyists should write in the workroom where the other nuns did their assignments,’87 suggesting that the task of copying books was work akin to the handwork for which many of these convents were famous and therefore was simply one among a choice of several kinds of manual labour deemed suitable for the nuns. Such decrees were evidently followed in at least some monasteries. At Unterlinden, for instance, book copying was assigned to the workroom.88 At Oetenbach, too, the scriptorium became the largest workroom in the community,89 but it is one workroom among several, merely the most convenient place for the work to take place. The specialist, then, might work alongside her non-specialist sisters, each undertaking tasks suitable to her own station and educational background. The workroom was in many ways an ideal place in which book copying could be done.90 If the monastic scribe did not work in the common workroom, she might work in the Schreibstube, often translated as letter-parlour but perhaps more akin to the modern idea of an office.91 The Dominican women’s house of St Katharina in St Gall, for instance, had both a Schreibstube and a Bücherkammer; the latter held a library of 151 books according to a sixteenth-century inventory.92 Likewise, according to an entry in Germania Benedictina, there are twenty manuscripts that stem not only from the Medingen (3) library but from the Medingen ‘Schreibstube.’93 A third indoor space for book copying might be found in the monastic library, if one yet existed at the convent in question. While special rooms set aside for the holding of books and manuscripts are certainly not ubiquitous in the later Middle Ages, a few such places can be identified from documents describing building arrangements, from the presence of such rooms on monastery plans, and most especially through the prescriptive documents of the convent reformers. By the fifteenth century in particular monastic reformers were assuming a literate environment in the monastery,

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one which faced a need for the housing of written materials. From one or two small chests of the earlier Middle Ages grew a room, and in some instances a set of rooms, devoted to housing written materials. The Windesheimer reformers, for instance, expected the production of manuscripts to be part of the monastic duties, though as Wybren Scheepsma has shown, the distribution of such labour was more limited in women’s houses than in male houses of the order.94 So too the Bursfelder statutes expected book copying to be one of the labours undertaken by those who had been called to the service of God, for they portrayed book copying as ‘nearest to the spiritual’ of the tasks that might be undertaken.95 That such activities led to the formation of libraries per se can be seen most clearly in the writings of Dominican reformer Johannes Meyer, and it was he whose description of convent offices linked the presence of a library with the activities that generated the materials for that collection of books. Meyer requested that the library be provided with writing materials of parchment, ink, and quill, so that those so drawn to the written word would have the materials available to do so. His intentions on this front are not clear. Was the writing in the library the taking of notes? Was it the generation of marginal comments, glossing, as it were, or simply providing rubrics and instructions for the use of the manuscripts? Was it the ongoing process of keeping up to date those manuscripts housed within convent walls? Or was it perhaps the duplication of those materials, the outright copying from one book into another book that he envisioned? The context for this passage does not in fact specify what aspect of scribal work might be undertaken, but the presence of books and of materials to copy them would lead us to believe that scribal activity was part of the experience of using the convent books. From scriptorium proper to workroom and on to library: the places where book copying could take place in a convent were various. The privacy of one’s own room grew to be a final repository for the work of scribal duties. We have, in the fifteenth century in particular, some evidence for an increased level of private spaces within cloister environments.96 There was in some monasteries an urge to anchoritic experiences and a concomitant shift to a monastic economy in which individual rooms – cells – might be set aside for the use of a specific nun. The move out of a communal dormitory environment, the rise of the cell, and the re-creation within the monastic environment of the anchoritic experience was part of the rebirth of spirituality witnessed during this tumultuous spiritual period. Women religious, it has been supposed, could take up personalized contemplative experiences within the privacy of the four walls separating her from her fellow religious. Part of those contemplative duties might well

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have involved the creation of worshipful materials to suit her own private devotions. Thus, monastic historian Leonard Hindsley has linked the rise of the individualized cell to the rise in book production, asserting a causal relationship between the adoption by the Inzigkoven canonesses of private cells and strict enclosure in 1431 and the ‘literary flowering of the community’ that followed. As he asserts, ‘This change fostered the development of contemplation, while strict enclosure encouraged work in the scriptorium.’97 At St Katharina in Nuremberg, too, the scriptrices not only ‘had rooms of their own’ but were also given ‘exempt[ions] from normal manual labour,’ as Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner has discovered.98 We cannot tell if these varied spaces for copying resulted in differences of approach to the undertakings in question. Indeed, we would be hard put to connect any one manuscript with a particular localized space for copying at all, for our scribal colophons do not state directly the localized geography within the convent in which these manuscripts were made. But just as we are beginning to elucidate the geography of religious ritual, so too we may find the geography of the monastery’s book-copying labours to be a topic of vital interest for future scholars of monasticism.99 The question of furniture too remains an open-ended one for late medieval copying efforts. We know of some copying tables as depicted in manuscript imagery; the study of Lesley Smith demonstrates the nature of the trope of the female copyist in such illuminations during this later medieval period, and other studies by art historians provide a generous sampling of writing-related images.100 The desks depicted ranged from inclined surfaces attached to bookcases down to the mere board-and-trestle construction, and monastic communities probably witnessed both ends of the spectrum. Some desks might have ink holders and squared surfaces to assist the professional-grade copyist in the production of hand-made leaves; others might be a simple flat surface, merely a prop on which to work. Yet such furniture, though perhaps desirable, was not fundamentally necessary to the copying process. As long as the light was adequate, the cold not too chilling, and the individual competent to the task, the worker could hunch over and undertake the labour of putting down words in ink. In women’s monasteries as in men’s, there was no particular requirement for the elaborately carved writing tables that are shown in our medieval Hollywood sets; the work required a hard surface and implements and expertise, but it did not require a special collection of furniture. If the question of the geographic location of copying is open-ended, and if the function of a formalized desk could be handled by a plank

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and trestle, as appears to be the case, what then might we know about the circumstances of monastic book copying in women’s convents? How does the ‘scriptorium,’ now turned to its second meaning as a designation for a team of copyists who work together in the same institutional environment, function? For that sort of scriptorium, location hardly matters. When we speak of a book from the ‘scriptorium’ of Fulda, for instance, we really mean the grouping of people who worked within the physical space devoted to copying. We would include among the various ‘products of the scriptorium’ books copied in other parts of the abbey. Office, workroom, private cell, or a physical space called ‘scriptorium’: it does not matter so much where the books were produced as it does how the people involved in book production interacted with one another. Collaboration in Copying Women’s convents with scriptoria, that is, with several scribes who undertake book copying as a sanctioned convent activity, provide at least intermittent glimpses of the social dynamic that lay behind book production. For one thing, in many if not most instances, to speak of the ‘scribe’ in the singular at all is a misnomer. Scribes often worked as teams. Indeed, women who did collaborate often did so in complexes that resemble not so much a web, even and symmetrical, as a briar thicket, with thick branches and thin ones, single branches moving at odd angles and jutting out on their own, and an interweaving of strands that can be hard to follow with the eye, let alone detangle from one another. Take for example the contributions of Margareta Kartäuserin of Nuremberg’s St Katharina.101 She came to St Katharina from Schönensteinbach in 1428 as one of a group of nuns sent to reform the convent. She brought six years of experience from the earlier convent. Her early years at St Katharina are largely undocumented, but by mid-century, she became one of the central scribes in a large and active scriptorium. As Karin Schneider has determined, Margareta Kartäuserin also served as Ratschwester and as Sängerin.102 She died, probably in her early to mid-eighties, in 1489. During the middle decades of the century, she copied a number of books. Her early scribal efforts seem to have concentrated on manuscripts without music. She contributed to a volume of spiritual exhortations, to two volumes of vitae, and to several other spiritual works.103 These are also the years in which she collaborated with Kunigund Niclasin, an established leader of the St Katharina scriptorium; at least three of the volumes with which Kartäuserin was involved were copied jointly with the older nun.104 The

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Wolfenbüttel lectionary appears to mark a transition in Kartäuserin’s career. The colophon to this manuscript explains: This little book ... was written by two sisters, Anna and Kunigund [and] completed on Saturday after the octave of the Visitation of Maria that one numbers after Christ’s birth 1455 [= 12 July 1455]. The first sister Kunigund died the day of St Dorothy virgin and martyr as above [=6 Feb 1455]. [In different handwriting]: God have her soul, amen. I, Kartäuser inherited and corrected it in Christ’s love in Advent 1455.105

If indeed these women are nuns from St Katharine’s, and the names and dates certainly seem to suggest that they are, then we see here a tangible record of the changing of the guard. With the death of Kunigund (perhaps Kunigund Schreiberin, fl. 1400–50)106 and the end of the career of Kunigund’s contemporary Barbara Rutzin, and with the death of Kunigund Niclasin two years later, Margareta Kartäuserin is left as the chief scribe – though still one among many – in the St Katharina scriptorium. In her mature years that follow, Kartäuserin takes on more complicated projects. She undertakes a three-volume missal, for instance, though there is an extended gap between the winter and the summer volumes. Perhaps this reveals her increasing control over scribal planning. In the winter volume, the first musical manuscript she is known to have copied, she works with another text scribe, Margareta Imhoff. Another St Katharina sister, Barbara Gewichtmacherin, handles the decorations and illuminations.107 Eleven years later, Kartäuserin takes sole credit for the text portion of the summer volume of this collection, staking her claim – and asking for prayers – on fol. 1va.108 In the early copying of the winter portion, then, she would have had another scribe to consult, one concerned with the same problems of layout and spacing that she faced. Later in her career, however, she would have garnered a set of habits and tricks that would help in the difficult task of coordinating notes, text, rubrics, and decorations and so would be prepared to take primary responsibility for the necessary organizational decisions. Thus, the second volume of the missal reflects Kartäuserin’s scribal authority, derived from her increasing expertise. Perhaps not coincidentally, the copying of the second volume of the missal overlaps with her preparation of an eight-volume antiphonal, work which extended from 1458 to 1470.109 Kartäuserin also prepares a collection of hymns and a twovolume ritual, though both these contributions are undated.110 What we see in Kartäuserin’s development, then, is a changing and malleable working relationship with her peers. Her initial contributions are

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intermittent and largely involve sections of larger works to which a number of scriptorium nuns contribute. This might be an aspect of scribal training; the work she contributes to these volumes is neither particularly long nor particularly ornate. Kartäuserin later comes to copy workaday manuscripts for her own use in their entirety; the ritual and the book of hymns were presumably useful to her in her office of cantrix. When working on the most elaborate projects, on the other hand, Kartäuserin makes use of the services of a qualified specialist, the illuminator and sometimes scribe Barbara Gewichtmacherin,111 and works at times with another informed collaborator, Margareta Imhoff, and at other times by herself. In short, the scribe can intersect and overlap with a number of her colleagues, making use of what expertise others can bring when necessary, and working independently when deemed appropriate. By drawing on the services of others, Kartäuserin is following in the footsteps of her famed predecessors and contemporaries. Kunigund Niclasin worked closely with a number of convent scribes – Klara Keiperin, Klara Ridlerin, Margareta Kartäuserin, Margareta Scheurerin, Ursula Geiselherin – and with two or three men – Elpert Swertin, Frater Cunradus, and Frater Conradus Frackendorf. As librarian, Kunigund was in a position to recognize the needs of the convent, and she seems to have been consciously acting to meet those needs. Indeed, the breadth of her service is remarkable. Not only did she work on a number of scribal projects – including a fourvolume German Bible which she spearheaded112 – she also labelled many of the books with a precis of their contents and prepared an inventory of the library.113 Similarly, Klara Keiperin, Niklasin’s successor, worked with many scribes. In short, the connections of one scribe to another at St Katharina reveal an extensive network of collaborators, demonstrating that book preparation there was as much a corporate undertaking as it would have been at any of the major male scriptoria. Moreover, the network of literate fellow workers extended beyond the cloister walls, as the number of male names associated with book production attests. The known identity of selected men can be supplemented by the direct physical evidence of their collaborative role. Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendter and Karin Schneider both discuss slips with instructions to the illuminators that survive in some of the St Katharina library volumes.114 This physical evidence demonstrates that communication between scribe and artist did not always come through spoken dialogue; the illuminators may never have graced the convent parlour. Nevertheless, it bespeaks a working method that involves a kind of easy expectation about what each member of the team will accomplish. A

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few words of instruction at a distance allow the lead scribe to direct and manage the people with whom she works. Given that the same pictorial hands appear in several of the codices produced in cloisters, the nuns within the convent walls must have been satisfied with the work their outside collaborators produced. The presence of book copying as a miniature industry clearly allowed for a certain degree of specialization. Indeed, collaboration seems to have been the working practice in many a convent scriptorium. Pairings of names are ubiquitous in the scribal record. Adelheid von Smaehing and Agnes von Waldeke from the Dominican cloister at Altenhohenau likely worked together on the gradual that bears their name.115 Similarly, the prolific scribe from Lichtenthal, Margaretha dicta Regula, collaborated with Elisabeth Entzberg on at least two volumes, a breviary and a diurnale.116 Three Cistercians from Kentrup worked together on a manuscript containing Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons,117 while two of the Salzburg Petersfrauen gathered sermons and treatises by Johannes von Indersdorf and Johannes Tauler.118 Thus, the reliance on cooperation in manuscript production crosses genres and orders; it is, as we might have expected, normative for the late Middle Ages. There were a variety of ways in which such collaboration could occur. There might be the qualified collaboration of equals, working together and planning together, sharing similar tasks and shouldering equal responsibility. There might be the teacher-to-student collaboration, passing down the expertise necessary for copying and layout. There might be a supervisor and staff, with its attendant hierarchical relationships. So too, there might be a sort of sequential collaboration, involving handing off a project only partly completed, awaiting another’s work for the endeavour to come to fruition. There is also, and quite commonly, the collaboration of specialists, as when a music scribe and a text scribe work together to design and inscribe the music page. Thus, even if a single scribe took responsibility for the whole volume, her efforts might be complemented by various other members of the scribal workshops. Illustrations, for instance, were usually handled separately and could even be done off-site at an entirely different location. Rubricating too was often a separate activity. Proofreading might follow all these stages. Nor is the creation of manuscript layers always a straightforward sequence of events. One scribe can start and, having divided the sections or tasks in advance, instruct others on how to finish the work.119 In another scenario, the first scribe might copy straight through several

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sections, but leave spaces between those sections for later additions – another prayer on the same theme, for instance, or another song by the same composer. In such cases, the first scribe has worked in anticipation of later collaboration by persons known or unknown. Alternatively, the first scribe could complete the work to its initial specifications, and a later scribe insert new material, working without the foreknowledge of the original scribe. There can even be what I think of as collaboration through happenstance, as when fascicles by two or more separate copyists are brought together in a composite manuscript, perhaps when a number of letters are gathered together for purposes of preservation, or when the kind of manuscript – necrology, chronicle, library catalogue, records of documents, and so forth – demands continual updating. A close examination of working methods employed by the scribes of days gone by has much to tell us about the scriptorium as social network.120 The work of scribes demands many different skills. It can be divided into stages, each of which might be handled by a different person or group. The first step, the preparation for writing, is practically invisible to us. We do not know who prepared the nibs on pens, nor who gathered and prepared the parchment. That such tasks were integral to book production is illustrated in a twelfth-century miniature from the front pages of a Bamberg manuscript, for instance. Three of the ten images in small roundels detail this early part of book production, with a monk preparing a quill pen, stretching and scraping the parchment, scoring the sheets with knife and ruler. Another three images depict the binding process, with the sewing of gatherings, the preparation of the wooden portion of the cover, and the preparation of what is presumably a clasp. Only two of the images are devoted to the copying process that we tend to classify as scribal activity. One of the images shows a monk inscribing something on wax tablets – presumably planning the layout for the upcoming act of putting words on parchment. The other appears to show proofreading, perhaps by the rubricator, as Gude Suckale-Redlefsen suggests in the catalogue entry for this manuscript, for the worker is depicted with a quill tucked behind his ear and a knife in hand, and only in this roundel do we see both the item being copied and its hard-bound model.121 Thus, the set of images here jumps over the act of copying proper in favour of the preparation and the follow-up to that activity. The final two images in the series show the presentation of the opened book and its use in teaching. In a single series, the miniaturist has shown the complications of book preparation, a set of activities in which the mere writing of words becomes an insignificant portion of a complex process.

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Even within the world of writing properly speaking, scribes of either gender faced a wide array of tasks. They established the broad elements of page design and inscribed them with faint lines that marked the blocks of space devoted to various elements. For each manuscript, the scribe needed to balance margins and text. He or she might also need to account for space devoted to notation, to miniatures, or to elaborate capital letters. Such design elements typically resulted in sets of rectangles outlining the major divisions of the page. Next, the scribe brought the page into clearer focus by providing ruled lines which would eventually serve as guides to the evenly spaced and carefully horizontal placement of text and music. Using prick-marks in the margins (often trimmed later in the process), the scribe drew guide lines to ensure similarities in line layout over many pages. Moving in still closer to the stage of inscribing the words, the scribe formulated a plan for word placement that would, ideally, avoid the need for crowding or drawing out of text when copying the fully justified text. At this stage in the copying of a musical manuscript, the scribe necessarily devoted attention to the coordination of music and text, for the difference between a melismatic and a syllabic setting placed restrictions on the spacing of accompanying texts. In manuscripts of all sorts, the scribe also had to address the further complexities of rubrics and of initials, allotting space to each element, choosing in advance whether the rubrics would be terse or prolix and the capitals significant, multiline affairs or the smaller lesser initials imbedded in the text and marked only by ink colour. Such decisions depended as much on meaningful understanding of the text and its structure as on the strictures of page size and budget. Once a plan was in place, the scribe needed to copy accurately and legibly the text at hand and to decide what elements of abbreviation to use, how to space the words, where to punctuate and so on. In short, the scribe decided to what degree the copy would mimic the exemplar and where and to what degree the copy might depart from the model. As has been amply demonstrated elsewhere, scribes could display a remarkable degree of what has been dubbed scribal initiative.122 In addition to decisions involving details of layout, the scribe might amend a corrupt text, for example, or collate two readings. Musically, a scribe might provide a favoured cadential formula in lieu of the one in the exemplar or adjust a discord by recomposing a passage. The scribe was not the automaton of computer data entry but a vibrant contributor prone both to occasional errors of inattention and to a personal integrity shaped by the larger purpose of reproducing usable materials. In effect, the scribe entered the

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basic ‘content’ of a book using not only the ‘three fingers which write’123 but also the thoughtful habits acquired through training. Within this multifarious world of scribal activity, the monastic scribe, like her secular counterpart, might choose to specialize in one particular kind of task or choose to remain a generalist. The scribe’s domain clearly encompassed responsibility for words and for placement of other design elements. It could also, but did not necessarily, encompass the execution of those fancier elements as well. Initials, miniatures, illumination, rubrics, and notation could all be contracted out or done in-house or even in person by the lead scribe of the team. Sometimes the division of labour is quite clear to the codicological investigator or is spoken of in the scribal colophon; in other cases the matter is ambiguous and the numbering of participants – one? two? many? – remains indeterminate. There are a few scriptorium positions that are singled out in scribal colophons and in other monastery documents that help to clarify the functioning of these women’s monastic scriptoria. In a few instances, the copying effort was organized by a lead scribe. Convent documents, for instance, name the abbess Anna Flötzerin of the Clarissan convent of Gnadental bei Basel as ‘scriptrix superior’ and convent nun Brigida Liespergin as ‘subscriptrix.’124 In other cases, such as the instance of Gisle Codex discussed above (p. 67), the presence of a single leader who claims the role of scribe in a colophon may in fact attest to the position of that individual as head of the scribal workshop. It is clear from the kinds of coordination necessary to manuscript production that there must often have been a person in charge. The artist frequently gets special mention in scribal colophons.125 Margaret Scheiffartz de Meirrode of the Premonstratensian house of Schillingskapellen claimed responsibility for many pictorial elements in her fifteenth-century missal; she undertook the preparation of ‘all the pictures and floratura.’126 Similarly, Elisabeth von Winsen both copied and illuminated (‘scripta cum floribus picturam’) a psalter which, she tells us, was finished in 1478 in the Cistercian house at Medingen (3) under Provost Tylemann de Bavenstede.127 Another Elisabeth, Elsbet von Cellinkon, was described in Elisabeth Stagel’s sister-book as scribe (or perhaps author) and artist: ‘she was able to write very well and loved to write good things.’ Similarly, the Oetenbach sister-book identifies one of the three women who joined the convent along with Ita von Hoehenfels as a scribe who could both write and illuminate manuscripts.128 Indeed, artistic offerings are so common among women’s convents as to form an important strand of discussion in the art-historical literature.

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Of interest here, however, is the close pairing of scribal and artistic undertakings in these descriptions; members of the monastery worked with their sisters to create the book-based legacy of many of these women’s houses. The position of the rubricator occasionally gets special mention. In 1484, for instance, Elisabeth Schmidin, a sister of Unlingen, asked one Conrad Durren to rubricate a copy of the Book of Spiritual Poverty.129 The colophon from another manuscript states that it was ‘rubricated by Johannes Swarcz, confessor for Adelhausen, in the year 1472.’130 Likewise, the convent chronicle for Villingen specifies that the nuns not only copied but ‘rubricated and rendered’ the three antiphonals, new songbook, and new sequentiary that they completed in 1494.131 To our eye, the task of copying a text and the task of rubricating it seem to be remarkably similar. Other than ink colour, there is little mechanical difference between copying text and copying rubrics; both acts consist of putting words into written form on parchment (or on paper, depending on the physical makeup of the codex). There are, however, several ways in which the rubricator’s task can differ from the scribe’s. If there is no written exemplar for the rubrics, for instance, then the work of the rubricator would be akin to that of the modern-day individual responsible for the preparation of a book’s index. Medieval rubrics often serve as chapter labels and content summaries in one – the equivalent of headers, marginal outlining, and bold typeface in our modern-day textbooks. In some liturgical manuscripts, the rubrics are also a virtual instruction manual for who should do what when, and thereby provide information about the ceremonial element of liturgical practices. If the scribe has no model from which to work, he or she might leave the creation of such material to an established expert. Even if the scribe does have a viable exemplar that follows the forms necessary to the convent, there can be sufficient differences of copying style between text and rubric to call on the skills of a scribe of different background and training. In many German sources, rubrics are marked not just by colour and perhaps underlining, but also by a shift from the Latin of the liturgy to some form of German vernacular, a change often accompanied by a change of handwriting style. This kind of scribal partitioning is particularly evident in the many obsequials – manuscripts which contain the liturgy surrounding death and dying – that survive from the period.132 Roughly half of the surviving fifteenth-century obsequials from women’s houses adopt a bilingual approach to presentation, with the cues or texts of the liturgy given in Latin and the instructions

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and descriptions of actions and personnel given in the vernacular. In a 1509 processional-obsequial from St Maria Magdalena in Freiburg, for instance, the text scribe copied large chunks of Latin liturgical text, intermixed with vernacular instructions on how to perform it. Given the close coordination of spacing between Latin and vernacular in this manuscript, a single scribe evidently copied both sections, for only occasionally does a word appear cramped, and that can almost always be explained by the need for a two-line drop capital at the start of the next liturgical item.133 In other manuscripts, however, such coordination of copying efforts facilitated, but did not require, the introduction of a second party in the copying effort. Perhaps, just as the monastic libraries were organized by language, scribes too specialized in one language or another. This can be demonstrated anecdotally. Of a sampling of fourteen women monastics who copied several volumes, eight copied solely vernacular manuscripts, two apparently specialized in Latin manuscripts, and four copied a mix of Latin and German books.134 Elisabeth Waraus of the Dominican convent St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’ in Augsburg, for instance, copied eight books, all in German; she must have done this out of choice, however, for she was fluent enough in Latin to serve as translator for some of them. Mezzi von Klingenberg, ‘Sengerin’ from Töss, is likewise described by Elisabeth Stagel as being an expert at decorating German books, as explored below in chapter 6, p. 206. Gertrud von Büchel of Rolandswerth and Loppa von Spiegel (also known as Lopa de Speculo) from the Clarissan convent in Cologne, on the other hand, each specialized in Latin chant manuscripts, to judge by surviving evidence. If, as appears to be the case, individual scribes took on different aspects of the book trade, then the presence of an independent rubricator might be pragmatic. Since a shift of language might involve different kinds of scribal competencies, a scribe might call on an expert in the other language to cover the rubricated portions that marked a linguistic and a palaeographical shift of style. Another task that was often delegated to others was the correcting of books. This came both in the conventional arena of proofreading and in the kind of updating and amending of liturgical resources that fell under the duties of the cantrix (discussed on p. 29). The work of the proofreader can be seen in innumerable manuscripts in the marginal and interlineal corrections found in one or more contrasting hands. Such proofreading could also be, and commonly was, done by later readers of course, and a book might be amended and corrected over

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the course of many generations. But proofreading activities were also integrated into the production process, and on occasion the task or the person who accomplished it are mentioned by name. The famous Nuremberg scriptorium at St Katharina in particular offered information about the women who corrected its books. In 1445, Kunigund Niclasin gives credit to the anonymous woman who served as ‘Corigirerin’ in her German Bible, asking the reader to pray ‘for the scribe who has copied this book, sister K.N ... and also for the corrector.’135 Fourteen years later in the same scriptorium, Kunigund Holzschuherin corrected a two-volume missal.136 Such work was not always done in-house. In a collection of mystical writings in a manuscript from the Straßburg convent of St Nicolaus in Undis, the section containing the Book of Spiritual Poverty ends with a colophon that asks for prayers ‘for the scribe, who wrote this book with her hand, and for the priest, who corrected and improved it.’137 In any verbal enterprise, it helps to have the fresh eye of another informed individual examine the work for accuracy; that process was as familiar to our medieval antecedents as it is to us today. The work of the editor, then and now, often goes unmentioned, but it was seen then, as it is now, as a means of improving the final product. Such work has value. To these medieval women, the editor’s contributions, like the scribe’s, had earned not only the reader’s recognition but also her prayers. Some of the expert copyists proved especially versatile. They write and paint, paint and floriate, copy text and notes, and otherwise demonstrate multiple competencies. The scribe-as-artist is one familiar figure. In the late twelfth century, Guta of Schwarzenthann wrote and painted, for instance, as she claimed in the famous homilary now housed at Frankfurt.138 Her late medieval successors combined those skills as well. Sophie, a nun at Helfta and daughter of Count Mansfeld, served the convent as both scribe and illuminator, though none of her manuscripts are known to have survived.139 Likewise, Sibilla of Bondorff copied and illuminated a German version of St Bonaventura’s The Life and Miracles of St Francis in 1478.140 But other nuns lay claim to an even broader swath of scribal activities. To return to the claims of Gisle cited above, this nun of the Cistercian convent of Rulle takes a certain element of unconventional pride in her work: the venerable and devout virgin Gisela de Kerzenbroeck wrote, illuminated, notated, paginated [or ‘put on the page’? the Latin is impaginavit], and decorated in gold letters and beautiful images this extraordinary book

Structuring Scribal Relationships 87 in her own memory, in the year of our Lord 1300. May her soul rest in holy peace. Amen.141

The scribe here is centrally important for the creation of the volume. She writes, and that comes first on the list. She illustrates the book as well. That illustration involves three tasks in the enumeration: illumination, decorating in gold letters, and crafting the ‘beautiful images.’ The wording suggests that she not only rendered the images in paint and gold leaf, but also may have actively and creatively worked to design those images. She notates the gradual, a task that clearly followed the entry of the words, for the music of some of the melismatic chants alternately crowds together and stretches uncomfortably in order to align with the syllables.142 The term ‘impaginavit,’ which is buried in the middle of the list of tasks, might merely refer to pagination, the act of putting numbers on each page of the manuscript, for the gradual is, rather uncharacteristically for its time, foliated in the middle left-hand margin of its recto pages, presumably by gathering (Ai ... Aviii, etc.). Under the circumstances, however, the term paginate seems more likely to refer to the scribal art of page planning; I suspect she is claiming responsibility for ‘placing on the page.’ Whatever the exact intent of the middle word, it is clear that Gisela is here claiming sole credit for the work she has done; in effect, her list of tasks says ‘I have done it all.’143 Men too sometimes lay claim to multiple competencies. To draw for a moment on manuscript colophons from outside of Germany, the work of the exceptional medieval scribe can be shown to encompass many of the editorial and production tasks that normally belonged to team members. One of the colophons establishes the scribe’s participation in manuscript preparation. This colophon asserts that ‘Radulphus shaped, cleansed, pricked, furrowed [i.e. arranged the page layout, including lining], wrote, illuminated.’144 Such a claim is reminiscent of the set of Bamberg images of book production that place more emphasis on the setting up of the page – what we think of as the stage of ‘getting ready’ – than on the copying of the words. Of course, Radulphus has also completed the tasks of writing and illuminating that would bring the book to fruition; he is, in effect, claiming to have ‘done it all.’ Another scribe focused on what we might think of as postproduction activities: Finished. Emended, corrected, postscript added, rubricated, revised and sent back by me, Ranerium, in my own hand. Ranerius.145

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This scribe served as his own proofreader, and may (given that he claims to have corrected the volume) have adjusted the text of his exemplar in some way. He also provided some kind of commentary. He mentions the addition of rubrics, here separated out as a rather late task in the process; then he revised and returned the book in his own hand. The third colophon to consider here also mentions a few post-copying activities, but chooses a different array of tasks: Roderic Olacthnain … has written, illuminated, bound, and indexed that work of Clement with its scholarly apparatus for his bodily brother Tatheo Olacthnain.146

Roderic has copied the work, and he has illuminated it. He bound the book as well. Perhaps most significantly, he has provided both a table – probably an index – and the book’s ‘apparatus’ or glosses. Together with Gisela’s rhetorically similar claims, these colophons offer a kind of recipe for book production. These scribes, with their lists of tasks, signal their creative control over the copying process. Though there may be a bit of the braggart at work, there may also be a bit of rejoicing at a job completed, with the personal satisfaction attendant on work well done. The scribes signal too an ownership, a personal stake, in the work produced. The inclusion of scribal name within the colophon creates a permanent link between the person who spent time and energy on the copying process and the work that resulted. Even half a millennium later, we still know these individuals by name and can associate them with the works they produced. Perhaps most significantly, the scribe who includes his or her own name in the colophon asserts a personal responsibility for the work inside. After all, the convent superior who directed that a particular book be made lent an authority of office to the copying. Here, the scribe adds the authority of expertise. That claim to expertise is present whether we have a simple name of the individual or, as here, descriptors of the kinds of tasks that person has undertaken in putting the book together. In the case of a full-fledged team-of-one who claims to have controlled most, if not all, of the work on the book, we are in the presence of a scribal expert. The glimpse that these colophons provide of the scribe in action, doing all of these different things, offers the implicit assurance that the scribe knows what he or she is doing. The text is, to a degree, validated by the identity of the copyist.

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The presence of scribal specialists, of scribal teams, and of full-fledged scriptoria at so many women’s convents indicates the heavy emphasis which these women’s communities placed on the written word in general and on the codex in particular. These were communities that valued books and that participated actively in their creation. Indeed, the prevalence of internal, community-based scribes at so many women’s convents shatters the presumptions in place a few decades ago. Convent women as a whole are not illiterate and untrained, mere burdens on the male monastic orders. Rather, they belong to communities of the book, and share their lodging and their lives with representatives of an elite literate culture who functioned as scribes with a variety of skill levels. The women who organized the book copying for a given house could often rely on fellow sisters to undertake whatever copying they found to be necessary. That they turned to outsiders for some manuscript production was, therefore, choice, not mandate. The shaping of intellectual life fell, on the one hand, under the jurisdiction of the convent’s leadership. Abbess, prioress, or mater might now choose to hire a scribe and later opt for in-house production; they might turn at one time to a single individual and the next to a team of scribal collaborators. But control over intellectual life belongs too within the purview of the scribe him- or herself. These scribes copied a wide array of texts; they provided materials both liturgical and spiritual to fill the convent’s library. As we have seen, scribes sometimes produced work to order and at other times were themselves instrumental in selecting and shaping the items their books conveyed. It is the content of these volumes and the intersection of content and gender that is the focus of the next chapter.

3 The Content of Convent Manuscripts

To get a picture of how convent copying worked, it is helpful to separate the work done by members of the monastic community from that done by people outside of the convent walls. This chapter assesses the contents of 413 convent manuscripts written by women. (Another eighty-eight surviving manuscripts in women’s hands are largely omitted from discussion here because their contents are specifically archival in nature or because their contents are either altogether unknown or are described simply as ‘miscellaneous’ in the secondary literature consulted to date.) From this corpus of manuscripts produced by women scribes, we can trace the kinds of manuscripts common to convent collections. It appears that in book production, at least, women monastics had the potential to be self-sufficient for, as will be shown, the surviving manuscripts cut cross all categories of books used within those convents. After tracing the context for monastic women’s book production, this chapter examines the contributions of women scribes to convent collections, analysing the various categories of manuscripts known to stem from them. Liturgical manuscripts form one large cluster of books produced by convent women; spiritual and erudite literature form a second corpus of books copied in-house. Afterwards, a comparative assessment is offered of the place of these manuscripts produced in-house in relationship to the total number of books within those collections and to the range of books signed by male scribes. Though the exact figures are, of course, partly dependent on the vagaries of survival patterns, it is at least suggestive that men’s offerings to convent libraries show subtle differences in emphasis.

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The Context for Women’s Scribal Contributions Like their counterparts in male monastic institutions, female monastic scribes seem to have copied a little bit of everything. Some served as the businesswomen of the convent hierarchy. In addition to producing a wide array of purely archival and business material, these writers recorded the practical information necessary to the convent in the form of chronicles, necrologies, and the like. The women of the convent also took responsibility for producing other books needed for administrative purposes including, for example, the rules, statutes, and constitutions of the order. Similarly, they were also practical keepers of liturgical traditions and innovations, for they were frequently (though not always) responsible for the production of the many and varied liturgical manuscripts that supported the convent’s daily rounds of community prayer.1 Some of these liturgical manuscripts were deluxe products of considerable financial investment, ornamented with gold leaf, decorated with floriated or historiated initials, and bound in elegantly tooled covers, while others were hastily jotted collections of dubious accuracy. Most of the liturgical resources produced in-house, of course, fell somewhere in the middle: carefully copied, legible, and accurate representations of the liturgy that was the centrepiece of these women’s lives. Understandably, women scribes in this monastic environment focused their efforts in part on the resources needed for their daily lives. In addition to providing the manuscripts needed for the convent archives and convent sacristy, women scribes copied large numbers of prayerbooks and other devotional manuscripts, manuscripts that were typically housed in the convent library or the individual monastic cell. Thus, they directly supported a life of contemplation through their production of Gebetbücher, books of hours, and contemplative books.2 Perhaps even more so than with the pragmatic resources intended for directly liturgical functions, these manuscripts can represent the extremes of beauty and of inelegance. The most highly decorated and elaborate book of hours, for instance, might have served then in part as a symbol of wealth and certainly represented great financial investment on the part of copyist and owner; these manuscripts could now easily find a place in a major art collection. The most casual prayerbooks and shoddiest devotional anthologies, on the other hand, might have functioned as mere bound notebooks to be filled with jotted reminders of the inner life; they often contain little of artistic merit. The codices containing devotional

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texts, then, run the entire gamut of book production stemming from convent circles. As with the liturgical manuscripts, many of the surviving manuscripts fall somewhere in a middle ground, carefully copied and moderately ornate. Whatever their quality (as measured by standards of beauty rather than standards of religious sentiment), the devotional manuscripts produced within these women’s convents bear witness to an ongoing commitment to the written word as a means of preserving, retaining, and circulating devotional texts and ideas. In this kind of copying, as with the production of administrative and liturgical resources, the activities of the various women scribes attest to the practical functionality of convent life. Through their copying activities, these women served the community’s needs by producing materials for study and for prayer. Convent scribes also produced various kinds of spiritual readings for table and for private study, including biblical exegesis, sermons, and mystical treatises. These are the books that connect the convent’s members to the broader Christian community. They also bring into the convent the new ideas of practical Christian dogma. Some scribes worked directly with the authors of the texts, recording the words of a favourite sermon, or copying out the thoughts of a beloved ‘Beichvater.’ Others attest to the fairly broad access convent scribes had to the literature circulating in male monastic circles of the day. These are the books that kept the community informed and are among the books with the greatest degree of visible wear-and-tear that come down to us from many centuries ago.3 From the categories above, it appears that the woman scribe from within convent walls was most likely to produce books that fitted the religious culture in which she was immersed. She gave her time to produce the books that served as resources for ritual along with those intended for Christian contemplation, the two central tasks of monastic life. But scribes from women’s convents occasionally attest as well to a broader learned culture that evidently flourished within the convent walls. The books that they produced form a corpus, albeit a somewhat small corpus, of pedagogical material, scholastic writing, and vernacular literature. Some of these books reflect the texts and authors cited by the authors who stem from women’s communities, while others could be similar to those held by their non-monastic sisters. Such books represent a crossover of courtly and urban intellectual culture into monastic intellectual life, a practice more familiar to us from male monastic traditions.4 True, it is not always clear how these books were used. Nevertheless, in some convents, at least, a relatively broad life of the mind was supported through the copying efforts of their women residents.

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Practical Administrative Resources Literate bureaucracies of any age produce different kinds of documents, some of them book-length tomes of magisterial weight, others single sheets with the details of an ephemeral event. The category of ‘administrative books’ shades quickly into the category of ‘archival material,’ material which lies outside of the focus of this study. Nevertheless, these administrative volumes and the broader category of archival materials were predominantly produced in-house and attest to the literate underpinnings of convent life. The clear-cut business documents – cartularies, bursary records of various sorts, and the like – have been excluded here. There is a difference between archival and scribal activity, even when both involve handwriting. The administrative books, however, deserve our attention as a hybrid category that demonstrates the overlap between the archival record, unique to the convent, and library resource, available for consultation. These volumes of administrative books were consulted by the members of the community and so formed part of the ‘library collection’ of the convent. The women who served in the convent leadership frequently copied these items themselves; in other cases they assigned the scribal duties to others. There were sometimes archivists appointed to maintain convent records and organize the many documents important to convent functions. There were also male administrative assistants who contributed to the written record, including bailiffs and other assistants who could provide legal and financial assistance to the convent in its dealings with the outer world.5 Although male representation became increasingly important as convents adopted stricter clausura during the reform movements of the fifteenth century, much of the archival work of German monasteries still fell to the abbess and her monastic charges throughout this late medieval period. This emphasis on female scribal activities in part reflects the relationship between ‘history’ and daily life in a convent environment. In a liturgical environment, part of the historical record also becomes part of the liturgical schema. This process has been described by Margot Fassler as the enaction of the historic past.6 Details of sisters’ lives and holy deaths do, on occasion, become incorporated into community practice. These holy antecedents of the present-day community are memorialized through services, through prayer. They are remembered on their important anniversaries; their names are recorded in prayers

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and listed on calendars. Their lives too can serve as models for sanctity; the so-called sister-books record biographical details of a number of community members who provide especially good models for how to lead a conventual life devoted to Christ. Their vitae make their way into the table readings and into the oral lore of the community as reference points for the internal life postulated by the community. Necrologies too can provide details about the women whose deaths they record; those women’s ‘good deaths’ and their patient suffering provide a backdrop to the concerns of the nuns who write and consult these convent documents. Annals and internal histories also attempt to record a historic past immersed in Christ, a past that can serve to inspire greater devotion among the later generations for whom those records are written.7 The stories of reform such as the writings of Johannes Nider and those in the next generation of Johannes Meyer that circulate in convent circles similarly draw the community to a model of how to live now; the past is intended quite consciously to inform the present. Such books are at once both practical and inspirational. They record the details of daily life necessary to functioning. They answer basic questions of a monastic existence, from whose name is to be mentioned on which day to how this monastery is distinct from all those others the postulant might have chosen. They define and shape the community’s identity. At the same time, they provide an ideal towards which the members of the monastic community might strive. The values they put forth – visionary insights, devotional excellence, patience in the face of troubles, or practical life skills – helped to guide later generations to a personal selfidentity that, one hoped, would not be unduly at odds with the community’s needs and goals. Given the evolving information such community resources address, these are often complicated books. They often reflect the contributions of numerous members of the community, with frequent shifts of scribal hand. Occasionally, a document may be recopied in toto by a particular individual to serve as a ‘new draft’ of the needed information. In their generation, then, these manuscripts tended to call on the services of the monastic archivist and the people who most frequently needed access to the information they contained. Because of the liturgical implications of these kinds of data, such documents often fall under the purview of the cantrix. She was responsible for keeping the liturgy up to date; she therefore had the attendant responsibility to keep the liturgical books up to date, and it is often her hand that adapts the calendar or the necrology to reflect the most recent events of the community.

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The range and scope of historical records that form part of the monastery book collection reflects the continued literate activity of the convent as bureaucracy. That so many of these manuscripts stem from within convent walls reflects the practical organizational decisions of convent structure; it is easier to assign the task of writing to a member of the community than to overcome the obstacles of clausura. For these kinds of books, at least, internal rather than external scribal resources appear to have been the norm. Liturgical Resources Of the books known to have been produced by women scribes, roughly one third fall in the category of liturgical books. (Table 3.1 provides a visual schema for the discussion of the kinds of liturgical books which follows.) Some of these manuscripts are relatively short, but some are among the longest books among the convent’s holdings. A calendar, for instance, might only fill a single gathering, while an antiphonal might easily run to several volumes of hundreds of pages each. Similarly, liturgical books vary greatly in size. Some were copied in small octavo volumes using small script in a format clearly designed for a single user. Others adopt the large format of the folio choirbook in handwriting clearly intended to be viewed by many people. Some are impressive service books and formed part of a convent’s ‘treasures’; others are somewhat shabby workaday volumes. The connection of these volumes to one another comes through the function they had in the life of the monastery, for these are the books that support the rounds of prayer, readings, music, and ritual that was at the heart of monastic life.8 Books for the Choir By far the greatest number of books produced by these women monastic scribes are the antiphonals, books that contain the choir’s texts and chants for the divine office. These books, each of which is a unique presentation of a cross-section of choir materials for the office, might be divided in various ways. Some convents distinguish between music for the night offices (matutinale or nocturnal) and those for the daytime offices (diurnal). Others separate the solo chants (responsoriale) into a distinct volume. Some are divided along the seasons of the church year, others are abbreviated in order to accommodate all materials in a single

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Table 3.1 Liturgical Books for Late Medieval Women’s Convents

Priest

Mass

Office

missal or sacramentary – lectionary – ordo missae

?breviary?

Bishop

Other

pontifical*, benedictional*

Abbess/ Prioress/ Hebdomadaria

Mass lectionary (epistolary, evangeliary)

breviary, collectar, lectionary, legendary, homiliary

Choir

gradual, kyriale

antiphonal (nocturnale, diurnale), choir psalter, hymnal

Soloist

cantatory, troper

responsoriale

Planning

missal (as reference resource), calendar, ordo

breviary (as ref.)

rules, constitutions and statutes, calendar, ordinal, customary, ritual/manual/agenda

hours, psalter, perhaps breviary, legendary, and homiliary

processionals obsequials

Private reading

processionals, obsequials, miscellaneous ‘choirbooks’

* No surviving manuscripts of this type have yet been associated with women scribes; the manuscripts themselves, of course, would have belonged to male celebrants.

hefty volume.9 No two antiphonals are identical in content, a fact that poses challenges to the bibliographer. This diversity of format and contents characterizes antiphonals from male scriptoria as well. In fact, except for the colophon at the end of the manuscript, there is often little to distinguish a manuscript written by a woman scribe from one by her male counterpart. What all antiphonals have in common is the presentation of proper items for the office – the texts and melodies for items that change every day. These chants include the antiphons that surround and adapt psalms and canticles to the celebration at hand. Thus, antiphons are those musically interesting bits that frame the meditative repetition of pitch patterns used to recite the longer central texts of each service. They form the most numerically significant portion of each collection, which is perhaps why the whole volume is often referred to as the antiphonal. The antiphonal contains other kinds of chants in addition to the antiphons. It includes the choral sections (the

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so-called responds) for the responsory, and typically also includes either cues to the soloist’s verses or the full text of the solo passages that alternate with these choral responds. It often contains the hymns for the office, though the hymns may also be copied together in a separate manuscript. So too, these late medieval antiphonals often incorporate the invitatory, the texts (and music) to open matins. In short, the antiphonal is a compilation manuscript that contains a broad, almost bewildering, array of chants used by the choir to perform the office. Antiphonals represent not just the greatest number of liturgical manuscripts to survive in women’s hands, but the greatest effort in terms of pages copied and time spent and greatest cost in materials invested. They are typically longer than the other liturgical manuscripts in the collection. Often, too, they are bigger than the other manuscripts (with the exception of the display books such as the evangeliaries, which become a formal part of the apparatus of celebration). One sign of the significance of the antiphonal in the convent collection is that like the psalter, it is frequently held in several copies. Book inventories, for instance, frequently list a ‘new’ antiphonal, implying that there is an ‘old’ antiphonal in the convent even if the entry for the older book is not explicit. Moreover, these antiphonals were books that reflected the evolution of liturgical practices; they were among the volumes most likely to be amended through marginal annotations, introductions of cues and paste-ins, and through erasures and corrections. These were what I consider to be ‘living books,’ copied not for display but for regular, perhaps even daily consultation. Considered individually, they give evidence for local practices and customs. Considered as a group, they bear witness to the continued centrality of the Opus Dei in these monastic women’s lives. Numerically and temporally, then, the copying of antiphonals accounts for the greatest expenditure of scribal effort within women’s convents. The choir psalter and the other miscellaneous choirbooks that lurk undifferentiated in our modern-day catalogues form a generic complement to the antiphonals.10 Whereas the antiphonal contains the proper, changeable items for the office, both psalter and choirbook may hold the ordinary items from the office, items that typically remain unchanged from day to day. The psalms, of course, are standard fodder for such collections, but the psalter and the choirbook often include text and music for invitatories, which start the service, and may contain as well antiphons, canticles, chapters, and short responsories. The variability of coverage and the malleability of local practices makes it hard to index and classify such

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manuscripts, but they, like the more numerous antiphonals, are intended to serve the choir nuns in the performance of the liturgy of the office. Books intended for choir use during the performance of the Mass are also prominent in the surviving legacy from women monastic scribes. Graduals form a significant component of the scribal output of women’s convents.11 These are frequently among the most elegant products of monastic scriptoria, extensively (and expensively) decorated and perhaps even illuminated. The gradual contains the proper for the Mass. These chants are perhaps the most familiar to modern-day audiences. The genres for the proper – introit, offertory, and communion, and the soloist-based responsorial chants of the gradual and alleluia – form the choral core of the changeable texts within the Mass. These are among the most stable and the most standardized of chants used in the services of the late Middle Ages. As a result, it can be hard to determine the provenance of a particular manuscript unless there is a scribal colophon laying claim to a particular time, place, or scribal identity, or other manuscript inscription such as a statement of ownership. The ordinary texts for the Mass, that is, those with invariable words for day to day, though technically relegated to a separate collection known as the kyriale, are almost always included in some portion of the bound codex that we now catalogue as the gradual. These ordinary chants (Kyrie, Gloria in excelsis, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) were, in the late Middle Ages, the ones most likely to be set as polyphonic cyclic Masses. We have no direct evidence that women monastics in Germany sang polyphonic masses of the sort composed by Dufay and Josquin, but we do have singing treatises such as the one tucked into the front of a Freiburg antiphonal12 that provide instruction in mensural practices, suggesting that the nuns at Freiburg at least were capable of such polyphonic elaborations. The balance between monophonic and polyphonic performance would presumably have changed from place to place and time to time.13 The practice of polyphonic elaboration might also be a ‘cantare supra librum’ phenomenon, improvised by the convent’s elite singers. In such improvisatory practice, there may be little or no written indication that polyphony served as part of the elaboration of the service, but other records (payment records, visitation comments, and visitor’s reports) may provide additional data on performance practice. In contrast to scholarship on Italian convents, the investigation of German monastic performance – monophonic or polyphonic – is in its infancy, however, and no firm conclusions can yet be drawn. There may, for instance, be polyphonic settings – motets, Masses and the like – among the

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monastic incunabula, but this book concentrates exclusively on manuscript sources from convent libraries. Along with the generically inclusive graduals, which are explicitly copied for the Mass, there is also a substantial corpus of undifferentiated choirbooks surviving from women’s monastic scriptoria. These sometimes provide a combination of Mass and office chants. More often, they are officia, containing works for some component of the church year, but not intended to provide coverage for an entire season. These uncategorized miscellanea reflect the reality of manuscript production: each manuscript could be newly designed to meet the needs of the community or individual for whom it was intended. Customizable, on-demand copying makes for challenges to the modern-day cataloguer, and the boundaries of genres of chant books should be considered fluid since the copyist responded to the need at hand. Two additional types of liturgical manuscripts appear to have been central to monastic experiences, if we are to judge by the efforts of the women scribes who copied these resources and the numbers of copies that are extant. The processional, which contained the chants for processions, and the obsequial, which contained the liturgy surrounding death and dying, were both ubiquitous among the manuscript holdings from women’s convents.14 The processional has a clear-cut function; it contains the chants used in the many processions that ornament and enhance the experiences of the church year. Depictions of processions suggest that those manuscripts were used by a pair of singers, and that the use of the manuscript (whether as written word or as prop signifying written word) was integral to the experience of the liturgy-on-the-move. Obsequials are less obviously functional books; they exist in greater numbers than the community’s needs might seem to dictate. After all, it is rare that a community of a dozen or two dozen individuals experiences a death, and the great numbers of the books with ceremonial for such occasions seems counterintuitive. It is likely that these volumes may have served a memorial function, much as the weekly Mass and office for the dead performed in most communities served as reminders of the dearly departed. But it is also probable that these books served as non-liturgical books as well, designed as much for reading and contemplation as for actual liturgical action. The presence in some volumes of casual inked illustrations provides at least circumstantial evidence for this latter interpretation; these volumes were likely meant to be looked at and considered as well as to serve as the readable scripts of liturgical word and action.

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Books for Soloists Within the choir, the role of the cantrix as soloist is, in at least some communities, distinctive. Accordingly, there are present within the library holdings a few ‘soloist’s’ manuscripts, which parallel these duties, that were copied in women’s hands. The cantatory and troper are older genres, not particularly prevalent in thirteenth-to-fifteenth-century German circles; the few copies that do survive come without scribal attribution. The sequentiary is more complicated. The issue of who performs the sequence, though presumably answered for the earliest repertories by the work of Richard Crocker and others, has not been fully explored for late medieval practice.15 Margot Fassler has shown that over time (and in some regions) the sequence shifted from a solo piece to a choral genre. As she says, ‘By the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the sequence had become a choir piece in some places, perhaps a piece for the entire religious community to sing; in fact, except for its musical structure, it had become a hymn.’16 Indeed, the late medieval sequence is traditionally described as a choral genre. Yet the manuscript legacy from German women’s houses seems to contradict the choral nature of the genre. Gathered into separate volumes, the sequence still circulates in small, almost private-sized manuscripts.17 Containing ranges of a twelfth or more, the song literature included in these manuscripts has many of the hallmarks that we consider part of soloistic style when we concern ourselves with such issues at all. To step for a moment outside of German monastic circles, Craig Wright speculates that the newly discovered sequence most likely composed by Guillaume Dufay may well have been sung by the same vocal experts who sang the motet ‘Nuper Rosarum flores’ at the dedication ceremony for the Florentine cathedral in 1436.18 If Florentine practice reflects broader performance practice norms, then the sequence may well have moved back and forth between solo and choral performance depending on need and circumstance. The single sequentiary manuscript in a woman’s hand that stems from this period was copied in part by the Freiburg Clarissan scribe Elsbeth Töpplin, though an earlier manuscript from the twelfth century also attests to women monastics’ interest in preserving this kind of literature.19 More characteristic are the anonymously copied sequentiaries, most of which have one or more statements of ownership by individual nuns from the convents in which the manuscripts were housed. This suggests that such manuscripts were part of the private collections, additional evidence for the likely soloistic nature of the sequence of this era.

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With the exception of the sequentiaries, books containing chants for soloists are uncommon in the German convents. This probably reflects three phenomena. First, the choirbooks themselves typically contain at a minimum the cues to solo passages and more commonly the full text for that reduced-texture material. Thus, there was not an explicit need for a separate soloist’s manuscript in many women’s convents. Second, the soloist, as a trained member of the musical elite, was likely to have a prodigious memory and a training that encompassed the entire range of responsibilities she had before her. The ‘need to read’ is a modern invention, one that would have been foreign to the orally trained musician – even church musician – of the later Middle Ages. Though literacy and musical literacy were probably a given for the women who served as cantrices in the wealthy convents, the expectation in monastic circles – as in courtly secular circles of the era – would have been a performance freed from the page, memorized or reconstructed during liturgical enaction. Third, I suspect that soloists’ manuscripts were more ephemeral than their choral counterparts. Copied, as they were, for the use of a single singer, they would have been more casual and less beautiful than their manuscript counterparts prepared for display. So too they would have adopted the habits and conventions of the women who copied them. A later cantrix might well recopy the material to suit her own tastes and preferences and discard the older copy when finished.20 In short, I suspect that these were often practical, disposable manuscripts, and did not necessarily have lasting value for the community once the manuscript’s creator had passed away. Solo manuscripts, then, were likely prepared in greater quantities than survive, and may have belonged in part to the manuscripts intended for personal use in addition to their liturgical function. Books for Male Clerics In contrast to the relative frequency with which books for the monastic choir and soloists appear, books for the bishop who served a given community are entirely absent from the collection of surviving manuscripts affiliated with female scribes. The pontifical and the benedictional exist only in male scribal hands.21 The pontifical contains the necessary information for liturgical services that require a bishop. These include ceremonies such as the ordinations and blessings of abbesses or nuns and the consecrations of churches, altars, and liturgical accoutrements such as vestments and liturgical vessels. The pontifical contains information about services that would have been held at convents and profoundly

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affected the life of the nuns, services in which they were often ceremonial participants. The pontifical casts that information in such a way, however, that the bishop is the central focus of presentation. There are no equivalent summaries of action or text for the other participants in these ceremonies. Perhaps as a consequence, the pontifical manuscripts that survive from late medieval Germany were uniformly owned and copied by men. Likewise, the benedictional, which contains various blessings used by the bishop, was typically incorporated into the pontifical, and so too is entirely absent from the scribal legacy of women’s houses. We know from a broader assessment of convent holdings that books for the male clerics who served particular convents do survive. Curiously, none of them bears a colophon pointing to a female scribe. Rather, these books tend to differ in liturgical detail from the manuscripts copied by or for the nuns. The cleric’s book might, as in Salzburg, follow the practice of the cathedral, while the nuns themselves might adopt a different liturgical practice.22 These discrepancies were presumably negotiated ‘on the fly’ as the week’s details were worked out, and in practice there were probably relatively few direct clashes of liturgical practice even when, as was common, Dominican friars served Cistercian communities. Nevertheless, it seems at least plausible, given the patterns of manuscript survival, that clerics generally supplied their own liturgical books, and that the nuns provided the ceremonial books that lay exposed on the altar along with the choirbooks that provided the nuns’ portion of the liturgy. Thus, the discrete role of male clerics within the service seems to spill over into a discrete repertory of service books, one set owned and used by the nuns, and a separate set used by the attendant cleric(s) for the sacramental aspects of the service. There are, of course, missals copied by women scribes, some of which may have been intended for the male clerics serving the convent. Scholars have assumed that these missals, like their equivalents in male houses, might have served as ‘performance materials’ for the officiating priest who served the community. Such is certainly a possibility, of course, and it is possible too that the convent held those resources in their library to serve the migratory pool of confessors and chaplains who came and went in their liturgical existence. Such an interpretation does not, however, explain the absence of male-associated missals from female hands. Of the sixty-six missals known to have survived from women’s convent libraries, only two were affiliated in any way with men. One Ulrich von HohenRechberg appears as a later owner for the Augsburg St Stephanus convent missal (BrixenFP 62),23 a manuscript for which the scribe is unknown.

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Similarly, Werner Haselbeck became a later owner of the missal for the Benedictine women’s convent at Essen,24 but again the scribe for the volume is unknown. Of the ten missals copied by women scribes, none at all have inscriptions or ownership marks to indicate association with the male clerics, and three are very clearly indicated as being owned by the convent nuns who created the volumes. Thus, missals seem to have been used in women’s convents for purposes other than supplying the male clerics who served them with liturgical resources. We will return to the possible use for missals below. Books for Readings within the Services The books containing the various readings for Mass and office form a significant corpus of surviving material from convent scribes. Lectionaries and evangeliaries, legendaries and homiliaries serve the needs of the community’s readers. The issue of who performs the readings is, however, less clearcut. Some readings belong to the weekly ‘hebdomadaria’ or ‘Wochnerin’ who served in rotation as the official assigned to prepare and perform the readings. Other readings were presumably taken by the community leader – abbess, prioress, ‘mater’ – who led the community through the service. Since women were not ordained, they could not perform the office of priest and prepare the sacraments, but they could and did ‘substitute’ for the positions typically assigned to deacon and subdeacon in our who-does-what schema for Mass and for office. The office, in particular, appears to have been celebrated in many communities without the attendance of the chaplain or cleric who served the community, so the distribution of roles presumably fell to the community’s leadership. A thorough investigation of late medieval customaries will be necessary to prove decisively what solutions the various communities adopted.25 The passing allusions to liturgical experience in the writings of the Helfta nuns in the thirteenth century suggest that the abbess may well have performed some aspects of the role of the deacon.26 Thus, it is probably the abbess or her substitute who declaimed the readings, and it is the women of the community who would have practised the reading and pacing of scriptural and homiletic texts according to the instructions of the various Rules. These books containing ‘readings’ that stem from the monastic scriptorium were likely intended for monastic use. Mass lectionaries and their office counterparts were compilation manuscripts with a mix of different kinds of texts. The scribes sometimes subdivided the Mass

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readings into epistolaries and evangeliaries; the evangeliaries in particular are readily identifiable among the surviving convent collections. Similarly, collectars and legendaries find a ready place on convent library shelves and are thus a focus of the monastic scribes preparing materials for convent use. Homiliaries, on the other hand, are harder to track; they often disappear into broader categories of sermon literature unless the modern cataloguer has taken care to distinguish service book from library book. Women scribes demonstrably copied at least a few examples of each of these various text manuscripts; more volumes produced in-house likely lurk among the vast numbers of unsigned manuscripts of this sort that survive from individual convents. These are among the manuscripts that are least likely to come with attribution to a particular scribe. There is a traditional anonymity of style in copying such works; with the emphasis on readability, there is less room for the quirks of handwriting that characterize some of the other literary genres. Books for Reference The breviary, of course, exists among the scribal output of various convents as a kind of hybrid volume for the office.27 It collects in an abbreviated version all of the materials necessary for the functioning of the office liturgy. These could contain the whole office for private recitation; they could also be volumes for consultation, providing a ready overview of the service. It has been argued that breviaries are intended for the officiating priest; I suspect a closer examination of the breviaries copied in women’s scriptoria might reveal the role of convent leadership in office devotions, for in at least a handful of volumes, rubrics point to the duties of the abbess or the Wochnerin. A more systematic accounting of the books used in women’s convents may help us to reconstruct the monastic practices, which surely varied by time and place as well as by gender. Officially, of course, convent women had little need for such portable reference guides. Unlike their Franciscan and Dominican counterparts whose positions as friars allowed and even encouraged travel, the women of German convents were at the least encouraged towards enclosure, and later mandated to follow strict enclosure, making travel undesirable. What purpose, then, would be served in crafting a breviary? The volume could work as a sort of reference resource to be consulted in the reconstructing of liturgical choices on an annual basis. It would serve, in that sense, as the model on which the day’s liturgy could be based.

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But the size of the breviary suggests that the volume might also serve as a private devotional book. The FreiburgUB 136 breviary is 15 x 11 cm, for instance, and the GrazUB 1550 breviary from the thirteenth century, at 16 x 12 cm, is not much larger. These are the size of modern-day paperbacks (though thicker); they could well be held and consulted as a written focus for the experience of the liturgy. The missal, too, falls in this hybrid category of book for which no distinctive segment of the convent seems quite appropriate as reader. It contains the proper items for the Mass, and typically includes the texts that the choir sings, though not necessarily the melodies that go with those texts. More a summary than a practical compilation for personal use, the missal may have enjoyed a status as reference book or may in fact have been intended for the use of the priest associated with the convent. The St Katharina missals, however, clearly state that they belong to the Nuremberg convent; if these are intended by nuns for nuns, then they likely formed a kind of reference resource rather than a book necessary for the liturgical practice of the convent. The priest would have had his own collection of texts to be used at altar and pulpit; the convent’s missals may have had a home in the convent library. It is hard to judge the purpose of a particular missal, since they only rarely include colophons. There is, I suspect, a three-way tension inherent in the system of written liturgical sources and the performance of lived liturgical practice. On one side fall the corporate books with their presentations of liturgical texts. These invite a common point on which eyes can focus, a written ‘place’ that gathers together the sisters who sing together in a common place on the page. On another side come the private books for worship – books of hours, breviaries, private prayerbooks – demonstrating in a public way the intimate thoughts of the holder of the book. The wearing of such books as part of feminine attire shows the display aspect of such devotional practices; the nun in the Romance of the Rose departed her chapel with devotional book in hand. Yet a third strand to complicate the experience of written texts is the basic orality of liturgical practice of the day. The psalter was almost invariably committed to memory, and the familiarity of week-in, week-out, year-in, year-out practices made the liturgy as much a place of rest and repetition as of innovation and fresh perspective. Aural and oral habit distracted from the written representation, and the eye of the monastic might well fall on one of the images within liturgical space rather than on the books representing the language of the service.28

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Books for Planning Given the monastic emphasis on liturgical books for the choir nuns and the omission of copying efforts intended specifically for male clerics, it is clear that the focus of women’s efforts was on crafting the materials that they needed on a daily basis to perform the liturgy for which the convent was responsible. Books for planning the liturgy served as important adjuncts to that process. The ordinal and customary form a pair of manuscripts often copied by women scribes for the communities in which they lived. These two volumes serve as a sort of planning guide to liturgical practice. The ordinal addresses the rite itself, discussing the character, contents and methods of services. It would describe the level of feast, the ways in which it might be carried out. It was a combination of description and rubrics, providing instructions on how things were to be done. The customary, on the other hand, dealt with the ceremonial aspects. It would typically address the structure of the community and the duties of the officers, and frequently described who says, sings, or does what.29 These are not full service books, though they might list incipits for the year. They were, however, important tools in crafting the convent’s own unique liturgical experience. Last but not least, the ritual, sometimes known as the manual or agenda, provided a rough guide for liturgical leadership, which ‘covers everything he needs for non-eucharistic, non-office worship.’ It might include information on baptism, marriage rites, the liturgy surrounding death, blessings, and so on.30 While much of the secondary literature suggests that these are the equivalent of pontificals, and that rituals serve the local priest in the same way the pontifical serves the bishop, the manuscript evidence from women’s convents contradicts this. Of the forty-seven surviving rituals known to stem from women’s convents, only two were later owned by a man, while twenty-one were either owned by specific women within the convent or passed from one women’s convent to another, indicating a particularly feminine circulation of these materials. Seven of these rituals were signed by women scribes, suggesting that the ritual was, unlike the pontifical with which it has been compared, part of the genres of liturgical books available to and of interest to convent women. Liturgical Books for Private Reading The liturgical books discussed thus far have a distinctive place within the actions of the liturgy, and would have a practical liturgical use either at

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the stage of preparation or during the enaction of the liturgy itself. A convent member might consult the volumes to make decisions about particular choices within the day’s ceremonies or might read from or follow along in a book intended for use within the service. But there is another way some of these books might be used, and that is as books for private reading and contemplation. Books of hours in particular have long been identified as a contemplative genre, intended as much to provide guided meditative imagery as to provide the living texts of prayer and other ritually formulated texts. Following the outline of an abbreviated office, they offer a private mode of prayer akin to and supplemental to the public celebration of the divine office. Prized by their collectors for their artistic beauty, these volumes are also important relics of a paraliturgical practice of devotion that formed another link in the chain of sanctity these nuns constructed for themselves. The psalter, too, was a book that might shift into the private realm of study and contemplation.31 The monastic rules allow time for devoted study for those nuns who had not yet developed full fluency with the psalter. As the Benedictine Rule (RB 8.3) commands, ‘those who need to learn some of the psalter or readings should study them’ immediately after vigils during the winter season. Moreover, the small format of the psalter, and the sometimes workaday quality of some volumes suggests that these were indeed the textbooks of the era. To my knowledge, none of the extant German psalters were bound with abecedaria, but the French monastic parallels, witnessed, for example, in the early thirteenth-century psalter ParisBN lat. 1315 (fol. 123v), suggest that study of these psalters might have included a study of the alphabet and symbols of written transmission. To us, the alphabet seems the central, basic, and obvious tool for reading, but for the medieval reader, the abbreviations and habits of word truncation were as important as the letters themselves. The psalter provided opportunity to study both the craft of reading and the most common texts of community life. Those that provide interpretations and elucidations are rather clearly studypsalters; others are harder to categorize. We know, however, from descriptions of convent life, that a nun might carry her psalter with her. In those instances, the psalter might indeed become a dual-function text, now used for service and now for private use.32 Our habits of either/or categories are at odds with the more fluid boundaries of medieval cataloguing. The breviary too could move across the public-private divide. Breviaries might well have statements of ownership in the flyleaf pages, suggesting

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that they became part of the ‘owned’ materials of the individual woman monastic. Though those inscriptions are rarely in the hands of the scribe who prepared the volume, they confirm that we have here a body of books prepared in-house and used by other women of the convent. These might well be a kind of study guide to the liturgy of the day, and offer the advanced student of spiritual life an opportunity to think further on the texts, homilies, and themes of the day’s services. Thus, the breviary might function as a contemplative nun’s guide into the ‘proper’ of the day, just as the psalter functioned as a guide into the ordinary texts of the monastic services. The private ownership of processionals and obsequials, attested to again by numerous ownership inscriptions that sometimes even include the passing down of a book through the hands of several nuns, suggests that these volumes too might reside in women monastics’ cells and serve as private devotional material as well as public, ceremonial books.33 These are among the most heavily annotated books, suggesting that they did indeed move into spaces where ink and quill were readily to hand. These books offer a reminder of the chants, the prayers, and above all the actions of the services contained within their pages. They provide a template, then, for the inventive reader to recreate a playlet version of the actions they script. By reading the rubrics as well as the texts, the private reader can reimagine the things they have witnessed and done in the public life of the convent. This reimagining is very much like the visionary experiences described by the nuns of Helfta. The moments of rapture that are evoked by, for instance, Gertrude as she recalls in prose form the vision of Christ appearing in the midst of liturgical activity, draw as much on the movements and sounds of the liturgy as on the mystic’s inner visionary powers. It is liturgical context that frames and stimulates the mental recreation of the vision; it is the re-creation of both context and vision that is described in the resultant texts. The contemplation of liturgical action, then, seems to have been vital to the mental imaginings and ‘thought-work’ of the late medieval German nun. Medieval nuns did not confine their reading to liturgical books, however important those books might be to both inward and outward life. Rather, the scribes devoted only part of their time and energies to the ‘required’ books of convent life. Other volumes, however, predominate in the output of the female scriptorium of late medieval Germany. Those books form the focus of the discussion that follows.

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Spiritual and Erudite Literature Private Devotional Books In a world in which the ritualized and community-based readings of the liturgy form a central component of lived experience, it may come as a surprise that fully half of the surviving manuscripts copied by monastic women were intended for private reading, study, and contemplation. By far the largest number of books intended for non-liturgical readings are the private devotional books, the medieval equivalent of personal books. These include books of hours, contemplative books, and guides to holy living, but by far the most numerous of the books of this type are the prayerbooks, the Gebetbücher, which form the largest single category of books copied by women scribes.34 The Gebetbuch is a private collection of prayers. It seems on many occasions to have been copied by a woman for her own use, and may have been compiled over many years. They are widely disparate in content, in layout and other codicological details, in length, in elegance, and in outlook. Just as the liturgical books form the central core for corporate worship, the Gebetbuch is the icon of the private devotion, reflecting a personal and intimate choice of patron saints, intercessory figures, and spiritual requests in the collections of prayers found therein. Gebetbücher can be in Latin, in the vernacular, or in a mix of languages; the vernacular and the mixed versions predominate. Given the lifestyle of women’s convents, a life in which every action is a form of prayer, these private prayerbooks were especially privileged. They seem in some cases to have been copied by a monastic individual over years or even decades. In several instances, the handwriting moves from the assured to the unsteady as if human frailty had impacted the copyist’s efforts. Some Gebetbücher are copied straight through, of course – fair copies, perhaps, of an earlier exemplar. More commonly, however, the Gebetbuch is an assembly of materials, gathered by one compiler or many, and it reflects the interests and shifts of focus common to any spiritually informed life. These can be among some of the most artless manuscripts in a collection, which I take as a sign of their great utility. These were books whose words mattered more than their beauty. At the other end of the spectrum are the books of hours – Latin prayerbooks prized as objects of contemplation and as works of art and only nominally as a vehicle for text. Gebetbücher copied by women are relatively evenly distributed across the monastic orders (if one ignores the many surviving copies from the large library of St Katharina in Nuremberg, which weight the numbers

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in favour of Dominican books). This suggests that literate endeavours are similarly common among the elite in any monastery. Moreover, it suggests that the resources of time and materials were commonly invested in private prayer and contemplation as much as in public worship. The continuity of literacy across the public and private acts of prayer accords with iconic representations of prayer as book-based in this late medieval era. By using books they had copied themselves, these women are picking and choosing their own basis for spiritual life. The scribe of the prayerbook was most often the compiler. By choosing the texts on which she focused her prayer, the woman scribe also chose what to emphasize in her own inner life. Much has been made of the emphasis on the vernacular in German women’s spiritual lives. This has been adduced as a sign of ignorance of Latin and suggests that the nun or canoness followed a less intensive intellectual model than her scholastically trained male counterpart. The characterization of the ‘dumb nun’ seems unrealistic to me. After all, these are literate women copying their own texts. There are ample copies of Latin sermons, educational materials, and service books stemming from these women’s houses, and even from these women’s hands. Latin literacy may not have been universal in these women’s convents, but it was common, the more so among the scribal elite.35 Rather, I suspect, the emphasis on the vernacular in prayers and other readings is a sign of a modern-day sort of bilingual model, in which one language – Latin – was used in public ceremonial prayer, and another – the local vernacular – was used in private, inner devotions.36 The vernacular – one of the many dialects of German – was the language of the hearth, and so the language of intimacy. What these women hoped to achieve through prayer was intimacy with God. Vernacular prayers were one path that these late medieval women could follow. That path was notably different from the one used by their male monastic brethren, who adopted a single-language approach. But men had access to the miraculous through the mysteries of the sacraments. Women, on the other hand, adopted the intimacy of private conversation. It is difficult to estimate how many prayerbooks originally existed in convent collections. Gebetbücher, even more than other kinds of manuscripts (with the possible exception of books of hours) have been dispersed to collections across the world where they often serve as the sole representative of a particular monastery’s book legacy. Even when a particular monastery’s book collection has survived largely intact, an individual prayerbook will often have made its way into the world-at-large,

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separated from its original monastic context. The isolated manuscript can often be reconnected to its original intellectual and spiritual environment by virtue of its emphasis on particular saints and particular ceremonies and even by flyleaf ascriptions or commonalities of scribal hand. Nevertheless, there is, as yet, no easy way to determine what prayerbooks survive from a particular monastery without reading all available library catalogues. Thus, the figures cited here are likely an undercount of extant sources. Second, the prevalence of short texts within the genre of prayers makes indexing and cross-referencing a challenge that can test any bibliographer’s mettle. It is likely, then, that further attention to this genre of book will allow scholars to link some portion of known but unidentified prayerbooks with their original monastic context. This process should be facilitated by many of the computerized indexing tools that have been developed over the last two decades, but that work is still incomplete. Finally, the prayerbook, as a private book, was apparently omitted from many of the inventories of monastic collections; women monastics themselves did not always include these manuscripts among the monastery’s books.37 As a result, we can only hypothesize about whether or not the surviving examples that have been identified are representative of what monastic library collections once contained. Even given their numerical predominance, Gebetbücher are but one component of the broad array of devotional literature copied by women scribes. Devotional books of all sorts exist on a sort of continuum in which one genre blends into another. Many contemplative books also contain prayers, for instance, and the subgenres in a particular devotional collection might include sermons, prayers, meditations, spiritual treatises, exempla, legends and vitae, and didactic writings.38 Nevertheless, we can distinguish between prayerbooks, with their largely intercessory focus, and contemplative books more broadly speaking, in which the focus may be on spiritual identity and a personalized exploration of religious ideas; the former are more numerous, but the latter are also an important aspect of monastic scribal activity. Note that as defined here, contemplative books are imagined to be largely collections that include a range of items. Other kinds of literature that might have served as the basis for contemplative reading – mystical treatises, for instance, explications of the psalms or other books of the Bible, or The Paradise of the Soul – have been gathered under different headers for purposes of tracking more closely the specific intellectual/spiritual trends of the era. A third strand of devotional writings deserves special mention. The ‘guides to holy living’ (and holy dying) form an important component of

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devotional literature for nuns. These collections include a number of popular texts, including some of the most widely circulated didactic texts of the period. Kunigund Niclasin of St Katharina’s in Nuremberg, for instance, provided the convent with a copy of the Gesta Romanorum.39 The front cover of the didactic manuscript identifies the Gesta as ‘many good examples’ (vil schöner exempel), and the text’s provisions of morals and allegorical explanations provided interpretive guidance to the reader. Convent scribes often adopted literature that incorporated the metaphor that treats life as a path; the astute reader could use such devotional literature to pick a route that would lead to the desired outcome of heavenly bliss. Adelheid van Lych from the convent of Tertiaries in Lynnich copied Otto of Passau’s immensely popular The 24 Elders or the Golden Throne of Loving Souls, a compilation which describes twenty-four routes to the golden throne awaiting the soul in paradise.40 This kind of writing seeks to guide the reader to a method of leading a good life; often there is a parallel discussion of leading a good death by bearing up patiently under the suffering of this life as a preparation for the life to come. The popularity of this theme in women’s monastic writings crosses international borders; French women’s convents too had a decided preference for this kind of literature.41 Some of the most engaging of these guides to holy living copied by women scribes offer self-reflexive instructions on how to read a text. Katharina Tucherin, for instance, copied William of St Thierry’s Golden Epistle for the St Katharina collection.42 This text, a practical guide to the spiritual life originally addressed to the Carthusians at Mont-Dieu, addresses directly the kinds of reading that monastics were required to do. He differentiates first between attentive study and mere reading: There is the same gulf between attentive study and mere reading as there is between friendship and acquaintance with a passing guest, between boon companionship and chance meeting.43

He implies, of course, that the proper monastic reader would give preference to the former mode of inquiry, using reading as a vehicle for inward devotion: For reading serves the purpose of the intention with which it is done. If the reader truly seeks God in his reading, everything that he reads tends to promote that end, making the mind surrender in the course of the reading and bring all that is understood into Christ’s service.44

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As William describes it, the task of reading when done properly will act as a force for good, changing and improving the mind of the reader who seeks God. The mind will surrender, presumably by leaving distractions behind. Thereafter, the reader will be able to bring an increased understanding ‘into Christ’s service.’ One can become a better servant of God, suggests William, by seeking understanding through the texts one reads. In between these two passages, William offers up three elements of ‘attentive study,’ a sort of how-to guide for devotional reading: Some part of your daily reading should also each day be committed to memory, taken as it were into the stomach, to be more carefully digested and brought up again for frequent rumination; something in keeping with your vocation and helpful to concentration, something that will take hold of the mind and save it from distraction. The reading should also stimulate the feelings and give rise to prayer, which should interrupt your reading: an interruption which should not so much hamper the reading as restore to it a mind ever more purified for understanding.45

Thus, for the monastic reader in particular, memorization was an important first step to reading, for from it followed the second step of ‘rumination,’ ongoing reflection on the text that might occur throughout the day. The third aspect of textual study for William was prayerful interruption, a kind of mental cleansing that would allow the reader mental clarity. Reading, for William, was an ongoing process of engaging with a text, both in the moment when the text was at hand and later as the text percolated through the reader’s understanding of his or her position relative to God. Reading, in other words, served as an important devotional act. The nuns who served as scribes to the various convent libraries evidently felt the same, since devotional literature abounds among the collections. In short, devotional literature in general had a particularly intimate feel about it. Prayers were offered up by the individual directly to the saints, to God, and to other members of the heavenly hierarchy. Contemplative texts turned the reader’s attention inward to consideration of her own position within the continuum of the blessed and the damned. Finally, guides to holy living served the earthly pilgrim in charting her own path towards blessed rewards, found both in earthly insights into and experiences of union with God and in the hoped-for reunion in the hereafter. By compiling these devotional and didactic anthologies, convent scribes chose to emphasize the private aspects of

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devotion, just as liturgical resources supported the public enactment of religious ritual. Books for Table Reading There is a floating category of books which might be used either for private study or for table reading, depending on the habits and practices of a particular convent. The books for table reading are, as Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner has shown, typically in both the vernacular and Latin.46 They encompass a wide array of texts. Formal ‘table reading’ books can be identified in some collections by the written designations they carry. Other convent-produced volumes are less clearly focused, but fall within the categories cited in rules and statutes as appropriate content for table reading. The kinds of writing gathered here in this category are of several sorts. Legends and vitae form one clear category.47 Thirty-nine volumes of vitae come down in copies firmly associated with women scribes; others presumably await scribal identification through comparisons with archival hands. These volumes typically include the writings on many saints, ranging from a few longer treatises on saints of particular import to a convent or order to collections that treat a series of holy men and women in short, precis-like paragraphs. These vitae offer models for holy living as well as the biographical and spiritual-biographical elements that are nominally their first function. They inform the reader/listener about the person under discussion, but also provide clues to the values and methods of spiritually devoted ancestors. Several of the most famous collections of vitae circulated broadly in women’s circles: Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend was as much a part of monastic culture as it was popular with secular courtly circles, and that popularity was sustained throughout the period. The thirteenth-century nun Jutta at the Cistercian women’s house at Alzey, for instance, made a copy of the text in 1294,48 and two centuries later, the well-known copyist Margaretha dicta Regula created the manuscript StraßburgBNU 2542 for the Cistercian women at Lichtenthal. Likewise, the fifteenth-century assemblage Der Heiligen Leben (The Lives of the Saints) was distributed in places like Basel, Salzburg, Straßburg, and Soeflingen. Among the surviving copies prepared for women’s convents, signed contributions by women outnumber those by men. Elselin de Bisel prepared a copy for Unterlinden; Susanna Weglyn prepared a copy for the Soeflingen Clares in 1493 with the assistance of Johannes Kursi; and Dorothea Schurstabin from St Katharina in Nuremberg provided a supplement to the Lives of the Saints in the manuscript copy at Altenhohenau, presumably during the period ca. 1465 when Nuremberg was undertaking

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 115

reform of the latter convent. In contrast, only the Nonnberg Abbey copy was signed by a man; the manuscript was prepared by Udalricus who served as chaplain at Nonnberg (fl. 1453).49 Several of the rules call for ‘edifying writings of the Church Fathers’ to form one component of table reading, and, of course, such copying does occupy some of the efforts of monastic scriptoria. These writings are more often found as short excerpts in florilegia, where the specific author invoked can be hard to tease out, but the thoughts of the early Church Fathers are made known to the women of the convent. There are instances, however, when women scribes, like their male counterparts, copy extended treatises. Augustine, in particular, and Cassian are popular authors with women scribes, and pseudo-Augustine also appears as a standard text in women’s houses. Gregory the Great’s Dialogues were copied in the late fifteenth century by a ‘Schwester Eufraxia,’50 and several collections listed simply as ‘Altvater’ texts by modern bibliographers have also been preserved from among the books in women’s convent libraries. This category of writings was so significant for women monastics’ lives that the organizer and reformer Johannes Meyer calls for a shelf in the monastery library to be devoted to such texts. These were part of the great church tradition, and women monastics as well as men heeded the words of the Fathers of the Church. Theological writings of various sorts complemented the works of the early Christian authors. Explorations of the passion and of the life of Christ were particularly appealing to medieval women scribes, along with catechetical literature more generally. The writings of the Viennese school, for instance, provided access to a kind of intellectually predigested theology that addressed both lay and monastic audiences.51 Heinrich of Langenstein’s The Recognition of Sin was found in St Katharina in Nuremberg in a 1457 copy by Georgius Stromer and in the library of the Salzburg Petersfrauen in a copy by Anna Ammanin, one of the professed nuns of that convent.52 Similarly, Thomas Peuntner’s works circulated regionally within women’s south German and Austrian monastic communities, and at least four signed copies are still extant.53 Other catechetical resources in women’s convent libraries include what Werner WilliamsKrapp describes as ‘elucidations of the Credo, Paternoster, Ave Maria, the secrets of the mass and the Eucharist, as well as teachings on sin or the preparation for death, clear instructions for confession, and similar texts.’54 Theological miscellanies also dot the monastic collections and frequently came with colophons. As I will argue below in chapter 4, the colophon may have served an ‘authorizing’ role in the absence of a single big-name author to whom the texts could be attributed. The status of the

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

abbess who requested the collection or the scribe who took on the copying project helped to vouch for the significance and authority of the works contained therein. Mystical treatises formed an adjunct to the other theological writings copied by convent women. These volumes which, according to shelf marks at least, might be intermingled with the more philosophical explorations of theological issues, form a distinct subgenre within the products of the convent scriptorium. Mystical writings are ubiquitous in convent collections, but signed copies are few in number. Single copies of Mechthild and of Gertrude survive in women’s hands, as does a volume, for instance, of the writings of Ludolf of Saxony. Marquard von Lindau received more attention in women’s circles, with surviving manuscripts known to be copied by women scribes stemming from at least three different convents.55 More popular, however, are the great fourteenthcentury triumvirate of Seuse, Eckhart, and Tauler (though Tauler is represented through sermons and so is categorized below). Of the dozens of surviving copies of Seuse’s The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, a number come with scribal identifications;56 and of Meister Eckhart’s oeuvre, at least fourteen copies were intended for women’s convents including one copied in part by Albertus Sartoris of Biberach for Kirchheim in 1450.57 The majority of mystical treatises copied by women, however, like those of theological collections, are compilations of numerous different authors. The scribes gather materials from many authors as a kind of sampler of mystical thought and directions for spiritual exploration. These manuscripts are typically fairly legible. They avoid the abbreviations common to some of the liturgical manuscripts. Moreover, they are often in the vernacular. They can be used for browsing as well as for more careful study. Adaptable and functional, these manuscripts represent a strong philosophical strand of German monasticism of this later medieval period. Not only writers but also readers were concerned with and engaged with the ideas that the mystics raised. For the reading audience that was not particularly drawn to mystical writing, another strand of intellectual inquiry can be found in the sermon and the hortatory literature. As many women scribes copied sermons as copied mystical treatises, a view that is perhaps at odds with our assumptions about the pervasiveness of mysticism within the broader monastic movement of the period.58 Collections of ‘Predigten’ could form lengthy tomes. Indexing, if any, was casual at best, and the sorting out of which sermons and which authors are represented in which collections in which intellectual circles is a Herculean task. A few favourites emerge from the

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 117

women’s scribal circles. The sermons of Johannes Tauler, those of Stephen Fridolin and Johannes Nider’s 24 Golden Harps were particularly attractive to women scribes.59 Additionally, stories in several different convent chronicles refer to the inspired copying of sermons by a nun who heard them preached.60 In this topos, the nun first hears the sermon, and only later is moved to write the words down. Whether those words were then copied from the notes of the cleric to be preserved within the convent, were newly dictated as a launching point for written circulation, or were crafted from memory by a scribe who had thought long on the subject and was now committing the ideas to parchment for their broader circulation cannot always be determined. What the topos does suggest is that women had choices in what ideas and causes they chose to further through scribal activities. Not all sermons were copied; not all speakers became ‘authors’ in the monastic collections. Women scribes could pick and choose the ideas that held special appeal and so transmit them to a broader audience (of community nuns or of later generations). In other words, through their contributions to the copying of sermon literature, the monastic scribes helped to shape the dialogue that built up over generations of preaching. They were not only listeners to the sermon, but shapers of the sermon tradition.61 The books for spiritual reading account for fully half of the surviving scribal efforts from within convent walls. There are over two hundred books copied by women scribes that fall into this utilitarian but intellectual category of written words. Monastic rules typically demand a few volumes suited for table reading and for books that will be distributed annually for private study during those hours devoted to reading and contemplation, but the wealth of such materials goes well beyond the minimums established in the rules. There is instead a richness of ideas and a multitude of volumes, suggesting that women’s interests helped to drive the creation of these kinds of literature. These are the books that enriched the convent’s spiritual life, just as liturgical books enriched the convent’s ceremonial life. That such a wealth of books survives attests to a vibrant intellectual and spiritual culture within the convent walls. Books for Study There are some books from women’s convents that, clustered together, bespeak the kind of education that convents provided. Apart from the kinds of texts that model the mores and aspirations that convent members deemed appropriate – works such as chronicles and histories, stories

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

of holy lives and holier deaths – there are also some books that were simply ‘textbooks’ for the medieval women who used them. Grammars and vocabulary lists survive from several women’s convents.62 The educational activities at Ebstorf are particularly well served by the surviving convent manuscripts. In the studies of Conrad Borchling, Brigitte UhdeStahl, and Eva Schlotheuber the educational challenges posed by Ebstorf nuns to their novices are revealed clearly.63 The steady progress towards Latin literacy, numeracy, and basic educational standards not so different from our own can be traced in the legacy of written materials copied by teachers and by students in that environment. Two further categories fall in this schema under the category of ‘education’ since they attest to some of the intellectual achievements of the nuns who lived enclosed and isolated lives. The writings of scholastic authors do appear in copies intended by nuns for the members of their own community, though not in the numbers found in male monastery libraries. Women monastics were particularly attracted to the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, to Heinrich of Saint Gall, and to Bonaventura, to judge by the number of surviving treatises, but the works of Durandus, Alexander de Villa Dei, and Heinrich Herp also circulated in these convent circles. What we do not find in these intellectual circles is the exploration of ancient philosophy so prevalent in university circles (and so in theological circles to which men had access). Nuns deal in a very different way with the past; their focus is on inward learning rather than outward ratiocination. Their intellectual credentials are neither as broad as their male peers nor as firmly founded. It is apparent that nuns read broadly rather than deeply. Modern thinkers might bemoan their lack of access to university learning and speculative thinking. At the time, there was a sense of excitement over those issues and topics that were available to the women who copied and read these books; it is not appropriate to denigrate their accomplishments by arguing over what they might have achieved in a different intellectual environment. That we have chosen to privilege male learning of the era as the central facet of medieval learning reveals more about our own priorities and values than it does about the inner life and aspirations of the women monastics for whom the rules of enclosure and the foci of learning were a given of community structure. The other area of educational materials are what we would now call the ‘literary’ resources found in some convent libraries. Poetry and song circulated within convent circles just as they did in the circles of their non-monastic sisters. Albrecht Classen has argued that some of the poetic miscellanies of the late medieval German culture serve as witness

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 119

to a distinctive feminine tradition in these arts.64 The glimpses of monastic contributions to such genres in the writing of Helfta, for instance, provide suggestions that these women too grew up knowing of and loving the gifts of language and of song that enriched daily life. Plays and epics too became part of the continuities of culture that necessarily happen when educated families retain connections to their literate daughters within the convent environment. The literature and the other educational materials are roughly a sixth of the surviving convent materials copied by women. These resources could easily be classified as ‘non-monastic’ for they are not necessary for either the liturgical or the spiritual devotional practice to which these women had dedicated their lives. Nevertheless, it is interesting that even women enclosed from the world enjoyed the intellectual ‘outings’ of a good book, of great literature, and of profound thought that circulated within the broader culture in which they lived. They may have been apart from the world, but these women monastic scribes did not altogether reject the world. Books are part of the material evidence that bears witness to the kinds of aspirations these women had. They devoted their life to prayer, to contemplation, and to liturgical actions; their books include the spiritual and devotional literature as well as the liturgical resources for community services. These nuns and canonesses did not, however, exist in a vacuum. They still remained part of and participated actively in the circulation of ideas and of literary works. They were able to pick and choose the selections and the authors whose ideas and words, whose intellectual, spiritual, or aesthetic efforts were particularly inspirational. In short, they were able to copy the works that spoke loudest to them. In so doing, they shaped the exposure of their fellow monastics to the broader world of literature and ideas. Through the books they copied, these women scribes also shaped the discourse of future generations of readers and writers who themselves browsed the shelves of the monastic library. Genres and Gender: Who Copied What As stated above, women scribes copied books that ranged in content across the library holdings. While the 147 liturgical books that have been identified to date formed a significant component of the contributions signed by women scribes, the 211 books of spiritual readings copied by women that have survived to the present day actually comprised a larger proportion of the self-identified efforts of convent members. Erudite literature, including both materials that were specifically educational and

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

the literary and scholastic legacies of medieval thought, for a total of fiftyfive surviving manuscripts in a woman’s hand, was a smaller adjunct to these more specifically liturgical and devotional books. The discussion that follows assesses the proportion of copying effort devoted to each category of books according to gender. The discussion must, however, be hedged around in caveats. The manuscripts that survive may not be representative of what monasteries once had; indeed, there is likely to be a bias towards the nicer, more elegant manuscripts that may have been deemed ‘worthy’ of preservation. Moreover, the number of manuscripts that can be classed according to the gender of the scribe remains small enough that the identification of a few more manuscripts might easily change the weighting of the subcategories. Finally, the presence of a large group of manuscripts of unspecified contents – nearly a fifth of the collection, both for those manuscripts copied by women and in the collections as a whole – suggests that the categories of modern-day bibliographers are not always adequate to the uniquely personalized contents of the medieval manuscript.65 A medieval manuscript could be and often was an assemblage of many different kinds of texts. Only those ‘miscellanies’ in which texts of one particular type predominated have been included in the assessment offered here. Given such constraints, what do the categories reveal? Table 3.2 shows an analysis of the distribution of manuscript production by category and by gender. It draws on the author’s private database of known convent manuscripts, which is in turn largely based on published library catalogues, on Sigrid Krämer’s Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelalters, and on references to scribal identifications in the secondary literature.66 As can be seen, this table categorizes all non-archival manuscripts into three broad headings: liturgical, spiritual, and erudite. The numerical tallies for these categories are listed in bold. Table 3.2 also provides an indication of the proportional representation within each gender grouping of the various subcategories such as devotional literature, legends and vitae, writings of the Church Fathers, and the like. One of the significant observations here confirms an impression held by most modern-day readers who have browsed through medieval library holdings, and that is that liturgical books often go unsigned. Whereas there is a relatively close balance between the liturgical books and the spiritual volumes that stem from women’s convents overall (shown in the right-hand side of the first column as figures in bold on table 3.2; they represent 42.1 per cent and 45.7 per cent of the total surviving collection, respectively), the liturgical manuscripts are under-represented

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 121 Table 3.2 Distribution of manuscript production1 Kind of book

Distribution of total surviving mss2

Distribution of mss copied by women 2

Liturgical

1346

(42.1%)

147

(35.6%)

56

(23.0%)

63

(2.0%)

6

(1.5%)

8

(3.3%)

530 173 89 269

(16.6%) (5.4%) (2.8%) (8.4%)

72 39 10 39

(17.4%) (9.4%) (2.4%) (9.4%)

47 12 7 49

(19.2%) (4.9%) (2.9%) (20.1%)

173 162 1396

(5.4%) (5.1%) (45.7%)

25 20 211

(6.1%) (4.8%) (51.1%)

19 10 152

(7.8%) (4.1%) (62.3%)

162 131 60 37 390

(5.1%) (4.1%) (1.9%) (1.2%) (12.2%)

18 10 21 6 55

(4.4%) (2.4%) (5.1%) (1.5%) (13.3%)

16 8 10 2 36

(6.6%) (3.3%) (4.1%) (0.8%) (14.8%)

Biblical (excludes evangeliaries and lectionaries) Devotional and didactic Legends and vitae Church Fathers Theological and catechetical texts Mystic/ascetic literature Sermons Subtotal: Spiritual readings Educational texts Rules, statutes, etc. Scholastic authors Literature Subtotal: Erudite literature Total mss

3195

413

Distribution of mss copied by men2

244

1 This table includes only those books from women’s convents for which contents have been ascertained – some 3195 manuscripts from roughly 400 convent libraries. Roughly 20 per cent of these manuscripts can also be categorized by the gender of the scribe. Manuscripts of an archival nature and miscellanies that cut across several of these broad categories have been excluded from consideration. The figure for Bibles excludes the many evangeliaries and lectionaries counted among the liturgical books. The figures for sermons are artificially low since sermons by mystics have been grouped in the category of mystic/ascetic literature; the figures for educational texts are likewise depressed since psalters, the focus of several different kinds of study, have been included only under the broader heading of ‘liturgical books’ and not as educational materials. The first column of figures reflects the distribution of manuscript types across 3195 surviving manuscripts from convent libraries. The last two columns of figures reflect the distribution of manuscript types within the specified gender, measured both in numbers of manuscripts produced and (in parentheses) as a percentage of books produced by scribes of that gender. A more in-depth analysis of convent libraries can be found in the author’s work in progress, Libraries, Learning and Liturgies: Books for Nuns and Canonesses in Late Medieval Germany. 2 Percentages refer to the proportion of manuscripts in a given category to the total number of manuscripts copied by scribes of that same gender.

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

among the signed efforts of both female and male copyists, and spiritual readings show a corresponding rise in frequency. That so few liturgical books were signed by scribes of either gender (and the corresponding observation that spiritual readings form a disproportionately high percentage of copying efforts as signed by scribes) probably reflects the traditional anonymity of liturgical manuscripts. In earlier centuries, the vast majority of liturgical sources of all types remained unsigned. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, scribal colophons gradually became, if not common, at least unexceptional. Even in the fifteenth century, however, the number of unsigned liturgical manuscripts continued to outnumber the signed ones. The proportion of copying devoted to liturgical books by scribes overall must have been around 40 per cent; that both women and men show a lower proportion, then, is partly a matter of the nature of liturgical manuscripts. Even given the bias against signing liturgical manuscripts, however, the proportion of liturgical manuscripts signed by men is notably lower than the proportion signed by women. Instead of making up nearly half of the surviving manuscripts, the liturgical manuscripts signed by men form less than a quarter of the corpus of manuscripts produced by men overall. This marked underrepresentation of liturgical manuscripts among the work of male scribes suggests, though it does not prove, that more liturgical manuscripts were produced in-house than were farmed out to outside male scribes. This fits with what we know from stories of liturgical reform, which often feature convent women fixing or replacing older, outdated liturgical manuscripts. Indeed, whenever content women were capable of copying liturgical manuscripts, it made better economic sense to produce the manuscripts without paying outside male professionals. Thus, it seems likely that liturgical manuscripts were often the products of the very convents that needed them. Curiously, it is not the psalters, processionals, and obsequiales that are most often signed by women as scribes; rather it is the antiphonals and graduals, where roughly 20 per cent of the surviving convent manuscripts were actually signed by their women scribes. One wonders if a bit of boasting was going on; these are among the most complicated books to copy, and among the most heavily devoted to musical texts. It took special professional-level training to copy the elaborate liturgical manuscripts, and the women might well have laid claims to that effort. (A more extensive discussion of monastic motivations can be found in chapter 5.) The absence of such scribal signatures on the liturgical manuscripts that were more likely to be treated as private books is more

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 123

puzzling. Flyleaves and front pages of psalters, processionals, and obsequiales frequently sport ownership inscriptions, and these manuscripts were often ‘updated’ by many hands over the course of several years. The relative anonymity of these scribal offerings, then, is a conundrum, but one that is in keeping with a broader context in which liturgical manuscripts are by habit underrepresented among the signed products of scribal culture. A second major oddity in the reported assessment of library contents is the low number of books, either signed or unsigned, explicitly devoted to educational pursuits. This should not be taken to imply a low regard for novices within the institutional system of women’s monasticism. There are numerous documents that allude to education, training, and convent schools sponsored by women’s houses from German-speaking lands. Instead, the perceived de-emphasis on books for learning reflects ways in which we moderns talk about schooling. We often seek out educational material that forms a parallel with our modern-day textbooks for discussion. We tend, as well, to expect texts specifically aimed at the beginner and look for curricular guides for the beginner. Monastic educational materials, however, come in several guises. The straightforward volumes are those listed on table 3.2 as educational texts. Grammars and vocabularies, books on computus and on the seven liberal arts, even the occasional medical and law book stem from women’s convents. The holdings of Ebstorf are particularly significant, for the collection there retains a significant number of student books, several of which demonstrate the same rocky path to Latin literacy as our modern student might experience. Some study materials, then, form close parallels to the materials used in modern educational methods. Other categories of books, however, might also have an educational function. Psalters, for instance, are manuscripts of dual or triple function. Sources for liturgical performance, they are often grouped (as they are here) among the liturgical resources of the convent. Psalters are also singled out by monastic rules as appropriate for special study, and monastics who have not yet learned the psalms are directed in the Benedictine Rule (RB 8.3) to focus their private reading on mastering this important corpus of texts. Psalters also served as a focus for meditation and for study and dissection; commentaries on the psalms form an ancillary literature that could be used to expand understanding and track themes through a wide range of religious literature. We should assume that an individual psalter could serve many purposes, and that education was one such purpose. The hortatory literature too is often explicitly about self-improvement; it is

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

educational in intent and persuasive in style. Similarly, guides to holy living form a significant component of women monastics’ collections. These multifaceted approaches to study and to learning demonstrate that education in the convent should be understood to be an ongoing task that continues throughout life. The discussions in the various monastic rules about reading and study privilege book reading above other forms of pursuits. It is the job of the convent book collection to support that mission. And indeed, if one counts together the basic educational texts, psalter, hortatory literature, and guides to holy living, in toto roughly one third of materials that survive from monastic libraries directly supported the educational mission of convent life. It is readily apparent that among non-liturgical works devotional literature took up the lion’s share of women’s scribal effort, followed by legends and vitae and by theological texts. The parity between vitae and theological texts among the works of these women scribes is at odds with their distribution in the collection overall. The number of manuscripts containing vitae, thirty-nine, is more than half again as many as we might have expected if the work produced by women scribes had followed the overall distribution patterns for surviving convent manuscripts. Such popularity for signed collections of legends and vitae cuts across temporal boundaries and across monastic orders. Surviving copies of vitae prepared by women scribes date from all three centuries under consideration and from each of the major orders. It is not clear, however, whether this unexpectedly high representation of vitae among the corpus of manuscripts copied by women reflects a preference among convent scribes for copying this kind of material, or whether it reflects a scribal propensity on the part of convent women to sign these kinds of manuscripts, or whether it merely reflects a pattern of survival rate for this kind of manuscript. I suspect that the presence of so many signed copies of vitae serves a memorial function. Just as the vitae commemorate past members of the church or the convent, so too the scribe herself will someday join the group of those remembered in prayer. As will be discussed below (chapter 5), the scribes often specifically requested remembrance by using requests such as ‘pray for me’ and ‘may her soul rest in peace.’ These requests are markedly different from the kinds of formulas that are more widely distributed, such as those discussed in Lucien Reynhout’s Formules latines de colophons, and so I suggest that in signing these manuscripts the nuns were self-consciously entering into a kind of economy of salvation.

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 125

Numerically, the popularity of devotional literature, vitae, and theological writings accounts for more than a third of women monastics’ securely attributed scribal activity, roughly equivalent to the amount of effort devoted to liturgical copying. The other categories are somewhat smaller in their impact, though no less important to monastic intellectual life. Mystic and ascetic literature and sermons account for another tenth of the copying efforts of these women scribes, on a par with the overall prevalence of such writings in the surviving convent literature. Curiously, signed copies of scholastic writings come next in frequency of preservation, notably out of line with the presence of this literature in collections overall. Many more scholastic texts are signed by women that we would predict given the relatively small portion of such manuscripts which survive from convent libraries. Finally, the other kinds of writing pursued by women monastics themselves – educational texts, writings of the Church Fathers, rules and statutes, literature, and Bibles – cover the entire range of texts that have been preserved from convent libraries. Women copied texts of all sorts, and they copied them in numbers that suggest that in-house copying of manuscripts performed by members of the convent community may well have been a late medieval norm. Men’s offerings to women’s convents are weighted quite differently from either the efforts of their female colleagues from inside the convent or the surviving collections overall. In particular, men signed significantly fewer liturgical books for women’s houses than we might have anticipated. These kinds of books make up less than a quarter of the books known to have been copied by men for convent libraries. Even given the limited presence of signed liturgical manuscripts overall, this number is dramatically low. It suggests that men may not have been the scribes of choice for liturgical books, and that monastic women may have looked to their sisters to find a copyist for liturgical books when they could. Here, however, we enter the realm of speculation, however, for 85 per cent of the surviving liturgical books cannot be associated with scribes of either gender. Other than the markedly low representation of liturgical manuscripts, most other categories of texts copied for women’s convents by male scribes show rough parity with the presence of such volumes in the collections overall, with two exceptions. Theological texts, as the single highest category of books copied by men other than the specifically liturgical manuscripts, form a disproportionately large segment of the male-produced manuscripts. Indeed, this is the only category of books produced in which the number of codices by male scribes substantially surpasses those by women. Scholastic texts are also out of kilter, being

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

more prevalent than predicted among the manuscripts signed by men. In short, male scribes who worked for women’s convents produced a disproportionately high number of learned texts.67 What is particularly significant, however, is that they did so at one particular historical period. Of the fifty-nine learned texts represented by the theological and scholastic writings copied by men, the numbers of manuscripts jump from seven in the first generation of the fifteenth century to twenty-seven manuscripts preserved from the middle of the fifteenth century. That is, almost half the surviving learned texts copied by men for women’s convents were copied in a single generation. Since we know that this same generation of the 1430s to 1460s witnessed a new drive towards spiritual and educational reforms (above, p. 12), we can speculate that these manuscripts may have been ordered specifically to serve this renewed spirit of educated monasticism brought forth through the Bursfelder Union and the Windesheim reforms. Chronological Considerations: Copying Endeavours across the Black Death We can tell from library inventories that manuscript collections in German women’s convents were both valued and valuable. Table 3.3 assembles some of the information to be gleaned from inventory records. Mostly what we see are records of loss. A library of fifty-one manuscripts dwindles down to six; a library of two hundred volumes has left us only thirty-five. But note too the implicit story of triumph here. We have records here of eight libraries that once had fifty or more manuscripts, and several that run in the hundreds. If one has confined one’s familiarity with women’s monastic manuscripts to single houses, each with a paltry handful of known manuscripts, the idea of the wealth invested by these women’s houses in their manuscript holdings is revelatory, for it suggests that women’s houses, like men’s, participated in the world of church-focused learning that was such an important part of the Middle Ages. It will be noted that several of the larger inventories for women’s houses date from a few years to a generation after the reform of the convent. Much has been made of the place of manuscript production within the Observant reforms of the fifteenth century. Werner Williams-Krapp, for instance, has characterized the fourteenth century in terms of an ‘explosion’ of the production of texts and the fifteenth as an ‘explosion’ of their delivery.68 It is true that many more manuscripts survive from the fifteenth century than from the fourteenth, and

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 127 Table 3.3 Sample of library inventories from women’s houses in German-speaking regions Monastery and Order

Date of inventory

Total mss mentioned in inventory

Surviving mss

Kochel, OSB

11th c.

21 ‘biblische und liturgische bande’

Wessobrunn, OSB

?

45 books

Kirchheim am Ries, OCist

1436

ca. 50 volumes

Lippoldsberg, OSB

?

51 mss

6

S. Marien [Gandersheim], OSB

1477

52 titles: 44 misc and 8 liturgical

3

Wienhausen, OCist

1474-Ref.

80 books given by 27 people

16

11 1 86

Wonnenstein, Frans

early 16th

110 German mss.

Günterstal, OCist

1457

ca. 200 volumes

35

7

St Katharina in St Gall, OP

1484

255 books: 185 Latin and 70 German

19

St Katharina in Nuremberg, OP

1455–61

ca. 600 volumes

472

NOTE: This table is organized on the basis of inventory size (from smaller to larger collections). It includes roughly a quarter of the surviving inventories and booklists for women’s houses that were completed prior to the Reformation (information drawn from Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz and Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs). The information on surviving manuscripts is drawn from my own database.

a steady upward trend with a mid-fifteenth century jump might be said to characterize manuscript production within women’s circles. Yet caution should be used in assessing what our surviving manuscript numbers actually mean. We take our measures, of course, in the face of great manuscript losses. David d’Avray’s recent work, for instance, postulates a much higher degree of manuscript loss during the later Middle Ages than has been assumed in the past, and by extension he speculates that many more books were copied than we have assumed. He grounds his suppositions on the observation that ‘any book owned by a private individual was vulnerable to time, whether the individual was lay or clerical.’ The survival rate for ‘pocket books, functional, without pictures, often probably in loose quires, written in scripts illegible to many if not most early modern literate people’ would, he suggests, have been as low as those of incunables of the same period.69 And, indeed, we find that the

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evidence for manuscript copying is not univalent. As Sara Poor notes, the ‘convent of Töß near Zurich, for example, never embraced reform, but nevertheless had a library and a scriptorium, and was active in the production and exchange of vernacular devotional literature.’70 What, then, can we make of the patterns of book production and book survival from this late medieval era? The thirteenth century had witnessed a blossoming of copying activity in several different women’s houses. Alison Beach’s studies of Wessobrunn, Admont, and Schäftlarn show the emergence of an active scribal culture in isolated convents during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.71 What makes the fourteenth century distinct is that the total of known scribes grows so rapidly from the double handful of thirteenth-century women scribes to six times that number within the fourteenth century proper, and nearly eight times that number by the early fifteenth century. Table 3.4, which addresses both musical and non-musical book copyists, shows the growth in the number of named women scribes – and that is what makes such a dramatic difference for tallies of women scribes. The first generation of the fourteenth century seemingly retains thirteenth-century practices, only occasionally claiming manuscripts through colophon or through other attestations of scribal activity, and half of the manuscripts they claim are liturgical resources. Over the remainder of the century, however, naming conventions differ. Other genres were increasing in number and were increasingly ‘claimed’ by scribal colophon. Manuscripts of legends and vitae, in particular, often provided the scribe’s name either in her own hand or in the hand of a fellow conventual. The increase in this kind of literature contributes in a substantial way to the putative increase in women’s scribal activities. In all, nearly eighty women scribes can be identified and assigned a specific generation during the period from 1300 to 1425 alone. Curiously, there is no directly observable change to book copying patterns after the Black Death. As can be seen on table 3.4, there is little difference between the middle and the end of the fourteenth century, and even the early fifteenth century conforms to roughly the same patterns of distribution. Both Frediswindis de Malborch and Loppa von Spiegel, for example, copy liturgical books before and after the Black Death.72 Likewise, of thirty-six datable or near-datable manuscripts of the mid-fourteenth century, half fall on each side of the Black Death, and the balance of genres remains steady. Indeed, liturgical manuscripts continue to make up roughly half of the surviving monastic codices,

The Content of Convent Manuscripts 129 Table 3.4 Known German women monastic scribes by generation, 1300–1525 Period

Total no. of Women Scribes

Named Scribes

9

Unnamed Scribes (Feminine Gender)

Early 14th c.

12

3

Mid-14th c.

18

18

0

Late 14th c.

17

16

1

14th c. (generic)

12

10

2

Early 15th c.

20

18

2

Total

79

71

8

suggesting that there was no dramatic change to patterns of monastic book copying presaged by the Black Death itself.73 The picture is different when we examine the fifteenth century. Table 3.5 provides statistics for overall manuscript production in women’s scriptoria during the late Middle Ages in toto (the boldface line), in the long fourteenth century (the second line down), and then in a series of generations. The tallies are divided into total manuscripts, liturgical manuscripts, spiritual manuscripts, and erudite manuscripts. Note that production of signed manuscripts overall increases markedly in the middle of the fifteenth century but then apparently levels off at the turn of the sixteenth century, perhaps in the face of an increase in the availability of incunabula. What is curious is that the mid-fifteenth-century increase does not correlate directly with the spread of Observant reform. While further research on reformed houses – and on houses that refuse reform – is necessary, eighteen houses that are not known to have adopted Observant reforms have four or more active women scribes, and together these houses preserve 107 signed manuscripts. To the idea of reform, then, we must conjoin the motivator of a basic increase in literacy. Pragmatic literacy is known to have increased broadly in society during the fifteenth century, and particularly among the noble and well-to-do women who inhabit the wealthier women’s cloisters.74 So too, there was a perceived social need for books, which led to the expansion of books for the laity as well as for cloistered monastics that took place during these same three generations of the fifteenth century.75 In short, the changes to manuscript creation, and to patterns of colophon use, reflect multiple social shifts during a tumultuous century.

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Table 3.5 Manuscript Holdings from Women’s Scriptoria: Genre versus Generation Period or Generation:

Total mss by women scribes

Liturgical mss by women scribes

Spiritual mss by women scribes

Erudite mss by women scribes

Contents unknown

13th c.– 1525

595

105

296

43

151

14th c. – 1425

84

26

33

9

17

early 14th c.

15

6

1

3

5

mid-14th c.

18

7

5

2

4

late 14th c.

18

3

11

3

1

14th c. (general)

12

4

3

0

5

early 15th c.

21

6

13

1

2

mid-15th c.

131

29

63

10

29

late 15th c.

185

20

96

14

55

82

13

52

4

13

112

17

52

6

37

15th c. (general) early 16th c.

Summary statistics for the broad sweep from ca. 1200 to ca. 1525 are given in row 1 (bold); subtotals for the ‘long 14th century’ are provided as row 2. The bottom portion of the table provides detailed information by individual generation. Liturgical manuscripts principally include antiphonals and graduals, breviaries and psalters, rituals, processionals, and obsequials. Spiritual manuscripts include Bibles, devotional and didactic literature, legends and vitae, Church Fathers, theological and catechetical texts, mystic and ascetic literature, and sermons. Erudite manuscripts include educational texts, rules and statutes, scholastic authors, and poems and plays. Gaps in modern-day cataloguing have resulted in a significant number of manuscripts by women scribes for which contents are unknown. Note that statistics here count manuscripts, while those of tables 3.4 addressed individual scribes.

Conclusion Among the signed manuscripts that survive from women’s convent libraries, women copied significantly more manuscripts than men did. Thus, we should think very carefully before attributing an unsigned manuscript from a woman’s convent to a presumptive male scribe: women were capable of and active in the reproduction of the written texts which were so important to convent life in all its facets. Second, women scribes copied at least some manuscripts in all of the genres found among surviving manuscripts from women’s convent libraries.

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Thus, monastic women as a group demonstrably had access to the texts themselves and to the training necessary to copy those texts. This suggests a greater breadth of intellectual attainment on the part of German women monastics overall than had been recognized heretofore in the literature. The stories of uneducated and untrained nuns, while sometimes true in the specific, should not be taken as generally true for nuns and canonesses of this late medieval era.76 Moreover, in-house scribal activity continually increased over the course of the three and a half centuries under consideration. The fourteenth century was not, in fact, a period of great decline, at least as far as book production was concerned, though book provisions were eventually outpaced by fifteenth-century copying endeavours, suggesting that the monastic reforms of the fifteenth century had a measurable impact on book production. Intellectual and spiritual needs may have shaped the amount of effort put into the creation of books for internal use in any given generation. Finally, among the signed manuscripts that survive from women’s convents, there are distinctions to be drawn in the balance among the different genres, a balance which seems to depend on the gender of the scribe. Such distinctions might well have reflected a mandate on the part of the monastic hierarchy; that is, they may have reflected institutional decisions on when to produce a manuscript in-house and when to turn to outside resources. Thus, it is doubly significant that liturgical books are particularly limited in the signed output of male scribes. The most logical hypothesis to explain this finding is the simplest: presumably more women than men undertook the task of copying these crucial monastic resources for women’s houses. Women scribes also saw a decided preference for legends and vitae, weighing in at almost twice the expected number. Male scribes, on the other hand, offered women’s convents a substantial portion of the theological texts that are now extant from convent libraries, partly as a result of a mid-fifteenthcentury efflorescence of such contributions, perhaps in support of monastic reforms. Both genders proffered a significantly higher proportion of signed codices containing the works of scholastic authors than one would predict given the place of such works in convent libraries overall, suggesting that these manuscripts held a special place within the world of literate texts.

4 Scribe as Individual

What Scribes Tell Us In modern parlance, the colophon is that portion of the book that gives information about its publication. So too in medieval times the scribe offered up a kind of finishing touch to a manuscript or a section of a manuscript through some sort of inscription separate from the content of the text itself. A colophon, then, is a kind of scribal signature, as well as a marker of either intent or closure. Colophons appear variously at the front of volumes (where some might argue that they are not actually colophons properly speaking but rather merely inscriptions, a distinction which seems pedantic given the commonalities of content and of formula in their texts), at the ends of sections, and at the conclusion of the work. They vary in content, in language, in style, and in degree of humour and level of detail involved. Marc Drogin’s Anathema, for instance, gives an engaging account of the kinds and scope of scribal curses built into such signatures, and Wilhelm Wattenbach’s Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter laid the groundwork for such research fully a century earlier.1 These curses function mostly as threats against anyone who would steal, alienate, or alter the book in hand. ‘Qui culpat carmen sit maledictus, Amen,’ says one such saying (who finds fault with the songs [psalms], let him be accursed, Amen).2 Or, ‘Hunc qui furetur anathematis esse necetur’ (Who steals this, may he be killed as one accursed).3 Or again, ‘May whoever steals or alienates this book, or mutilates it, be cut off from the body of the church and held as a thing accursed, an object of loathing.’4 Other colophons offer up recipes, describe storms or pestilence, and lay before us other hum-drum or compelling details of daily life.

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Central to the scribal colophon is some idea of the closure of the copying process. Though the modern cataloguer typically treats the scribal colophon as distinct from the material of the explicit, in fact the two often run together visually, for both typically adopt a shift of ink colour (perhaps to red ink) or of text size or style to make them stand apart from the principal text being transmitted. Both explicits and colophons are add-ons that provide information to help one to situate the text. This could be a service to the reader who had just finished the book, a reminder of what the text was and whence it came. Such information could also be of assistance to that group of medieval readers who bore an uncanny resemblance to our modern-day browsers, for the explicit and colophon together provide the medieval equivalent of a modern book-jacket blurb. The explicit gives a kind of formal conclusion to the text; it often provides a reference to a title or at least a brief summation, and it also typically names the author if authorial identity is important. In short, it tells the readers something about the contents of the text being transmitted. The colophon proper, on the other hand, gives information about the copying endeavour: the when, where, and who of the scribal undertaking. It provides information about the context in which the book came to be created. Both explicit and colophon would have been useful to a medieval browser who was attempting to find an appropriate text to read, but it is the colophon portion that tends to draw our modern-day scholarly attention, for it provides valuable clues to manuscript provenance.5 Many colophons are individualized – even idiosyncratic – yet they are also prone to overreliance on clichés. Many of the manuscripts of European creation of the High and late Middle Ages reveal scribal habits that span generation and geographic boundaries. In-jokes and hackneyed formulas appear time and again.6 The scribes who wrote, or at least compiled, these treasure troves of information situate that data amid wellworn themes of hard work, of joy at completion, and of rewards for a job well done. After reading a few thousand colophons, one gets the sense that all too few medieval scribes chose to say anything either original or pertinent, for manuscript upon manuscript shares the same verbiage, and some even string together a series of verbal formulas in the exact same order. The colophons examined here, however, are selected to offer more information than the mere cliché itself. Rather than merely lodging a complaint about an achy back or providing a brief praise to God, the colophons at the centre of this study offer up information that nowadays

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would belong in the journalist’s toolkit, an identification of the time, place, or person(s) involved in the copying, stressing for the medieval reader, as well as the modern, the connection of the manuscript with the convent women for whom it was created. Time As part of their authenticating apparatus, colophons for manuscripts from women’s convents often reveal information about the timing of the copying endeavour. Roughly 250 of the manuscripts copied by women scribes, for instance, give a specific year in which the volume was completed, typically in roman or, less frequently, in arabic numerals.7 These dates should always be taken with an element of caution; the scribe might copy the date of a treatise or the date provided by the exemplar, for instance.8 In general, however, the kind of information provided seems to privilege the copying effort over authorial production, for the citation of year or season, of ruler, or of convent leader offers a temporal positioning of a particular exemplar rather than an identification of the relationship of that exemplar to the period(s) of the authors contained therein.9 In addition to reckoning time calendrically, scribes could also measure time according to a particular significant individual. Some colophons omit the year altogether but indicate that they were copied ‘at the time of’ a particular abbess, prioress, or ‘Maisterin.’ The tenure of someone as monastic leader did indeed provide a kind of chronological assignment that fits the production of a manuscript into a particular span of years; in that sense, her name could serve in lieu of numerical year. This is akin to the numbering of years based on the reign of a king or a duke in other calendrical citations. But such does not seem to have been the principal purpose behind name-dropping of this sort, for often the name of abbess or prioress appears alongside the roman numerals that count the elapsed years since Christ’s birth. In the dated colophon especially, it may not have been so much the built-in redundancy of dating systems as the measure of authority and importance that a respected figure, reflected through subject-verb wording, might provide; her name and her involvement legitimates the text in question. Thus, when a scribe such as Laurence of Weda asserts that ‘Lysa of Ermiberch, prioress of the monastery of nuns in Engelport procured the copying of this martyrology,’10 the colophon provides not only a temporal positioning of the manuscript but also a religious leader’s

Scribe as Individual 135

imprimatur for the copying in question. Monastic manuscripts were particularly prone to mentioning the convent leadership as part of their apparatus for positioning the manuscript in time since it was often the leaders who sanctioned or even requested such copying.11 Scribal colophons give other details that might also help the modern scholar to reconstruct the timing of the copyist’s project. They might mention big events, either disasters or happy occurrences, events that were likely to have resonance for the inhabitants of the convent who were steeped in its history. Colophons from women’s convents variously list such events as a great storm, the arrival of the plague, a fire, or the exile of a community, or the occasional happy event such as the birth of an heir to the throne.12 Such events can frequently be mapped back to a specific occasion or a range of time in which the copying must have taken place. The knowledgeable reader might even find such measurements of the past more helpful than the calendar date. Just as we tend to fix things in our memory on the basis of particular events (9/11, to name a recent one, or the birth of a child), the medieval thinker too reconstructed a chronology on the basis of memorable events. The scribe, then, who mentions an event and not a year might play into local schemas of temporal memory more effectively than the scribe who relies on mere numbers to convey a sense of when the book copying took place. Knowledge of the past was different in the days before the Times Square hoopla, which now marks the turn of the calendar year. Events were often more important to medieval scribes than were the numerical indicators of calendrical time. Indeed, the more important element of timing for the scribe who constructed a colophon was not the calendar year and its mapping onto secular chronological time of events through history, but rather the place of the book copying within sacred time, that is, the place of the book in relationship to the liturgical calendar. Monastic manuscripts, or at least women’s monastic manuscripts, even more than their secular counterparts, nearly always cite the copying dates with reference to the feast day on which the copying was completed (and perhaps when it began). Kunigund Niclasin and Elpert Swertin, for example, completed a copy of Dietrich of Apolda’s Life of St Dominic in ‘the year that one numbers 1436 on the eve of the birth of Our Lady,’ or 7 September.13 The relative predominance of major feast days as the citation of the date on which the manuscript or section was ended suggests that the canny scribe might indeed pace out the writing in order for the completion to fall on a date that was of personal or community significance.

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

Curiously, a number of manuscripts forego the year in favour of the feast day, which suggests that at least it was the place of the book in God’s calendar that mattered most to the scribe who composed the text of the colophon. The mention of a particular saint’s day places the manuscript in an annual cycle of memory and remembrance. A similar combination of specificity and vagueness in dating can be seen in the sisterbooks of this era. While sister-books might record the feast day on which a convent sister died – and even the hour of the day – they almost always leave unmentioned her place within the generations of the past. The deceased nun was still present in the prayers of the convent, and the reader might need to know when in the convent calendar to call her forebearer to mind, but there was little need for historical comparisons. For manuscripts too, the construction of a historical schema spanning years or decades seems less important to the scribe than the measurement of work by the convent calendar. This is, to some extent, a matter of common sense. That the work extended over a particular portion of the year mattered very much to the person undertaking the labour.14 Was it two months or seven? From feast X to feast Y or feast Z? The scribe had less interest in the details of which calendar year she had finished. (After all, no matter when her work was completed, it would always have been, from her perspective, ‘this year’s work.’) Given their concerns about time, scribes of colophons seem to be providing a context for the manuscript to the reader who might later come to use it. Colophons that indicate a span of months devoted to copying, for instance, make implicit claims about the care and labour put into the project of book copying. Colophons can also reassure a reader that the material is up to date. The book might post-date a monastic reform, for instance, or have been copied at a time of special intellectual achievement within the convent. Time matters in part because it tells the reader the circumstances under which the book was copied and gives that reader a tool to evaluate the material that she now has to hand. Place In addition to the time, the place of book copying is often mentioned in the scribal colophons of the late Middle Ages. In some of the humanist manuscripts of this period, and indeed, in some of the university manuscripts that stem from the early part of the period, the mere mention of city might suffice for the scribal colophon in question. Monastic manuscripts, however, at least women’s monastic manuscripts, tend to adopt

Scribe as Individual 137

institutional identifiers as they list the place of copying. Someone might mention the monastery in which the book is copied without identifying the identity of the copyist at all. Of course, many monasteries have several nicknames over the course of a century or two. The same convent might be known by its saints, by order, by a geographic name, by a common street name, and by three or four radically variant spellings. Nevertheless, it is a help for provenance hunters to be given what clues are available. Similarly in a few manuscripts, we have mention not only of the name of the convent in which the book is copied, but also the identity of the scribe as being foreign to that place. The scribe copying in exile or the visitor may well draw that status to the reader’s attention. Steterburg nun Alheydem Kalves copied ‘in the Wienhausen convent during the exile from our monastery.’15 Reforming nuns too, who were sent from their homes to assist in the imposition of Observant reforms, are often known to have served as scribes, their written words reinforcing their verbal directions and their lived demonstration of the new lifestyle, new religious practices, and new liturgy.16 Margareta Merin, for instance, travelled from Colmar to Sylo and eventually to Engelport zu Gebweiler, where she was both reformer and the convent’s first Observant prioress. She was also famous for copying large choirbooks.17 Being from afar seems to have given the scribe a bit of cachet, an authority by virtue of hardships endured. Of course, for many monastic manuscripts, the place of the monastic order is spelled out through colophon language. The identity of the order might be important for some kinds of liturgical books, but not germane to a number of books in other genres that nonetheless draw attention to convent affiliation. Agnes Bützlin, for instance, identifies herself as Clarissan in a Passion of 1497;18 Brother Thomas Finck specifies that his copy of Seven Daily Meditations was made for Helena von Hürnheim, ‘Maisterin’ of the ‘gotshuss ursprung sant Benedictiner ordens’;19 and the small collection of vitae contributed by Martha Peurlin in 1466 was specifically intended for the ‘Dominican cloister (prediger ordens) of Heiligen Grab next to Bamberg.’20 The pattern of feast day cited as the day in which the book was ‘perfected’ also tends to match up with the saints appropriate to the various orders, as when the Clares, for example, cite St Francis’s day.21 Oftentimes the colophon provides little geographical information but does identify the scribe as a fellow monastic. This suggests that social role, particularly within the church, mattered as a form of personal identifier. Since the scribes typically drafted the text of the colophon

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themselves, preference for title over region provides insights into selfidentity in this late medieval world. In an era when travel was difficult and even most church employees worked in the diocese of their birth, one was more often identified by what one did than by where one was born or where one professed. Thus, one Frater Iohansen from the Cistercian order copied a book for Frau von Mulheim in the fifteenth century; this book contains the order’s statutes and was owned by the Cistercian women’s convent of Günterstal where the book’s private owner presumably resided.22 It was important to the scribe (and to the modern-day cataloguer) that the reader know of the affiliation of the scribe; this is a book copied by a Cistercian for another Cistercian. It was also important to the scribe that the reader know of the identity of the intended recipient of the book; the colophon here serves in part as a statement of ownership. But the colophon itself does not attend to the specific affiliation of the Cistercian brother, nor do we know from whence he stems. The idea of ‘place,’ then, could potentially include a broader notion of one’s location within the realm of the Godly as well as the more prosaic concern of geographical locale. From what can be determined on the basis of surviving manuscripts, when the convent leadership sought a scribe, they turned to individuals who were nearby geographically. Copying might cross boundaries of order, particularly among Observant convents, but were less likely to cross boundaries of space. The Dominicans nuns at St Gall exchanged books with the Inzigkofen Augustinians and the Villingen Clares, for example.23 Similarly, Johannes Kursi worked both for the Benedictines at Urspring and for the Soeflingen Clares.24 Clearly, one could turn to known individuals from the region, particularly those already connected to the house in some way.25 Does this mean that the book trade was not central to women’s monasteries? That is less certain. Books purchased through formalized trade are harder to track, for the imported books were less likely to be clearly delineated as belonging to a particular convent library. Statements of ownership that mention their origin are fewer in this late medieval period than are colophons that specify a convent as dedicatee, so that books prepared ‘on spec,’ as it were, are less easy to connect with a particular women’s monastery.26 A better sense of the place of the book trade in the monastic circulation of books could possibly be drawn from studies of incunabula, of book fair records like the study of book trade at Deventer27 and of book lists, but these tasks lie outside of the scope of the current study.

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Person A third major element of the scribal colophon’s content was the identity of the people involved in book copying. Primary among these was the scribe who did the copying, for in contrast to the scribes of earlier eras, self-identification seems to have been increasingly important to these late medieval monastic scribes. The scribe might give his or her name. This could be a fairly simple designation; roughly a third of the colophons that do provide names give first name alone or first name with some title or positional identifier (‘soror’). As a fourteenth-century copyist put it: It is finished, let it be done Who has written me

The scribe thanks God. has the name Gertrude.28

Adelheid, Agnes, Barbara, and Catherina and their many sisters offer similar personal identities, in that they probably chose to record only that name by which they were called. And, indeed, the presence of a given name within the colophon would presumably have been sufficient to identify the scribe to the readers of that book during her generation. Nevertheless, the ‘Sister Margaret’ referred to in a colophon might be any one of some thirty individuals of that name from a given convent within a particular century, and as time passes, a given name proves less and less useful for tracking the products of a particular scribe. The popularity of certain names extended over centuries. There are thirty-four different scribes named Margaret, thirty-two Elizabeths, twenty-eight Katherinas, and twenty-four Annas, for instance, though of course they adopt a number of variant spellings.29 The absence of a consistent and detailed naming habit suggests that some scribes were not interested so much in a universal knowledge of the work that he or she had done but in a specific and localized acknowledgment of the contribution that was made. Fortunately for the modern-day scholar, and with a certain perversity in view of the expectation of isolation from a previous life that comes with the taking of vows, it was apparently the norm in German women’s convents to include the patronymic and other surnames in scribal signatures. There are, for instance, seventeen different surnames among the various ‘Dorotheas’ who signed manuscripts, while only three of the Dorotheas forego further self-identification.30 The scribe for the German convent, then, typically offered some clue as to her own identity when she crafted the wording of her colophon.

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

Whether or not the scribe chose to reveal her personal identity, she might provide a glimpse of a monastic office she held through the wording of the colophon she crafted. One’s identity as a monastic was perhaps the most common attribute cited in these women’s communities. ‘Soror’ and the many variant spellings of ‘Schwester’ (‘Swester,’ ‘Suster,’ etc.) were among the most common labels provided. Other descriptive terms such as ‘professed,’ ‘spiritual woman,’ and ‘noble and well-born woman’ also attest to women scribes’ monastic status.31 The parallel identification for lay sisters, however, does not appear in colophons as a form of self-identified status, though other convent documents delineate such roles, and convent necrologies identify some women scribes as ‘our lay sister.’32 Though we know, for example, that Adelhaid Vögtin, a lay sister of Schönensteinbach, ‘read German and Latin and wrote (schriben),’ we have no surviving books known to be in her hand.33 Conversely, we know that Katharina Tucherin of St Katharina’s in Nuremberg was a lay sister, but the colophons of her surviving manuscripts do not identify her in that capacity, and the books she copied may in fact predate her entry into the cloister.34 Of the offices most frequently named, the office of ‘scriptrix’ or ‘Schreiberin’ is the most common self-appellation for the women scribes who create these summaries. Women were evidently comfortable claiming as their own the work that they had done. A woman scribe might also name herself according to an office held – she might be ‘abtissen’ or ‘pryorin’ or occasionally ‘cantorin’ – but more often such convent offices are found through crossreference to other documents.35 Colophons tend to give credit to the offices held by the book’s recipient rather than the hierarchical position within the convent of the scribe herself. The scribe claims her place within the convent and she claims her work, but she does not always claim her own status. Some scribes adopt other self-identifying labels that seem to us moderns more puzzling. The labels ‘peccatrix,’ ‘humble sinner,’ ‘poor servant,’ and the like, might seem to detract from the authority of the scribe, however much they might be part of the conventional language of self-deprecation. Should one really trust someone who admits fault? Yet here too the scribe has chosen to situate herself in the larger world of humanity. Humans are, universally in medieval theology, sinners, and the scribes of these colophons lay claim to a status as human and as penitent. In so doing, the scribes who adopt this convention draw on the clichés and habits common to the world of prayerful living that was the monastic community.36 The scribe identifies herself as working for the

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community’s best interest; she is but a weak vessel who serves the community as commanded. She has, in essence, begged the reader’s indulgence by appealing to a common position shared by all humanity. This concern with one’s identity as a productive member of the community rather than one’s status may help to explain the fourty-four women who choose to go nameless in their roles as the scribes of the books that they copied. For these women, their feminine identity is only revealed through gendered endings and the titles they claim; they omit references to their own names in the colophons they provide. One might call herself ‘scriptrix’ or ‘Schreiberin’ or identify herself as ‘Schwester’ of a particular convent. For example, one fifteenth century scribe writes: This book was finished on the eve of St John the Baptist (23 June) in the year that one numbers after Christ’s birth 1429 years. Pray to God for the scribe [schriberin] who has written this book with her hand, and for the priest, who has corrected and improved it. 1429.37

This scribe, a member of the community of St Nicolaus in Undis in Straβburg, is clearly concerned with the copying process, but not with her own personal glory. She describes the date on which the book was completed. She begs a prayer for herself and points out that she did the work ‘by hand.’ She also lays claims to the accuracy and care with which the book was crafted: it was corrected, not by the scribe herself but by another, a priest. The two verbs she uses to evoke his postproduction proofreading (corrected and improved) likewise reinforce the authority of the end product. This is her book, but he has helped to make it better. In short, the scribe of this volume goes nameless, but she does not go entirely unremembered. Other scribes similarly give hints of gender and of duty but not of specific personal identity. Anonymity was acceptable.38 The purpose for the colophon is, at least in part, to situate the manuscript in a particular time and to associate it with a particular person, named or unnamed. Take the example of another scribe who closes her section of a fifteenth-century manuscript with a few telling details: Here ends the third sermon of blessed Johannes Evangelist and Apostle in the year of our lord 1481 in the vigil of St Matthew, Apostle. Margareta Schleicher, at that time Prioress in Medingen (1).39

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Schleicher’s colophon offers a summary of the copied material. It also gives a connection to a particular moment in time, a dating which draws, as is usual in such inscriptions, on the liturgical calendar as well as on an enumerated year. It yields as well a threefold personal identification: name, office, and convent. Such citations lend authority to the work being copied. This work, suggests the colophon, is not just any text, but one copied by thus-andsuch a person housed in this-or-that convent. We of the era of footnotes may at times forget that we too enhance our textual authority through name dropping of a slightly different sort. If our weighty names typically come from the ranks of academics like ourselves and clutter our end pages in the form of footnotes and bibliographies, it is small wonder that the scribe of the medieval convent might borrow on the reputation of recognized figures from within the monastic hierarchy, whether self or other. At a time when each copy of a text was made by hand, with all of the risks and benefits that afforded, the name of the person who copied or arranged to have copied a text implied discreetly that one could trust in the accuracy of the rendition. Even the identification of oneself as a sister of the community does, in fact, contextualize the manuscript. This is a book made by one sister for a broader pool of people in her convent. Through scribal colophon, the copyist helps to situate the manuscript in a known (and so trustworthy) environment. In addition to providing information about who physically copied the manuscript, scribal colophons name a range of other individuals. Particularly common to scribal colophons is the name of the person who ordered the book. The claim that abbess thus-and-so had this book made may be even more common to monastic resources than the claim that a specific hand crafted the volume. The name of the commissioning agent represents the person who took responsibility for creating the book, and this name looms large within the legacy of colophon information. These individuals are sometimes treated by modern-day scholars merely as private owners of the manuscripts in whose name they were copied. Yet often their position within the convent hierarchy suggests that they were more than merely private owners of particular books. Rather, they were the persons charged with overseeing the convent library, with the expansion of the book collection, or with the decision to copy, donate, or give away the books that were copied on their watch. That is, the name of the person for whom the book was made may be more a legacy of convent hierarchy than a byproduct of demands by a particular individual for reading material appropriate to her own interests.

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Thus, colophons from dozens upon dozens of cloisters offer up an array of abbesses lending their names to the endeavour thus realized. Sibilla of Bondorff of the Freiburg Klarissans wrote and illuminated a German translation of St Bonaventura’s biography of St Francis, working, as she states, under the direction (sub ferula) of the abbess Susanna of Falckenstein.40 Other scribes mention that the abbess ‘made it be written’ (scribi fecit)41 or that a book was copied ‘at the time of’ the abbess in question. The scribe of one manuscript omitted any mention of herself, but gives credit to her superior: Lady Meliora ab Greudt, abbess of the Hermetschwil monastery, made this work be written. Cost: 9 French crowns.42

In a related pattern of book identification, a Cistercian book of hours now housed in Cleveland, which omits any direct mention of the scribe, has a colophon which states that it was copied ‘at the time of’ Apollonia Schröttlin as abbess in Kirchheim.43 Of course, such leading roles were not confined to the abbacy. A prioress or generic ‘mother’ or ‘leader’ might serve both as leader of the convent and as agent of book production, as with the thirteenth-century ‘prioress and sister’ Yoles Viennensis of Frauenthal44 and with the convent ‘Mater’ Ide Lifmundis whose closing claims to have ‘had a book made,’ found on a verso, faced the scribal colophon of her loyal copyists, Aleith and Claricia, found on the recto of the opening.45 Names of important women of the convent serve as code for their office and leadership roles; the quality of the person who received the book is a stand-in for the quality of the book itself. When asserting that a book was crafted for the leader within the convent hierarchy, the scribe implicitly suggests that the book is worthy of that leader. There is at work a process of status by association in which the book is made better – more trustworthy, more valuable – by being identified with a significant individual. Indeed, powerful members of a community were likely to be singled out as the possessor or dedicatee of a manuscript volume. As another of these monastic scribes reveals, he, ‘Brother Thomas Finck ... thought to copy a small book ... for Frau Helena von Hürnheim, leader [maisterin] of the convent Urspring of the Benedictine order.’46 The book he copied was a miscellany which included Seven Daily Meditations, a spiritually edifying volume which might have been appropriate for table reading.47 Many times, too, the scribal colophon states that the book was copied ‘at the time of’ a particular abbess or prioress. In addition to setting the

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time-frame in which the copying occurred, this phrasing suggests that creating a book for the leader of the community was considered equivalent to creating the book for the community as a whole. This fits with the leadership role described in many of the rules these women followed: the abbess served as representative of the community in its external dealings; it was she, then, who could contract for and receive important investments – like books – on behalf of the community. Although the convent leader is the most frequently cited individual other than the scribe to grace the text of the colophon, other names do appear. Scribes used their colophons to offer books to friends, to the convent, to members of a nearby urban community, or simply to God. For example, a Brother Albrecht signed a book of hours intended for the nun Veronica Welsser: This book is for the virtuous and spiritual woman Veronica Welsserin of St Katharina in Augsburg and is copied and finished in the year of salvation 1501 on the Saturday before the Sunday Exaudi. Bruder Albrecht.48

Veronica was a member of Augsburg’s St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries,’ a wealthy Dominican convent of approximately fifty women at the end of the fifteenth century. She was evidently a powerful member of the community, for three years after she received the book of hours from Albrecht, she was to commission the two paintings needed to complete the cycle depicting the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome that would adorn the convent’s new chapter house. In that same year, 1504, she was elected prioress of the convent.49 The book came to Veronica before she assumed an actual convent office, but she was presumably already visible as a patron and as an informal leader of the St Katharina community when the book was copied. At one level, then, the colophon was a harbinger of the printer’s colophon of future generations. It gave official details to verify the period in which the book was produced, the place of origin (or place for which the manuscript was intended), and it named people involved with the book as scribes, donors, and owners. Though scribes offered differing levels of detail, the colophon as described thus far seems focused on facts. It might even seem to be protocataloguing, but of the sort done by the uninitiated, for it is neither as consistent as modern standards would demand nor as thorough as modern systems would require. Nevertheless, we should remember that, whatever their ‘omissions’ from a modern perspective, the colophon was provided voluntarily by the scribes

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whose principal task was to copy texts. After all, 80 per cent of manuscripts of this era come lacking the apparatus of the colophon altogether. In these signed and dated manuscripts with their precious and utilitarian colophons, then, we have information that these scribes thought the reader should know. Scribes at Work and Play There are as well, other details that abound in scribal colophons: ink recipes, comments about the weather, references to the plague, or the war, or the invasion, or the fire, or the reform. The scribes who copy these manuscripts tell us that they are glad to be done. They play with words, and assert that the manuscript was copied ‘by hand and not by foot.’ They request prayers for an achy back. In addition to being a realm of fact, the colophon is a liminal place, freed from the restrictions of a set text, yet prone to the use and reuse of formulaic expressions and habits of identification that cross wide geographic spans and centuries of verbal construction. A scribe could generate each colophon afresh, yet there is also a clear consistency to the genre. We may chortle at the wit of a scribe, and relish the historical detail of a forest knocked down by gale-force winds, yet we also realize that this information is constrained by habits of expectation of what a colophon should and should not contain. In many instances, the scribal colophon goes on at length. It can provide financial details, insights into convent relationships, summaries of manuscript contents, and so on; the variety seems only to have been limited by the imagination of the scribe. One manuscript inscription from the Cistercian convent of Frauenthal talks in detail about the financial arrangements involved in putting the breviary together: This collection was completed in the year of incarnation of our Lord 1342 in the vigil of Pentecost under Lady Margareta de Brunecke, abbess in Frauenthal by means of the arrangement and regulation and also sheer devotion of Sister Elyzabeth called Tunnein for the sake of reverence and honour to the most holy Mother of God, Virgin Mary. And therefore whoever later reads in this [the book] or enjoys it in perpetuity keep with devotion the memory of the not undeserving previously named sister held in their prayer because actually it is prepared with great labour. Moreover it consists of 3 t. and 1 sol. hlln. parchment. Pay of the scribe proper 3 t. and 28 hlln. Sum of the total 7 t. and 14 den. But also for the illumination 9 sol. brevium on top of binding with clasps 10 sol.50

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The inscription begins, characteristically enough, with information we moderns want to know. The scribe assesses the contents of the book, cites the year and feast day of its completion, and explains for whom and for where the manuscript was intended. The identity of the commissioning agent, a sister of the convent, comes next, and we read that she procured, regulated, and worked with ‘sheer devotion.’ The dedication of this undertaking and of the book itself to the Virgin Mary could be predicted, of course, since Frauenthal was also known as Valle St Marie and was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. At the midpoint of the inscription, the scribe turns to a request for prayer in somewhat tortuous Latin. The readers in perpetuity are enjoined to keep Elizabeth Tunnein in their memory and therefore in their prayers. She justifies the prayer request by citing the scope of her efforts. She is not undeserving says the inscription, no, perhaps she is even deserving of the reader’s pious contemplation. Not only is the scribe deserving, but the book she prepared was very expensive. In a day of non-standard currencies, exactly how expensive is not clear. Various monetary units are listed, and those are given in abbreviations: t. (talers) and hlln. (perhaps plural for heller? the heller was a monetary unit in Cologne in the 1370s, for example)51 as well as sol. (solidus) and den. (denarii). The math for these calculations is, predictably, as irregular as the value of an individual coin might be; standardized currencies were not in force in this era, and perhaps the account given here reflects those variations in coinage. Whatever the exact cost, the reader is supposed to take away from the discussion one important datum: that the book was costly. The iteration of several different expenditures in turn gives the sense that the value of the book was high. The list starts with parchment, and the reader might notice the quality of the material goods incorporated into the manuscript. The work of the scribe comes next, and together a subtotal is provided. But not only was this book copied, it was also illuminated and bound, and the listing of those costs as separate items reinforces the value that those artistic endeavours added to the book. Reading these elements of manuscript identity in conjunction with one another, one might come to form connections between the elements of this colophon. Sister Elizabeth Tunnein is devoted to the Blessed Virgin; her convent too is devoted to the Blessed Virgin. Sister Elizabeth’s devotion to the BVM makes her ‘not undeserving.’ (The convent too is devoted and so ‘not undeserving.’) Elizabeth is meritorious as a believer, and she is also meritorious for her hard work in bringing the book into existence.

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That work was prepared ‘with great labour,’ paralleled by great expense. The value of the book, then, reflects on the value of Elizabeth’s devotion. The book functions as a material realization of that devotion, one that can be seen and assessed by the readers, all of whom, in perpetuity, should keep that sister, that devotion, that labour, and that financial investment in mind in order to remember them in prayer. The manuscript book points back to the person who arranged for its creation, and forward to the future readers who will eventually come to understand its value. If some colophons degenerate into a kind of financial memorandum (albeit one with spiritual import), others can be more playful. Snippets with poetic flavour complement more prosaic details in the wordplay of some nuns. One fourteenth-century abbess and scribe gives an account of her labours in short rhyming lines: Swer an disem buch werd lesen Der schol des genant wesen Daz er gedenk durch got: swester Katherin Hofmeinin dez ist ir not Die daz buch geschriben hat Daz ir got helf auz aller nat Und geb ir ze lon Die himelischen Kron. Amen.52 Difficult though it will be to read this book / The teaching of abovementioned wisdom / That he [the reader] thanks God-assisted sister / Katherina Hoffmann whose necessity it is / to have written this book / that she requires God’s help through all hardship / And gives him [God] alone / the heavenly Crown. Amen.

We know of her name, but not her office; of her labour and devotion, but not its place or year. In short, we have here a hint of personality peeking through. She offers both praise to God and encouragement to the reader. She has undertaken the copying out of duty, but her mind is on otherworldly rewards. Yet this devotion is not unduly studied; here is a scribe with a light touch, perhaps even a modicum of wit. Not unexpectedly, Hoffmann’s other colophon also comes in rhyming verse: Auch die ez schraip mit irr hant Katherina Hofmenin is sie genant.53

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She who writes with her hand / is known as Katherina Hoffmann.

Even personal details might come into focus in these last few words of the manuscript jotted with quill pen and ink. One scribe, who may have grown tired of the clichéd colophons asking for blessing on the right hand, proclaims boldly that she works a different way. ‘Margaretha von Schonbergk has written this with her left hand (mit yrer lyncken hant),’ she claims.54 Just as Margaret thought that being left-handed was important, Alheydem Kalves found her hands worth mentioning, though she is less direct in her reference, referring to their ‘errors’: 1456: This book is completed by me, useless Sister (sororem inutilem) Alheydem Kalves, a religious and also a professed in the Steterburg monastery [an Augustinian convent]. For that, blessed be God on earth. Have patience with the errors. Written in my 73rd year with great labour in the Wienhausen convent during the expulsion from our monastery. Pray to God for me a salutation of the angels or a Requiem aeternam in Christ’s love.55

Kalves’s entry provides a host of details; it serves both as closure for the book and as a self-deprecating self-identification rich with biographical implications. She mentions the monastery where she professed and provides a significant historical detail with her reference to their exile from their own community. The framing of the reference to Weinhausen with the phrases ‘with great labour’ and ‘expulsion from our monastery’ suggest that she remains unhappy with her circumstances. She characterizes herself as ‘useless,’ perhaps a reference to an absence of status in her new and purportedly temporary home. Kalves also carefully cites her own imperfections as a scribe who makes errors that demand the reader’s patience. Nevertheless, at seventy-two, she still finds herself hard at work. That activity, commendable in its own right and perhaps surprising for an elderly nun, contradicts her self-described uselessness, as does the ‘great labour’ that she is able to accomplish. Kalves concludes with a turn to the spiritual element. She begs for the reader’s prayers and reminds them of ‘Christ’s love,’ a love that implicitly sustained her in her scribal efforts and now should sustain the reader in the activity of prayer. In this colophon, a personal voice comes through. The nun who writes appears to be a bit crotchety and perhaps needlessly verbose (she is, for instance, both religious and professed), but she is also generous with her labours for the sisters of both houses who surrounded her. Her information, intended for the reader then, proves

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helpful in our readings now; the detail assists readers of either era to reconstruct several aspects of the historical moment in which the scribe undertook her work. The details that such scribes provide are not just trivia. The laments over loss of status or the joy in financial expenditure as investment mattered to these scribes. At the very least, such information allows the scribe to personalize the manuscript, to give a glimpse of self after the long labour of copying the words of others. Just as the parameters of time, place, and person serve to identify each manuscript as a particular object from a specific and localized context, so too the nominally extraneous information in these colophons brings in the attitudes, observations, and interests of the people who put those manuscripts together. In spite of the well-known repetition of key phrases across many genres of books, over numerous generations, and throughout innumerable regions, it is rare for colophons of more than a few words to be identical. We are dealing here with a genre in miniature, one with a less poetic vocabulary than the Japanese haiku but one capable nevertheless of providing a great deal of meaning in a relatively condensed form. Colophon as Risky Evidence Colophons are, of course, risky evidence. A scribe of one generation might copy the inscription of her exemplar. As Ingeborg Neske discusses in her catalogue of manuscripts from Nuremberg, a sixteenth-century hand clearly betrays the scribe of NürnbergStadtB Hert. 8, for instance. Her (or his) 92-folio gradual has a colophon falsely dated 1463 and ostensibly stemming from the Katharinenkloster scribe Margareta Kartäuserin. The notation and the handwriting both differ in style and in elegance from the square-shaped neumes and professional-looking script of Kartäuserin’s other signed manuscripts.56 Perhaps the content of the later manuscript, like the colophon, derives from Kartäuserin’s 1463 missal, part of a two-volume set that will be discussed below. Even the figure of the nun adjacent to the colophon of the faux-fifteenth century source might derive from the figure of a nun created by Barbara Gewichtmacherin for the Kartäuserin missal where it appears in an historiated initial on fol. 20r of the first volume of the set.57 Andrew Hughes has speculated that noted missals served as reference books that made the whole of the liturgy available.58 Perhaps what we see here is that reference function in action. The later scribe has turned to an authoritative source, from whence derived not only liturgy but also the

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nominal scribal signature. There is a strong caution to be garnered here; one cannot believe everything written down, not even when it is written with great love and great labour. With that warning in mind, two closely related colophons from the fifteenth century seem suspicious. Both stem from manuscripts that have not yet been subjected to modern cataloguing, and neither manuscript has yet been examined by the author. The close identity of verbal formula is noted in Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux. The first manuscript offers an idiosyncratic verbal formula for its dating: Post M, bis duo C, post L octo superadde, / Presens scriptura finit fratribus profuratura. Pro collectore huius presentis humilis collecti et compendii, affectuose rogo, supplica xpo Iesu dno nostro. 1458 the present writing is finished and proffered to the brothers. I affectionately ask, pray to Jesus Christ our Lord for the one who collects this present humble collection and compendia.59

The colophon indicates that the manuscript may have been prepared for a male convent in the region, but this manuscript, significantly, was one of several acquired by Abbess Elizabeth Borchtorpe of Wöltingerode for use in the Cistercian women’s house. This collection of miscellaneous religious writings – the contents of which are listed by Adam Wienand in his brief study of the convent’s collection – contains, among other items, a tractatus attributed to St Bernard, with a versified introduction added at the conclusion for the monastic community.60 The presence of a bit of annotated Bernard and the odd wording of the colophon might not be particularly interesting, were it not for the presence of a second manuscript, one thought to have been written at Wöltingerode itself. This second manuscript also contains something related to Bernard of Clairvaux; Sigrid Krämer identifies the miscellaneous collection as ‘In Bern. Clarev., etc.’61 This manuscript too contains an unusual formula at its beginning to provide the date, but the colophon of this manuscript runs somewhat longer: Post M, bis duo C, post L octo superadde, / Presens scriptura finit fratribus profuratura. Pro collectore huius presentis humilis collecti et compendii, affectuose rogo, supplica xpo Iesu dno nostro. / Finitus est presens liber a.d. 1478 in vigilia gloriose nativitatis dni in Woltingerode omnibus legentibus in salutem sempiternam.

Scribe as Individual 151 1458 the present writing is finished and proffered to the brothers. I affectionately ask, pray to Jesus Christ our Lord for the one who collects this present humble collection and compendia. The present book is completed a.d. 1478 in the vigil of the glorious Nativity of our Lord in Wöltingerode. Eternal good wishes to all who read.62

This colophon, taken on its own, might suggest at first glance that the text itself was finished in 1458, and that the Wöltingerode scribe copied the book some twenty years later. Since we know, however, that the first manuscript came to Wöltingerode by purchase, and since we have in the second half of this second colophon direct evidence for the copying of the second manuscript within that women’s community, we can speculate that the second manuscript was copied from the first. Quite possibly the scribe for the second manuscript was one of the Wöltingerode nuns. She took the newly purchased exemplar as the model for her own copy of a collection of theological writings. In so doing, she copied not only the original text, but also the original colophon with its unusual dating and its remarks about the collection of materials. Then she added her own observations: the book she copied was finished in 1478 on Christmas Eve within the walls of her own convent. She also took up the spirit of the season, wishing future readers ‘eternal good wishes.’ The initial date in this second colophon is an ‘error’ by modern standards, but it is also a clue to the transmission of the text. We cannot know for certain why the second scribe may have included the dating of the previous manuscript. Perhaps the verbal play amused her. Perhaps she was inattentive and did not recognize the end of the text until she had committed herself to the beginning of the colophon. Perhaps she thought that the manuscript she copied from had a particular authority and chose to remind her readership of the presence of that model within the convent’s own collection. At any rate, the interpretation of the dates within colophons must be handled with a good deal of care, for what they say may not be what they mean. Caveat lector. Indeed, dates of all sorts, particularly roman numeral dates, can be a place ripe for disaster, both on the part of the medieval scribe and for the modern transcriber. The omission of a ‘C’ or the misreading of an X for a V can shift a manuscript dating in ways that can profoundly change the understanding of a convent’s history and development – altering a supposed date of reform, for instance, or changing the order in which particular treatises were introduced. The timing of the shift of calendar year or the day on which a particular saint’s feast was celebrated might

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vary from convent to convent. Dates are problematic too when their assignment is ambiguous. Is the date as given a reference to the completion of the text by the author, or the perfection of the copy by the scribe? The careful bibliographer may come to distrust even such a designation as ‘feria II’ (Monday) after checking her historical date calculator and discovering that the feast in question would have occurred on a Thursday that year. Dates are by no means easy to interpret. Names hold terrors in their own right. Is this Elisabetha the same as that one? (Yes.) Is Anna Gropengheter the same as Anna Grumpenberger? (No.)63 A scribe might sign her name one day as S(wester) Clos Schreiberin and another day as Küngünt Schreyberin and yet again as Swester Kungund Clos Schryberin.64 Abbreviations can lead the modern scholar to hopeful but unsubstantiated identifications, demanding further codicological investigation. Thus, the inscription ‘S.A.A.’ and associated date of 15 February 1471 on fol. 467r of SalzburgEA b V 40 (a collection of works by the Dominican mystics, Tauler, Eckhart, Indersdorf, Seuse) can be linked to the signature of ‘Schw. Anna Ammanin’ (fols 299v–301v) in SalzburgEA b I 24 that accompanies a prayer added into a lectionary, but the connection needed confirmation through identity of handwriting style and habit before that guess could become a firm hypothesis.65 Even more challenging are the scribal marks of a variety of sorts that stake claims to involvement in the copying process without, however, being amenable to our modern-day alphabet-based cataloguing and computer indexing techniques.66 That a convent scribe might possess both a worldly and a monastic name merely complicates an already difficult situation. Not just personal names but convent identifications too undergo sea changes. When the monastery is identified in one manuscript by saint, another by city, and a third by nickname, it can seem a hopeless task to pin down the sampling of nuns’ manuscripts to any single location. Indeed, eighty manuscripts lack even tentative scholarly assertions as to their provenance although their use of gendered terms and grammatical endings clearly signals their origins within the milieu of the woman’s convent. Another potential difficulty is the inscription that adopts the language and content typical of the colophon but seems to be written in a different hand from the principal hand of the text. Such details can be difficult to ascertain from catalogue descriptions, though the better catalogues will point out such shifts in scribal style. It is hard to know why another provided the finishing touch after a central scribe did much of the work; one wonders in such cases if it might be the hand of the proofreader offering

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closure to the work and so marking it as approved for the library shelves, but we have as yet little direct evidence for such a practice. Yet whatever their difficulties of interpretation, the colophon has much to teach us about these women scribes and their male counterparts who laboured on behalf of these women’s convents. We learn from their texts the names of these scribes, their order, their monastic office. We learn as well of the specific tasks they have undertaken, a topic that will be discussed more fully below. We find the name of the convent, its leader, or its secular patron. We find in the genre the names of the people to whom the book was given or for whom the book was made. These aspects of colophon content reveal the book as an object situated inside a social network of give and take, of authority and service. Authorizing the Text The colophon serves as a genre in its own right. Like other such genres, it comes with assumptions about wording, style, vocabulary, content, presentation. We can predict, for example, that it will fall at the beginnings or ends of manuscript sections, and most likely at the end of the gathering or book. We can also recognize it as one of the genres predicated on intertextuality. The scribe of one colophon engaged with the texts and practices of her predecessors. She presumably adopted verbal formulas, conventions for citing dates, and even habits of personal identifiers from those colophons she had seen in other manuscripts, and perhaps from gossip as well. She knew the conventions of references to prayer and the exclamations that were common to a range of scribes from around the region. She may have been conscious too of the noncolophon text that was the occasion for her own endeavour. The colophon, then, exhibits standards and conventions regarding how and what one says. As a genre-in-miniature, it was not universally popular; many manuscripts forego such scribal additions, or at least limit that information so as to be person- or context-neutral. But in one out of every five cases, scribes or someone close to them tell us who they are or where and when they worked. Why? The decision of whether or not to sign a manuscript depended on one’s generation as well as the conventions for the particular kind of book in production. From the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, the percentage of books being signed by scribes doubled, from around 7 per cent to 14 per cent. This increase in scribal self-identifications came early on in the fourteenth century and seems to have held steady

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throughout the period of the Black Death and into the latter part of the century.67 The early fifteenth century witnessed another such increase, with 21 per cent of manuscripts bearing scribal identifiers. The middle of the fifteenth century witnessed both an explosion in the quantity of books copied68 and, remarkably, a jump in signed manuscripts, with more than 41 per cent of mid-century manuscripts identified by scribe. The last generation of the century, however, returns to early fifteenth-century practice, and sixteenth-century manuscripts too hover at the 21 per cent mark for manuscripts bearing some kind of scribal identification. This confirms what we have assumed elsewhere, that earlier manuscripts circulated with relatively little attention to their copying process, an idea encapsulated in clichéd references to the ‘anonymity of the monastic scriptorium,’ but over time, more and more detail has been offered to link the scribal craftsman or craftswoman to his or her work.69 This shift, I suspect, correlates to changing attitudes towards literacy and a shift towards broad-based emphasis on monastic learning of all sorts as witnessed in the reforms of the Dominicans in the midthirteenth century, for example, or the retrenchment of monastic practices under the reforms stemming from Melk in the fifteenth century.70 What differs slightly in my own portrayal of these changes is that, I argue, women monastics participated too. They, like their monastic brethren, demonstrably engaged in programs of liturgical reform, and engaged too in educational practices, practices that would become a bone of contention in the sixteenth century with the Tridentine emphasis on clausura. We see additional evidence of women’s convent-based education with the emergence of women monastics as authors, as chroniclers, and as visible, active correspondents, particularly during the fourteenth century and on into the fifteenth century. Of course, women’s education was not equivalent to men’s. Women lacked access to university education, and since they were barred from bureaucratic advancement within the church, education in theology and law was not as central to their training as it was to that of their fellow male monastics. Nevertheless, monastic women appear to have treasured their booklearning, and women’s convent libraries grow steadily over the three and a half centuries in question, with an extra push towards book provision during the fifteenth century reforms.71 Yet a growth in the size of monastic library collections would not intuitively seem to demand an increase in the proportion of signed manuscripts. An increase of production does not necessarily need to correlate with an increase in the identification of the circumstances for copying.

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The number of such manuscripts might logically be predicted to go up, but for the proportion of manuscripts with colophons to change, and to change so dramatically, suggests that other factors are at work as well. This trend towards greater specificity, however, may be in part the result of what I think of as the ‘cataloguing problem.’ When a convent is limited to a mere handful of manuscripts, it is relatively easy to identify which manuscript is which. When a convent collection grows in size, on the other hand, one may want to be able to specify which particular manuscript one is referring to. In this way, the scribal colophon becomes an adjunct to the librarian’s duty of identifying each manuscript as an individual object. The regulations guiding librarians in creating assertions of ownership become popularized in the thirteenth and again in the fifteenth century as part of the process of defining convent offices as seen in the works of such authors as Humbert of the Romans, who discussed and regularized the role of Dominican offices in the thirteenth century, and in Johannes Meyer, whose Ämterbuch did the same in the fifteenth century.72 Librarians were enjoined to catalogue their books; Humbert, for instance, asks the librarian to ensure that an inscription be added to indicate what type of book, or what book, it is; or whose writing or writings are contained in it; and at the beginning of each book, let a title of this type be placed: ‘this book’ or ‘this volume’ contains this and that and it belongs to this House of the Order of Preachers.’ And if it is worthy that the donor of the book be remembered, let it say further, ‘which such and such gave for his soul.’73

The contents need to be specified, either by category or by what we moderns would call a title; alternatively the author of the text(s) contained therein might be given. Moreover, the localization of the manuscript as belonging to a particular monastery is considered important; at the very least such information might facilitate the return of borrowed material, much in the way that book plates nowadays serve as reminders that a volume should not be integrated into a reader’s private collection. For Humbert, the identity of the donor might also be significant and worthy of mention. The alert reader will notice how closely these items approximate the contents of scribal colophons. A manuscript’s contents might be relegated to the explicit rather than finding their way into the colophon proper, but the colophon does quite frequently include the manuscript’s ‘home institution’ as well as the identity of a sponsor for the copying endeavour, whether in the form of a financial

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donor or the authority of a convent leader who ‘had the book made.’ In other words, librarians and scribes alike see the identity of the book as belonging to or having been created for a given monastery and they may provide descriptions of the circumstances by which the manuscript came to be part of the convent’s book collection. In this way, the scribal colophon is part of a mechanism of control over the material possessions of the convent. It provides within the covers of the book a mechanism for reference. A studious monastic could order up the old book or the new one, the book copied by a particular person or prepared at the time of a particular abbess. In Observant convents too the scribal colophon may help position a particular book as fitting within the new practices of Observant religious thought. A book that came from ‘Our sisters at Tulln’ might then have special authority as material that could be assigned as reading, either by the individual nun or at table.74 Hence, the scribal colophon provides a reference point just as later tables of contents would come to do. This function – colophon as index – may well have influenced the distribution of scribal colophons by genre. Whether or not a scribe ‘claims’ a book depends on the period, but it also depends, at least in part, on genre. One measure of this can be taken by comparing the number of signed manuscripts of a particular type to the total manuscripts of that type. Specific details are provided on table 4.1 (which adopts the divisions of manuscript type discussed in chapter 3; see discussion of table 3.2, p. 121). These figures are only rough estimates, of course, for we have no way of knowing such information for the manuscripts that have not come down to the present day. Nevertheless, these figures do serve as a rough indication of the habits and expectations scribes brought to works of various sorts. As mentioned in chapter 3 (p. 120), liturgical books went unsigned more than books in other categories; only about one sixth of the surviving liturgical books bear scribal signatures, and for the large display manuscripts – particularly evangeliaries, lectionaries and epistolaries – the number is closer to one out of every ten. Educational books and rules and statutes also seem to have been copied without any particular emphasis on the identity of the scribe. Other genres clearly came with different conventions, however. Scribes had a proclivity towards selfidentity in manuscripts containing vitae and theological texts; roughly a third of each type of manuscript comes with a scribal colophon. Books containing scholastic texts form the upper end of these predilections: more than half of the surviving copies from women’s convent libraries

Scribe as Individual 157 Table 4.1 Scribal signatures by genre Kind of book

Total Surviving mss surviving for which scribe mss is known (total, in %)

Surviving mss known to have been copied by women

Liturgical

1346

15.1%

10.9%

4.1%

63

22.2%

9.5%

12.7%

Devotional

530

22.5%

13.6%

8.9%

Legends and vitae

173

29.5%

22.5%

6.9%

89

19.1%

11.2%

7.8%

269

32.7%

14.5%

18.2% 10.9%

Biblical (excludes evangeliaries and lectionaries)

Church Fathers Theological texts

Surviving mss known to have been copied by men

Mystic/ascetic literature

173

25.4%

14.5%

Sermons

162

18.5%

12.3%

6.2%

1396

25.6%

14.7%

10.9%

Subtotal: Spiritual readings Educational texts

162

14.2%

7.4%

6.8%

Rules, statutes, etc.

131

13.7%

7.6%

6.1%

Scholastic authors

60

51.7%

35.0%

16.7%

Literature

37

21.6%

16.2%

5.4%

Subtotal: Erudite literature

390

21.3%

14.1%

7.2%

Total mss

3195

20.6%

13.1%

7.6%

NOTE: Like table 3.2, this table includes only those manuscripts from women’s convents for which contents have been ascertained – some 3195 manuscripts from roughly 400 convent libraries. Roughly 20 per cent of these manuscripts can be associated with a particular scribe, usually through scribal colophons. As can be seen below, the presence or absence of scribal colophons seems in part to be genre-dependent; manuscripts that contain vitae or theological texts are much more likely to come with a scribal colophon than those of a liturgical nature, for instance, and more than half of the surviving scholastic collections from women’s convents have scribal signatures.

bear scribal identifiers.75 In short, patterns of scribal signatures seem to be genre dependent. Just as conventions of layout and imagery depended on the kind of book being copied, the presence or absence of a scribal self-intrusion into the book-copying process (and into the conscious attention of the book’s eventual reader) likewise depended on what materials the codex was meant to convey.

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Given the penchant of women’s convents for using the services of their own community members in the crafting of books, it is hardly surprising that in most categories, the proportion of manuscripts copied by women outweighs those copied by their male counterparts. (Compare the last two columns of table 4.1.) In the preparation of sermon literature, for instance, women identify themselves as scribes in 12 per cent of the surviving manuscripts, while men sign only 6 per cent of the surviving exemplars. Similarly, women identify themselves as scribes in roughly 11 per cent of the surviving liturgical manuscripts, while their male counterparts identify themselves only 4 per cent of the time. Even in a category such as mystic/ascetic literature, which sees a slightly closer gender balance, women scribes add colophons 15 per cent of the time, while men add colophons 11 per cent of the time. Are such figures useful? What the statistical survey points to, first of all, are categories in which patterns for the distribution of colophons are anomalous. In contrast to the other genres, for instance, a higher percentage of men than women claim books with contents in the biblical and theological categories. This may well suggest that convent women were more likely to turn to outsiders and specialists for such copying than to undertake such work in-house. For the biblical texts, such reliance on outsiders may reflect the special need for accuracy. The proofreading habits and attention to detail characteristic of ‘professional’ copyists would have been especially valuable when the words needed to be preserved exactly from one copy to the next. For theological texts, on the other hand, the matter may have been dictated by more practical considerations. Given monastic women’s more limited access to theological training, it is almost certain that male monasteries had a greater fund of exemplars of such texts than women’s convents did. Any order for a theological text that could not be obtained within local women’s communities would have been directed to male monastic libraries and their affiliated scriptoria. Thus, practical details could encourage women monastics to patronize scribes in different ways for different genres. But how, then, to explain the overall prevalence of signed manuscripts among the legends and vitae and among the scholastic texts? These genres in particular, along with theological texts, often used the colophon as a concluding text for scribes overall, and for women scribes in particular. Is there something distinctive about these genres that encouraged monastic scribes to identify themselves? I present here a twofold explanation of why colophons are especially popular in these particular genres of books. These tend to be books that work in small

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units, that are compiled in aggregate, and so are likely to become miscellaneous collections. This gives psychological room for the presence of an additional piece of literature, the colophon per se, considered here as a genre in miniature. In this context, the colophon can be seen as a small piece of writing in its own right, an addition by the scribe that confines itself to the parameters of ending remarks. Like other small genres such as the lyric, the letter, and the convent genres of chronicle and sister-book, the colophon allows a circumscribed area for individual creativity. The order of ideas, the wording of information, the inclusion of a choice or range of topoi, of verbal formula, and of personalized information allowed the scribe drafting the colophon to put his or her own mark on the manuscript in which that colophon is found. It allows the scribe ownership not only over letter shape and layout but also over at least a small portion of the content of the manuscript. We cannot know for certain if the scribe would have recognized him-or herself as an ‘author’ of a colophon text, but certainly the genre allows for the individuation of the manuscript as a ‘verbal possession’ of the scribe. The colophon, then, was one piece among many others that were gathered up together to provide a rich bouquet of texts both old and new to be read by members of the monastic community. In this view then the colophon is witness to the authorial initiative on the part of the scribe, a chance for him or her to play with words.76 Indeed, the colophon was liminal territory, someplace that lay outside of the text proper, that did not belong to the prescribed words that the scribe must put down on paper or parchment. Rather, the colophon was for the scribe a place of relative freedom, much like those spaces that lay outside of the central frame in the art of the time. Just as the medieval illuminator might adorn the margins of a sacred service book with elements drawn from the grotesque and the irreverent, the scribe might use the space that lay after the assigned text in order to provide a hint of personal commentary and a sense of who he or she was. Thus, the scribe who complains of bodily pain or the scribe who recounts an amusing anecdote is providing a backdrop to the text that is being read, bringing that text forward into the present time, both of copying and by implication of reading. The colophon had a second major purpose, however. It was not merely a place for frivolous self-display. Rather it served as part of the authorizing apparatus of the codex. In the period before title pages, in a period before book indices or even tables of contents, in a period in which the author might be unknown and the title go unrecognized, in

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such times the scribal colophon served as part of the mechanism by which the book became validated. It provided, in short, the kind of concrete detail that was designed to convince the reader that the book was trustworthy, worthy of contemplation, indeed, that the book itself was in some way assigned to a particular person or place or world view. The colophon by its very presence declares that the manuscript in question is officially approved and should form part of the collection of books that merit reading. Thus, during a period of reform, a manuscript of known provenance might carry more weight with knowledgeable readers than manuscripts of uncertain origins. When abbesses and bishops call for the destruction of the ‘old manuscripts,’ it helps a manuscript’s chances of survival to be explicitly identified as fitting the new library’s criteria. A scribal colophon does that, particularly in manuscripts of a miscellaneous nature for which no other single ‘authority’ or purveyor of textual content can readily be identified. The works of an author such as Augustine can easily be associated with that esteemed Elder of the Church, but a gathering of theological tracts by eight or nine different authors might better be identified as ‘approved texts’ by showing that they were selected by an approved individual. In short, colophons serve as devices for manuscript ‘accreditation,’ serving alongside physical attributes such as quality of parchment or paper, the absence or presence of illustrations, the beauty and legibility of script, and so on, to assert a relative legitimacy for the volume in question. The better the ancillary information provided, the better the presumed quality of the book. Publishers in later generations would come to similar conclusions: claims about the creation of this particular copy of a book are claims about its trustworthiness and value.77 Through its pedigree as provided in its colophon, the manuscript lays claim to being worthy of study. It gives hints about the perspective that the compiler of texts brought to bear and situates the volume within a particular intellectual milieu. In the absence of an easy-to-consult table of contents, the reader could use the colophon to get a sense of what teachings this particular volume might provide. What we see in these late medieval scribal colophons is dramatically different from their early medieval counterparts.78 In the early Middle Ages colophons often functioned as book curses, summaries of the kinds of damnation to be visited upon those who defaced or absconded with the manuscript in question. As Marc Drogin has traced so effectively, the early colophons dispense advice to the future readership. ‘Please wash your hands / Before touching this book.’79 ‘Therefore, O

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reader, turn ye the leaves with care ...’80 ‘So, gentle reader, turn these pages carefully and keep your finger far from the text.’81 ‘Nor shall a man write any accounts upon the pages of a book or scribble anything on any part of it.’82 In short, take care not to mark in the volume or smudge its text. And, above all, do not steal, alienate, or dispose of the codex lest you suffer both Christ’s curse and mine: Whoever steals it or sells it, may there be anathema on him.83 May whosoever steals it from him or destroys its title be anathema.84 May grace be to the reader, indulgence to the benefactor, anathema upon its thief.85 Christ’s curse upon the crook / Who takes away this book.86 Whosoever removes this Volume from this same mentioned Convent, may the anger of the Lord overtake him in this world and in the next to all eternity. Amen.87 Whoever takes this book or steals it or in some evil way removes it from the church of Saint Caecilia, may he be damned and cursed forever unless he returns it or atones for his act. So be it. So be it. Amen. Amen.88

Such early medieval colophons point towards a paucity of manuscript materials. The ownership of the material object, the manuscript itself, was a matter of grave concern for the convent that had the volume in its collection, and the colophons of this early period detail a variety of ills that would attend upon those who treated the tomes with less than perfect care. The motivation of the scribes for providing such colophons was quite simple, in that the destruction or loss of a single manuscript might have a major impact on a monastic library. By the late Middle Ages, however, the colophon asserts an ownership of a rather different sort. In this late medieval culture, in which book exchange formed an important part of the intellectual circulation of ideas, texts, and spiritual practices, assertions of ownership are rather addressed to the ideas than to the objects per se. Only rarely do the scribes condemn those who take the manuscript from a particular library, reflecting the reality that books might be traded away by fiat in order to provide for the addition of new or alternative texts within the

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

convent collection. If a book might become an object of exchange, imprecations against those who read it after its bartered trade might in fact prove awkward. Nor do these late medieval colophons provide guidance on the preparation for reading. Issues of handwashing and notetaking go largely undiscussed in the colophons examined here. Instead, the late medieval colophon is an assertion of ownership over a book’s intellectual and spiritual contents. The book was now one particular copy of texts which were themselves intended for broader circulation, a gathering of many different author’s words that could be provided to one’s own house or to another monastic community as material for study. The conventions of the colophon had shifted to adapt to this new reality. No longer do our German monastic scribes assert with English book owner Agnese Lyell: ‘hoo thys boke stelyth, schall have cryst curse and myne.’89 The verbs of theft and loss common to early medieval book curses – abstulerit, alienaverit, furatus fuerit, subtraxerit, and their ilk – no longer find their way into the texts of these late medieval monastic colophons.90 Theft and alienation, in other words, are no longer central concerns of the scribal colophon. Rather, the information provided in the colophon will help any future reader to assess a book’s worth, for that information gives an intellectual context in which to situate the texts of this hand-copied book. In other words, the colophon had shifted its function from assertions of ownership – the medieval equivalent of the book plate – to assertions of content – the medieval equivalent of the title page. We can gather from the colophon a sense of what the book contained. Moreover, we can gather from the colophon the idea that there are sufficient texts in the library that the discerning reader might pick and choose among them. The information of the late medieval colophon is, in this sense, a tool for the reader’s selectivity. Rather than enjoinders to the reader about how to use the book and imprecations on those who might abscond with it, the late medieval monastic colophon provides catalogue-like information. The later colophons presume a responsible readership and work to assist that readership with choosing or contextualizing a book deemed to be suitable for study. Returning to the notion of the ‘cataloguing problem’ evoked above, we see that as libraries expanded in this late medieval era they developed a need for a mechanism for control. The colophon assists in that control. It provides guidance in the choice of manuscript to be adopted for study. There is a surplus of manuscripts just as there is a surplus of texts, and the reader might use the colophon to select the material that would be worthy of her study time.

Scribe as Individual 163

Elizabeth Eisenstein reminds us that It is one thing to describe how methods of book production changed after the mid-fifteenth century or to estimate rates of increased output. It is another thing to decide how access to a greater abundance or variety of written records affected ways of learning, thinking, and perceiving among literate elites.91

Though she is speaking, of course, of the rise of printing and the shifts that printing brought to book culture across Europe, her remarks are relevant to the late medieval practices of scribal production as well. Even among hand-copied manuscripts, the shift towards numerical abundance in monastic book holdings of the late Middle Ages was evidently accompanied by shifts of ‘learning, thinking, and perceiving’ by those who read the books as well as those who made them. By the thirteenth century, women’s monastic communities in many orders had begun the process of crafting and utilizing some, if not all, of their own books. The importance of manuscripts within the convent and the prevailing presumption that libraries of at least a few dozen volumes would equip even the smaller houses suggests that book-based monastic life was common to women’s experiences of monasticism in ways we have not perhaps assumed before. By the fourteenth century and on throughout the fifteenth century, such emphasis on book production was not only habitual, it was also increasing rapidly, until the burst of scribal activity in the mid-fifteenth century transformed library collections of women’s communities into large and active centres for intellectual exchange. Print as a mechanism for verbal reproduction was, of course, to have transformative powers in the lives of many monastic communities, but the reliance on hand-copying prior to and overlapping with the introduction of print did not preclude equally significant shifts of use and function for the volumes in these late medieval manuscript collections. The shift of the colophon from book curse to authorizing element is, I would argue, a sign of such a change in function. The early medieval book is a treasure, to be valued, hoarded, and handled with care. The late medieval book is in contrast an object for consultation, one that can be read and reread, studied, shared with one’s colleagues at table, contemplated in the quiet of one’s cell, or passed along to another to use, given away, put back into circulation.92 The late medieval colophon facilitates this late medieval functionality. It identifies aspects of the preparer’s life:

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

time, place, identity, authority, context. But the colophon also serves as a reference point for a later readership of the book, providing information to be consulted, information that could itself become part of the reading and interpretation of the texts contained within the covers of the volume in question. The colophon, no less than the manuscript itself, speaks with written words to those who can decode its meaning. Not every reader would have attended to the detail of the colophon to the extent described here. One does not need always to know the source or the authority behind a text to give it meaning. But when such context is desired, the colophon is an easy mechanism for providing such information. The late medieval monastic colophon, with its practical details of dates of completion, place of copying, and personnel, was a bibliographic entry, one which was provided by a scribe in order to allow the reader to know, and perhaps to understand more fully, what was in the volume that lay before her on the desk. In this chapter, the colophon emerges as a sort of proto-autobiographical note. In the best of textual worlds, the colophon provides within its text a sense of the identity of the individual who undertook the copying in question. It may or may not offer a name for the scribe him or herself, but it does frequently provide clues to the network of individuals responsible for the manuscript’s creation. This might include the monastic leader who commissioned the work, the donor who funded it, the member of the monastic community to whom the book was being given, or other people who were connected in some way with the creation and circulation of the manuscript in question. The copyist is not necessarily at the centre of the activity. Rather it is the convent and the duty of copying that is evoked in these scribally generated yet cliché-ridden texts. Yet the colophon like other genres has other information to impart as well. The mind-set of the medieval scribe can be adduced from the evidence for the purpose and nature of the copying activity. We come to understand some of the ‘why’ of copying as well as some of the details of how a manuscript came to be copied when we pile together the facts of monastic scribal life. The discussion that follows relies heavily on internal evidence from the colophons themselves. It is the words of the scribes, no matter how clichéd, that provide the most direct insight into the perceptions, the desires, and the mental habits of the people who undertook the copying. To this evidence, however, can be added the information from monastic directives: from the rules under which convents worked, from the statutes and visitation records

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that attempt to control the internal life of the monastery, and from the biographical information available for some though by no means all of the scribes who worked for women’s convents in late medieval Germany.

5 Why Scribes Serve

Experienced scribe needed in Rhineland area. Excellent spiritual benefits with old established cloister. Must have copying experience in Latin and in the vernacular. Above average job security, opportunity to attend special prayer services, hopes for personal salvation, etcetera. Send resume to ...

Modern economies have regularized the search for gainful employment in ways that would have astonished our medieval ancestors. We are accustomed to having specific job titles that can be associated with a specific list of duties. We recognize that certain skills prepare one to serve in particular capacities. In short, we have a sense that a given career comes with a portfolio of skills and duties. In constructing a sense of the historical position of the medieval scribe, we might be tempted to evolve a similar set of criteria that would have served as an ancestral job description. The monastic scribe needed to be located in a suitable geographic area. He or she needed to be willing to undertake the position of employment with the specified agency. The scribe, to be effective, should have had adequate training and bring appropriate knowledge to the job. (It is possible to copy texts in languages one does not know, for instance, but it is not as time-efficient as working in languages with which one is fluent.) The scribe must also have been interested in the remuneration, whether that came in the form of tangible benefits, including a place at the table and a bed in the dormitory, or spiritual offerings such as prayers or a sense of personal fulfilment. This chapter explores some of the aspects of the scribe’s job in order to develop a sense of what the medieval ‘job description’ might have

Why Scribes Serve 167

looked like. The second part of the chapter then explores what hints remain of scribes’ motivations for undertaking such duties. The underlying question is why these medieval workers undertook the labour of copying manuscripts. There is no single answer; indeed, there are overlapping categories of motivations that emerge from the documents of the period. Nonetheless, it is useful to survey motivations, because they help to explain the kinds of choices scribes made – choices of topic and content, choices that balance fine detail against elapsing time, choices of scope and thoroughness. We understand more about the manuscript as medieval artefact if we understand some of the reasons it came to be made. The Medieval ‘Job Description’ Why scribes serve can be divided into two categories: circumstances and motivation. In order to hire someone to copy manuscripts, one needs to provide suitable conditions for book copying. The materials need to be available, for instance, and the scribe must have the proper knowledge and tools for the effort at hand.1 In a monastic environment, there also needs to be administrative support (or at least administrative benign neglect) to permit the activity to take place. The first portion of the chapter will address the circumstances of copying, while the second part will explore the admittedly more speculative question of what motivated scribes. The Circumstances For scribal work to be practical at all, the monastery needed to provide suitable conditions for that work to take place. When work was contracted out, the external individual or group would need to supply sheltered workspace as well as ink, quill, parchment, and other necessary tools. When, on the other hand, the nuns chose to have the manuscript copied within the convent, it was their own cloistered space that needed to supply workspace and materials sufficient to the task. Humbert of Romans (d. 1277) suggests that some of those materials might be found in the library, but larger convents might well be provisioned with a scriptorium of their own, while smaller convents might make do with a public workroom or other workspaces (as discussed above in chapter 2). In either instance the medieval job applicant might find the circumstances less desirable than today: colder in winter, hotter in summer, lacking modern pest control, lit without benefit of modern indirect lighting

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fixtures, surrounded by a noise level certainly different from, if not necessarily louder than, our own. As anyone who has journalled on a backpacking trip can attest, and as many a scribal colophon reminds us, the scribe’s hand might tire, the back might ache, the eyes might grow weary, and the soul might grow impatient with the repetitive mechanics of the task. But mere bodily impediments can be overcome, and monasteries were demonstrably provided with both the tools and the spaces necessary to the copying effort. Given that the what and where of copying were provided, our medieval applicant would also need the ‘when’ – the time to copy. In this, the medieval scribe was the antecedent to the modern contemporary worker, for both held down the equivalent of a couple of part-time jobs to make their lives complete. For the monastic scribe, it was not necessarily a question of income as it can be for today’s middle class. Though life was not necessarily economically easy in women’s convents, the typical convent’s reliance on dowries and on financial funding from productive agricultural land rather than on modern notions of fee-for-service income meant that the individual monastic did not face the paycheck-topaycheck existence characteristic of the modern worker. Nevertheless, the monastic worker faced the exigencies of an existence defined by several purposes. It would be a mistake to think of the position of scribe as a primary form of self-identity for these monastic workers. They were, as we have seen in chapter 4, prone to self-naming conventions that emphasized their place within a network or community. They were scribes, yes, but also soror, Schwester, or office holder in this or that named community. Whether serving from outside of the convent walls or within the enclosure of the women’s community itself, the scribes for women’s convents fitted themselves into a world where shared experience of a life-in-God came before personal or familial identifiers. The ‘job description’ for a scribe, then, might place the actual work of copying well behind other kinds of activities. Attendance at services and personal devotions likely formed a larger framework for the monastic day than the preparation of words, images, or notation with quill, ink, and parchment. A scribe for a convent was, therefore, one of a legion of part-time workers whose duties to text may have been realized as much in the verbal practices of oral devotions as in the act of encoding written words in a more physically tangible form. The monastic scribe within a women’s community, then, fitted her scribal work into the convent’s own rhythms of a rule-mandated balance between prayer and work, a world in which prayer, quite simply, came

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first. She would likely have pursued her copying efforts during a block or blocks of time during the day set aside for physical labour. Some of her convent sisters would have spent that time tending to the handwork for which many women’s convents were famed; they might have done embroidery, weaving, or decorative arts. For the lay sisters of the convent, this time might have meant more backbreaking labour: the cleaning, the cooking, the maintenance of the community’s property and spaces. The work of the scribe was but one subset of the tasks undertaken by the convent membership. Though we can, with reasonable security, posit that copying was fitted into the interstices of the Opus Dei, we have less evidence about whether such copying was a continuous activity or whether it occurred as a seasonal or ad hoc assignment. From a modern perspective of efficiency, it would make sense for a scribe to work at a given project each time the work cycle came around, for it is easier to maintain consistency if one works daily on the tasks in question. Yet we cannot know from the rules and statutes they follow nor from the verbiage these scribes provide whether the day-to-day maintenance of their skill was an option in the world that they inhabited. The monastic lifestyle would seem to have such room for daily practice in its schedule but we cannot necessarily presume that all available time would have been used for copying. We cannot know if the work was done in a series of extended workdays scheduled under project deadline – that habit of the modern academic producing manuscript to task – or if the scribe produced a manuscript through small incremental efforts seriatim over the course of weeks, months, and years, efforts which only belatedly resulted in the product that sits on our shelves today. In short, while we can deduce that the nuns must have had time available from the artefacts that they produced, we do not know what portion of the day, how many days in a row, or even what seasons they were involved in copying. Even the scribes who worked as outsiders – those not (necessarily) bound by the strictures of convent vows and the daily rhythms of monastic practices – would typically have found their interactions with a woman’s community to be only part of a broader scope of duties and responsibilities. Christopher De Hamel describes the situation: Quite often medieval scribes were not full-time copyists of books. They may have been owners making books for personal use, or notaries, students between lectures, moonlighting royal clerks, parish priests unable to live on their stipends, inmates of the debtors’ prison, and so forth.2

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Even the most professionally active external copyist might contract with several patrons (if we judge by surviving manuscripts) and so spend only a portion of his or her time on the commission that led to the preparation of women monastics’ manuscripts. We currently have no evidence of scribes who worked solely on retainer for a single women’s monastery. Yet neither was their relationship directly akin to that of the contemporaneous pecia workers, those ancestors to the modern-day publisher, who sought to produce books en masse for a market under a centralized business model by copying books in sections or pieces. Rather, external scribes, if working for money at all, have their closest parallel in contract workers, for they appear to subsist on a kind of project-based involvement with women’s houses rather than on the more traditional patron-client relationships in their roles as scribes.3 Clearly, then, a scribe needed to be someone who could retain in memory the specific goals and related decisions of a given project over repeated sessions. The ideal scribe had an innate skill for project management, and could break a large commission into the small tasks that would see the project through to completion. The scribal candidate, then, was likely adept at balancing many responsibilities, not least of which was time management. The working scribe needed a place to work, the supplies and the time to make the work possible, and enough training and knowledge to undertake the work. We have little direct evidence of the kind of scribal training available in women’s monasteries. We know from studies of other scribes in other environments that the teaching of scribes typically involved the teaching of a number of different hand styles and a certain facility with text.4 For women monastics, such advanced training was, presumably, not always available, nor was it always necessary. Yet somebody must have been in place to demonstrate the preparation of the quill, the grip of the hand, and the style of copying to which the monastery aspired. In discussing scribal training, we are in the unfortunate circumstance of having to reason in a circular fashion. We can see from the manuscripts that these monastic scribes had some kind of training, and so we can deduce that the scribes were trained. A relative prevalence of monastic literacy can, however, be deduced on the basis of archaeological evidence. The fourteen fragments of wax tablets and a stylus retrieved from Freiburg and Constance drains and discussed in Ulrich Müller’s study of wooden objects, for instance, suggest a generalized need for impermanent forms of written communication in this late medieval culture. That such finds were substantially more prevalent in

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the Freiburg Augustinian men’s convent (with a total of thirty-five writingrelated items) than in the more public areas investigated in the Constance dig (which had only five writing-related items) reinforces the idea that convents, both men’s and women’s, relied heavily on the written word.5 Yet this only establishes the presence of some literate individuals within monastic communities, and tells us nothing of how many convent members were literate and how they were trained. Such significant and important questions remain, for now, unanswered. Indeed, little documentary evidence has emerged thus far to provide background on the kind of training monastic scribes brought to bear on their copying efforts. The Latin studies of the nuns at Ebstorf included activities such as taking notes and completing written exercises, so we can tell that in at least one fifteenth-century monastery basic handwriting was included as part of the regular in-house curriculum. We cannot say, however, whether those handwriting skills were imparted tangentially or taught as a separate skill in a formalized way. The ability to form letters was likely a relatively common skill among choir nuns, after all, for many of their monastic duties presume some basic literate skills. The cantrix, for example, was to list the week’s work assignments on a board for the other nuns to read, and other convent officers might also have recourse to written communication. Nuns are noted too, for their correspondence, and the convent archives are rich with documents produced through the efforts of many of the convent sisters. The more advanced level of scribal work, however, the ability to plan out the best use of parchment space for the desired effect and to control the consistency of letter forms and note shapes characteristic of the larger liturgical sources must have been taught in some way, but exactly how is still unclear. A few documents mention women who brought into the convent the scribal training that proved so useful to them. It was the three outsiders – Ita von Hoehenfels and two companions – who rescued the finances of the Oetenbach convent, for instance; the scribe who joined the convent alongside Ita worked with the scribe already in place and together they prepared and sold sufficient manuscripts to bring the convent back to solvency.6 The ‘outsider’ of this story must have arrived with her skill already intact, yet how this secular woman came to have scribal training suitable to her monastic duties is an interesting but for now unanswerable question. Like so many skills that are passed down by demonstration rather than studied through graduated workbooks, we lack the procedural manual that would no doubt be required by some modern-day bureaucracy.

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So too, Loppa von Spiegel, one of the most famous German scribes of the era, provides us with little information about her formative years as a copyist. In some of the more elaborate scriptoria we can speculate that a formal program of scribal training might have been available, especially given the collaborative nature of the production process. At St Katharina’s in Nuremberg, for instance, dozens of manuscripts were produced through the efforts of many nuns. Some of that work might well have fallen under the rubric of a kind of master-apprentice working relationship. But here again the details that we seek must currently be derived from the endproduct; instructional practice is not set out explicitly in any of the materials known to me. Perhaps a more in-depth investigation into monastic education overall might produce hints as to how scribal training progressed. Did a novice with particular facility at her written lessons get tapped as a future member of the convent’s scriptorium, or did one have to seek out the privilege and duty of serving as a preparer of convent books in one’s more mature years? We cannot, at this juncture, say with any certainty how nuns were recruited or trained. Yet it is clear from what we might call ‘hiring patterns’ that convent leaders regularly sought their scribal candidates from within the convent membership, though they always reserved the right to farm out copying duties to professionals from the outside world. Monastic Labours Common elements in the medieval scribal job description may have overcome some of the many differences that various scribes experienced. Differences of rule and statute, monastic order, class background, position within the convent hierarchy, and educational access: all these features would have mitigated the perception of a singular and unified scribal experience. After all, a manuscript copied by a lay sister would be received differently than one by a choir nun with years of privilege and a superior education. Yet underlying all these parameters were the commonalities of scribal production – the page produced, the text inscribed, the initials entered and the book ‘finished and perfected.’ The scribe of whatever background and from whatever circumstances served as an active agent in the broader context of book production. Just as there was no one experience of being a convent scribe, so too there was no one singular motivation underlying such scribal service. Rather, we can infer a whole series of overlapping motivations of need and duty that inspired and induced these medieval workers to undertake their specialized labours. Human these scribes most assuredly

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were, with all of the redundancy and even self-contradictions built into the individual mixture of desires and reasons that stood behind their choice of work. We will never understand fully what brought such individuals to undertake scribal activity, just as we can never tell with any precision what array of reasons set another on the path to book production. We can, however, tease out a few strands of opportunity and obligation common to monastic book copying under a variety of circumstances. For the monastic scribe in particular, the heavy emphasis for manuscript production must have lain in a combination of convent need and assigned duty. Monastic scribes serve because there is a clear and established need for books within communities. As shown in chapter 2, the convent leadership had to provision the convent with books for liturgy, for study, and for devoted contemplation. From the point of view of the convent scribe, then, the need to copy a manuscript would have been made known through the superior’s order. In other words, many scribes copied manuscripts at least in part because they were asked to.7 And indeed, the most frequent explanation for how a manuscript came to be made was that a superior in the convent community had requested it. Examples are legion. Abbess, mother, or prioress might have ‘had the manuscript made,’ to adopt the clichéd formula of the scribal colophon. Nonnberg abbess Agatha Haunsberger ‘had this book written’ (hadt das püch schreyben lassen) for the convent of Nonnberg abbey.8 Similarly, Elizabeth Borchtorpe literally ‘made to be written’ (scribi fecit) a beautiful book for St Maria in Wöltingerode; the more idiomatic translation, of course, would be ‘had [the book] written.’9 And again, ‘I sister Dorothea Deriethain, professed of the Dominican Monastery of St Maria in Medlingen started this gradual at the command of (mandato) Prioress Margarethae Schleicherin ...’10 As discussed in chapter 4 (p. 141), such references are a way of dating and authorizing the manuscript. The clichéd formulations are at the same time revelatory of a kind of social status implicit in the copying effort. Just as the front credits of modern-day films attribute their production to the director and the producer and save until the end the name of the individuals whose physical labour contributed to the final product, the manuscript takes the instruction of the superior – the recognition of a need (or opportunity) and the assertion of a plan of action – as significant, often more so than the work of the scribe her or himself. In terms of scribal motivation, then, the formula of command (‘had made’ or ‘had written’) reveals a positioning of oneself against a backdrop of adherence to the

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vow of obedience. The cliché tells us both of the monastic superior’s power to command and, perhaps more importantly, of the monastic personnel’s willingness to carry out the demand. The scribe copied because she was told to; she fulfilled through copying the physical task assigned her by her superior. External scribes too often served at the behest of a monastic superior. The external scribe typically worked to order. That there was a contractual relationship – either implicit or explicit – in the copying of books can be deduced from payments in account ledgers. The scribe who works for pay does the bidding of another under a work-for-hire relationship. Take, for instance, Brother Johannes Strentzlin. He copies a book that ‘belongs to lady Agnes de Tusselingen, abess in Günterstal,’ as he says on fol. 160vb.11 He works directly for her, then, presumably for financial reward and presumably to the good of the whole convent. Nevertheless, in spite of the quid pro quo of such a relationship, there is still a patron-client hierarchy in the commissioning of the manuscript. The scribe, whatever his/her place in the world at large, often works under someone else’s command. In a sort of idealized monastery of the late Middle Ages, then, wishing for something might make it so, at least as far as the convent’s leader was concerned. A convent superior had but to decree and the work would be undertaken. When convent need and convent resources came together appropriately, the manuscript might be crafted in-house. When no one of the necessary skill level was available or when such production might prove inconvenient given the other obligations of the convent members, that manuscript could be commissioned from someone external to the monastic community. A monastic scribe might also copy simply because it was expected as part of her duties as a convent officer. A new feast or a new prayer necessitated the emendation of liturgical sources, and more ambitious reforms might result in the radical recasting of convent materials. The cantrix who oversaw the performance of the liturgy therefore also needed to keep the chant books up to date.12 Sometimes she did this through purchase, and at other times she made changes in her own hand, either by revising existing books or by copying new ones. At the abbey of Isenhagen, for example, we know that the nuns turned to outsiders to prepare new books, for a will of 1450 gives 20 marks to the Sangmeisterin to purchase new books.13 But some nuns did adopt a more direct role in the creation and maintenance of the chant books. The sister-book entry for Töss sengerin Mezzi von Klingenberg, for instance,

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indicates that she personally took a role as a scribe.14 Similarly, Dominican reformer Johannes Meyer’s description of ‘swöster’ Clara von Ostren of Schönensteinbach shows her as directly involved in her capacity as singer in the maintenance of the convent’s liturgical resources. She ‘served as sengerin for more than 30 years,’ functioning admirably in all the capacities of that office; in particular, Meyer continues, she personally ensured ‘that all books were corrected well and accurately.’15 Singers from all monastic orders presumably found it a duty to contribute to the liturgical manuscripts in their possession. Elisabetha Hüttlen, the Cistercian cantrix at Seligenthal, for instance, took her turn at working in one manuscript: ‘1462 Closter Frau Elisabetha Hyttlen also made the gradual; she was 35 years the cantorin.’16 In particular, convent Sengerin were prone to copying their own individualized rituals to remind themselves of the cycle of duties over the course of the year. This genre of liturgical book provided an adapted and idiosyncratic version of the instructions for the liturgy and was replaced as often as once a generation in convents such as St Katharina’s in Nuremberg. Such privately copied rituals or ordos still survive from half a dozen women’s convents of the later Middle Ages. The survival of such manuscripts is especially worthy of note, for the information they contain might rapidly become out of date as convents underwent the flex and flux of reform, revision, and reprioritizing. Certainly the manuscripts would have had little-to-no useful function after the imposition of Tridentine reforms. Nor are such manuscripts typically of sufficient artistic merit to be saved as examples of the manuscript art. Yet these casually copied and idiosyncratic manuscripts are among our best resources for understanding the ceremonial of women’s convents and merit our more complete attention in future studies.17 In smaller convents the cantrix too was responsible for the convent library. It was she who might provide the indexing, the book register, or the shelf mark if the library had grown to sufficient size. Such a role was rooted in earlier medieval practice, and discussions of the role of the cantor/cantrix by such scholars as Karl Christ, Chris Page, Anne Yardley, and Margot Fassler reveal a richness of office duties that might well have delighted the easily bored.18 One can sing the chant, arrange the chant, select the chant, serve as convent historian, update the necrology, and still have time to copy a book or two over the course of a fulfilling career. Such a work-list might daunt the less versatile, but in this context, the cantrix was, of necessity, scribe or at the very least caretaker of the books of the monastery, and so might copy books by virtue of her post and its assigned duties.

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Other convent personnel too might have scribal duties. We know from convent inventories that books were housed in the infirmary; historian Monica Green has identified seventeen German women’s convents that housed medical treatises, for instance,19 and it seems logical that the infirmarian might have helped to prepare those specialized tracts. The archivist and her assistants too might contribute to creating books for the convent collection as might others who had no formal monastic office. Humbert of Romans, for instance, asserts in his provisions for a monastic library that there would be a need for parchment and ink – along with ‘pens, pumicestones, chalk, lead, rulers, knives (to cut the pens), and tallow or candles for nightly study, and all things of this type necessary for writing or studying or keeping awake’ – to be made available as circumstances and the convent leader would allow.20 He suggests (though he does not state) that someone other than the librarian will be trained to take on the job of refurbishing the convent’s literary collection.21 Persons or person unnamed might make copies of books to replace worn and damaged manuscripts. Similarly, in Humbert’s well-regulated library, duplicate manuscripts and extras might be sold in order to subsidize the acquisition of new books. In Humbert’s opinion, the ideal library was far from a static collection; it would change in order to meet a convent’s evolving needs. The ideal library, then, needed agents for book production. In short, the convent library would be served by convent scribes, or by convent purchase plan, or both. In the fifteenth century, three major monastic reforms called upon convent women more generally to take up quill and produce books. The Bursfeld ceremonial of 1463, for instance, called for choir prayer and reading, feminine handiwork, and book manufacture. It singled out writing, rubricating, parchment preparation, and knowledge of Latin as necessary skills.22 The Bursfeld reforms were known to at least some of the nuns in question here. The Gaukirchkloster (Paderborn Cistercians) owned the statutes, as did the Willebadessen Benedictines.23 The convent Langendorf, St Marien, owned a copy of a Bursfeld ordinarius.24 And Gertrud von Büchel, a nun at the Benedictine convent at Rolandswerth copied a ‘Nonnenregel von Bursfeld’ in 1497 for the Koblenz Cistercians.25 Similarly, Johannes Busch (d. 1480) of Windesheim fame, apparently asked the reformed women at Augustinian houses to undertake scribal activity, training and instruction, and Latin knowledge.26 The Windesheimer constitutions, however, only discuss the maintenance of convent collections. The tasks of the librarian are spelled out in detail and it is clear that the convents were book-centred institutions, but, as with

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Humbert of Romans’s comments on the well-regulated library, the explicit task of scribal labour was not, evidently, discussed. Finally, among the nuns of the devotio moderna, book production was central to their activities; as Wybren Scheepsma establishes, ‘[r]eligious and ascetic texts intended for these women are estimated to have amounted to at least three quarters of the total number of extant manuscripts containing Middle Dutch texts.’27 Book copying, then, in some reformed cloisters became a specific part of women’s monastic duties and in others was an implicit corollary of Observant reforms.28 There is some evidence that reformed cloisters did in fact produce more than their share of manuscripts. The 266 surviving manuscripts copied by women that stem from Observant women’s houses outnumber the 203 manuscripts prepared by women that come from houses not known to have adopted Observant reforms.29 Given that only one third of the women’s houses that have the largest surviving libraries adopted such reforms, the imbalance does point to a more active scribal movement within Observant cloisters; there are fewer Observant houses but they produce more manuscripts than their non-Observant peer institutions.30 It does not, however, come close to matching the observations elsewhere in the scholarly literature that ‘ninety percent of German manuscripts owned by convents come from this very small number of reformed women’s houses.’31 Indeed, examining the total pool of manuscripts known to have survived from women’s cloisters, only one third of the surviving manuscripts come from Observant houses, and this includes those manuscripts prepared in those houses prior to their adoption of reforms.32 That is not to belittle the flurry of activity that frequently came within the first generation after reform; there clearly is an association of the renewal of convent library with the renewal of a convent’s spiritual life. The direct association between the adoption of Observant practices and the building of the convent’s manuscript library, however, should not be overstated. For now, we should probably assume that Observant houses produced roughly twice as many manuscripts as their non-Observant peer institutions unless additional information comes to light. That caution aside, however, times of reform typically involved the creation of reform-related materials. Revised statutes and guidelines for implementation of the desired reforms were important to the reforming movement. Thus, in 1469, the nuns at Marienrode lent a reformed collectarium, a collection that contained Cistercian regulations, to the convent of Wienhausen for the nuns to copy.33 Gertrud von Büchel’s efforts on behalf of the Koblenz Cistercians also suggests a reformer’s

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hand; she provided the new statutes for another cloister that faced the same circumstances as her own. In this, she is like the Dominican nun Elisabeth Muntpratin. Elisabeth, along with another a nun in St Katharina’s in St Gall, copied a manuscript for the Inzigkofen nuns in 1484. Among the items she copied was a 37-strophe Historisches Lied by Dominican author Johannes Scherle from two years earlier that addressed the imposition and advantages of clausura for the St Katherina’s nuns. (Scherle happened to be the Biechtvater for the St Katherina’s convent, and is credited with both words and melody.) Significantly, the song is paired with Johannes Meyer’s book on the reformation of the Dominican order; likely the St Katharina nuns sought to encourage their Inzigkoven sisters to a closer adherence to reformed ideals.34 Similarly, the switch to Observant reform often required the preparation of appropriate liturgical materials. Jeffrey Hamburger tells the story of the Ebstorf reform of 1469 particularly well: After segregating the nuns from the laity, the first act of the new prioress, Gertrude von dem Brake, was to confiscate all existing choir books – whether lectionaries, graduals, or antiphonaries – declare them corrupt, and, much to the consternation of her charges, have them cut to shreds. In the weeks that followed, the nuns spent each night writing out a rough script for the following day’s services, performed by a skeleton staff of twelve nuns. Until they learned the new ordo, all others were barred from participation. Book by book, the chronicle catalogues the acquisition of a new liturgical library. At first the prior commissioned some paper manuscripts from an outside scriptorium, no doubt in the interest of speed. Over the course of 3 years, however, the nuns produced their own, more lavish, set of liturgical volumes, including codices ‘literis aureis et pictatis.’35

The reforming leader, then, destroyed the old liturgical manuscripts and started the process of creating new volumes that met the liturgical requirements of the reformed experience. The story notes too that casual paper copies were ordered first, but that the luxurious codices normal for worship were generated by the nuns themselves, a labour supervised by their monastic superior. In short, an abbess under pressure of need might ask of her nuns the work of scribal service. While the rules and statutes of a given house may not have required manuscript copying, their provisions for obedient service facilitated such work when the need arose. Perhaps the need for revision of both statutes and liturgical materials contributed to the presence of reformers who were also scribes on many

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of the visiting teams who brought reform from one centre to another. When Ebstorf reformed the Lüne cloister in 1481, for instance, one of the seven reformatrices who travelled from Ebstorf along with Mechtild von Niendorf was a scriptrix.36 Likewise, Magdalena Kremer, a reformer in residence at Kirchheim unter Teck, filled numerous offices including that of scriptrix; she also served as sacristan, as mistress of novices, and as cantrix. Her liturgical and educational knowledge was reinforced by her ability to communicate it by preparing the documents that would serve the reformed community.37 Similarly, when the nuns of Schönensteinbach undertook the reform of St Katharina’s in Nuremburg, they sent ten sisters, one of whom, Margareta Kartäuserin, became one of the major scribes of the St Katharina scriptorium. Kartäuserin’s specialty, the preparation of liturgical books, would have been particularly important at that point in St Katharina’s liturgical history.38 In answer to the question of why scribes serve, it becomes apparent that in part the answer lies within convent duty. One copied books because one was instructed to do so and because the task fitted into one’s place within the convent. One copied as well when the community faced a need for books so that they could carry on their work. When a convent switched from one set of religious and spiritual practices to another – as when a convent underwent reform or transferred from one order to another – a spate of book copying could help accommodate those changes. In part, monastic scribes served because they were obliged to do so. Financial and political position might also affect the demands for scribal activities within a convent. In addition to the expectations for book creation laid forth in monastic rules and statutes, foundation documents (or less formal pressures from a monastery’s founders) might also encourage book production on the part of the nuns of a given community. Ulrich II of Königstein, for example, expected that the women of Engelthal would produce books as part of their community existence.39 These women prayed, they did weaving and embroidery, and they managed their estates, but alongside these more plebeian activities, they also served as the intellectual producers of their convent. Those books were not necessarily to leave the convent; it could have been that the nuns were expected to create their own in-house resources. But it was Ulrich’s expectation that by sponsoring a community of noble nuns, he was also endorsing a community capable of producing their own intellectual resources in the form of the material book. Book copying created a kind of self-sufficiency.

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Similar pressures to encourage scribal activity might emerge from the financial import of such book copying. Women copying books produced a valuable resource both intellectually and monetarily. Of course, there was an initial investment necessary both in training and in materials to facilitate the creation of books. Parchment was expensive; ink had to be hand-mixed; training took years of practice. The end result might be a scribble or a luxurious volume by the most highly valuable professional in a region, but in either case the end result had value itself. We know that manuscripts were sometimes used as pawnable items and formed, therefore, part of the realm of monetary exchange in which goods stood as pledges for monetary borrowing. Though none of the manuscripts with scribal signatures come with evidence of pledges marked, we know that books, like plate, occasionally stood in lieu of money as temporary or perhaps permanent pledges. This is one of the reasons why religious dicta prohibited the lending out of books; this practice of book pawning came to be abused, presumably in women’s orders as well as men’s. Similarly, manuscripts might be produced for more direct financial benefits. Often, books were produced by women scribes for sale. This phenomenon was attested to in numerous ways. We know from documentary evidence, for instance, that the Oetenbach sisters mentioned above (p. 171) copied books worth 10 marks a year, and thereby turned around the financial situation of the convent upon the arrival of these literate nuns in the thirteenth century. According to the sister-book, Ita von Hoehenfels joined the convent along with three companions. One was both scribe and illuminator, and together she and a copyist already present at the monastery turned the monastery fortunes around by selling books not only to other monastics but also to secular clergy and to lay people. As a measure of the importance of this activity, the scriptorium at Oetenbach became the largest workroom in the community.40 Perhaps that emphasis on financial value explains why the occasional scribal colophon degenerates into a kind of financial memorandum, listing off costs for parchment, ink, pictures, and so forth; the manuscript which Meliora ab Greudt had prepared for the monastery of Hermetschwill mentioned above, for instance, cost 9 French crowns, while the one prepared with funds provided by Sister Elyzabeth Tunnein for the Cistercian cloister of Frauenthal in 1342 itemizes costs for parchment, scribe’s labour, illumination, and binding.41 The financial benefits of such copying could be significant, particularly in a convent that observed clausura, for we know that men placed

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orders for books with their women monastic colleagues. Dominican nun Druda de Elfenhusen from Paradiese, a convent in Soest near Cologne, worked for Frater Iacobi de Duzenberg, as recorded in the colophon to her now-destroyed manuscript.42 In the same vein, the Salzburg Petersfrauen prepared a psalter, now lost, for Abbot Otto II Chalchosperger.43 These male-sanctioned copying efforts were not just momentary anomalies; the presence of scribally active women’s communities was well known in this late medieval period. Inzigkoven, for instance, had established a reputation for its ‘fine missals and choirbooks.’44 So too, the Cologne Klarissenkloster was responsible for illuminated manuscripts for clients outside of its convent. The scriptorium, in place by the mid-fifteenth century, had more than one scribe who specialized in music books. Loppa de Speculo (von Spiegel) is known to have copied both a notated gradual and an antiphonal dated 1350.45 More recently, her convent sister Gertrud van dem Vorst has been identified as the initial scribe for another now-fragmentary gradual; her image and a marginal inscription together attest to her responsibilities as scriptrix.46 Indeed, the success of such women’s scriptoria in generating material for the book trade was sometimes perceived by other communities as threatening. As mentioned in chapter 1, the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers in Trier (1249) forbade the friars to have psalters and other books copied by female scribes.47 Book copying could solve the financial woes of women’s houses, but that was evidently seen by some clerics as a financial drain upon the male side of the order. Of course, book copying was not only about money. Book copying could also support the realm of book giving. Scribes used their colophons to offer books to friends, to the abbess, to members of the outside community, or simply to God. SalzburgNA 28 D 3, for instance, was given to ‘my sisters from Nonnberg’ by the dean (Techanttin), Barbara Schedlingerin. The purpose behind the book giving might be unclear, but often there was a personal emotive significance behind the creation of a particular book for another person that one knew. One member of the community very often chose to copy a book for another member of the same community, and so the gift of a book from this member of the convent to that becomes a relatively frequent form of exchange, particularly by the latter part of the fifteenth century when the practice is attested to by numerous flyleaf inscriptions. Angesa von Mandorf, for example gave a proser to her ‘liebi besi,’ best friend Elsbet Staibelin.48 Likewise, book giving went up and over the walls of the monastery so that we have testaments that one person gave a book to another person in a variety of arrangements. Book

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gifts that were visible to the broader community would have enhanced the monastery’s reputation. Such gifts would also have placed the individual or group who received the gift in the convent’s debt. Moreover, the book given away allowed the monastic community to help guide the reading and, presumably, the attendant intellectual or spiritual growth of others. Thus, monastery-sanctioned copying served directly to the monastery’s benefit, even if the end-product was soon given away for gift or purchase elsewhere. If book copying sometimes followed from financial or spiritual considerations, at other times it resulted from a crisis or urgent situation. In the period of recovery following a fire, for instance, the replacement of the liturgical resources for the convent would have been a pressing necessity, of as much urgency in the spiritual sphere as was the rebuilding of the refectory in the physical sphere. The convent of Brunshausen, for instance, lost its library in the wars of Otto of Braunschweig-Göttingen in the fourteenth century. Similarly, the nuns of Isenhagen faced a disastrous fourteenth century. The convent burned in 1336, forcing the nuns to turn to alms for support; in 1385, the convent was destroyed by lightning and was again rebuilt.49 Lüne too was twice destroyed by fire, once in 1240 and again on 30 April 1372. The abbess of Himmelkron lodged complaints in 1467 and again in 1478 ‘for fire-damage and the alienation of property.’50 Again, at Neuenwalde in 1500 all the convent buildings were burned; we know from inventories that choirbooks, documents, tapestries, and chalices were lost in the fire.51 Given the extent of destruction typically wrought by fire on the largely wood-based construction, it seems astonishing that such disasters did not claim more of the manuscript collections in women’s houses. Nor were fires the only occasion for such losses. The repeated stories of plundered convents likewise suggest that civil unrest created scribal need. Convents including Bassum, sacked in 1350, Heiligen Kreuz, which suffered repeated plunderings, and the Altkloster of Buxtehude, looted in 1499, would each have faced a need for a refurbished convent manuscript collection.52 We know too that the Benedictines of Nonnberg Abbey held off such generalized plundering by bribing the army with some of the convent’s older but richly crafted manuscripts. The story comes from later – in the Napoleonic period – but they are surely not the only nuns to have exchanged selected objects from the treasury (or funds from the coffers) to maintain personal safety and some level of control over what was carried off by marauders and what objects and books maintained within the convent’s possession. But it would have been in the hours, days, and weeks following the crisis that the convent’s personnel would determine which of the books

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should be replaced and in what order. Only then could the scribes be assigned to fill the gap in monastic manuscript holdings. Replacement of liturgical books, indeed, the replacement of library books in general, could become a central convent task over a multiyear period depending on the extent of the convent’s initial losses and on the generosity of other donor convents that might help to reconstitute the collection. In such circumstances, stories of loss could also be stories of great opportunity. We cannot know with what degree of joy the library cataloguer noted the presence of the ‘new’ antiphonal or missal, but the circumstances surrounding the creation of those manuscripts, however dire, allowed for the production and emergence of an altogether wonderful resource. Wholesale loss was not the only motivation for the replacement or updating of books from the convent library. One might, if one wished, revise or recopy books whenever it seemed appropriate. Indeed, much of the ‘additional’ material towards the ends of monastic manuscripts was presumably added by readers-as-scribes who contributed their own choice offerings to supplement the texts that were already collected and compiled. Many women’s hands can be found among these later additions to manuscripts, and there is no hard-and-fast line between the reader who annotates a manuscript while she studies and the scribe who adds new material to that same manuscript. In the study presented here, the addition of a few words or even a marginal sentence or two has been taken as mere ‘book use,’ while the accumulation of several pages of new material has been deemed ‘scribal activity,’ but the distinction is an awkward one and might have puzzled the women who encountered these manuscripts with quill in hand. For liturgical books, too, there was an ongoing opportunity to update and adapt the manuscript, so that the readings at the end of a given manuscript’s period of usefulness might depart surprisingly far from the readings available to the original user. The Nonnberg nuns resisted the adoption of Tridentine reforms in 1581, for instance, by complaining that the new service books that the bishop wanted them to adopt omitted so much of their traditional service that it would be ‘much work’ to bring them up to date.53 In spite of occasional resistance to change, however, most houses had several copies of antiphonals, missals, processionals, and the like, so that the liturgical manuscripts could be rotated; one might be used while the other was off for repair or revision. The replacement of the worn and damaged manuscripts was supplemented by the manuscript created deliberately as a duplicate, either for

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private use or as an investment. Manuscripts with private circulation – breviaries, books of hours, processionals, prayerbooks, and the like – occasioned numerous seatings at the copytable. By the fifteenth century, and in many convents by the fourteenth century, there is a sense that the individual nun might come to own books of her own. Ownership inscriptions, wills, and records of books passed down through the convent membership show the lively internal trade in books that became part of convent culture. The scribe for such books might work on her own; the preparation of a Gebetbuch, for instance, could be a come-as-you-are copying endeavour that represents the jottings of a person collecting material for her own contemplation. One might serve as scribe, then, simply in order to have a copy of the book. At other times, however, the convent membership seems to have copied manuscripts either to duplicate a borrowed text for use within their own convent or to offer the duplicates of a particular text for use elsewhere. Oetenbach’s scriptorium, for instance, depended in part on borrowed exemplars, but they clearly intended their copying to be part of the convent’s financial structure.54 St Katharina’s nuns likewise engaged in a form of book trading, gathering and acknowledging texts from sister houses and giving away unnecessary duplicates.55 Thus, some manuscripts came to be copied when an exemplar made its way into the hands of the necessary personnel. Copying becomes a form of scribal networking, and the words and texts available at one monastery might be recopied for use at another. One copied, in short, when either demand or opportunity arose. Another aspect of the intellectual reward of book copying comes from the control of knowledge that falls to the task of the scribe. If the scribe has liberty to select the works that he or she copies, the scribe can then shape the kinds of material that circulate within and between convent libraries. Thus, when a scribe such as Sister Ursula Kollerin or her fellow Sister Barbara Stromer of the Nuremberg Clarissans copies the sermons of the local confessor, Franciscan mystic Heinrich Vigilis, she participates in a cultural movement of particular import for women’s monasticism.56 As Anne Winston-Allen notes in the preface to her recent study Convent Chronicles, ‘virtually all the sermons in German that survive from the Middle Ages were written down or copied by women who heard them in convent parish churches ...’57 It was the convent women acting as scribes who shaped the circulation and subsequent survival of hortatory literature. This has import for how the ideas of reform, of identity, and even of liturgical and contemplative practice grew and changed within late medieval Germany.

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Bragging Rights: Scribes as Experts It is possible and even likely that scribes who copied manuscripts for convent usage also copied for the internal rewards, those of intellectual achievement and of artistic and creative opportunities inherent in the creation of manuscript books. The categories of motivation are not mutually exclusive, of course; the scribe who is told to copy is not necessarily an unwilling scribe, and even the most unwilling scribe stands to gain some benefit in terms of status or accomplishment from undertaking the work. And indeed, unless the human psyche has undergone a radical transformation, many of these medieval workers must have gotten pleasure out of their work. But there are among these medieval scribes some whose motivation apparently also stemmed at least in part from bragging rights – from being able to tell others of the accomplishments they had personally achieved. The scribes under consideration here, after all, had some reason for putting down their name as having been associated with the manuscript; this places them at odds with the standard practice for their peers. Memorializing one’s copying activity through a scribal colophon is a request for recognition. By giving one’s name, one is at the very least providing the reader with an opportunity to consider the identity of the person who crafted the book. The naming of self as scribe then is or can be perceived inherently as a touch of braggadocio. Given that scribes sign only one out of every five books, there must have been some use for self-identification when it did occur. The hope for a bit of personal glory might have tempted individuals then just as it does now. Was the medieval scribe, then, anticipating Andy Warhol’s allotted fifteen minutes of fame? The scribe who signed a manuscript did, after all, receive some kind of personal recognition for the work that she or he had done. And, of course, scribes were justifiably proud of the hard work they had contributed and conscious of the recognition that accrued to the work they had undertaken. The men and women who make explicit claims for their contributions then seem to have some desire for public recognition. Scribes might brag too of their own unique characteristics, as does the left-handed nun who describes herself in the colophon: ‘Amen, amen. Margaretha von Schonbergk has written this with her left hand; pray for the good of dear Sister Julian and please also pray to God for me. Amen.’58 We know not only of her own identity but also for whom she crafted the book. But this glimpse into personal identity is also another way of making the person behind the book memorable to the reader. We remember these women all the better for

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the details that they provide. The scribe who signs her or his name, then, along with the one who provides other personal identifiers achieves a certain level of fame that would continue from the time of copying through all the generations of readers who might come to examine the book for which she was responsible. The details of name and of personal identity serve to establish oneself as having been important, or useful, or both. A woman scribe – or her male counterpart – might therefore copy for a sense of fame, as well as for the creative joy of it. There is a kind of moral authority as well that comes with book copying. The scribe who crafted a book might use that hard labour to encourage the reader to take extra seriously the ideas placed before her. It is a claim of a kind of intellectual debt: I the scribe worked so hard in copying this manuscript that you the reader owe me the courtesy of taking my work seriously. One unnamed monk in particular reveals his struggles in a letter to his young niece Gertrude, who lives with her widowed mother: My beloved sister Gertrude, you should know that I herewith send you a book that I have written for you that you asked from me when I visited with you and with my sister. It is not so tidy as I would wish, but nonetheless this is my best [i.e., the best that I can do], and so take my good wishes for this work! For I have written it with much work and assembled it from many kinds of books. Whereupon I hope that it should serve you well.59

He calls the book the product of his labours (‘das Werk’), and then explains how much energy and effort went into it. His emphasis lies more on the physical exertion of writing than on the intellectual challenges of choosing materials, though both are mentioned; he has ‘written it with much work’ (mit großer Arbeit geschrieben) and has gathered its materials from numerous other books. One gets the clear sense that the sampling of the books he had chosen as resources was more fun than the physical labour of copying out the selected texts. The book that our anonymous monk sent along with the lengthy letter has, he claims, several kinds of texts, some of which he enumerates (the book itself appears not to have survived). It contains daily prayers. It addresses the ‘passion of our dear Lord called the “hundred Articles,”’ presumably Heinrich Seuse’s Hundred Meditations on the Passion from part 3 of The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, which circulated widely, particularly in women’s communities. The monk’s assemblage also contains various prayers, including a prayer to the twelve Apostles and to Gertrude’s

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guardian angel as well as prayers for the dead. Later, he says, she will find prayers to the Holy Cross and to the Blessed Virgin. In short, for his beloved Trude-Schwester who, he hopes, might come to live as a beguine or in a cloister, the monk has undertaken the work of gathering materials, of organizing them, of inscribing them on the page, and of instructing her in their use. But note as well that he has also taken care to remind his young reader of that work, thereby placing an implicit obligation on her to return that favour through her reading of the chosen texts and their ideas. Just as he has selected and copied with effort, so too should she read with effort. The work of the scribe will be paid off by the attention of the reader. Thus, writing and reading become parallel tasks, and work in one area can be balanced by work in the other. In this way, the scribal formula of hard work becomes a coded demand for the reader’s attention. The colophons’ repeated citations of hardship undertaken become more than just a set of witty jests at having finished an onerous task; they remind the reader to pay attention to what was created with that effort. Scribes might make claims of hard work in one of three ways. They might cite the achy backs, tired hands, or the ‘three digits which write,’ reminders of the physicality of the copying process.60 Complaints of this nature are relatively straightforward; the scribe plays upon the guilt of the reader to demand closer concentration on the work produced. The aches and pains sustained might have been for nothing, suggests the scribe, if you the reader do not consider the manuscript worthy of your full attention. Often, too, the colophon expresses relief or a sense of freedom at being finished. The anonymous ‘scriptor’ for CambridgeCCC 528, for instance, wrote that he ‘dances on light feet’61 near the end of a large collection of sermons by Nicholas Luce that belonged to the Brigittine convent in Elbing. A similar theme is evoked by an unidentified ‘Gertrude’ of the thirteenth century who remarks that as she finishes the decretals she ‘becomes accustomed to play,’ perhaps in a state of déshabillé or perhaps spiritually uncloaked; the word she uses to describe herself is ‘nudis.’62 This sense of release from the task of copying might again suggest to the sensitive reader that the copying itself was hard physical work, and so invoke the reader’s pity along with her resultant scholarly diligence. A third strand of scribal formulas focuses more on the rewards deserved for a task well done, in which the stipulated reward, predicated as it was on the work that the scribe has completed, would presumably be transformed by the reader into the ‘reader’s reward’ of attending carefully to the manuscript product of that work. In the telling, however, such

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rewards for scribal duties are, somewhat curiously, gendered, whereas the complaints are not. An examination of the 23,774 entries in Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux demonstrates that male monastics, but not their female compatriots, might include formulas such as ‘Who writes well should drink well,’63 and ‘Give for the scribe’s pains a beautiful girl.’64 Such clichés were presumably more an expression of abstract longing (‘hey, I’ve worked hard and deserve a treat’) than a tangible request for sinful dalliance. Women scribes were less prone to this kind of delight in praise of debauchery in response to a job well done, however. They may describe the aching back or the joy at being done, but they were unlikely to call for unmonastic kinds of celebrations; wine and women (or men, for that matter) are absent as rewards recorded by these busy women. Colophons from women’s houses might offer up a prayer of joy or speak to joy in the hereafter, they might ask for salvation or for Christ’s love, but they rarely spoke of more worldly rewards. This more limited focus on spiritual reward in women’s colophons may fit in with the more circumscribed parameters of women’s monastic lifestyles. They lived in a time that held strong moral scruples regarding women’s chastity. The reforming visitators with their critiques of convent living and the presumption of women’s lesser capacity to resist temptation placed high emphasis on claustration and on absolutes of moral propriety. In such a context, a women scribe may have felt less free to participate in the clichés of scribal banter lest she invite speculation as to the rectitude of her and her feminine companions’ lifestyle. If one lives at risk of moral blame and the bishop’s chastisement, one may be less likely to indulge in frivolous word-play that might invite greater scrutiny. Yet even if the means of expression differ between male monastics and female, the tangible sense of a task well done is conveyed in colophons by scribes of both genders.65 Moreover, both the earthly rewards requested by men and the heavenly rewards more often cited by women suggest a kind of grumbling pride that comes with the completion of the labour-intensive copying. Just as the modern worker brags about the breathless pace of work that piles up on one’s desk, the medieval monastic cites the hard work, discomfort, and strain almost as a point of pride. If hard work is virtuous, then invoking hard work in a scribal colophon profiles the scribe’s noble virtue in having taken on that work. Not everyone, these scribes suggest, could have done this copying. Moreover, it is work deserving of reward. The self-positioning of scribe as expert can be found most explicitly in the scribes who ‘do it all,’ as discussed in chapter 2 (p. 86). Some

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scribes had a particularly broad array of talents that they brought to bear in the creation of the beautiful, often illuminated and almost certainly pictorial manuscripts crafted in the convent scriptorium. These scribes offer up their names as a sign of their accomplishments. The women who list in their colophons the many tasks they undertook seem to have had a sense of ownership over the activity of copying. One monastic scribe discussed above emphasizes her pictorial skills: ‘All the pictures and floriation of this book have been painted and have been provided with flowers by Margareta Scheiffartz of Meirrode, once a daughter of the Bornheim regulars (?) in Schillingskapellen. Pray for her.’66 She not only lists what she did but repeats her claims to actions by providing verbs to those actions as well; the intentional redundancy suggests that she thinks her tasks somehow notable and noteworthy. Elisabeth von Winsen too describes her actions as involving both writing and preparing the associated illustrations for a psalter in 1478 in the cloister of Medingen (3) under provost Tylemann de Bavenstede (who served from 1467 to 1497).67 Similar claims were entered by ‘the venerable and devout virgin Gisela de Kerzenbroeck’; as her colophon tells us, she ‘wrote, illuminated, notated, paginated (?), and decorated in gold letters and beautiful images this extraordinary book in her own memory, in the year of our Lord 1300. May her soul rest in holy peace. Amen.’68 The resultant Codex Gisle, then, was putatively entirely her own responsibility, though it was not in fact done entirely in her own hand; the position of scribal leadership and the claims of supervisory control allow collaborative book production to blend in with individual endeavours.69 Such listing of skills suggests that the special mastery and expertise of the copyist was part of the reason for the naming of the scribe. The ability to have such great control over the artistic process that one designed and implemented most aspects of the copying process was a matter deemed worthy of the reader’s contemplation. Medieval scribes were evidently not adverse to expressing a touch of justifiable pride when they possessed multiple competencies.70 Working for Redemption In trying to determine the reasons behind scribal effort, the words and signs that the scribes themselves employed provide useful clues to what these women and men thought they were doing. The manuscripts these scribes crafted with such tender care reflected the underlying mindset of medieval monasticisim. A scribe might start the day’s work with the

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small marginal ‘xb’ – an abbreviation for Christe benedic, Christ bless [this work].71 Similar signs of work faithfully undertaken can occasionally be found at the ends of copy sessions and are found more frequently at the ends of large sections and again at the end of manuscripts. In fact, the appearance of one or another religiously based closing formula in scribal colophons is so common as to be quite literally invisible to the modern reader. Such expressions of religious faith as ‘Praise be to God’ and ‘Glory to Christ’ have frequently been omitted from modern-day manuscript catalogues through ellipses. They are, all too often, dismissed by modern cataloguers as mere cliché. Yet verbal formulas frame the way that we consider what we do. Just as salutation and signature in correspondence nowadays assert one’s close relationship with the party addressed in the letter (‘Dear X’) as well as one’s sincerity and veracity in the intervening text (‘Sincerely’), so does the scribal closing formula assert a close relationship between scribe and God. Sometimes that relationship is direct; the scribe offers expressions of praise or thanksgiving that directly address God, Christ, the Holy Trinity, or the Virgin Mary as a sort of medieval pantheon.72 At other times the relationship is mediated, and the scribe addresses the reader whose intercession through prayer is requested. To understand the effort of copying, it can be useful to examine the religious ideas adduced by the scribe him or herself, for the scribes who copied manuscripts for women’s convents, like their fellow monastics everywhere, lived and worked in a prayerful environment. If we understand the convent as a business centrally devoted to the corporate act of prayer, we have a context for understanding the work done within convent walls. It was the task of monastics to offer up prayers, to praise God, to beg intercession, to reach for the salvation of self, friend, neighbour and stranger. The action of prayer could be done through liturgical practice as a group, and members of a convent community gathered in ritualized actions devoted to the work of prayer. But other activity too was a prayerful offering to God. Individual contemplation, reading, needlework, scribal activity, labour in the fields – all could be construed as prayer as long as God was kept in the heart as a centrepiece for the action undertaken. Gertrude of Helfta articulated a vision of activity that kept a mindset of devotion as a backdrop, and found that all activity, even suffering, could be offered up to God.73 That scribes too saw their own work as enacting God’s will and as a form of contribution to the convent’s culture of prayer is witnessed through the statement they provided. ‘Laus sit Deo’;74 its vernacular

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equivalent ‘Got sy lob’75 and ‘Laus sit Christi’76 each attest to the book’s place and the scribe’s place within a community devoted to the praise of God. There is, of course, a structural ambiguity in how these phrases are often presented. In context, the scribes often assert, ‘The book is finished, praise be to God.’ Depending on the way in which this line was delivered if read out loud, the reader/listener could interpret the formula as an expression of thanksgiving either for the completion of the task or for the book itself. In the first instance, the formula might be a sign that the scribe is glad to be done and therefore released from the task. The modern equivalent could be the heartfelt, ‘I’m done, thank God,’ which does not necessarily carry with it a strong religious import. In the second scenario, on the other hand the scribe might be praising God for assistance in the creation of the book, acknowledging God’s agency in allowing or facilitating the fulfilment of the copying effort. There is in this interpretation a relational aspect to the two clauses; perhaps an effective translation might be, ‘The book having been finished, [for which] praise be to Christ.’77 Occasionally the perceived agency is made explicit. The book might be ‘written and perfected with the help of God’78 on a particular day in a particular year, or might come into being ‘through God.’79 In both interpretations, the inclusion of the formula of praise intersects with the work that occasioned its inclusion; the finishing or the work itself evoked in the scribe a need to remind the reader of the act of prayer. Sometimes, of course, a monastic scribe would have seen the work of copying as itself a form of prayer. In the mystical theology of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in particular, one praises God by doing his work and by keeping him in one’s thoughts. The act of copying, if done in the right frame of mind, is a form of prayer. Perhaps it was for this reason that the scribe Walburgis Grashof, an Augustinian nun of Steterburg, juxtaposed the concluding formula with a reminder of her love for Christ: ‘The book having been finished, praise be to Christ,’ says Walburgis. ‘The book was completed on the feast of St Agnes, a Thursday in 1467. Christ is beloved,’ she reminds us, ‘by Walburgis, the scribe of this book.’80 Not only is the completion of the book an occasion for praise, but it is also an occasion for the scribe to remind us of the devotional aspect of her copying endeavour. That devotion, presumably kept in mind throughout the endeavour of copying the breviary and now expressly articulated at the conclusion of the task, had made her preparation of this book a physical enaction of prayer. If copying could be a method of prayer, so too the object created might stand as a tangible reminder of prayer, for the monastic book was

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often a devotional object. This would have been especially noticeable in the case of the deluxe manuscripts with bejewelled covers and elaborate, illustrative covers. Here, the book as an object on display for the purpose of liturgical action serves as a visible reminder of the word of God on which Christianity is founded. Yet even in the less elaborate manuscripts (such as those discussed by Jeffrey Hamburger) that come from a circle of nuns whose own artistic endeavours were influenced strongly by the handcraft tradition normative to German monastic culture, the images, however rustic or crude, participated in the visual aspects of devotional practice. One examined the image and gave it due attention; in that process one followed in the desired path of prayerful activity. Given that books were themselves devotional objects, prayers made manifest through writing, these scribal exclamations of praise must have resonated particularly well with the monastic readership. In the culture of the written word that permeated the monastic environment, reading and writing were seen as a means to the study of the word of God. In such a context, the formulaic comment of heavenly praise might also be cautionary or hortatory: Reader, beware, and turn your attention to how this text that you have just read informs your own relationship to God. In short, even the mere inclusion of a separate threeword text asserting praise or thanksgiving pointed out some kind of intersection between copying and prayer. These expressions of praise are ambiguous or perhaps multivalent. They can offer up a prayer at the completion of the work, and can serve to remind the reader to do likewise. They can also offer up the work as a way of praising God. So too, they might offer up the finished book itself as a devotional offering, as prayer made manifest through the material object. The scribe who included a formulaic catch-phrase might mean one or all of these things, if indeed he or she was conscious of meaning anything in particular by the standard closing. If some manuscripts relied only on the brief and formulaic single-line prayer and other manuscripts lack colophons altogether, a third and large group of monastic manuscripts provide more extensive colophons that offer further information about the mind-set in which those manuscripts were produced. Here again, as before, formulaic phrasings and clichés abound, yet the choice of wording can reveal aspects of the religious predilections of the scribes who adopted them. Among the most frequent assertions is that the preparation of the manuscript was done ‘to the praise and glory of God’81 or ‘to the praise and glory of God the

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Almighty,’ centring the scribe’s praise on the central figure of the Trinity. Other colophons, however, specify that the manuscript was copied ‘to the praise and glory of the Holy Trinity,’82 to the Blessed Virgin, to Christ, or to the praise and glory of God and a favored saint. One might dedicate the work ‘to the almighty God to whom praise and glory [be given] and to the holy Saint Martin,’83 for example. While the phrase itself situates the copying in a context of a life lived and worked in prayer, just as the less specific ‘praise God’ formulas discussed above, in these longer colophons the named addressee or intercessor might vary according to the spiritual inclination of the convent sister who wrote the concluding words. This variability is a telling detail. These scribes lived in a personalized world of favoured saints and of favoured aspects of the deity. In crafting their closing formulas, the scribes chose among these heavenly holies to craft a formula that represented their own faith. These decisions, made consciously or unconsciously, represent a selection made through some combination of the private choice of the individual, the saints adopted by her monastic house, the saints favoured by a given order, and the broader world of Catholicism at large. We have among these scribes, then, a set of witnesses to the individualized practice of medieval Catholicism, a desire on the part of the faithful to affiliate themselves with the multiple identities of the sacred available in the rich panoply of God in the forms manifested in the Trinity, in his saints, and in the blessed Virgin, mediatrix. But if the work of the scribe was often bounded on the one hand by a relationship to the sacred, it was also undertaken on the other for the practical use for his or her convent of choice. One copied this book, say scribes for a number of different manuscripts, for the consolation of the convent sisters. One scribe identifies herself, her faithful dedication to God and saint, and her purpose in serving her sisters thus: ‘Sister Adelheydis Strosserin has written this book to the praise and glory of God Almighty and to the holy father St Francis and to the solace of the whole convent through God and [it] was perfected on St Francis’s day 1444 after Christ’s birth.’84 The purpose of the activity was to uplift her fellow sisters in her community of convent living. Similarly, Margret Ortlibin arranged for the book to be copied ‘to the praise of ... God ... and to the consolation of my worthy convent,’ as she has the (male) scribe remind us in the colophon to The Marriage of Christ with the Believing Soul.85 The book, then, was a gift to God, but it was also a gift to the community of women who were doing his work. There is a sense, then, of duty and of offering in the crafting of these manuscript books. The book can easily

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become both a prayerful offering and an object that reminds the fellow sisters of the prayer that is incumbent upon them as members of the religious community. In giving the book to her community, the scribe both provides the book itself and prompts her sisters to their sacred duty. Yet if some manuscript colophons give us a sense of a selfless offering, the more common strategy of the scribal colophon was to provide a sense of shared participation in the work, in which the scribe establishes a kind of bargain with the reader. In a large number of the colophons of manuscripts for women’s convents, there is a sense of shared purpose between the copyist and the reader of the book. A common division of labour is implied by many of the colophons that survive. Many scribes, for instance, request of the reader a separate prayer or two: Pray for me, sister Agnes of Mülheim.86 Pray to God for the scribe with an Ave Maria.87 Pray to God for the scribe who wrote this book.88 Beg God also truly for me, poor miserable scribe and [beg] Maria his venerable mother.89

Each of these scribes is asking for the reader to undertake prayerful intercession – to beg God on her behalf for her salvation. This collaborative structure in which the reader might pray for the person who had crafted the book is a sense of request for group activity in which each prays for the soul of the others. Colophons sometimes make this relationship explicit. We know, for instance, that Hans Wildsgeferd, a canon of Augsburg Cathedral (d. 1470) had arranged for books to be copied as a gift for ‘the religious sisters, prioress, and convent of the church of Saint Peter at Salzburg, so that they would pray to God for him.’90 His gift of the book is traded against their prayers for his salvation. Similarly, in the middle of the fourteenth century, Sister Jutta Alfter had a book prepared. The colophon again offers a compelling vision of the trade of scribal activity for prayerful remembrance: Sister Jutta Alfter paid for this book with her prebends and alms. Pray devoutly for her and for those she remembers. And Sister Loppa de Speculo completed [or perfected] it by writing, ruling, notating, [and] illuminating

Why Scribes Serve 195 so that you would not exclude [her] from your hearts nor from your devout prayers. The year of our Lord 1350, great pestilence existing everywhere.91

This colophon in particular reveals an organization that was designed to lead to corporate acts of remembrance. One sister paid for the book, arranged for its financing, perhaps even requested that the content of that particular manuscript be copied. The prayers of the reader were then requested not only for her own soul but also for those many people that she had in her own prayerful remembrance. Her fellow sister at the convent did the elaborate work of creating the manuscript, and requested of the reader a second set of prayers. She speaks to the reader more directly and asks ‘that you would not exclude her from your hearts,’ that is, that you would keep her in your remembrance, something she sees as slightly different from the well-designed devout prayers (which she also requests). And indeed, the occasion for the worry is mentioned as well, since the year of the great plague was upon the convent. One might also pray for the other collaborators involved in book production. Not just the donor and scribe, but the whole of the copying team might be recognized through the reader’s prayers. ‘Pray to God for the scribe who copied this book with her hand, and for the priest, who has corrected and improved it,’ reads one such colophon.92 And again, ‘Say an Ave Maria for the scribe, the painter also as you please, and a good year [for both].’93 Prayer might benefit more than a single person, making it a good match for work accomplished through collaboration. The scribe might emphasize the sincerity of her request for prayer: ‘I beg it with my whole heart,’ decrees Katherine von Karpfen.94 Thus, one might beg for the prayer ‘with all one’s heart,’ or might put the emphasis on God’s agency in granting such a request. ‘This book is perfected in 1489 and was written by Sister Margaret Zurlin and desires through God an Ave Maria.’95 The formulation of such a request is complicated: the scribe requests that you the reader be moved by God to pray an Ave Maria for the scribe’s own benefit. Is the request to God, or to the reader, or to both? The end result would be the same: an increase in the scribe’s own personal chances for salvation. The scribe, then, hopes that the reader will be moved to take up the request for prayer and to thereby intercede for her salvation. Scribes in these colophons of manuscripts for women’s convents laid out a variety of end goals that might be achieved through the prayers of the readers who examined their books. Such readers might be ask then to ‘beg God,’ ‘ask God,’ or ‘pray to God’ for the scribe: ‘Pray to God for

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the scribe, Sister Appolonia Polanderijn’96 or ‘Pray to God for the holy sister Cleopha von Baden ... who has written this book.’97 The phrase used in vernacular colophons does not translate well into English. The general sense of the language used, ‘Bitte(n) Gott’ suggests a plea, petition, request: beg God for me, pray to God for me, ask of God, request of God. Here implied is salvation for the speaker: pray to God for my salvation. Many of these scribes allude to ways in which the request might be needful. I am poor (arme)98 or poor and miserable (arme und ellendes);99 I am sinful (bösse).100 Self-denigration abounds in the formulaic language of the colophon. Yet even as the scribe asserts her sinful human condition, even if she acknowledges the confessional identity of being needful of intercession, she requests from the reader help in attaining the salvation that she desires. That salvation might be found through a ‘good holy end’ in the words of one scribe. It might be realized through ‘eternal joy’ or ‘eternal bliss.’101 A hope for eternal salvation, then, became an aspect of the motivational structure surrounding manuscripts and their colophons. Most of the language within the genre of the scribal colophon suggests a generalized intercessory form of prayer. One might pray with someone in mind, but the vehicle for prayer is left open to the reader. In other instances, however, scribes offered more specific details of the prayerful endeavours. One might pray an Ave Maria for the scribe, perhaps the most frequent of the specific prayers requested, followed in popularity by the Pater Noster.102 In Clarissan liturgy and elsewhere, the Ave Maria and Pater Noster were stand-ins for the full body of liturgical prayer as found in the divine office, prayers that were used by those who lacked the literacy and broad education to undertake a broader array of formalized prayer cycles. But repetitions of the Ave Maria and of the Pater Noster stood also as a separable devotional practice, one that could easily fill any moment when a set prayer was required, and requests for such prayer types were remarkably common in these scribal colophons for women’s convent manuscripts from a variety of orders and regions. The Nuremberg Clarissans, the Salzburg Petersfrauen, the St Katharina nuns in St Gall, and many other nuns from a whole variety of convents commanded the reader to pray in a specified fashion for the salvation of the scriptrix. In requesting such prayers, the scribe has imagined for herself a mechanism by which her own salvation might in due course be achieved through the intercessory prayers of others, perhaps as a form of spiritual payment for the service of the copying of the book in question. The

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emphasis on Marian prayer fits into a monastic culture with its heavy emphasis on Mary. So too, a request for a Requiem or an incorporation of phrases of remembrance for the dead shows the concern for eschatology. ‘Mother Ide Lifmundis had this book written. May her soul rest in peace,’ assert Aleith and Claricia of St Mathias in Trier in the thirteenth century.103 Similarly, Alheydem Kalves of Steterburg asks the reader, ‘Pray to God for me an angelic salutation or a Requiem aeternam in Christ’s love’ in a colophon from 1456.104 Memorializing prayers such as the Requiem and individualized devotions such as the Ave Maria and Pater Noster could be delivered by the reader on behalf of the scribe (or donor/donatrix) to work towards her salvation. Curiously, readings from the psalter, so central to the divine office and so integral to monastic devotional practice in general, were not included as part of the intercessory apparatus that the scribe thought the reader might bring to bear on her behalf. The colophons examined here do not request devotion through psalm recitation, for instance. One does not read the Miserere text on behalf of the scribe, for instance. Possibly the first person nature of the psalter rendered its texts less suitable for such intercessory prayer on another’s behalf, as popular first person prayers such as Obsecro te and O Intemerata also fail to appear in scribal requests for prayers. Neither does the office itself become an opportunity for remembrance of the scribe; prayer requests are evidently aimed either at the private devotional moment – an aside in daily activity – or at a position within the Mass, mentioned in a few colophons as a suitable context for the requested prayers. Margaret Vesslerin, for instance, asks the readers that when they say ‘prayer at Masses, do not forget this little book’s scribe.’105 The context for the request is ‘all the sisters young and old’ with whom she lives in a small community within a larger city; she may well have been a beguine asking her community sisters to pray for her during Mass. Nor was she alone in such requests. The anonymous scriptrix of the Wilhering sermon collection also parlayed her work into a request for remembrance within the formalized liturgy: ‘O scribe stop, because your hand is tired. The scribe’s tribute is a Mass.’106 The ones who owe the scribe the debt of prayer are, of course, the readers of the book. That might be stated explicitly. ‘Who reads in this little book’ (wer in disem büchlin lisset) should pray a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria for the ‘poor and miserable little scribe,’ asserts the scribe for one prayerbook,107 addressing the fact that it was the reader who should undertake the prayer. Likewise, ‘All readers (Omnes legentes) ... should

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say Requiescat in pace. Amen.’108 More often, however, the verb in its simple imperative suggested that ‘you’ offer up the prayer; the fictional ‘you’ written of by the scribe would prove to be the individual readers, seriatim, who encounter the text as they turn to the end of the manuscript. Accordingly, a set of prayers, one or more from each reader who encountered the manuscript, would stream upwards to God over the years of the manuscript’s utility, as each reader in turn discovers and honours the request for prayer. Elsewhere it is not the individual but the corporate readership who is addressed: ‘All beloved sisters’ are beseeched for their prayers in yet another colophon,109 and plural imperative requests from scribe to a broader readership also suggest a community brought to prayer as a group on the scribe’s behalf. In other words, the role of the reader was not just that of passive recipient, of one who takes in the text of the book and then simply puts it back on the shelf. Rather, the reader becomes a collaborator with the scribe him- or herself in a form of spiritual exchange. The scribe provides the material object, the book itself. In return for the use of that object, the reader then provides prayers on behalf of the person who copied. Both scribe and reader become active agents in a process of redemption. They each do work that should earn them merit. The copyist and the reader who prays both potentially take up devotional activities, working together for the betterment of humanity. What these scribal colophons articulate for us, then, is a vision of the world in which purgatory looms large. Book copying was, in a strange sort of way, a salvation issue, an activity that could better the soul of the person who undertook it. That betterment came about not only through earthly measures of having done a (reasonably) good job in the work one had undertaken, but also through the spiritual realm in that one now merited special attention. Book copying could lead to prayers that might save souls – the soul of the scriptrix and the souls of the broader community for which she herself worked and prayed. To accomplish this act of redemption, the scribe reminds her reader that a debt was incurred; the scribe asks that she be remembered. The reader benefits from the work of copying and so might provide that which all humans needed in this Catholic world view: prayer. Both scribe and reader work to the same end, that of personal and community salvation. The scribe does so by creating the work; the reader by reading the work and then praying for those who created it. At times, the reader too fits

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him- or herself into the chain of prayer, adding an ‘Ich auch’ request for a prayer from the next reader. Though as mentioned above the scribes were aware of the need for salvation, describing themselves as poor, sinful, and miserable, they were not irredeemably so, and the efforts of another to pray on their behalf could work towards their eternal betterment. Not one of the scribes mentions purgatory by name, nor does the idea of the middle ground between heaven and hell, the holding ground from which sufficient prayer might release the soul to its heavenly delights find iteration in the language that these scribes used. Yet the needs of the soul in purgatory are manifest in a variety of ways through these scribal colophons. The idea of intercessory prayer, the idea of repeated praying, yes, even the idea of a purchasing of prayer through the work or the goods produced fitted closely with late medieval notions of salvation and its mechanics. Hidden here is an optimist’s view of the nature of salvation. One can move closer to heaven through the work that one does, whether the work be the act of copying or the act of praying for that copying. Salvation is never a zero sum game, and we all move a bit closer to salvation, suggest these scribes, if we undertake the copying, reading, and praying about our books. The thirteenth-century mystics at Helfta confirm the efficacy of prayer in releasing souls from purgatory to salvation. Gertrude the Great had a vision, for instance, in which the prayers of her community would ‘release a great number of souls from their punishment in purgatory,’ and she directs the whole community to undertake a special prayer.110 Many a secular donor of this era too established foundations and endowments in which their financial or substantive contributions were given in exchange for communal remembrance. Prayer, then, was a kind of coin towards a heavenly good.111 What I am suggesting here, then, is that the repeated requests for prayer in monastic colophons are not simply trite expressions. They have more substance than the modern day ‘Have a nice day.’ Their appearance in monastic manuscripts attests to a world view and a selfgenerated understanding of the activity of monastic prayer that was inclusive in its outreach. The scribe might pray for others, she might pray for herself, she might pray through the work undertaken with God in mind. But the scribe was not an anchorite; she lived in a community, and as a member of that community she could ask its members for their prayers as they sat with the book before them. She worked, then, for both personal and community salvation.

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Prayer, in these colophons, is at times a first-person activity, something I do as scribe, whether through acclamations such as ‘Praise God’ or through a simple ‘Remember me.’ But prayer is also a third-person activity, something one does on behalf of someone else. The scribe seeks to bridge that gap. Her own request that she be remembered transforms into a request to the reader that she be remembered to God. And thus, the work that she has done on behalf of other souls might also be remembered to God. Her prayers, reinforced by the reader’s prayers, bring attention to those souls whose need for release from purgatory is a given in this late medieval culture. Scribal activities fitted into a sort of spiritual economy. I use this term ‘spiritual economy’ not in its recent sense of convent situated in a broader urban or regional economic entity, the ‘spiritual economies’ referred to in Nancy Bradley Warren’s study of English nuns at the house of Dartford or in Kathryn Burns’s study of the establishment of women’s convents in Cuzco in the colonial Americas,112 though of course German women’s houses were, like their peer institutions, strongly interconnected to their civic environs.113 Rather, I use the term spiritual economy to reference a reciprocity in exchange that includes spiritual good as well as material goods in its formulation. Spiritual economy in this sense becomes a reference to gift giving and exchange not strictly of things but also of actions, including the act of prayer. Though the idea of prayer as coinage is perhaps anachronistic and may belong more to the critiques of the reformers in the time of the Reformation, it captures the sense of obligation and reciprocity built in to the medieval engagement between scribe and reader. Sheila Sweetinburgh has discussed how hospitals of late medieval England were involved in gift giving and mutual reciprocity. The rich served as patrons and benefactors, the hospital as a symbolically suitable charitable institution, and the poor and unfortunate as the recipients of assistance. Yet the debt incurred by the recipients through the benefactors’ and hospital’s munificence could be countered through the gift of prayer directed back to the titular benefactors; as Sweetinburgh puts it, such gifts signal ‘the donor’s regard for [the hospital] as a worthy charitable institution’ and the ‘grateful recipients’ would respond ‘appropriately to his act of mercy on their behalf.’114 Given the pattern of gift giving, Sweetingburgh concludes, the benefactors evidently desired ‘immediate aid for their soul and ... the accumulation of prayers by the poor on their behalf.’115 It was the client who was the recipient of goods tangible and earthly, of care and succour in a time of need. But to the

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medieval eye, the exchange was an equitable one, for the client provided the nominal benefactor with prayers. Such prayer (directed from patient to God on behalf of the benefactor) moved the benefactor towards salvation and spiritual health and well-being just as the food, care, and medicine moved the patient towards bodily health and well-being.116 We can posit a similar relationship between scribe and reader. It was the reader who was the recipient of the material goods – the book, a manuscript that bore the words that were intellectual or spiritual fodder for contemplation. Yet the scribe benefited as well from being added to the roster of those for whom the reader might pray. That prayer might come at once as the reader’s eye caught the phrase requesting remembrance. The prayer might also be postponed to be included in more corporate acts of worship as the reader offers up remembrances for many people, including those important in the creating of the book, within the bounds of a formalized worship service. The desired prayer might be found yet again in that moment when that reader returned to cogitate upon what she has read; the memory of reading might prompt a momentary aside, a thought and prayer offered again on the scribe’s behalf. In other words, both reader and scribe received benefits from this exchange. And in the coin of medieval thinking, it might have been the spiritual benefits that put the scribe ahead in the service-for-rewards sweepstakes. Of scribes’ reasons for copying books, then, the notion of a spiritual reward might have been a central element among those many motivational factors at work in late medieval culture. The scribe took on copying as duty or as opportunity dictated. Yet her purpose may not have been entirely selfless. She responded to the needs of the convent and pressures of the spiritual life that she had chosen, but she might have done so as well with a sense that both a personal good and a community good could come out of that scribal project. Book copying was but one more task that might remind the broader community of the need for and importance of prayer. It might help both the scribe and her readership to move one step closer to that hoped-for day of redemption. We have in the manuscript book a form of work that can articulate its own prayerful purpose. The seeming clichés of the scribal colophon then are testament to the spirit of prayerful living that stood as a social ideal for the inhabitants of women’s convents. In setting forth these short formulaic prayers, acclamations, and requests for intercession, the women and men who copy them rearticulate the spiritual purposes thought by contemporaries to underlie monasticism. Whether the scribe herself believed in these purposes, she thought it important to represent

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this monastic ideal through a tradition available to her within the genre of the scribal colophon.117 These expressions of love for God and of personal need that beg God for the good of the individual were an articulation of the expected interchange in which work was prayer and prayer was work. The monastic scribe was in the enviable position of being able to accomplish both at the same time. Thus, we might add to that idealized job description with which this chapter started that the scribal candidate ‘must be interested in issues of the pragmatics of salvation.’

Conclusion

Scribes for women’s monasteries brought various experiences to the work they undertook. They were, for the most part, maters or sisters, fraters or confessors, affiliates of a monastery, with the attendant obligations of worship, duty, and labour. The women and men who served women’s convents as scribes were also socially connected, with friendships, natal families, and the bonds of community ties. They were frequently persons of responsibility, and might belong to the convent elite, expected to assist with the bureaucratic functioning of the convent. Alternatively, scribes might be full-fledged professionals, juggling many commissions and working under the pressure of rolling deadlines. Like humans of any era, scribes of the late Middle Ages found themselves with the need to balance the myriad facets of a busy life. The work they undertook in crafting manuscripts, then, was likely to have been intermittent. In spite of the ‘great labour’ of book copying of which scribes often complain, such skill-based effort was not the sole occupation to which these men and women devoted their lives. Like the frate dipintore discussed by Megan Holmes, they ‘occupied two distinctly demarcated yet overlapping social fields,’ that of book production and that of monastic responsibility.1 We can, as Holmes does for friar and painter Filippo Lippi, ‘consider ... how he [or she] obtained commissions, was remunerated, developed patronage networks, balanced ‘prayer and labor,’ and managed to secure that all-important permission from his [or her] monastic superiors to paint [or write], both within and without the convent.’2 Given the general absence of women in the German guild records related to book production in German cities and the decline of guilds in the mid-fifteenth century,3 we must assume that the experience of monastic German women would have differed from those of Filippo

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Lippi in at least two important respects. No specific guild regulations would have guided or regulated these women’s professional growth. Concomitantly, neither would they have benefited from the formal apprenticeship structure that was of such utility to their Italian confreres.4 Nevertheless, the dual role of artisan and monastic, and the constraints of pursuing craft and office simultaneously – experiences that were shared more broadly with their artistic contemporaries – required reconciliation and a careful balance of activities. Work on manuscript production was always framed within other convent duties, and that work was evidently accorded a secondary or even tertiary role in the individual scribe’s life.5 Perhaps it is for this reason that lists of monastic officers typically exclude the role of ‘scribe’ from the monastic hierarchy even when one can localize manuscripts produced within that cloistered community. If one could be both prioress and scribe, then the scribe’s role did not fit well into the feudal structure of monastic bureaucracy.6 Scribal work was craftwork, and the scribe’s role therefore akin to that of artists who worked for women’s convents. Women from the convent hierarchy could tell the scribe or artist what to do – what to copy, what timetable to follow, and with what material investment. But the scribe, in undertaking such work, often fell outside of the relational patterns extending up and down the chain of command. Yet if work as scribe is only occasionally mentioned as a specific office in monastic rosters, such work is nevertheless accorded status as a praiseworthy undertaking in a variety of convent narratives, and from these we can glean hints of the attitudes of contemporaries towards their book-producing sisters. Such scribal activity was, for example, singled out from time to time in sister-books and convent chronicles, which are self-constructed narratives by community members that attempt to craft a story of community identity through ‘historical’ accounts that function, at least in part, as spiritual biographies of the members of the house.7 Though such references to writing occur largely in passing, and far more emphasis is placed in these stories on sisters’ spiritual triumph over adversity (especially illness and death) than on book copying, the context in which these allusions to writing are framed can provide glimpses of the way in which scribes and their written activity was viewed by their near-contemporaries. In these accounts, signs of learning are typically interpreted as signs of holiness, as Gertrud Jaron Lewis has explored at length.8 Tales of women miraculously inspired to comment on the readings and the liturgy form

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one important strand of narrative, for instance; such women might even become almost instantaneously literate, suddenly understanding the Latin that has been opaque to them until that moment.9 These serve as a parallel to stories that use book copying to invoke such miracles of learning and devotion. Johannes Meyer, for instance, cites the skills of lay sister Adelhaid Vögten. Although no specific details of her copying efforts are included, he mentions with implied astonishment that she could ‘read German and Latin and write,’10 tasks presumably not typically associated with her responsibility as cook. The emphasis of his narration remains on her devoted prayers and the way in which she combined such prayers with her work in the kitchen. ‘Writing’ here functions simply as an amplification of her devotion, a mark of the learning that led to her being accepted into the convent in the first place. More explicitly miraculous is the case of Mechthilt of Wangen, singled out for her writing by the author of the Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch. In the narrative account of her life, Mechthilt ‘never had learned either Latin or writing, and yet wrote the four passions [the Gospels] in German with her hand.’11 The inspiration is twofold: she receives, without human agency, an understanding of the Latin that facilitates her translation of the text, and she likewise receives the ability to write down the text that came through inspiration. The coordination of such a miracle with copying of the Gospel texts is likely no accident. Book copying can be a sign of miraculous or near-miraculous learning, but it can also signify corporate piety, borne out through a series of convent virtues. Many of the accounts of such book copying place emphasis on teamwork, and leadership in such ventures stems from the convent’s head (abbess, prioress or Meisterin, or equivalent). As the Villingen convent chronicle recounts, for instance, the sisters prepared three antiphonals and new songbooks as well as a new sequentiary ‘with much diligence, loyalty and labour.’12 The characteristic of diligence, in particular, places this group book copying into the broader context of diligence in work of all sorts as a prized facet of convent endeavours; the term adopted as a descriptor here (‘fleiß’) is used at least twenty times by the Villingen author in speaking of other exemplary lives from the convent’s history. There is also a feature of anonymity: none of the working sisters is identified by name, but the hand of the Villingen abbess, reformer Ursula Haider, clearly directs the program of monastic labour. The same might be said of the Emmerich sisters, a Dutch group who belonged to the devotio moderna tradition, for according to their sister-book, ‘the sisters copied, illuminated, and bound’ many books, and we know that work in the form

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of book production was integral to those cloisters’ practices.13 The scribes are not, for the most part, identified individually, but their common work leads to a common good. Similarly, at Ebstorf, the sisters copied new liturgical books in elaborate format including gold letters and illuminations; in this account of the ‘artists ... who understood this craft,’ the majority go unnamed, including one sister who worked alone, although another sister, Elisabeth von Nigendorp, is identified as having worked on several projects over these years of heightened manuscript production.14 In some of these convent narratives, then, it is the work of the community and a commonality of endeavour that is reflected in the act of scribal copying. The production of manuscripts is seen visibly as being in line with other workshop activities, shared among the sisters as part of the ‘work’ (Arbeit) that forms a physical counterpart to their prayer.15 In these contexts, the explanation of book production is typically mentioned in passing; it may form an illustration of the conscientiousness with which nuns faced a newly reformed life, for instance, and may in fact reflect the very process by which they adopted the reformed liturgy. That is, book copying en masse can be seen both as a sign of religious fervour and as a process of practical mechanism for the generation of needed materials. It is, by implication, the sisters’ obedience as well as their hard work that reveals the holiness of their adopted task. In a similar vein, references to individual scribal activity in the sisterbooks and chronicles generally function to reinforce the devotional quality of a given sister’s life. Such references to the physical act of writing are often imbedded in the narrative, offered as one detail among many that signify the holy life and exemplary habits of the convent resident under discussion. In the case of Mezzi of Klingenberg, a resident of Töss described by Elisabeth Stagel, for instance, the twenty-one sentence narrative twice circles back on itself.16 The narrator begins with Mezzi’s role as cantrix and her participation in Mass. Next, she explores Mezzi’s visions of the wonderful [Christ] child moving about the chapel, a manifestation of her faith that gave comfort to the afflicted. The first third of the spiritual biography closes by quoting Mezzi’s assertion that good discipline (which is to say, ascetic practices) will help her anger to pass, implicitly suggesting that Mezzi was particularly exemplary in handling convent dissent or her own anger, exhibiting extraordinary patience in the face of provocation. A shift of focus in the mid-part of Mezzi’s story confirms the otherworldliness of the cantrix, quite literally, for the narrator recounts that after her death, another sister of the convent, Margaret of Zurich, heard singing. Of the voices, one – presumably that of the former cantrix – stood out,

Conclusion 207

singing words of comfort: ‘I travel on from sadness to joy, and from complaint to utmost joy.’17 Thus, Mezzi’s earthly suffering was revealed to the Töss nuns to be a fitting prelude to heaven, just as their own suffering might lead to salvation in the fullness of time. After this scene from shortly after Mezzi’s death, the narration returns to her earthly life within the convent. In this part of the story, Mezzi’s virtues now become apparent. She prepared the altar and the candles for services and so earned a post-mortem pair of golden shoes for all the steps she took (as revealed in another vision). In addition to preparing the physical light, she also prepared ‘many of our good pictures ... [and] illuminated many German books.’18 But of all things, she was first and foremost a singer, a duty she carried out until her death, providing leadership in the choir throughout her career. Her knowledge of the service, claims the narrator, included understanding of both Latin and German. Lastly, the narrator turns from the virtues of Mezzi’s active life to the activities of her virtuous death: as she desired, she died willingly in the Lord’s service after falling sick in choir. The place of book copying in Mezzi’s life is, for the narrator, part of her service to enlighten her fellow sisters. Just as she toiled to ready sacred space for worship, working beforehand to provide a welcoming location for the night services, so too did she ready the convent books for consultation, working beforehand to provide a welcoming visual element for the reading of these vernacular – but presumably devotional – resources. These two visual activities then invite a return to her central role, her position as cantrix and convent leader. Her singing, informed by her mastery of languages and content, provides a model to the choir, much as her good death, endured ‘in the Lord’s service,’ provides a further model to the convent sisters. These clichés, of labour for the good of the convent, spiritual leadership through leadership at service, and suffering offered willingly to God are integral to the construction of many of these spiritual biographies in the sister-books. Relatively little focus might be given to the ‘facts’ of a sister’s life, but much is made of the way in which her actions might inspire others to take up her spiritual practices. Mezzi’s place as a scribe is not meant to enjoin others to take up the quill, but rather is meant to encourage them to labours on behalf of their fellow convent dwellers, whatever labours might be appropriate to their station. In treating the individual monastic scribe, sister-books and monastic chronicles frequently provide quantity-based accolades. The description ‘She wrote many books’ and its close paraphrases appear in a number of

208

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

sister-book narratives. The Unterlinden sister-book describes Gertrud von Rheinfelden, for instance, who ‘wrote, with great industriousness the choir [books] needed for the divine office, and many other books ... in the writing and also in the explication of the books she was outstanding.’19 The narrative pairs the scope of Gertrud’s work, both liturgical resources and ‘other’ books, with her erudition and the ability to explicate texts. This model sister shares her wisdom both in written form, through book production, and, one assumes, verbally. The discussion of her life also occasions the vision of the scribe, a ‘right hand that shone with brilliant light,’ witnessed by the scribe’s birth mother, a devoted member of the convent. As the narrator explains, this vision is in truth to be understood as a sign of divine approval of the work that Gertrud does. The presence of such a vision also subtly suggests that the scribe pursued her work with the appropriate cast of mind; she sought the godly in the work that she did. This narrative, one of the few to focus on scribal activity as a central role, thus emphasizes Gertrud’s devotion; her endeavours, doubly emphasized both by the effort she puts out and by the tangible results in the form of many books, form a special kind of offering. Johannes Tauler, in his sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, says of work: If you performed your work in the right method, with a sole aim to God, and not to yourselves, your own likes and dislikes, and neither feared nor loved aught but God, nor sought your own gain or pleasure, but only God’s glory, in your work, it would be impossible that it should grieve your conscience.20

Gertrud’s work might have been seen by her sisters as her special office, in keeping with the ‘lowest’ tasks and akin to the skills of other workers in the physical arts. In Tauler’s listing, ‘One can spin, another can make shoes, and some have great aptness for all sorts of outward arts ...’ Yet, Tauler reassures his audience of nuns, ‘These are all gifts proceeding from the Spirit of God.’21 And so too the narrator here reassures her own audience of nuns that Gertrud’s work was sanctioned by, and performed in honour of, God. Thus, it is not so much Gertrud’s specific labours that are the model for her fellow sisters, but the attitude and the devoutness with which she carried them out. Adelheid von Efftich (or von Apiaco), another sister at Unterlinden, was also identified by the narrator as a scribe; she, like Gertrud, ‘wrote many books in a most elegant way, especially for choir service.’22 There are differences in the narrator’s approach to these two women’s lives,

Conclusion 209

however. Adelheid’s service, mentioned only near the end of the narrative, was offered up in the context of a strict and arduous life, with her steady emphasis over the years on abstinence, discipline, vigils and prayers, and a strict adherence to the rules of silence. These ascetic practices merit nearly 80 per cent of the total description, and clearly the emphasis of her biography lies in how Adelheid lived her life instead of what work she accomplished with her time. Yet the mention of beauty made through her work is provided at a memorable spot in the narrative, occurring as the author’s penultimate observation, immediately prior to a short account of Adelheid’s death-bed musings about the consolation and comforts of her beliefs.23 To the author of the Unterlinden sister-book, beauty or elegance is more than an aesthetic matter; the value of the object, here a book, prepared for display provides a visible sign of the convent’s success not just in material ways but in spiritual ones as well. The Ebstorf reform account mentioned above also singles out the ‘illuminations and gold’ used in the copying of the convent’s reformed liturgical resources. These allusions to material beauty are not merely a matter of braggadocio on the part of the chroniclers; rather, they are a confirmation of the esteem the nuns placed on these holy items and so a signal of the consolations of belief. Adelheid, like Gertrud, contributed to the monastery’s collections of books, and she, again like Gertrud, did such work with the appropriate mindset of devoted diligence. One gets the sense, however, that Adelheid’s behaviour was easier to praise than Gertrud’s; Gertrud’s sole contribution was through the labours she wrought, whereas Adelheid could serve as a model for any nun who sought to live a more ascetic life. Both performed the office of scribe, but the end result was judged to be different. Gertrud’s copying is praised for its industry; Adelheid’s for its beauty. Their lives could be measured with the same yardstick: Gertrud could serve as a model of the industrious worker, but Adelheid’s life was a better model for the spiritual aspirant – a life demonstrating the beauty of self-denial and holy obedience. In other words, the beauteous book functions as a metonym for the life well lived. Gertrud might be the better scribe, and certainly copied a broader range of books than her monastic sister, but Adelheid was the better nun. Confirmation of the place of book copying as an illustration of the quality of life lived by the nun can be found in Johannes Meyer’s report of Clara von Ostren, a founding member of Schönensteinbach, who corrected all the books.24 For Clara, this was seen as a sign of diligence in her office as cantrix, a form of systematic industry and perhaps a reforming

210

The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

impulse that also brought the liturgical books into alignment with required practice. The narrator spends more time on Clara’s other activities. She taught singing, and more important, she also taught her sisters to know and understand the service, evolving her own mnemonic devotional system using the solmization syllables for understanding the place of the liturgy.25 Ut represents humility; re calls forth a meditation on holy obedience; mi reminds us of charity, that is, godly love and affection; fa stands for patience; sol for calmness and la for modesty.26 Significantly, in this narrative, Clara’s book work is mentioned only in passing; it is but one detail of her service in the office, confirmation of her ability as cantrix. Her contributions to spiritual life in her model of solfège-guided contemplation, in contrast, occupies a chapter of its own, and the reader is reminded that it remained in use as a recipe for devotional practice for seventeen years after her death. In these contemporaneous accounts of convent women, we could take these signs of scribal activity as data points, moments in which particular women are known to have done the work of book production. Such references give us at least a partial measure of the accomplishments of these extraordinary women who could craft books with physical skills garnered over a spiritually productive life. Likewise, we can consider each book-copying anecdote as an unusual or memorable event, the telling detail that brings to mind the memory of a particular sister about whom the reader is asked to think. Yet in the accounts of the sisterbooks, the physical detail is also a sign of the devotional, and book production often a signal of piety. From the point of view of the convent author, the written work of their convent sisters is a matter for praise because of what else that work reveals about the inner life of the woman who undertook such work. In short, the position of book copying within these stories centres on convent virtues of diligence manifested through productivity, on beauteous objects and the practical good of improved liturgical accuracy, and above all on the piety of a devotional life lived in service to the convent and to God. The version of scribal identity made manifest in these contemporaneous accounts, then, shares much in common with the attitude scribes revealed about their work through the scribal colophon. In both versions, the scribe is most often identified as dually tasked; she lives first as a sister in the convent and only secondarily as a book copyist, no matter how large her oeuvre. The priorities of her life centre on the convent’s central activities of prayer and worship. In the chronicles, this form of selfdedication to monastic priorities is revealed directly through accounts of

Conclusion 211

pious prayer and indirectly through the emphasis given by the narrator to ascetic self-denial and other practices that might serve as models for her convent fellows. Details of scribal activity are often found late in these convent narratives, almost as afterthoughts, and serve as emphasis or illustration rather than as a central focus of the account. In the colophons, the scribe typically identifies herself by status as sister or as an affiliate of a particular monastery; her work is therefore explicitly framed within the life of community that she has adopted. Additionally, the repeated requests for monastic prayers from the readers on behalf of the scribe likewise frame her endeavours within the larger corpus of monastic duties. The women monastics who are at the centre of this study believed in a corporate endeavour of a life lived in prayer, and apparently believed as well that book copying formed a direct contribution to that ideal. What such book copying does is to place the control of convent intellectual and liturgical practices within the hands – literally – of the sisters themselves. Such copying matters because it allows for a determination of priorities and a balancing of resources, choices between this book and that one, under the control of the nuns themselves, and not solely in the hands of their confessors, nor in the control of a nearby male community. It affords women’s convents an intellectual independence that has not, perhaps, been as central to our view of women’s monasticism as it should be. As Winston-Allen has articulated for reformed communities, women monastics were as quick as their male brethren to find in books resources suitable for sharing with one another. Book exchange, traced at St Katharina in Nuremberg by Marie-Luise Eherenschwendtner, and at Villingen by Gabriele Loes, for instance, contributed to an enrichment of the collection of spiritually edifying materials at many women’s houses.27 Such exchange is a continuation, and perhaps an amplification, of the kinds of exchanges that had characterized women monastics throughout the late Middle Ages. Groups of mystics and other intellectual networks continued the circulation of books and ideas that fell within the best tradition of Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau, each of whom was a proponent of the circulation of books. At Helfta and again at Unterlinden, at Ebstorf and at Nonnberg, each of these women’s houses evolved a vibrant culture of ideas. Book copying intersects, then, with a world of monastic intellectual tradition, one distinct from the scholasticism and university theology of male communities and motivated by the spiritual concerns of these many women monastics.

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The Scribes of Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany

The burgeoning libraries of women’s monasticism provide ample evidence for women’s scribal productivity. The hundreds of women now known to have functioned as scribes within their convents formed a literate nucleus around which a substantial body of monastic learning rapidly grew. Their work, as copyists and compilers, as notators and artists, as rubricators and correctors, as project managers, layout designers, and all-round craftsfolk was rewarded. As we saw in chapter 5, it was a masculine scribal cliché to issue a tongue-in-cheek request for earthly rewards in the form of a ‘beautiful girl’ for the pain of scribal work. The reward for the scribe for a women’s convent, on the other hand, might be more valuable yet: not a beautiful girl but instead, a better informed and more spiritually devout woman. Those intellectual benefits, passed on via the written word from scribe to reader, were in turn redeemed by the reader’s prayers on behalf of the scribe. Some of the work that has formed the foundation for the study undertaken here might well have astonished our medieval scribal antecedents. The idea of counting manuscripts seems to be largely a modern phenomenon. Though the expert scribe can be identified in medieval documents by reference to her production of numerous manuscripts, it is not the precise number of books but rather the scope of her work that receives attention. In medieval reckonings, the expert scribe copied ‘many’ manuscripts, for instance, or she copied these particular sorts of manuscripts; only rarely do we get a witness to an exact number of manuscripts produced at any one house or by any one person.28 Similarly, medieval listings of manuscript books generally itemize the materials that are found in the collection. There are no summary counts of the kinds of manuscripts; no easy-to-compile statistics ready made for our modern eye. Those features are added by the modern-day editor to published inventories and catalogues. The medieval book listings simply provide the details of this manuscript, of that one, of another one, and so on, iterating one by one the materials that had been produced for monastic consumption. Yet to us moderns, the matter of number and proportion achieves a rather greater significance. It is through the broad array of women’s monastic library successes that we can deduce aspects of the intellectual life to which these scribes contributed so materially. The presence of women scribes copying manuscripts across all orders confirms that a general level of intellectual attainment was to be found in each of the major monastic practices of the day. The presence of men serving those same orders confirms continuity with the traditions of book exchange that had long been part of monastic culture. So too, the count of the

Conclusion 213

number of manuscripts produced at any one convent gives us a sense of the energy and intellectual excitement that would have come with the organization, preservation, reproduction, and dissemination of texts and of liturgical materials for the women who were resident therein. But as with any human undertaking, it is not so much the number of people, nor is it the number of manuscripts that they produced, that ultimately matter to us. Rather, it is the people themselves: the ways in which they sought to identify themselves, the things they thought important to mention, and the reasons they gave for undertaking the work of mixing ink and applying it to paper or parchment. The things they say speak to a life of skill and labour lived in community, shaped by community goals and needs, and dedicated to God. Although they ultimately sought a higher good of spiritual redemption, they practised their craft in an existence predicated on mutual obligations. Life in these literate convent communities encompassed connections between the individuals within a given monastic house: reciprocally from abbess to scribe and back, for instance, or from scribe to reader and reader to scribe, or even from scribe to (and from) the community membership in toto. That life might also include contact with individuals far removed from the cloistered inner sanctum; women monastics had contact with scribes, translators, preachers, authors, and miscellaneous other correspondents who dwelt far away in physical distance, or at least in experience, from their cloistered existence at home. These medieval scribes tell us too that there are various connective threads that link one person to the next. Those threads are sometimes framed as thoughts and prayers as we/they keep one another in our/their memories. At other times they are framed as words or texts, communicating ideas, practices, and rituals from one person or generation to the next. And sometimes those threads of connectedness are framed on parchment or paper, inscribed with words, notes, and images, and bound as codices upon the library shelves. Those hand-written books, products of medieval scribal endeavours, are, after all, the tangible relics that serve to link the medieval scribe to the present day, and beyond.

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Appendix A Distribution of Known Scribes and of Surviving Manuscripts by Monastic Order

This table shows the number of women’s monasteries of late medieval Germany (1200–1521) for which one or more manuscripts survive and compares those numbers with those of monasteries for which women scribes have been identified. It also includes information on the number of women scribes associated with those houses. (It excludes women scribes who are known to have been from a particular order but who have not yet been localized to a particular monastery.) The tally here omits double houses even when they have known women scribes; it also omits convents that are known to have had libraries but for which no manuscripts survive. Monasteries which changed affiliation before or after their period of identified productive scribal activity have been classified according to their status at the time in which manuscripts were copied. Monasteries which had scribal activity both before and after a change of affiliation, however, are included under ‘miscellaneous,’ as have convents for which affiliation is unknown. ‘Kanonissenstiften’ have been included under the general category of Augustinian women’s houses. The second portion of this table addresses the total surviving manuscripts from these women’s convents. Surviving manuscripts are limited here to those connected with specific houses; those known to belong to an order but of uncertain provenance have been excluded from these calculations. The subgroup of manuscripts from convents for which women scribes have been identified provides a measure of the surviving manuscripts from the 133 communities known to have sponsored women’s scribal activity. The column ‘Manuscripts by women scribes’ further refines this count to determine how many extant manuscripts can be linked to specific women and to their anonymous but female ‘scriptrices.’ ‘Manuscripts by men,’ on the other hand, includes those from all communities of a particular order. Manuscripts copied for women’s convents by men scribes that cannot be connected with a particular house are, however, excluded.

Appendix A: Distribution of Known Scribes of Surviving Manuscripts by Monastic Order Order

Augustinian Beguines

Total Number of convents convents with women scribes 88

Per cent of convents with women scribes

11

13%

Number of Total women surviving scribes manuscripts 29

630

Surviving Manuscripts manuscripts in by women convents with scribes women scribes 233

28

Manuscripts by men scribes 37

7

2

29%

2

41

13

2

1

Benedictine

83

21

25%

51

618

344

68

26

Brigittine

10

5

50%

7

165

104

7

7

Cistercian

96

26

27%

51

730

456

58

55

Clarissan or Tertiaries

54

21

39%

75

460

355

97

25

Dominicans

62

31

50%

126

1228

1125

221

56

Premonstratensian

14

2

14%

2

42

15

2

7

Miscellaneous

48

14

29%

16

138

55

14

5

462

133

29%

359

4052

2700

497

219

Total

Appendix B: Forty-eight Women’s Convents with Active Scriptoria in Late Medieval Germany

The listing that follows provides information on forty-eight women’s convents that participated actively in the copying of manuscripts during the late Middle Ages. The convents are listed alphabetically. The total number of surviving manuscripts currently identified is indicated, as is the number of women scribes affiliated with the convent, as identified through colophons, convent documents, and other archival evidence. The last column lists the number of surviving manuscripts to bear witness to women’s copying efforts, including manuscripts with colophons attesting to women’s scribal activities and manuscripts identified through a comparison of scribal hand. Convents are assumed to have scriptoria under several conditions. They may sponsor several women scribes; three known scribes is the lower boundary adopted here. They may create manuscripts for sale or gift outside of the cloister; evidence of participation in book trade is taken as indication that there was a formalized scribal structure. Both internal evidence from within surviving manuscripts (a colophon indicating a patron external to the monastery, for instance) and documentary evidence, including mentions in sister-books and convent chronicles of participation in the book trade, has been adopted here. Finally, evidence that physical spaces (including workrooms and libraries) inside the monastery were used for manuscript copying is taken as a sign of an active scriptorium. Note that the Oxford English Dictionary nominally limits the term scriptorium to the physical space set aside for copying; I, however, use the term to cover any group of literate individuals working together in the production of manuscripts. Information on monastic order, diocese, and monastery dates is drawn from KrämerScriptores, from Helvetia Sacra, and from GermBen. Cities have been normalized to English spellings except when the city name forms part of the common designation for the convent.

Appendix B: Forty-eight Women’s Convents with Active Scriptoria in Late Medieval Germany Convent, Order (Diocese)

Dates

Surviving Manuscripts

Women Scribes

Adelhausen, Freiburg im Breisgau, Dominican (Constance)

1234–1786

94

4

3

Altenhohenau, Dominican (Salzburg)

1235–1803

58

6

8

Augsburg, St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries,’ Dominican (Augsburg)

c. 1230–1802/7

26

5

5

Bamberg Klarissenkloster, Clarissan (Bamberg)

1341–1803

18

6

4

Cologne Klarissenkloster, Clarissan (Cologne)

1304–1802

39

4

9

Cologne Weissfrauen, Augustinian (Cologne)

1225–1802

70

4

2

Mss by Women

Esslingen-Weiler, Dominican (Constance)

1230–1592

23

7

10

Frauenalb, Benedictine (Speyer)

1180–1598

2

5

2

Freiburg im Breisgau, Klarissen, Clarissan (Constance) 1272–1782

28

5

8

Freiburg im Breisgau, St Katharina, Dominican (Constance)

26

4

3

9

1

5

pre 1289–1529

10

5

7

Heiligen Grab, Bamberg, Dominican (Bamberg)

1356–1803

36

3

6

Heiligen Kreuz, Regensburg, Dominican (Regensburg)

1233–present

28

5

11

Herzebrock, Benedictine (Osnabrück)

860–1803

23

8

9

1297–1677

Gertrudenberg, Osnabrück, Benedictine (Osnabrück) ca. 1140–1803 Gnadental, Basel, Clarissan (Basel)

Appendix B (continued) Convent, Order (Diocese)

Dates

Surviving Manuscripts

Women Scribes

Mss by Women

Inzigkofen, Tetiaries to 1394, then Augustinian (Constance)

1354–1802

59

7

18

Kentrup, Cistercian (Cologne)

1207–1808

10

3

2

Kirchheim (1) am Ries, Cistercian (Augsburg)

1267–1803

88

5

4

Klingental in Basel, Dominican; Augustinian after 1482 (Basel, then Contance)

1236–?

3

4

1

Lichtenthal (Lucida Vallis), Cistercian (Speyer)

1245–ca. 1789

132

6

23

Marienberg in Boppard (St Eucharius), Benedictine (Trier)

1121–1802

23

3

2

Medingen (1), Dominican (Augsburg)

1246–1802

51

7

11

Medingen (2), Dominican (Augsburg)

1266–1803

11

4

5

Medingen (3), Cistercian (Verden)

1237–present

35

2

20

Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg, Benedictine (Salzburg)

714–present

102

4

4

Nuremberg, Klarissankloster, aka St Maria Magdalena, Clarissan (Bamberg)

1252–present

47

18

23

Oetenbach, Dominican (Constance)

ca. 1234–1525

9

6

1

Pillenreuth, Augustinian (Eichstätt)

1345–1525

9

5

7

Püttrichhaus, Munich, Tertiaries (Freising)

ca. 1250–1802

52

8

12

Quedlinburg (St Servatius, St Dionysius), Frauenkloster (Halberstadt)

936–1539 (1803)

51

3

2

Appendix B (continued) Convent, Order (Diocese)

Dates

Surviving Manuscripts

Women Scribes

Mss by Women

Reuthin, Dominican (Constance)

ca. 1252–19th c.

19

2

10

Rolandswerth, Benedictine (Rheininsel)

ca. 11th c–1820

11

2

8

Rulle, Cictercian (Osnabrück)

1230–1803

3

3

3

St Caecilien in Cologne, Augustinian (Cologne)

1475–1802

23

2

4

St Katharina in Nuremberg, (Katharinenkloster), Dominican (Bamberg)

1296–1803

472

39

124

St Katharina in St Gall, Dominican (Constance)

1230–1869

26

7

10

Salzburg Petersfrauen, Benedictine (Salzburg)

ca. 1130–1583

45

16

26

Schönensteinbach, Dominican (Straßburg)

1397–1789

13

6

0

Seligenthal in Landshut, Cistercian (Freising)

1232–1803

8

4

3

Soeflingen, Clarissan (Constance)

1237–1803

17

6

6

Steterburg, Augustinian (Hildesheim)

10th c.–1572

32

3

3

Töss (Töß), Dominican (Constance)

1233–1525

0

4

0

Unterlinden in Colmar, Dominican (Basel)

1252–1789

78

8

8

Urspring, Benedictine (Constance)

1127–1801

6

3

3

Villingen, Clarissan (Constance)

1267–1782

18

7

9

Wald, Cistercian (Constance)

?–1806

1

9

1

Wienhausen, Cistercian (Hildesheim)

1121–1531

17

1

3

Wöltingerode, Cistercian (Hildesheim)

1188–1807

134

7

12

Notes

Introduction 1 In addition to the broad survey of the literature, I have also had the opportunity to consult roughly 500 manuscripts from women’s monasteries either via microfilm and facsimile or in situ. I am most familiar with the generous collections of manuscripts from the Dominican women’s convents in Freiburg im Breisgau and with the sources stemming from Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg thanks to two separate residencies at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library in Collegeville, MN. Access to numerous other monastic resources was facilitated by a Friends of the Library Award at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies in Toronto in the summer of 2000 and a full-year’s research leave in 2000– 1 which involved extensive travels both in the United States and abroad. Much of the codicological work I have done with these manuscripts, however, has addressed the role of later readers of manuscripts rather than their copyists, and so is fodder for a different sort of investigation than the one that has emerged here. More details will appear in my work in progress, Libraries, Learning and Liturgies: Books for Nuns and Canonesses in Late Medieval Germany. 2 ‘Scriptorium’ in practical usage means not just the space for book production, as it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, but also the collection of people who produced books in a community of similar activities. In using the term here, I mean to suggest a grouping akin to a ‘school’ but one contained within a local monastic environment. In my usage, a scriptorium is larger than a team of collaborators, but less broad than an urban grouping of stylistically similar artists. 3 In earlier scholarship, individual women scribes were identified but handled as isolated instances. Thus, Wilhelm Wattenbach’s study Das Schriftwesen im Mittelatter (1871) provides data on the ‘exceptional’ woman but does not

222

4 5

6

7

8

9 10

11

Notes to pages 6–8

treat women’s monastic book production as normative. More recently, however, significant contributions of Anne Winston-Allen, Werner WilliamsKrapp, Jeffrey Hamburger, Karin Schneider, Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Charlotte Woodford, and the many scholars working on particular women’s monastic libraries have significantly changed our understanding of the landscape for women’s book-production. Similarly, studies by Alison Beach on the twelfth century and Albert Bruckner on Swiss women’s book production serve as a point of comparison for much of the work undertaken here. GermBen XII, ‘Bersenbrück,’ 78. A Wienhausen nun, Gertrud Bungen, copied ‘ein Buch darin 12 Responsorien.’ Uhde-Stahl, ‘Figürliche Buchmalereien in den spätmittelalterlichen Handschriften der Lüneburger Frauenklöster,’ 49. The Marienberg bei Boppard necrology, TrierStadtB 355, lists three scribes. The first entry comes as a colophon: ‘Iste liber scriptus est per me Margaretam professam huius monasterii beatiss. Marie v. Et est finitus a.d. 1467 in vig. Visitationis v. Marie etc.’ (fol. 57). The second and third are both sixteenthcentury obits: ‘Obiit Barbara de Bopardia scriba huius monasterii 1562’ (fol. 49), and ‘Katherina de Disyngen quondam scriba huius monasterii per annos circiter 40 obiit a. 1555.’ (fol. 49v). Emphasis mine. CMO #13010, CMO IV/115. Christina von Haltern’s death notice for 17 June 1280 can be found in OsnabrückUB IV 608; it states that she had ‘viele weitere Bucher geschrieben.’ The surviving Bible which is most likely in her hand dates from 1278 is found as Osnabrück, Gynmansium Carolinum, Mss 90–1. See GermBen XII, ‘Rulle,’ 645. Albert Bruckner discusses the need for this kind of close codicological analysis; see his ‘Weibliche Schreibtätigkeit.’ Alison Beach’s study of twelfthcentury nuns who worked as scribes is a model of what this kind of research can achieve; she identifies clusters of ‘nun-scribes’ at Wessobrunn, Admont, and at the double monastery of Schäftlarn in the high Middle Ages, in Women as Scribes. Karin Schneider’s formative study of the scribal circle at St Katharina in Nuremberg identified many of the named scribes who served the cloister but also thirteen anonymous hands that collaborated with the named scribes, in ‘Die Schreibschule des Katharinenklosters.’ Bruckner, ‘Weibliche Schreibtätigkeit,’ 445–6. Drogin, Anathema! emphasizes the period up to the thirteenth century, so his sampling is somewhat earlier than those colophons studied here. For further bibliography on colophons, see chapter 4, note 1. Ibid., 72. Drogin draws this colophon from William Forsyth, ‘History of Ancient Manuscripts,’ lecture delivered in the Hall of the Inner Temple (London, 1872).

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12 Reynhout, Formules Latines de Colophons. 13 ‘Finito libro,’ cited in ibid., l:165–70, was used in the Seligenthal gradual of 1260 which was updated in 1462 (LondonBL Add. 16950); the phrasing appears again in WolfenbuttelHAB Helmst. 1400 (1524) copied in Steterburg in 1467 and in a Bohemian manuscript (Praha Kapit. 210) copied by Elizabeth de Duba in 1422. The formula ‘Feliciter,’ studied in ibid., 1:239–57, shows up in its classic formulation, ‘explicit feliciter’ (Reynhout’s variant A1) in BambergSB Patr. 58 (B V 43), fol. 603, copied by Ursula Kollerin in 1492 for the Nuremberg Klarissans, and again in 1501, a manuscript by Sebastian Fabri (ManchesterRL Lat. 152, fol. 294) for the same house. 14 References to Kirchheim are to the Cistercian convent of Kirchheim am Ries unless otherwise noted. KrämerHandschriftenerbe 1:393–6 cites this convent as ‘Kirchheim (1)’ to distinguish it from Kirchheim unter Teck, a Dominican women’s convent in the diocese of Constance which she references as ‘Kirchheim (2).’ 15 Freed, ‘Urban Development’; Grundmann, Religious Movements, 89–137. 16 The somewhat dated work on beguines by Asen, ‘Die Beginen in Köln,’ and Grundman, Religious Movements, 139–52, has been supplemented by a number of recent scholars, including McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture, and Spies, Beginengemeinschaften in Frankfurt am Main. 17 Garber, Feminine Figurae, 12; she points out that while the texts ‘were composed within an extremely short time span ... they were read and copied beyond this time span.’ See also Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women. 18 Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book; 49, 82, and 89–94. Poor is primarily concerned with the circulation of Mechthild’s text from the joint perspectives of authorship and readership; her chapter on anthologies, ‘Productive Consumption: Women Readers and the Production of Late Medieval Devotional Anthologies,’ is particularly important for the influence that readers had on the creation of texts in the late medieval convent. On Henry of Nördlingen’s preparation of the translation for the Medingen (1) sisters, see also Strauch, Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen, 246–7. 19 The classic formulation of the relationship between women’s mysticism and its surrounding literary production can be found in Grundmann, Religious Movements, 187–201, and Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter, 1:70– 132. See also more recent work by Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur ; Beutin, Anima; Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature; Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal; and Bynum, Jesus As Mother, particularly 170–262. 20 On Melk reforms and liturgical books, see, for instance, Freeman, ‘Melk’; see also Angerer, ‘Reform von Melk,’ and ‘Klösterliches Musikleben unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Einflüsse der Melker Reform.’ Note that

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Williams-Krapp sees the Melk reform as also driving the production of vernacular literature ‘since Benedictine sisters and lay brothers ... also had to be supplied with catechetical and edifying works in line with the new strict observance.’ See ‘The Erosion of a Monopoly,’ 244. Hofmeister, ‘Les Statuts du Monastère des Bénédictines de Marienberglez-Boppard (1437).’ Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 169–204. On book provision at times of cloister reform, see for example the accounts edited by Borchling, ‘Litterarisches und geistiges Leben im Kloster Ebstorf am Ausgange des Mittelalters’; Rüthing, ‘Die mittelalterliche Bibliothek des Zisterzienserinnenklosters Wöltingerode,’ 194; and the extensive studies by Williams-Krapp, including ‘Frauenmystik und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert,’ ‘Observanzbewegungen, monastische Spiritualität und geistliche Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert,’ and ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert.’ See also the discussion below in chapter 5, pp. 176–9. Krämer, Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelalters, cited hereafter as KrämerHandschriftenerbe. Users should be aware that Krämer includes among the convent manuscripts those that came as later gifts and donations to a given convent library; the listing in KrämerHandschriftenerbe is not necessarily one of origins but rather one of provenance. This seemed a sensible approach for my own study as well since a functioning medieval library included manuscripts that were directly commissioned for the collection alongside those that were acquired through gift and purchase. Bénédictins du Bouveret, Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au XVIe siècle, 6 vols, Spicilegii Friburgensis subsidia 2–7 (Fribourg, Switzerland: Éditions universitaires, 1965–82). Colophons from this collection are cited by citation number followed by volume/page reference; for visual clarity the format adopted is CMO #248, CMO I/31. Three secondary studies of convent chronicles proved especially useful: Garber, Feminine Figurae, provides a useful survey of how those womenauthored texts treat the women inhabitants of monastic convents during the earlier portions of the period under consideration. Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, takes the imposition of Observance as the central theme of her assessment of the same literature, so that the focus is centrally on the fifteenth century. Woodford, Nuns as Historians, focuses more on sixteenthand seventeenth-century practice but has some useful information, particularly in her introduction. The literature on the sister-book – defined as Dominican women’s chronicles – includes most centrally Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women; Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur, and Scheepsma, ‘For hereby I hope to rouse some to piety.’ Primary sources

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consulted in detail included the sister-books of Katharinental, Töss, and Unterlinden, the chronicle of Villingen, and Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens. Particularly useful was the series Necrologia Germaniae, formally titled Monumenta Germaniae historica, which gathered necrologies for roughly a dozen women’s convents. This series has been continued as Libri memoriales et necrologia, nova series. It is cited hereafter as NecGer. I include under this rubric the many art-historical and musicological manuscript finding aids. HKOL, short for Handschriftenkataloge online, is my preferred abbreviation for the Manuscripta Mediaevalia website, a resource consulted almost daily for most of the last two years. This site provides web images of over one hundred published catalogues of manuscript collections from German libraries. In addition, it provides searchable cataloguing across all listed catalogues in the ‘Datenbank’ area of the website, a tool that has proved invaluable in my own research. The HKOL site is a model of what web-based scholarly resources can look like. The Matrix Monasticon website identifies itself as ‘a scholarly resource for the study of women’s religious communities from 400 to 1600CE.’ The monasticon, that section of the website devoted to entries on individual women’s houses, is searchable by keyword as well as by name and by region; it is therefore especially useful for gathering comparative social and historical data across a number of houses. Discussions in chapter 5 on convent fires and on looting would have been almost inconceivable without the electronic data present here. Though I have not always given a citation to the Matrix Monasticon entry for each convent discussed here, I have examined all of the currently published entries on women’s convents in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Elsewhere in this study, I cite Matrix Monasticon entries by convent and subheading. Krämer, Scriptores codicum medii aevi. A CD-ROM of this database was published in 2003, but I have only had access to the web-based version. This source is cited hereafter as KrämerScriptores. At this point, my own database includes approximately 100 women scribes not yet listed on Krämer’s website, but I do not have the kind of cross-section of scribal efforts that she does. One might characterize our two studies in contrasting ways: my information is thick while hers is broad. Note that Krämer does not sort scribal listings by gender; therefore a variety of electronic search strategies may be necessary to elicit gendered information. My searches for women scribes on KrämerScriptores have included a wide range of keywords: Schwester, Soror, suster, Äbtis-, Priorin, Nonne,

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-innen, Clar-, Klar- Begin-, Meisterin, monial-, fem., and every female first name that I had already found elsewhere in my studies. 1. Of Monasteries and Their Scribes 1 In discussing women’s monastic art at the convent of St Walburg in Eichstätt, Jeffrey Hamburger reminds us of difficulties in meaning that attend upon the use of a description such as ‘private’ for both images and devotional practices in women’s convents of this late medieval era: ‘None of the images from the convent or the devotions in which they were used could have been fully “private” in the modern sense of that term. According to the rules that may not always have been followed, all images in the abbey, including the drawings, would have remained common property; nuns were forbidden private possessions ... In place of the term “private” we might better employ the designation “paraliturgical” to describe the devotions in which the drawings played a part.’ His caveat should certainly be borne in mind. Nevertheless, I have continued to use the term ‘private’ here for this book-centered study, for nuns often did in fact treat their manuscripts as private possessions. Moreover, the acts of reading could also take place privately, for any time reading took place without recourse to oral delivery, the one doing the reading was performing a kind of private colloquy with the text in question. Descriptions of ‘private devotions’ in the context in which I use the term refer not to the parallel devotions of nuns in spaces adjacent to the formalized liturgical action, but rather to devotional readings and meditations performed at times other than those assigned to the divine office or the Mass. See Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 51. 2 On the hiring of Latin teachers at Ebstorf, see Schlotheuber, ‘Ebstorf und seine Schülerinnen in der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts’; and Uhde-Stahl, ‘Figürliche Buchmalereien in den spätmittelalterlichen Handschriften der Lüneburger Frauenklöster,’ 28–9; see also the earlier study by Borchling, ‘Litterarisches und geistiges Leben in Kloster Estorf am Ausgange des Mittelalters.’ A study of the reform endeavours, including Latin training, brought by Tecla and two other sisters from Brunnepe in reforming the convent of Marienberg bei Boppard during the fifteenth century is described in various places, including Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles; 107; Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries, 126–8; and in Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 684. For Anna Jäck’s reasons for translating, that ‘the unlearned that do not understand Latin will ... read over other books,’ see Schmidt, ‘Kleben statt malen,’ 273. He goes on to explore the practice of illustrating books in Inzigkofen, his primary interest.

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Educational endeavours were not confined to the fifteenth century, however; a school mistress (scholastica) is mentioned in a 1325 document from Gernrode, for instance; see Matrix Monasticon, ‘Gernrode,’ consulted 8 March 2008; and the sister-book account of Margaret Finkin’s life indicates that ‘teaching Latin and writing’ were her central endeavours; see Lindgren, ‘Environment and Spirituality of German Dominican Women, 1230–1370,’ 189. Such educational narratives are reinforced by the manuscript evidence. In all, twenty-one vocabularies survive from women’s convents, two from the later fourteenth century (GandersheimStiftsB 248 from 1370 and TübingenUB Mc 160), another cluster dated to the first decade of the fifteenth century (WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 400 [435] from 1404; CambridgeCCC 524, also from 1404; and WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 576 [624] from 1408), and the others distributed across the fifteenth and on into the sixteenth centuries. Latin study – as reflected in manuscript copies of Latin vocabularies and grammars – extended across orders with a chronological emphasis on the periods after the Black Death and through the period of Observant reforms in the fifteenth century. On the balance between table readings in the vernacular and in Latin, particularly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Ehrenschwendtner, ‘“Puellae litteratae,”’ 52–3; for more on table readings, see Hasebrink, ‘Tischlesung und Bildungskulture in Nürnberger Katharinenkloster’; and Uffmann, ‘“Wie in einem Rosengarten ...”’ St Augustine, ‘The Rule of Augustine (Feminine Version),’ 28; original emphasis deleted. Hereafter cited as Augustine, followed by chapter and verse. St Benedict, RB 1980, chapter 38. ‘The Reader for the Week,’ 237; original emphasis deleted. Hereafter cited as RB, followed by chapter and verse. Benedict describes an annual ceremony during Lent in which each monastic returns the assigned book from the preceding year and in turn accepts a new book for private devotion and study (RB 48.15–16). He also calls for study both at and after vigils (RB 9.8 and RB 8.3). Since minds might drift during study time, Benedict provides for two seniors to supervise private reading to ensure that younger monastics stay ‘on task,’ as it were (RB 48.17). Augustine’s rule for women, like his rule for men, does not describe the distribution of books, but does specify that books should be available ‘at the appointed hour’ each day and not at other times (Augustine 5.10). He also describes those responsible for books who, he admonishes, should serve without grumbling (Augustine 5.9). St Dominic in the Primitive Constitutions of the monastery of San Sisto enjoined the sisters to devote time to both reading and study; nuns were not exempted from the demands of intellectual devotion to their calling (Dominic, ‘Primitive Constitutions,’ 20). Caesarius of Arles in his

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early rule had specified two hours a day to be devoted to study (The Rule for Nuns, 19). Even the Franciscan rule expects some of the religious to read the service, but the pervasive influence of the Franciscan call to poverty encourages a seeming tinge of anti-intellectualism. Francis exhorts the illiterate to turn their attention to the spiritual needs, rather than to formal study (‘The Rule of 1223,’ 10), while the Rule of St Clare also suggests that the unlettered should not be eager to learn to read (10.8). The context for these Franciscan writings, however, is meant to suggest the order’s affirmation of the worthiness of the spirituality of the untutored rather than to indict learning per se. In short, study and learning formed a common thread across all of the late medieval monastic rules governing women’s houses. A listing of vernacular feminized translations of the Benedictine rule can be found in Henderson, Feminine Versions of the Rule of St. Benedict [web page]. These feminine rules typically substitute women as monastic officers for the male officers listed in the standard RB text. The most widely known of the German feminine rules is The Altenburg Rule of St. Benedict; also accessible is the Oxford version of the Rule, edited in Middle High German Translations of the Regula Sancti Benedicti, 245–78. Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 3. A large literature on practical and community-based literacy has emerged in the last fifteen years; see for instance Kasper and Schreiner, Viva vox und ratio scripta. For an evaluation of literate skills in English women’s convents, and particularly the ‘ability to read and sing [which] constitutes one of the basic requirements for entry into monastic life,’ see Yardley, Performing Piety, 76–9. Information on monastic affiliations drawn from KrämerHandschriftenerbe, 1:377 and 2:411, 455, 473, 589. This phenomenon of shifting identity has led to the minimization of women’s convents’ place within the history of each given monastic order. The story of women’s convents fit less tidily into the tales of Benedictine or Dominican development, for example, than do those of their male counterparts. Nevertheless, helpful studies of Benedictine women’s monastic history are included in Hilpisch, History of Benedictine Nuns, though the title ‘Decline and Reform’ for the chapter covering the later Middle Ages is to be lamented (46). Likewise, nuns are addressed in the context of the history of the Dominican order in both Hinnebusch, The History of the Dominican Order, vol. 1, Origins and Growth to 1500; and Wilms, Geschichte der deutschen Dominikanerinnen, 1206–1916. I am thinking here of the efflorescence that followed at Helfta after the election of Abbess Gertrud von Hackeborn (1251–91), or the program of book

Notes to pages 26–30

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copying that followed the election of Abbess Agatha Haunsperger (1446– 84) at Nonnberg Abbey. A similar move towards spiritual reflection and attendant book-based activity could also be guided by the lives of individual nuns, of course. The place of books and book copying in vitae recorded in the sister-books – texts largely generated in the period from 1305 to 1350, according to Rebecca Garber – is explored more fully in chapter 6. For a review of late medieval reform movements, see Elm, Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. A review of reforming efforts in women’s houses can be found in McNamara, Sisters In Arms, chapter 14, ‘Regular Lives.’ For a more systematic exploration of fifteenth-century Observant women’s convents, see Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles; chapter 5 in particular discusses Observant convent libraries and manuscript production. Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 130. Matrix Monasticon, ‘Gnadenzell: Other Ecclesiastical Relations,’ consulted on 8 March 2008. See, for example, the reforms of St Katharina in Nuremberg as recounted in Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 111. The early liturgical manuscripts of Nonnberg are discussed by NiiyamaKalicki, ‘Quellen zu Musik und Liturgie im Stift Nonnberg im Mittelalter’; those of other Salzburg establishments of the era are reviewed in Engels, ‘Geistliche Musik Salzburgs im Mittelalter.’ David N. Bell, What Nuns Read. For a particularly clear discussion of women’s administrative roles within the cloister community, see Gückel, Das Kloster Maria zum Weiher vor Köln, 131–42. Lang, ‘Die mittelalterliche Bibliothek des Bendiktiner-Frauenstifts Nonnberg,’ 35–8. I am grateful to Dr Lang both for a copy of her dissertation and for the opportunity to discuss Nonnberg Abbey’s library and other medieval matters via email. For more on the cantrix and other monastic officers, see chapter 5 below. A search of KrämerScriptores for ‘armaria’ and for ‘bibliothekarin’ turned up only four examples of female librarians who also served as scribes. Consulted on 8 November 2008. Regarding the identity of Adelheid, KrämerScriptores cites Paul Buberl, Die illuminierten Handschriften in Steiermark, 1. Teil: Die Stiftsbibliotheken zu Admont und Vorau, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der illuminierten Handschriften in Österreich 4,1 (Leipzig, 1911), 2. The hand of Euphrosina (Eufrosina) Gärtnerin can be identified in five manuscripts; KrämerScriptores cites especially Karin Schneidern. ‘Deutsche mittelatterliche Handschriften aus bayerischer Klosterbibliotheken,’ 47. Dorothea Schermann’s psalter, a copy of St Bonaventura’s psalter that is adapted to address the Virgin Mary, is now SarnenBK Codex Muri-Gries 65

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and dates from 1515. For information on the Rote Buch, see Bruckner, ‘Zum Problem der Frauenhandschrift im Mittelalter,’ 173, 181. The injunctions of the Carthusian order, like some of the reforming statutes of Observant houses, places special emphasis on scribal activites. The Carthusian statutes expected the monk (and presumably the nun) to spend time in his cell ‘usefully and in an orderly manner, reading, writing, reciting psalms, praying, meditating, contemplating, working ...’ Thus, scribal work of some sort was expected as a normal practice in Carthusian monasteries, but that work was the responsibility of all monastics and not a separable office. See ‘Extracts from the Carthusian statutes,’ as quoted in La Corte and McMillan, Regular Life, 118. GermBen III/1, ‘Admont, Frauenkloster,’ 208. Monica H. Green has compiled a list of medical books owned by women’s convents, ‘Female Religious Institutions Owning Medical Books’ that she has released on Matrix Monasticon. Among the two dozen manuscripts from German houses, she identifies, for example, three manuscripts that appear to stem from the Cistercian abbey of Seligenthal in Landshut, which had a hospital associated with it since 1252: a fifteenth-century copy of Hiltgart of Hürnheim’s German translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum (MünchenSB Cgm 288); a fifteenth-century German and Latin volume with texts on materia medica, cooking, horse medicine, and ointments and plasters (MünchenSB Clm 2694); and the Arzeney Büch of Anna Maria Stöcklin from the mid-to-late sixteenth century (BethesdaNLM E68). Adelheid ‘lesen tüsch und latyn und schriben.’ Meyer, Das Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, ch. XL, p. 100. Clare of Assisi, ‘Rule of Saint Clare (1253),’ 65. She also requires them to say the Requiem aeternam at vespers and matins ‘because the sisters who can read are obliged to recite the Office of the Dead’ (ibid). Eberl, Geschichte des Benediktinerinnenklosters Urspring bei Schelklingen, 1127– 1806, 297. GermBen XII, ‘Isenhagen,’ 256. Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter. The nuns mentioned in Wattenbach, ibid., include twelfth-century nuns Diemud of Nonnberg (434), Diemud of Wessobrunn (155 and 445), Herrad von Landsberg (444), and Leukardis of Mallerstorf (444) as well as a variety of late medieval nuns: Anna Zineris, prioress of Altomünster (446); Gertrud von Büchel of Rolandswerth (366); Guta (Gutta) of Schwarzenthann (363 and 445); Gisela (Gysela) de Kerzenbroeck (367); Katherina de Brugg (446); Margareta of Merode (Meirrode) from Schillingscapellen (447); and the nun Sophia (506 and 510) as well as unnamed nuns

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from Niedermünster bei Regensburg (445) and an unnamed Venetian miniatrix (364). Christ, The Handbook of Medieval Library History, 261. There are 456 women’s convents from German lands with one or more surviving manuscript from the late Middle Ages; 133 of those convents (29.2 per cent) are associated with one or more female scribes. Sixty-three women’s houses demonstrably have two or more women scribes; sixty-one have two or more manuscripts copied by women scribes. These are not precisely overlapping categories, for some women scribes are only known to us through documentary evidence – obits, for example, or financial records – and have no surviving manuscripts, while other scribes are known to have copied many manuscripts. Esslingen-Weiler, Medingen (1), and Unterlinden can each be assigned seven women scribes based on the surviving convent manuscripts; this number is, of course, a minimum boundary, for none of these latter libraries survives intact. Note that I have retained Krämer’s parenthetical numbering for the three Medingen convents; details are provided above in ‘Caveats and Terminology,’ p. xiv. Physical spaces for copying are discussed in more detail in chapter 2. It should be remembered, too, that the balance of manuscripts from women’s convents should not be assumed to have been copied by men; rather, they are partly copied by scribes known to be men but mostly copied by persons unknown. Because of sampling procedures, male scribes for women’s convents are likely to be somewhat undercounted in comparison to their female counterparts. Though all instances of male scribes known to have served women’s convents are recorded here, special and extensive searches for categories of women scribes were undertaken that had no parallel for male scribes who served women’s convents. Thus, women scribes were identified by genderlinked terms such as Schwester, soror, Nonne, monialis, Äbtissin, Priorin, Meisterin, scriptrix, and so on, as well as by the many designations for religious orders with their feminized endings: -innen. Similar searches for male scribes – Beichtvater or confessor, Kaplan, and so forth – had to be matched back to the women’s convent for which they served. As a result, some men who worked for women’s convents are likely to have been overlooked because modernday indexing procedures make them less easy to identify than their female counterparts. Nonetheless, close scrutiny of convents for which a good deal of library history has been reconstructed – Nuremberg’s St Katharina, for instance, or Inzigkofen – suggests that the patterns seen here are relatively close in their proportional distribution. In general, then, more female

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scribes than male are known to have served the convents under consideration here. That is not to denigrate the role of archivist. The duties of the archivist, who attended on a daily (or at least weekly) basis to the business of the convent, were in fact indispensable, while the work of the scribe might be intermittent without harming the convent’s fiscal or spiritual footing. The objects of their efforts, however, were perceptively different; convent paperwork might be invisible to the other members of a convent community unless they had a specific occasion to consult this or that particular document, whereas the product of scribal labour – a book – was meant to be shared in the broader community. Anna Egingen (?) copied the Gebetbuch StockholmKB A 89 in the late fifteenth century, presumably for Sister Elisabeth Grücklerin; intercessions for the latter are found on fols 181v and 235v. The manuscript measures 10.5 x 7.5. See Kurras, Deutsche und Niederländische Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek Stockholm, 17–24. Likewise, a Liber Precum of much the same size (10.4 x 7.8) was copied in 1516 by Cleopha von Baden, ‘Monialis de Gnadental’; St. Paul im LavanttalStiftsB 76/1 (olim 25.1.18) had at least two subsequent owners, Jodoc. Schussler and Barbara de Gaysberg (formerly a Clarissen in Villingen), demonstrating the private circulation of such manuscripts. One of the larger manuscripts is MainzStadtbibl. Ms II.138, which measures 45 x 28. This antiphonal was possibly crafted for the Weissfrauenkloster in Mainz. See LMLO2 and HMML 44102. This manuscript is particularly interesting because it contains polyphony. This is an estimate, based solely on manuscript classification in various library cataloguing systems whose shelfmarks group manuscripts of similar size together. (See, for example, AugsburgUB, BerlinSBPK, KopenhagenKgl.B, LuneburgRatsbucherei, MünchenUB, StuttgartLB, and WolfenbüttelHAB). In this admittedly loose measure of book size, 186 manuscripts are quarto; 198 are octavo; and 146 are folio. Only three convent manuscripts are explicitly classified as duodecimo volumes, though given the prevalence of small manuscript sizes amid the manuscripts that lack any designation regarding format, there are likely many more duodecimo volumes lurking among such manuscript collections. The nuns described in Jeffrey Hamburger’s account, who had secreted Nonnenwerk-style images from their psalters in their choir stalls, desired a visual enhancement of the liturgy in a world where the nun’s choir was often screened off from the action and ceremonial of the celebrant. The visitator who directed the nuns to return the images to a place where all could see them was not returning the nuns to some ideal of word-based reading, but rather enforcing community-centred devotions in preference to private

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contemplation. The text that bore the image receives as little attention from the spiritual corrector as it apparently did from the nuns themselves (who would have known the words by heart already). Hamburger’s story suggests that imagery had a particular resonance for contemplative reading. See The Visual and the Visionary, 87–9. The image of Adelhaidis is found in the Cistercian antiphonal, MünchenSB Clm 23046, fol. 144r; see CMO #248, CMO I/31 and Béatrice Hernad, Die gotischen Handschriften deutscher Herkunft in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Teil 1: Vom späten 13. bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 44–5 and plates 127–32; for the image of Adelhaid, see esp. 45 and plate 131. The image of Adelhaidis and a portion of the musical material is also reproduced in Smith, ‘Scriba, Femina,’ 29. The image accompanies the text ‘Beate pater et dux,’ an antiphon which, according to the Cantus Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant, is found elsewhere as ‘O Beate pater et dux,’ an antiphon for the translation of Benedict’s relics on 11 July (though the chant is listed in the Munich manuscript ‘per totum annum’). The Cantus Database cites GrazUB, 30, fol. 172v, col. 02 as a source for the antiphon and assigns the chant ID of gra0361. Cantus Database, http://publish.uwo.ca/~cantus/index.html; consulted on 8 March 2008. Smith, ‘Scriba, Femina,’ 33 and figure 11. The manuscript is in Aachen, in a private collection. Smith points out that that ‘[s]he is my solitary example of an anonymous writing woman religious, for whom so many male counterparts exist. Her very singularity leads me to expect that she cannot really be anonymous’ (33). As Smith points out in her introduction, many more images of women monastics as writers appear in the years following 1400. Beach, Women as Scribes. The Rulle Bible is now found as Osnabrück, Gymnasium Carolinum, Mss 90–1. According to Judith Oliver, the obit is added on fol. 255v. See Oliver, ‘Worship of the Word,’ 120, note 20. The entry on the convent of Rulle in GermBen XII, 645, adds the information that Christina von Haltern’s entry in the convent necrology on 17 June 1280 describes her as ‘scriptrix’; see OsnabrückUB IV, 608. Catharina von Barr, a convent member who died 19 February 1519, likewise appears with the designation ‘scriptrix’ in the necrology. The inventory of table readings from Nuremberg St Katharina, for instance, sometimes indicates the scribe who copied a particular book; entry O 18 gives both scribe and location along with the book’s description: ‘A little book, containing a very good prayer and an exhortation on the saints and on the holy sacrament and the Last Supper and about the sufferings of Christ and the Imitation of Christ. This book was copied by Sister Clara Paumgartner and is located in the choir.’ The translation is quoted here from Winston-Allen,

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Convent Chronicles, 173. As she notes, the catalogue is found as ‘Jtem die her nach geschriben puecher hat der convent hie zu sant Kathereyn,’ compiled 1455–99 by one of the sisters, and has been edited by Franz Jostes in Appendix II of Meister Eckhart und seine Jünger: Ungedruckte Texte zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik, Collectanea Friburgensis 4 (Fribourg, Switzerland: Kommissionsverlag der Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1894), 115–59; her translation stems from an entry on 157. Ehlers-Kisseler, Die Anfänge der Prämonstratenser im Erzbistum Köln, 552. BaselStA St Albanurkunde 326 of 4 April 1438 identifies Anna Flötzerin as ‘scriptrix superior’; the nun Brigida Liespergin is listed as ‘subscriptrix.’ See Bruckner, ‘Zum Problem der Frauenhandschrift im Mittelalter,’ 176; see also Helvetia Sacra V/1, ‘Klarissenkloster Gnadental in Basel,’ 549. Meerbeke’s entry presumably comes in BrusselsBR 3416–24, fol. 70va (a. 1461); the citation is from KrämerScriptores, consulted 8 March 2008. The importance of visual layout and the kind of training necessary to accommodate complex musical manuscripts has been explored in a number of studies. My views on the role of visual details as navigational cues has been shaped by the writings of Andrew Hughes, particularly Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, chapter 6, ‘Liturgical Books: Content and Format,’ and ‘The Scribe and the Late-Medieval Liturgical Manuscript’; and by Rebecca Baltzer’s work on the copying of organum manuscripts, including ‘Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Miniatures,’ as well as by conversations with Dominic Leo about the Machaut manuscripts, and with Elizabeth R. Upton and Alice V. Clark about all things codicological. Hamburger himself did much to rehabilitate the term Nonnenarbeit; see his discussion in Nuns as Artists, 1–5; see esp. 4: ‘Rather than discard Nonnenarbeit as an outmoded epithet, we can instead, faute de mieux, accept it as an affirmation of difference, just as nuns, in contrast to clerical culture, unapologetically affirmed the role of images in their own spirituality. Whereas theologians rarely mentioned works of art except to criticize them or, on occasion, to concede their utility for pastoral purposes, nuns made them an integral, even indispensable, part of their piety.’ Oliver prefers the more specific term Nonnenbücher in her discussion of manuscripts produced in monasteries; on German examples of the book arts, see in particular Oliver’s study, ‘Worship of the Word.’ Walther Lipphardt introduced this cluster of manuscripts in an article, ‘Deutsche Kirchenlieder in einem niedersachsischen Zisterzienserinnenkloster des Mittelalters,’ providing a whole range of criteria that can help to certify the provenance of the manuscripts: ‘Material, Format, Lagenordnung, Zeilenzahl, Schmuck, Miniaturen, Schrift, Einband, Lederprägung der Einbände, Orthographie, Repertoire-Wechsel ...’ (313–14). See also his

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‘Die liturgische Funktion deutscher Kirchenlieder in den Klöstern niedersächsischer Zisterzienserinnen des Mittelalters,’ and ‘Mittelalterliche Musikhandschriften aus dem Kloster Medingen.’ The more recent work on Medingen manuscripts by Henrike Lähnemann and Gerard Achten suggests a redating of many of these sources to the period after conventual reform. See especially Achten, ‘De Gebedenboeken van de Cistercienserinnekloosters Medingen en Wienhausen.’ 56 ‘Istum libellum scripsit soror Druda de Elfenhusen O.F.P. in paradyso ad instanciam fr. Iacobi de Duzenberg.’ CMO #5357, CMO II/218. The citation is for MünsterUB 366 (291), a fourteenth-century manuscript destroyed in the Second World War. Paradiese was the women’s Dominican convent near Soest. 57 The colophon reads ‘a.d. 1294 Iutta discreta virgo O.C. in monasterio s. Spiritus apud Alzeyam complevit hunc librum scribens eum ad peticionem Henrici prespiteri de Schimischem. Laus sit Deo. Amen.’ It is found in OxfordBodl Laud. misc. 415 (SC 835), fol. 4. CMO #12102, CMO III/580; Palmer, Zisterzienser und ihre Bücher, 202–3, figs 147–9. This Jutta is not to be confused with the Jutta who famously instructed Hildegard nearly two centuries prior although the eleventh-century anchoress may, like her thirteenth-century counterpart, have had a certain degree of book learning. 58 The Petersfrauen psalter was crafted for Abbott Otto II Chalchosperger; the delivery of the manuscript is recorded in the Registrum Ottonis fol. 22v in the year 1404, but the manuscript itself is lost to us today. (GermBen III/3, ‘Salzburg, Petersfrauen,’ 421.) The presence of a scriptorium producing books on demand can be seen in other women’s convents as well. The Cologne Klarissenkloster, for instance, produced numerous illuminated manuscripts for clients outside of its convent. For instance, they most likely copied the fourteenth-century gradual KölnDB Codex 1150 for Johannes de Bacheym, cantor of the Cologne Benedictine monastery St Pantaleon (d. 1385). An image of a monk, identified by a scroll as Iohannes de Bacheym cantor, accompanies the initial for the feast of St Pantaleon on fol. 199v; elsewhere in the manuscript, images of adoring nuns adjoin such initials. Similarly, the so-called Rennenberg Codex (KölnDB Codex 149), an Ordo missae, was copied by the same Clarissan nuns for the dean of the Cologne cathedral, Konrad von Rennenberg (d. 1357). See the exhibition catalogue Glaube und Wissen, indexed on the web at http://www.ceec.unikoeln.de/projekte/CEEC/texts/GlaubeUndWissen/GlaubeUndWissen ZuHs1150.htm, consulted 8 March 2008. See also the recent discussions of the scriptorium and the crypto-symbols used by the nuns as signatures in Mattick, ‘Choralbuchfragmente aus dem Kölner Kloster St Klara,’ and ‘Drei

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Chorbücher aus dem Kölner Klarissenkloster im Besitz von Sulpiz Boisserée’; and Gummlich-Wagner, ‘Neue Zuschreibungen an das Kölner Klrarissenskriptorium.’ 59 Dominicans were theoretically barred from manuscripts prepared by women: ‘Fratres non faciant sibi scribi psalteria vel alia scripta per moniales vel alias mulieres,’ quoted in Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 273. 2. Structuring Scribal Relationships 1 Other such active centres of manuscript production within women’s convents will likely emerge from future studies of women’s convent libraries. Anne Winston-Allen, for instance, has discussed the importance of book exchange within Observant communities in Convent Chronicles, chapter 5, esp. 169–88. The convents under consideration in this book represent only the most obvious candidates to house cloister scriptoria. 2 In a handful of these convents, the woman scribe in question technically belonged to a separate community, so the figure for gender, which is accurate, is slightly different from the figure for ‘internal scribes,’ which would be somewhat lower. Several of these problematic cases, however, involve reforming women from one community who copy books for another community while they are in residence as visitors. There is, in other words, a temporary affiliation of the individual religious with the ‘other’ community that she has come to serve. If those ‘visitors’ are included among the internal scribes, then the number of communities with women scribes and the number of communities with internal scribes approaches parity. Curiously, those convents that receive manuscripts from women who are demonstrably located outside of the community also demonstrably have at least one woman scribe of their own. 3 There are 351 women scribes from specific convents, versus 220 male scribes affiliated with women’s convents; there are 561 manuscripts by women scribes versus 246 manuscripts by men. Though gender categories of male/ female do not correlate exactly to the relational categories of external/internal, they do serve as a close indicator. 4 Identified male scribes who served women’s convents are much more numerous for the fifteenth century and after than they are for earlier periods. For the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, I have found fewer than two dozen manuscripts explicitly intended by male scribes for female houses. This likely reflects a shift in content for colophons; while early colophons may well indicate the scribe by name, they are less likely than their fifteenthcentury counterparts to indicate the convent for whom the manuscript was being copied. Since scribal identification can be certain but provenance

Notes to pages 51–2

5 6

7

8

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unknown, there are likely more manuscripts from women’s convents lurking among the signed (and/or dated) manuscripts than have yet been identified. Ironically, twelfth-century documentation appears to be easier to come by; Alison Beach has explored the relationship of male and female scribes in this earlier period in her studies Women as Scribes, and ‘Claustration and Collaboration between the Sexes in the Twelfth-Century Scriptorium.’ A caution for those who seek male scribes by reading scribal colophons: male clerics might, like the nun who copies a private Gebetbuch for her own use, act on their own behalf in their book creation, but they can and do also copy texts for the nuns whose lives were tied to their own. It is only these later activities that concern me here. Peregrinus is identified in Appendix B.12.6 of Ehlers-Kisseler, Die Anfänge der Prämonstratenser im Erzbistum Köln, 550 and again on 552. MünchenSB Cgm 331, fol. 176v, as quoted in Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Cgm 201–350, 347, consulted via HKOL. Note, however, that this manuscript from 1480 was prepared for Thomas Jud von Bruckberg; see KrämerScriptores. Krämer identifies a second manuscript from the same scribe: MünchenSB Clm 4422, fol. 229. Udalricus, chaplain of Nonnberg copied at least two and perhaps three volumes for Nonnberg Abbey. His copy of the Leben der heiligen, Winterteil: Oct-März is dated 1453; see SalzburgNA 28 D 1 (HMML 10954). This volume is probably matched with SalzburgNA 28 D 6 (HMML 10963), a Leben der heiligen for April to September, which also dates from 1453, but I have been unable to compare scribal hands. Additionally, Udalricus copied Von den zehn Geboten und von der liebe Gottes for Abbess Agatha Haunsperger in 1452; see SalzburgNA 23 E 11 (HMML 10915). Johannes Würzburger’s collection of letters for Verena von Stuben, abbess of Sonnenburg from 1440 to 1458 (the abbess who famously feuded with Nicholas of Cusa) is now found as Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesarchiv, Cod.2336. See GermBen III/3, ‘Sonnenburg,’ 690, 694, and 698. EinsiedelnStiftsB 744; directorium monialium. Folio 310 contains the colophon: ‘Explicit hic notula scripta per me Ioh. Höfflin conventus Frib. lectorem conv. Thuricensis et finita in die s. Elizabeth a.d. 1477.’ CMO #10071, CMO III/328. KrämerScriptores provides a brief biographical summation for Höfflin: ‘1467 Licenciatus in Paris (Frankreich), 1477 Frater des Franziskanerkonvents in Fribourg (Schweiz) und Lektor im Konvent von Zürich (Schweiz) (wohl auch OFM).’ Martinus Vissegradensis signs his name to Praha Mus. Nat. 3671 in a colophon and at the front of the volume: ‘Explicit ... a.d. 1409 fratris Martini tunc confessoris sanctimonialium aput [sic] Ge(orgium)’ (fol. 195), and ‘Martinus

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Visseg(radensis)’ (fol. 1). CMO #13317, CMO IV/155. I am grateful to Dr Marie Ryantová, librarian at the Prague National Museum, for answering questions about the contents of this manuscript. Johannes Swarcz, Adelhausen’s confessor, rubricated MünchenSB Clm 26859 in 1472. CMO #11398, CMO III/489. This assertion is based on a search of KrämerScriptores in November 2005. These male scribes were first identified through their affiliation with women’s monasteries; then their biographies were searched using the truncated terms ‘Beicht-’ (for Beichtiger and Beichtvater) and ‘confess-’ (for confessor sororum, confessor monialium, and so on). A similar linkage can be seen in male scribes for convents in the Low Countries, though the confessors from Dutch-speaking regions have been excluded from consideration here. Johannes Meyer’s scribal offerings to Adelhausen include an Officia, FreiburgUB 107; a spiritual miscellanea that includes a vita of St Dorothea, FreiburgSA, B1 (H) 107; and the famous Ämterbuch, copied along with the Adelhausen chronicle and a variety of other materials pertaining to the convent in FreiburgSA, B1 (H) 108, dated 1482. Sebastian Fabri copied a diurnal in 1501 (the date of 1581 in the secondary literature is incorrect) for the Clares in Nuremberg. He notes that in 1450 the monastery was reformed, ‘Et nota a.d. 1450 reformatum fuit monasterium clarissarum. Et primus confessor tempore reformacionis fuit.’ ManchesterRL Lat. 152, fol. 294. CMO #16981, CMO V/286. Studies of convent mystics, in particular, have helped to elucidate the role of the confessor as literary figure, correspondent, and mentor. See, for example, the literature on Henry of Nördlingen and Dominican nun Margaret Ebner: Strauch, Margareta Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen; Hindsley, Margaret Ebner, Major Works; and Coakley, Women, Men and Spiritual Power, particularly 149–69. Likewise, Ursula Peters’s study of Christina Ebner and her unnamed confessor discloses the important role of the confessor in the production of her text; see ‘Das “Leben” der Christine Ebner.’ Kurt Ruh posits a collaborative model between learned confessor and unlearned nun; see for instance his Geschichte der abendlänischen Mystik, 2:248– 51. Scholars such as Ursula Peters and Rebecca Garber, working on a slightly later iteration of mysticism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, on the other hand, take issue with his idea of a confessorial Schreibbefehl – a command to write – arguing that the relationship between author and confessor might be more variable, and that the direct impulse behind text production might stem rather from the abbess. See Peters, Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum, and ‘Vita religiosa und spirituelles Erleben.’ See also Garber, Feminine Figurae, 22–30; and for a still later period, Bilinkoff, Related Lives.

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16 Even the cloister visitator might turn a hand to the provision of appropriate manuscripts for the women’s convents they served. According to KrämerScriptores, Johannes Saltkotten wrote one part of a manuscript during his stay at one of the sister-houses in Soest in 1473; see CMO #11309, CMO III/ 479. This manuscript, MünsterUB 360, was destroyed during the Second World War. 17 Fromm, ‘Volkssprache und Schriftkultur,’ 100. Reconstructing the relationship of author to scribe could be complicated both by questions of Latinate literacy (or lack thereof) and by the collaborative process itself. 18 Coakley, Women, Men and Spiritual Power; Benedict, Empowering Collaborations; and Bilinkoff, Related Lives. 19 See, for instance, the discussion of sermon production by nuns in Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 188–95. 20 Krauter’s Betrachtung des Leidens Christi is now found as NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 94 and the Beichtanweisung (1434) is NürnbergStadtB Cent. VIII, 4. According to KrämerScriptores, Krauter served as Beichtvater to the St Katharina nuns before his death in 1434. 21 Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 138. In Hindsley’s translation, Henry of Nördlingen’s comment reads, ‘It [the manuscript] was given to us in a very strange kind of German so that we had to spend two years of sweat and effort before we could put it into our German.’ 22 Edmunds, ‘The Life and Work of Clara Hätzlerin,’ 1, 4, and the inventory listing on 19–20. 23 Edmunds describes Hätzlerin’s hand as ‘entirely gender-neutral’ (ibid., 2) and points out that we would not be able to distinguish it from that of her male colleagues if we had not had a signature to verify the gender of the scribe. The point is worth remembering; there is nothing inherently gendered in the ways in which scribes worked. 24 There are some unsigned manuscripts from women’s convents that have on their pages an unusual form of notation, roughly equivalent to the approach to notation taken in a few Dutch songbooks of the period, copied by individuals who seem to have been unfamiliar with the conventions of the notational system of the day. These manuscripts have at their centre an inelegant but musically characterized material. It seems likely, however, that these were insiders’ manuscripts communicating to the community members those musical details that were necessary for the re-creation of the materials that they wished to perform. Thus they are likely representatives of the nuns’ own selfgenerated notational system rather than commissions to external scribes. See, for instance, the discussion of Medingen (3) manuscripts in Lipphardt, ‘Deutsche Kirchenlieder in einem niedersachsischen Zisterzienserinnenkloster

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26

27

28

29

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Notes to page 56

des Mittelalters,’ 310–18; the dating of the manuscripts, however, has been reevaluated by Gerard Achten, and others; see Achten, ‘De Gebedenboeken van de Cistercienserinnekloosters Medingen en Wienhausen.’ Henrike Lähnemann, for instance, mentions the ‘crude pencil drawings’ in some of the Medingen devotional manuscripts, in ‘Medingen Manuscripts / Die Medinger Handschriften.’ Leonard Hindsley describes BerlinSBPK mgq 886 (his ms B) as being hastily written, in The Mystics of Engelthal, 58. Monk and scribe Wilhelm Kechetter (Kecheller) is identified in the 1932 sales catalogue description, which reades: ‘Geschrieben von dem Mönche Wilhelm Kechetter im Cisterzienserkloster zu Herrenalb Wtbg. für seine Schwester Dorothea zu Lichtenthal (Baden) 1460.’ Luzern GelhoferRanschburg, Vente 14–15 June 1932, n. 20, as quoted in CMO #5837, CMO II/284. This manuscript is omitted in KrämerHandschriftenerbe and has disappeared from view. It is possible that a second manuscript, listed as HoustonPL 4, a psalter copied between 1444 and 1445 that also stems from Lichtenthal, was also intended by Kecheller for Dorothea. Bernhard Brantz from Herrenalb copied the processional KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 54 in 1463; it was owned by Dorothea Brantz. See KrämerHandschriftenerbe, 1:347 (‘Herrenalb’). Branz copied at least one other processional, KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 53, dated 1467. Beyttinger’s manuscript is now found as AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 8o 35 and is cited in KrämerHandschriftenerbe, ‘Kirchheim (1),’ 1:395. Likewise, Johannes Uelin, ‘Conventherrn zv bebenhusen,’ copied a manuscript in 1465 for two of his sisters – Katherina Velin and Margareta Läschin – who were resident at the Dominican cloister of Hedingen near Sigmaringen; the colophon is on p. 622 of BudapestBUA K. 538; see Vizkelety, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis, 35–48, esp. 47. I have identified brother-sister book-gifts through a biographical term search in KrämerScriptores. Johannes Hising notes his concerns in the colophon to MünchenSB Cgm 4566, fol. 136v: ‘Johannes Hising bacc. arcium hat dissen passion gescryben siner schwester Eva in siner grossen kranckheyt ma[le] fran[czos] warumb er gott danckt solcher krefft, bitt gott fvr in.’ (Johannes Hising, Bachelor of Arts has copied this Passion for his sister Eva in her great illness.) Eva’s probable identity as a Lichtenthal nun is made by Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften aus Cgm 4001–5247, 198–9, consulted via HKOL on 8 March 2008. Degler-Spengler, Das Klarissenkloster Gnadental in Basel 1289–1529, 69. Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs, Nachtrag zu Band 1, ed. Uiblein, 24– 5, item 14. The entry in the 1456 will (lines 9–11) reads ‘Item seiner fraun zu Closterneunburg ain puch genant ain epistler und ain newen fuchsein rokh

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33

34

35

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… Item ain mettenpuch und ain diurnal derselben fraun sun.’ The suggested relationship is posited by the editor, Paul Uiblein, in note 73. David Bell, What Nuns Read, 18–20, discusses books donated to women’s monastic houses in England. Similar donations to French women’s convents can be identified through a close reading of Genevois et al., Bibliothèques de manuscrits médiévaux en France. On Elisabeth of Schönau and her brother, see Clark, Elizabeth of Schönau, 50– 67. For letters between convent women and their families, see for example the sampling of letters in Oehl, Deutsche Mystikerbriefe des Mittelalters, 1100– 1550. One of these examples, a letter from an anonymous monk to his niece Gertrude, is discussed in detail in chapter 5, p. 186. Similar kinds of relationships can be seen through the repeated financial endowments offered by families to the monasteries where their sisters and daughters reside. The family left in the world still saw to the well-being of the members who had taken up a lifestyle of prayer and service. Ties of affection and moral if not legal obligations kept the world of the cloister and the secular world its prayer served connected. For a convenient review of the models of book production in the fourteenth century, see Shonk, ‘A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript.’ For the manuscript in question, he lists several possible production methods: an origin in a London bookshop; fascicular production; orders placed through ‘a bookdealer, the stationarius, who then farmed out the parts of the exemplar to independent scribes for simultaneous copying,’ and the production by a major scribe who took on the task of supervision, serving ‘as “editor” of the manuscript [who] did much of the writing, but some of the work he subcontracted to other scribes and rubricators’ (73). For the purposes of the current study, any of these models might be possible mechanisms, and I would consider all of them to be workshop production. Andrew Wathey supplements this view with his attention to musical manuscripts in ‘The Production of Books of Liturgical Polyphony.’ The Ewig cloister may have helped to bring the reforms of the devotio moderna to the women’s convent at Rüthen, but Rüthen also benefited from a connection with the men of Böddeken (OSA) who produced a vernacular Leben des hl. Meinolf that came to the women’s cloister second-hand (PaderbornEAB Cod. 437 has a possession mark on fol.1r: ‘Süsternhaus Rüthen’). These manuscripts, listed in Hengst, Westfälisches Klosterbuch 2:306–8, are omitted from the inventories in KrämerHandschriftenerbe, which lacks a listing for the convent, located in Kreis Soest. (Rüthen Schwesternhaus in the diocese of Cologne is not to be confused with the Dominican women’s convent of Reuthin, located in the diocese of Constance.)

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36 KarlsruheLB St Georgen 18. The affiliation of the Wislikofen Priory was taken from Helvetia Sacra III/1, Part 3, ‘Wislikofen,’ 1640. 37 See Halter, Geschichte des Dominikanerinnen-Klosters Oetenbach in Zürich 1234– 1525, 62 note 13; she cites Urkundenbuch der Stadt und Landschaft Zürich, ed. J. Escher and P. Schweizer (Zurich, 1888–1939), Bd. XI, 4430. Other ‘Klosterschreiber’ for women’s convents may also have been professionals brought in by the nuns for hire. According to KrämerScriptores, Johannes Kreutzburg was a Klosterschreiber for the Benedictines at St Cyriacus in Erfurt in the later fifteenth century, and he is known to have produced at least one account register (MagdeburgKönigl. StaatsA, Copialbuch 1515; see KrämerHandschriftenerbe 1:212, ‘Erfurt Benediktinerinnen’). She also identifies two other Klosterschreiber: Conradus Rossner, who worked for the Benedictines of St Maria und Theodor auf dem Kaulberg in Bamberg between 1444 and 1449; and Johannes Seybolt, who served in Seligenthal during the fifteenth century. 38 Much of that book trade was between women’s convents. This kind of book migration is particularly noticeable as convents merged, of course. For example, the women’s Dominican convents in Freiburg merged with Adelhausen; Straβburg St Agnes manuscripts made their way to Straβburg St Margaretha; Herrenalb manuscripts travelled to Lichtenthal (Lucida Vallis); a number of Nuremberg manuscripts wound up in Bamberg Hl. Grab, and Schönensteinbach manuscripts travelled to Freiburg’s St Maria Magdalena. Other books travelled too; in all, more than 250 individual manuscripts can be shown to have migrated from one monastery to another. Much of the trouble in tracking these migrations is that the date of transmission of a book from one locale to another is often uncertain, and even when known is not always clearly described in the shorter catalogue entries. 39 On book exchange between St Katharina in Nuremberg and the Augustinians at Pillenreuth, see Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur, 450–2; on the exchange between the Inzigkofen Augustinians and St Katharina in St Gall and later with the Franciscan Bickenkloster in Villingen, see Vogler, Das Dominikanerinnen-Klosters St. Katharina in St. Gallen zur Zeit der Reformation, 82ff. 40 The manuscript in question was TübingenUB Md. 456; Elisabeth Muntpratin (the Elder)’s hand is found on fols 2v–86r and 245v–9v. The latter section includes Muntpratin’s copy of the Historisches Lied by her convent’s confessor, Johannes Scherle OP, which addressed the 1482 enclosure of her convent (St Katharina of St Gall). Scherle evidently composed both words and melody. The copy of Meyer’s Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, found on fols 81r–245r of the same codex, is in a second (anonymous) hand. As Werner Fechter has shown, the St Katharina Klosterchronik for the year

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1484 remarks ‘vund ain schwostren buch schanckent wir den von vntzkofen (fol. 43v)’ (and we bestowed a sister-book then in Inzigkofen); see Fechter, Deutsche Handschriften des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts aus der Bibliothek des ehemaligen Augustinerchorfrauenstifts Inzigkofen, 118–20. Note that Elisabeth Muntpratin may have had a familial connection to Inzigkofen; her eponymous niece Elisabeth Muntpratin (the Younger) was to become a resident and eventually a scribe for the Inzigkofen cloister (141–2). Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns,’ 125. GermBen XI, ‘Lüne,’ 393. The manuscript of Die besessene Schwester is WienÖNB 3006, mentioned under manuscripts from Eppenberg in KrämerHandschriftenerbe, 1:210 and as a source in Grünenberg, 1:306. A more complete description can be found in Hermann Menhardt, Verzeichnis der altdeutschen literarischen Handschriften der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 2:751–2, consulted via HKOL. The colophon at the end of the first section of the manuscript (fol. 73r) reads: ‘et sus finis. Disz buch ist geschrebin in der kartusz czurn Eppinberge in hesszin Noch cristus gebort MCCCCLXXIIII jair von bruder Henr. höcher vnd gesant siner nayn niftiln kyn klemmen in dy clusz Grunenberg.’ If the words ‘nayn niftiln’ are a variant of ‘mayn nichtiln,’ and if the preceding ‘siner’ was a misreading of ‘einer’ (which are visually similar in this script), the book would then have been copied for ‘one of my nieces’ but would ultimately have benefited the broader community in which she was resident. The nuns’ corporate statement of ownership appears on the front cover (Menhardt, Verzeichnis, 2:752). Thanks to Vivian Ramalingam for help in decoding the published transcription. ‘Bruder Albrecht’ copied CambridgeFW 157, fol. 172v. ‘Das buchlin ist der tugendsamen unnd gaystlichenn frawen Veronica Welsserin zu sant Katherina zu Augspurk Unnd is geschriben unnd vollendet in dem iar der genadenn 1501 am samstage vor dem suntag Exaudi. Bruder Albrecht.’ CMO #141, CMO I/18 and KrämerScriptores. St Katherina ‘auf dem Gries’ was a Dominican women’s convent in Ausburg and by 1501 was quite wealthy. Though we know little of Bruder Albrecht, we do know that Veronica Welsserin was one of a group of five nuns who commissioned six panel paintings between 1499 and 1504; Veronica herself commissioned the final two works in this series from Hans Burgkmair and Hans Holbein the Elder in the same year that she was elected prioress. See Cuneo, ‘The Basilica Cycle of Saint Katherine’s Convent,’ and Matrix Monasticon, ‘S. Katharina (S. Katharine) [Augsburg]: Art Artifacts,’ consulted 8 March 2008. Welsser’s position is discussed in more detail below on p. 144. The establishment of a broader array of biographies might help to elucidate these kinds of relationships. KrämerScriptores, provides a good starting

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place for research into scribal biographies. It is to be hoped that this registry, sponsored by Erwin Rauner Verlag, will continue to expand. The entry comes on 19 March: ‘Iutta ux. scriptoris n/i/ Rudg(eri).’ Necrologium Saeldentalense = Seligenthal (NecGer IV, 482). The entry for Rudgerus himself is on 5 April (NecGer IV, 484). Elizabeth Michlen, listed on 21 March, is described as the ‘Klostersch hausfraw,’ and her death date given as 1510. Necrologium Saeldentalense = Seligenthal (NecGer IV, 483). The entry for Margret Schreiberin appears on 4 April, where she is identified as ‘ux. Iohanis scriptoris n/i/’ (NecGer IV, 484); there is no evidence whether or not she functioned as a scribe in her own right. Her husband, presumably Hans (Johannes) Seybolt, identifies himself as Klosterschreiber in MünchenSB Cgm 331, fol. 176v, copied in 1480 for Thomas Jud von Bruckberg whose granddaughter was a canoness at Seligenthal; see Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften des Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Cgm 201–350, 347. Seybolt was also responsible for copying MünchenSB Clm 4422, fol. 229; see entry for ‘Seybolt, Johannes (Hans)’ on KrämerScriptores. WeimarHAAB Germ. 2o, codices 3–8, ca. 1458; see KrämerHandschriftenerbe 2:659 and KrämerScriptores, ‘Felix, Johannes [Nr.1].’ Johannes Tretter copied at least six volumes for Nuremberg, St Katharina: KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 34 1516 Diurnal, pars aestivalis KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 53a 1516 Diurnal, pars hiemalis KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 34a 1519 Diurnal, pars hiemalis KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 103 1519 Diurnal, pars aestivalis KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 68 undated Diurnal, pars aestivalis KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 106 undated Latin book of hours KrämerScriptores includes the diurnal KarlsruheLB St Peter perg 57a among Tretter’s works, but Heinzer and Stamm, Die handschriften von St Peter im Schwarzwald, 134, do not. Stephan May may have been connected to the prioress at Medingen. The explicit for his section of LeipzigUB Ms 763 identifies him as coming from Ulm (fol. 162v), while the statement of convent ownership for the volume given on fol. 1r claims that the prioress – who herself added three sermons to this volume (on fols 242r–58v; she signs her additions on fol. 247v and fol. 258v) – also came from Ulm: Dz buch gehort jn dz closter zu Medlingen, vnd hat es dem confent bracht vnser erwirdige liebe muter priorin Margret Schleicherin von Vlm vnd haist dz klererlein (fol. 1r). Margareth Schleicher ‘von Vlm’ nominally owned both of the Medingen volumes that Stephan May copied. She also arranged to have at least one further

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manuscript made; according to its colophon, she directed one of the Medingen nuns, sister Dorothea Deriethain (von Riethain), to copy a Gradual (MünchenSB Clm 23014) that was completed in 1500. Thomas Ritter von Hall’s contributions for the Maihingen Birgitten include AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2o 17 and 2o 18, the two volumes of the Revelations, signed in 1487 and 1489 respectively; see Karin Schneider, Deutsche mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg: Die Signaturengruppen Cod.I.3 und Cod.III.1, 178, 179. The Matthias of Sweden volume is now found as AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. II. 1. 2o 43; it too was copied from the Maihingen cloister and signed in 1491; see Hägele, Lateinische mittelalterliche Handschriften in Folio, 213. Ritter’s later contribution to the Kirchheim convent was a copy of Sermons that included Marquard von Lindau; it is now found as AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall III.1. 2o 37 and was signed in 1499. Schneider, 223. KrämerScriptores, ‘Ritter (Riter), Thomas’ mistakenly includes ‘Augsburg, UB, Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2o 43, fol. 1r-225v (a. 1491) (partim)’ among Ritter’s works; this last manuscript, however, is a medical book copied in two hands, neither identical with Ritter, and is presumably a mistaken second entry for the Matthias of Sweden Apocalypse that switches the numbers III.1. for the correct designation of II.1. A review of psalter divisions and the visual cues – especially capitalization – that scribes used to mark them can be found in Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, paragraphs 873–85, pp. 224–36. A general evaluation of the ways in which the manuscript page was adapted to facilitate retrieval of textual evidence was one of the requested themes for the symposium Organizing the Written Word. Catharina Ingoltin copied the Thomas à Kempis volume in 1485; it is now found as New York, ColumbiaUL 6 (X. 242. 1. S.). This manuscript is well known; see for instance CMO 2528, CMO I/318; Krämer Handschriftenerbe; and the Digital Scriptorium. SarnenBK Codex Muri-Gries 65. See Bruckner, ‘Zum Problem der Frauenhandschrift im Mittelalter,’ 173, 181. MünchenSB Cgm 4597 pt II, fols 114–30e. This is a composite manuscript; the section under discussion here evidently migrated through both the Niedermünster and the Püttrichhaus cloisters before eventually travelling to Benediktbeuern in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. See Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften aus Cgm 4001–5247, 235–42; consulted via HKOL. The lectionary is now found as SalzburgEA b I 24. Schwester Anna Ammanin copied the text on fols 299v–301v. She was professed as a member of the Petersfrauen 28 May 1449 and died 11 January 1487. Anna Ammanin was

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quite active in the community; her hand is found in a total of five of the Petersfrauen volumes. In addition to the lectionary b I 24, she contributed to SalzburgEA a VII 35 (Thomas a Kempis, Spruch from Vitas Patrum Albertus Magnus, Predigt, etc); a II 7 (Passionstraktat Joh. von Indersdorf, Tauler, Grunde aller Bosheit); b VI 12 (Heinrich von Langenstein); and b V 40 (Tauler, Eckhart, Indersdorf, Seuse). See Hayer et al, Die deutschen Handschriften des Mittelalters der Erzabtei St. Peter zu Salzburg. These nun-illustrators are enumerated in the introduction to Gaze, Dictionary of Women Artists, 3–20; see also 21–7. Other women illuminators of the era include Gertrud von Buchel (Büchel) of Rolandswerth; Anna Ingam(in) (Yngramin), probably of the Bamberg Klarissans; Elisabeth Töpplin (Toplin) of the Freiburg Klarissen; Sibilla von Bondorff, also of the Freiburg Klarissen and later of Straßurg, St Clara auf dem rossmarkt; Margareta Scheiffartz de Meirrode of Schillingskapellen; Dorothea Deriethain of Medingen (1); Elisabeth von Temritz, abbess of Marienstern, and others discussed in the art-historical literature on particular scriptoria. See especially the recent studies on the Cologne Klarissen, which have established an active cluster of nun-scribes, by Mattick, ‘Choralbuchfragmente aus dem Kölner Kloster St Klara,’ and ‘Drei Chorbücher aus dem Kölner Klarissenkloster im Besitz von Sulpiz Boisserée’; Gummlich-Wagner, ‘Neue Zuschreibungen an das Kölner Klarissenskriptorium.’ For a recent review of the scholarly literature on Gothic artistic production by nuns, see Oliver, Singing with Angels, 1–5. Writing about illustrated manuscripts of saints lives, art historian Cynthia Hahn, for instance, articulates a common – and commonsensical – point of view: ‘the decision to illustrate a book would not have been entered into lightly: it entailed a great deal of effort and thought and ... can be assumed to have had a serious purpose’ (ix). She enjoins us to take manuscripts ‘as [we] find them’ (ix), but she also notes that ‘[u]nillustrated hagiographic libelli ... seem to have fulfilled comparatively modest functions,’ and her own focus is on the beautiful, rather than the pragmatic and modest manuscripts. After all, as she notes, ‘the very inclusion of illustrations gives them far greater status than their unornamented cousins’ (19). See Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart. I do not mean here to deride the work of art historians, for the findings of investigations such as Dr Hahn’s have been very valuable indeed, but only to make the claim that a parallel track of scholarly investigation needs to be developed that treats those ‘modest’ manuscripts with equal care. She adds titles to the material copied by Dorothea Leynacher in FreiburgUB 490, placing them in the margins as a guide to the text. Twelfth-century scribes Regilindis and Relindis served as abbesses of Hohenburg, for instance, and Diemudis was abbess of Nonnberg. For an excellent

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discussion of twelfth-century women scribes, see Beach, Women as Scribes, especially her discussion of professed sisters and lay sisters at Schäftlarn, 111–14 and116–27. Other convent superiors whose hand is found in one or more surviving books include the following: • Agnes Abbatissa Quedlinburgensis (1184–1205) served as scribe; see CMO #321, CMO I/42 citing Bradley I/12 • Anna Flötzerin, abbess of Gnadental is described in a cloister document of 4 April 1438 as ‘scriptrix superior’; see p. 42. • Elisabeth von Temritz, abbess of the Cistercian house of Marienstern from 1515 to 1523, served as one of the miniaturists for the MariensternKB antiphonale (1516). See Ambrosius Schneider, ‘Skriptorien und Bibliotheken der Cistercienser.’ • Katharina Hoffmann (Katherin Hofmenin) was abbess of the Nuremberg Clares (1380–93); she too served as scribe. She copied two books, both in German: a vita of St Clare (BambergSB Hist. 146) and Dietrich von Apolda’s Vita St Elisabeth (BambergSB Hist. 148). • Margaretha Schleicher ‘aus Ulm,’ prioress of Medingen (1) OP, contributed to LeipzigUB Ms 763, fols 242r–58v, a section of a theological-ascetical composite manuscript in 1481; she later commissioned a volume from Medingen (1) nun Dorothea Deriethain (gradual MünchenSB Clm 23014, 1499–1500). See Pensel, Verzeichnis, 102–6. • Yoles Viennensis, prioress of Frauenthal (Valle St Marie), signed a manuscript in 1269. See CMO #11983, CMO III/563 and chapter 4 p. 143. Jutta offers the colophon in a copy of the Legenda aurea, OxfordBodl. Laud. misc. 415 (SC 835); it is quoted in chapter 1, note 57. Elisabeth de Strabach’s colophon appears in DüsseldorfUB B 44; see CMO #3742, CMO II/23. According to Matrix Monasticon, ‘Jörresbusch: Manuscript sources,’ Strabach also copied WeimarHAAB Q 59a. Another fifteenth-century nun also describes herself as ‘monialis’: ‘Marie Bruckerin, monialis ordinis Penitencium’ appears within a longer colophon in the 1473 psalter, StraßburgBNU 306 (lat. 254); see CMO #13039, CMO IV/ 119–20. Adelhaid Vögtin could ‘lesen tüsch und latyn und schriben,’ Meyer, Das Buch der Reformacio Predigerorders, Book 3 chapter 40, p.100. Gisle/Gisela is discussed below, p. 86. Gisle’s position as scribe has been challenged, but Judith Oliver has argued that she may well have headed up a workshop; see ‘Worship of the Word,’ 108–9 and 120 notes 20–4. Oliver reviews the division of labour in the production of the Codex Gisle in Singing with Angels, 33–9 and 64–9.

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67 Lipphardt’s works are cited in chapter 1, note 55. On the redating of Medingen manuscripts, see Achten, ‘De Gebedenboeken van de Cistercienserinnekloosters Medingen en Wienhausen.’ Additional insights will be generated through Henrike Lähnemann’s web-based project, ‘Medingen Manuscripts / Die Medinger Handschriften.’ 68 Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 273. These Oetenbach scribes are discussed in chapter 5, p. 180. 69 ‘Scriptrices sedeant cum aliis laborantibus in communi domo, sed hae non scribant aliis, donec conventus habeat libros necessarios.’ Ehrenschwendtner, ‘Puellae litteratae,’ 53 and 63 note 40. She cites E. Ritzinger and H.C. Scheeben, eds, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Teutonia in der zweiten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts,’ Archiv der deutschen Dominikaner 3 (1941), 11–95, no. 5, 37. 70 The books needed by each convent are enumerated in two chapters of the Cistercian Summa Cartae Caritatis (of 1119): chapter 9, ‘The Founding of New Abbeys,’ and chapter 10, ‘Which Books Must Not Be Dissimilar.’ To the list given in chapter 9, chapter 10 adds a Gospel Book, book of epistles, lectionary, and calendar of saints. These Cistercian regulations are excerpted in La Corte and McMillan, Regular life, 126. 71 It is likely that the number of houses with scriptoria will grow as other women’s houses with three or more scribes can be identified – either through codicological work or through archival documentation. 72 Lipphardt, ‘Mittelalterliche Musikhandschriften aus dem Kloster Medingen’; see also his earlier studies, ‘Zwei neu aufgefundene Nonnengebetbucher,’ ‘Zu den Quellen mittelniederdeutscher Kirchenlieder,’ and ‘Deutsche Kirchenlieder in einem niedersachsischen Zisterzienserinnenkloster des Mittelalters.’ 73 Johannes Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens. 74 The Codex Gisle was copied by Gisela de Kerzenbroeck and is now found in Osnabrück, Diözesanarchiv Inv. No. Ma 101 (formerly Osnabrück, Gymnasium Carolinum, Ms s.n. according to Schraut and Opitz, Frauen und Kunst im Mittelalter, 19). The Gradual has been the focus of a recent monograph by Oliver, Singing with Angels. 75 GermBen XII, ‘Rules,’ 645, and Oliver, Singing with Angels, 8–11. 76 KrämerHandschriftenerbe. Krämer’s study of individual scribes might reveal more Augustinian copyists who served women’s houses, but the depressed numbers of known scribes of either gender relative to other orders are puzzling. 77 ‘Comparatus’ could mean either ‘compared’ or ‘prepared’; in context, the former seems more likely though either reading is sensible. 78 ‘Anno domini millesimo quadringentesimo quinquagesimo nono presens liber scriptus est et comparatus pro utilitate sororum beate Marie Magdalene

Notes to pages 71–3

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extra muros Hildensis. Orate ergo pro huius datoribus ut nomina eorum in libro vite scribantur hoc est sine fin vivant.’ HildesheimDomB J. 38, endpaper, recto as quoted in Giermann and Härtel, Handschriften der Dombibliothek zu Hildesheim, Teil 2, 199, consulted via HKOL. The verso of fol. 1 has a similar inscription but one limited primarily to date: ‘Anno Domini M.CCCCL. nono scriptus et comparatus est presens liber.’ Of course, such an assessment is risky given both the wide variability in the amount of detail given in colophons of any era and the equally wide variability of detail given in modern-day catalogues of manuscripts from different regions. But since the underrepresentation of named scribes in Augustinian houses cuts across regional boundaries, it is unlikely to be the result of modern cataloguing procedures. Guta and Sintramus crafted the Guta Codex, an ornate evangeliary, Straßburg Grand Séminaire 37 (anc. 78), dated 1154. A facsimile edition has been published: Le Codex Guta-Sintram: manuscrit 37 de la Bibliothèque du Grand séminaire de Strasbourg, ed. Béatrice Weis (Lucerne: Editions Facsimilés; Strasbourg: Editions Coprur, 1983). Also in the twelfth century, the scribe Ermengarda contributed the Lamspringe copy of Augustine’s Sermons, now found as WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 204 (237), dated between 1178 and 1191. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, chapter 3, ‘Before the Book of Hours: The Development of the Illustrated Prayer Book in Germany.’ Horn and Born, The Plan of St. Gall. See also their ‘Medieval Monastery as a Setting for the Production of Manuscripts.’ In this latter contribution, Horn and Born articulate a view of the St Gall plan as ‘a master plan of ideal buildings and their topographic relation to one another’ (17); they also articulate other monastic areas in which copying might have occurred (35–6) and suggest specifically a move towards including scriptorium and library in the space above the Chapter House (36). They still, however, seek equivalent specific locations for copying within the architectural plan of the monastic community. Other scholars follow this St Gall plan as normative; see for example Meyvaert, ‘The Medieval Monastic Claustrum,’ 54. Such ‘scriptoria’ came in several formats and sizes, as Florence de Roover confirms: ‘in general the large writing room seems to have been characteristic of Benedictine monasteries, whereas the Cistercian and Carthusian orders favored small or individual scriptoria.’ See Monasticism, 596. Drogin, Anathema! 10. There have been a number of architectural and archeological studies of earlier monasteries; there is a whole bibliography on Merovingian and Anglo Saxon convents, for instance. See, for example, Gilchrist, Gender and Material

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Culture. Late medieval convents, on the other hand, are mostly served by architectural anecdote and have not yet come to the attention of the architectural investigators. This question of the use of space is one of the more pressing facing monastic studies in the later Middle Ages. Questions of monastic spaces in the experience of worship have been addressed by Hamburger, ‘Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium’; Bruzelius, ‘Hearing is Believing’; and Uffmann, ‘Inside and Outside the Convent Walls.’ My questions here, about the labour side of the ‘ora et labora’ formulation, have yet to receive the scholarly attention they deserve. Hamburger, ‘Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium’; the story of the Ebstorf reform is retold by him on p. 121. Further discussion of this event can be found below in chapter 5, p. 178. Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 273. As Lewis, recounts (ibid., 234), ‘According to the Unterlinden sisterbook, scribal activity took place, in a very elegant way, (valde eleganter)’ in the workroom. Ibid., 273. Except in circumstances of crisis, however, evidence for the use of the workroom for manuscript copying is largely speculative at this point. There has been little systematic attention to convent documents to determine the use and function of convent workrooms for the later Middle Ages; such an undertaking on the monastic environment might be fruitful for a future generation of scholars. To further confuse matters, some authors use Schreibstube as a direct translation for scriptorium per se rather than the more frequent Germanicized term Skriptorium. Vogler, Das Dominikanerinnen-Klosters St. Katharina in St. Gallen zur Zeit der Reformation. She notes that the inventory of St Katherina’s books, found in Stadtarchiv St. Gallen, Trucke XVIII, Nr. 53, lists them in groups: ‘namlich meßbücher, gsang [sic] und bettbücher klin und groß, deren ettlich getruckht, ettlich in Perment und papir geschryben’ (30). On the St Katharina Schreibstube, see ibid., 26. The names of a few St Katharina scribes do come down to us. Cordula von Schönau, for instance, copied a breviary in 1499 (CMO #3152, CMO I/390), and Regula Keller was quite active in the sixteenth century (ibid., 31 and passim). GermBen XII, ‘Medingen,’ 518–47. For a provocative discussion of the localization of the scriptorium in a men’s cloister, see Palmer Zisterzienser und ihre Bücher, 23–6. Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries, 70. As he shows, ‘only a relatively limited number of sisters were involved in the actual copying’ of manuscripts, while for men, ‘the copying of religious texts constituted the single most important form of manual labour.’

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95 Hilpisch, History of Benedictine Nuns, 55. 96 Ironically, Observant cloisters also move away from private dining to communal experiences; the balance of shared space and isolated space seems to have been important to reformer’s perceptions of how spiritual actions of all sorts were undertaken. 97 Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 189. Note that the presence of independent cells appears to have been particularly prevalent among the Augustinians. ‘The canonnesses in Frose obtained permission from Emperor Otto II to live in individual dwellings. The canonesses of Gernrode may have also had personal rooms that they used, at least during the daytime.’ Matrix Monasticon, ‘Gernrode,’ consulted 8 March 2008. (The detail on Otto II’s privilege for Frose comes from the same article, with supplemental details and an excerpt of the Otto II privilege in Matrix Monasticon, ‘Frose.’) The Benedictine nuns of Preetz evidently lived apart as well, for the famous reforming prioress of Preetz, Anna von Buchwald (1494–1508), supervised the construction of fifteen new cells for the nuns. Matrix Monasticon, ‘Preetz,’ consulted 8 March 2008. 98 Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns,’ 125. 99 On architectural influences on women’s religious practices, see above, note 85. 100 Smith, ‘Scriba, Femina.’ Smith provides an inventory of thirty-three women depicted writing on p. 39. Other literature on scribal portraits is cited in Reading Medieval Images, 72, note 1. 101 Margareta Kartäuserin’s biography is drawn from Karin Schneider, ‘Die Schreibschule des Katharinenklosters’ (xix–xx), from Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns,’ from KrämerScriptores, and from the various catalogues containing entries on manuscripts to which she contributed. KrämerScriptores cites a 1921 study by K. Fischer, ‘Margret Kartäuserin,’ which I have been unable to identify. 102 Karin Schneider, ‘Die Schreibschule des Katharinenklosters,’ p. xix. 103 Margareta Kartäuserin contributed to a number of vernacular manuscripts early in her career: a volume of spiritual exhortations, NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 20 (after 1444); Leben der Altväter, NürnbergStadtB Cent. IV, 18 (undated); Vita S. Katherine de Alexandria, BambergSB Hist. 154 (1451); a collection of sermons, NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 46d (undated); and Christus als Kaufmann, etc., NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 100 (1452). 104 Manuscripts copied jointly with Kunigund Niclasin include NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 20, NürnbergStadtB Cent. IV, 18, and BambergSB Hist. 154. 105 ‘Dicz püchlein ... ward geschryben von zweien swestern Kunigund und Anna am sampstag nach dem achten tag visitationis Marie geendet da man

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Notes to pages 78–9 zalt von Christo purt 1455. Die erste swester Kunigund verschid in die Dorotee virg. et m.a. ut supra. [In a second hand:] Hab got ir sel amen. Ich Kartewsser obrlass und corrigirt es in cristminne im advent 1455.’ CMO #3225, CMO I/400, WolfenbüttelHAB 17. 9. Aug. 4o, fol. 260; see Heinemann, Die Augusteischen Handschriften, 4:) 209–12, nr. 3099. Kunigund Clos Schreiberin is discussed below, chapter 4, p. 152. Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns’ (128), suggests that Gewichtmacherin ‘probably did no more than ornament her copies and seems not to have been responsible for the paintings themselves.’ Citing the catalogue entry by Ingeborg Neske, Ehrenschwendtner believes that for the other paintings the nuns likely sent the volumes outside of the convent; see Neske, Die lateinischen mittelalterlichen Handschriften: Teil 2. Bibelhandschriften und Liturgica, 65. Neske, however, makes the more limited claim that five artists contributed illuminations to the eight-volume set, but makes no assertions about where those images were completed. Here, as with the case of the Codex Gisle, artistic production might better be ascribed to a team or workshop than to the artist whose name stands at the head of the list. I have not been able to consult either manuscript directly; my own consultation of Neske was via HKOL. Two of the three volumes of the missal are now found as NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 86 (1452) and NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 87 (1463); the third volume is lost. The colophon for the first volume reads: ‘Nach Cristi gepurt 1452 Iar habent diss puch geschriben Swester Margaretha Imhof und Swester Margaretha Karteuserin zu nutz iren Kloster czu Sant Kathrein in Nurnberg. Prediger Ordens. Pit Got fur sie.’ CMO #13020, CMO IV/117. NürnbergStadtB Cent. V, App. 34p-w (1458–70). Kartäuserin may have prepared a German book of hymns, NürnbergStadtB Cent. IV, 83 [undated] (the scribal assignment comes from KrämerHandschriftenerbe, II, 619, but is omitted in KrämerScriptores). She certainly prepared a two-volume ritual. The Temporale (sig. G III) is now found as NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 89 [undated], cited in Karin Schneider, Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Bd. 1, 404. The sanctorale (sig. G IIII), NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 43y [undated], is cited on pp. 135–6. Gewichtmacherin’s role is clearly dependent on scriptorium leadership. Only segments of manuscripts are given in her own hand, and most of Gewichtmacherin’s scriptorium efforts are at the behest of others whose names appear more prominently, yet she stands as the only one of the St Katharina scribes to have claimed a position as illuminator. Three volumes of Kunigund Niclasin’s four-volume German Bible survive: NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 40 and 41 contain the Old Testament, and

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NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 43 contains part of the New Testament. NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 42 belongs to the older six-volume set copied by Klara Keiperin; this is the only volume that survives. See HKOL entry for Nürnberg StadtB Cent. III, 40 in Karin Schneider, Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, 2. On Niclasin’s biography, see especially Karin Schneider, Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, xvi; and Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns,’ 125. Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns,’ 127– 8; Karin Schneider Die Handschriften der Stadthbibliothek Nürnberg. MünchenSB Clm 23287; the colophon on fol. 1 reads in part ‘Swer diz buch hab der gedench ... der armen swester Agnes von Waldeke ... (sequuntur versus) ... Gedencht auch ... Adelheid von Smaehing din diez buoch hat geschriben.’ CMO #329, CMO I/43. Margaretha dicta Regula and Elisabeth Enzberg both copied portions of the breviary KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 47 (1480) and an undated diurnale, KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 44. The collaboration between the two sisters is provocative since much of Margaretha’s other book production emphasizes table readings; see Stamm, ‘Klosterreform und Buchproduktion.’ Anna Kyttelers, Katerina Regis, and Katerina de Westhouen contributed to DüsseldorfUB B 38, dated 1473; see CMO #2539, CMO I/319. Anna Ammanin and Erentrudis Schöttlin copied works in SalzburgEA a II 7, 1471–ca. 80; see Hayer, Die deutschen Handschriften des Mittelalters der Erzabtei St. Peter zu Salzburg, 11–12. The pecia system common to copying centred on the medieval university system is one variant of this divide-and-conquer approach, though it does not seem to have been typical of patterns of copying within women’s convents. These kinds of collaboration merit further investigation, not just within the standard codicological study of the single manuscript (where much of this kind of work has been done) but also through comparative work as part of the broader history of the book. There are likely to be regional and chronological as well as conventual differences in working methods. The visual representation of book production is found in BambergSB Msc. Patr. 5 (B.II.5), fol. 1v and has been discussed extensively in the secondary literature. A selective bibliography and an explanation of the individual images can be found in Suckale-Redlefsen, Die Handschriften des 12. Jahrhunderts, 31–2; a plate of the miniature is provided there as plate 81, p. 133. The idea of scribal initiative made its way into the field of musicology in the early 1980s. See, for example, Bent, ‘The Songs of Dufay,’ 456; Nadas, ‘The

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125

126

127

128

Notes to page 83 Structure of MS Panciatichi 26 and the Transmission of Trecento Polyphony,’ 419; and Roesner, ‘Johannes de Garlandia on “organum in speciali,”’ 160. ‘Tres digiti scribunt ...,’ one of the clichéd formulas to appear in scribal colophons: ‘though only three fingers write, the whole body labours.’ The labels ‘scriptrix superior’ and ‘subscriptrix’ are found in St Albanurkunde 326 dated 4 April 1438. The document is cited in Bruckner, ‘Zum Problem der Frauenhandschrift im Mittelalter,’ 176. Colophons are crucial for reconstructing the role of women illuminators within monastic communities. Some scribal enlumineresses external to women’s convents can be identified through tax rolls, but as Christine Havice points out, those numbers are relatively small, ranging from a maximum of about 12 per cent to about 25 per cent in the middle of the fifteenth century; see ‘Women and the Production of Art in the Middle Ages,’ 68–70 and 73. ‘Omnis pictura et floratura istius libri depicta ac florata est per Margaretam Scheiffartz de Meirrode quondam filiam in Bornhem regularissam in Schillinx capellen. Orate pro ea.’ CMO #13025, CMO, IV/118. This colophon is discussed further in chapter 5, p. 189. CMO cites the manuscript (following Bartoniek, Codices Latini Medii Aevi, 227) as Budapest Mus. Clm. ac. 259 fol. 135v (Grad. Colon.); Krämer, Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelalters, 2:711, on the other hand, cites it as BudapestSzNB, s.n. The map in Kubach and Verbeek, Romanische Baukunst an Rhein und Maas, 2:1339 shows that Bornheim and Schillingskapellen were in close geographic proximity, both located in the region south of Cologne between the Rhein and the Erft rivers. HildesheimDomB J. 27. ‘Explicit expliciunt / que cordis intima promunt / scriptando manu / totoque corporis usu / ut clare patebit / oculos quas [?] cuncta rimabit / Scripta cum floribus / picturam sic sociamus / omnia hec fecit / et famula sola peregit / in Meding claustro / Luneborch prope situato / ordinis ut fateor / Cisterciensis et utor / Sed si queratur / quod nomen mihi debetur / omnibus et cognita / de Winsen sic vocitata / Elyzabeth proprio / de quo et gloria Christo / anno milleno quadruplex centum addito deno / sexaginta tribus cum quinario sociatus / corporis in festo Christi die venerando / Iubente venerabili domino preposito Tylemanno / de Bauenstede et necessaria ministrando / ob amorem dilecte sue amice Elyzabeth / de Bauenstede ...’ (fol. 146v). Uhde-Stahl, ‘Figürliche Buchmalereien in den spätmittelalterlichen Handschriften der Lüneburger Frauenklöster,’ 33–4. Elisabeth von Winsen also copied the Breviary HildesheimDomB Gymnas. Josephinum 55 (18), which is also dated 1478 (KrämerHandschriftenerbe 2:565). Both sister-book examples come from Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 273.

Notes to pages 84–5

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129 The text in question, the Buch von geistlicher Armut, forms the first segment of the volume MünchenSB Cgm 783 (fols 1r–167v) and was completed and signed on ‘1477 in quadrigesima feria quinta ante festum Palmarum finitum fuit (27 March).’ Several years later, the rubricator signs his own work on the same page: ‘Rubricatum per Conradum Durren ob peticionem sororis Elizabeth Schmidin anno 1484, 4ta angarie post Luciam [15–18 December].’ He continues ‘Swester Elisabeth und ir alle in ewr gebett laßt mich sin enpfolhen.’ The first two portions of the inscriptions are found in CMO #2930, CMO I/365, which follows Braun, Notitia historico – Literaria, 111, item 55. The inscription in toto is provided in Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften des Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Cgm 691–867, 330, consulted via HKOL. A Franciscan tertiary with the name Elisabeth Schmidin has been identified at the cloister of Unlingen in Württemburg in 1461, but according to Schneider (HKOL, p. 330) the identity with the Elisabeth Schmidin named here by the rubricator is questionable. The name Elisabeth Schmidin also appears in a fifteenth-century document used as binding material for a ninth-century copy of Cassiodorus, FreiburgUB 6. This Elisabeth Sch(m)idin (Elsen Schmidin von Oedenhusen), however, is connected to the Pfarrkirche von Scha(ffhusen ?), and the document was probably written by a Schaffhausen cleric. There is a notarial seal of a sitting dog. See Hagenmaier, Die lateinischen mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg im Breisgau, Hs. 1–230, 7, consulted via HKOL. 130 ‘Rubricatus per Iohannem Swarcz a. 1472 confessorem in Adelhusen.’ CMO #11398, CMO III/489. KrämerHandschriftenerbe does not include MünchenSB Clm 26859 among the Adelhausen manuscripts and it is possible that the manuscript was intended for use elsewhere. 131 ‘Item ist zu wissen, daß im 94. Jahr (1494) die würdigen Conventschwestern ... mit großem Fleiß, Treue und Arbeit geschrieben, rubriziert und gerissen haben die drei Antyphoner und neuen Gesangbücher, auch den neuen Sequentzer. Darum daß der Herr und König des himmlischen Jerusalem von uns allen in den heiligen sieben Zeichen desto mehr gelobt und verehrt möcht werden.’ Villingen convent chronicle, as quoted in Loes, ‘Villingen Klarissen,’ 61. 132 Obsequials, variously called agendas, Sterbebuchlein, rituale, manuale, and the like, are one of the most common products of women’s library collections. The place of obsequials in the collections of Freiburg im Breisgau and Nonnberg Abbey are discussed in Cyrus, ‘Obsessed with Death in Freiburg.’ 133 FreiburgAM 2536 (HMML 43553), a processional-obsequial dated 1509; this manuscript was likely copied for the Dominican nuns of St Maria

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Notes to pages 85–6

Magdalena. It was omitted without explanation in Huglo, Les Manuscrits du Processionnal. My own examination of this manuscript (via microfilm) has focused on the obsequial, which comprises the second half of the manuscript (fols 67r–157v). While the text (both Latin and vernacular) was evidently copied by a single scribe, it is clear that the music was copied after the text, for there are occasional gaps between pitches to facilitate alignment of pitch and syllable and corresponding passages where the pitches come more densely. The uneven spacing of melismas over the course of a page is perhaps the most noticeable visual clue that the copying process was one of music overlay, rather than text underlay; sometimes the spacing is quite regular, and at others the pitches are tucked in with slightly deformed note-shapes at the beginning or end of the melisma to avoid butting up against the adjacent musical gesture. That said, we cannot now determine whether the text scribe came back and copied the notes on a second pass, or whether an independent music scribe participated in the preparation of this manuscript. 134 The fourteen women monastics whose careers form the basis for the assessment provided here were selected to reflect a perspective on the range of endeavours an individual woman scribe might undertake. Each woman copied three or more manuscripts, and details of the contents and at least approximate dates of copying were available. Scribes from St Katharina in Nuremberg were omitted here in case the large size of the scribal establishment there might have led to uncharacteristic patterns of specialization on the part of the scribes involved. In alphabetical order by first name, the scribes assessed were: Anna Ammanin (Salzburg Petersfrauen); Anna Ebin (Pillenreuth); Anna Jäck (Inzigkofen); Barbara von Rottenburg (Reuthin); Elisabeth Waraus (Augsburg, St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’); Erentrudis Schöttlin (Salzburg Petersfrauen); Gertrud von Büchel (Rolandswerth); Katharina Pschachlin (Salzburg Petersfrauen); Loppa von Spiegel (Cologne Klarissen); Magdalena Becht (Esslingen-Weiler); Magdalena Topplerin (Medingen [1]); Margaretha dicta Regula (Lichtenthal); Margaretha Trutwyn (Esslingen-Weiler); Sibilla von Bondorff (Freiburg, Klarissen). 135 ‘Item dicz puch ist ausgeschriben worden an aller sel tag anno domini M.CCCC. vnd in dem XLV. jar. Pit got für die schreiberin die dicz puch geschriben hat swester K.N. Pit got auch vur die Corigirerin.’ NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 40, Deutsche Bibel (II, ATest.). Colophon from Karin Schneider, Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, 2. 136 Kunigund Holzschuherin corrected the missal now found as KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. 8a and 8b, dated 1459.

Notes to pages 86–7

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137 ‘Dis bvch wart vollenbraht vff sant Johannes abent des touffers in dem jare do man zalte nach Cristus geburte tusent vierhundert xxix iare. Bittent got fvr die schriberin, die dis bvch mit irre hant geschriben hat, vnd fvr den priester, der es corrigieret und gebessert hat. 1429.’ LeipzigUB Ms 560, fols 13r–165r, colophon fol. 165r. The manuscript is described in Pensel, Verzeichnis, 31–4, and the colophon for this segment of the manuscript is provided on p. 33. 138 As she states in the colophon, ‘Guda peccatrix mulier scripsit et pinxit hunc librum,’ FrankfurtStadtB Batt. 2. CMO #5652, CMO II/257. 139 Buzás, Deutsche Bibliotheksgeschichte des Mittelalters, 91. 140 A note in Latin in LondonBL Add. 15710 by Conrad de Bondorff, ‘baccalarius argentinensis,’ cites Sister Sibilla de Bondorff as the creator of the volume and states that she worked in the Clarissan house in Lower Freiburg in 1478 under the rule of Abbess Susanna of Falckenstein. CMO #2886, CMO I/360. Sibilla also contributed to LondonBL Add. 15686 (a Clarissan Rule), and possibly to KarlsruheLB Tennenb. 4 (Vita of St Clare) and FreiburgUB 1131 (a sequentiary). See Schraut and Opitz, Frauen und Kunst im Mittelalter, 32; fig 31 gives a miniature of St Francis on his knees in prayer. Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, plates 9 and 10 reproduce miniatures of St Clare. See also Bodemann, ‘Von Schwestern für Schwestern.’ 141 ‘Istum egregium librum scripsit, illuminavit, notavit, impaginavit, aureis litteris et pulchris imaginibus decoravit venerabilis ac devota virgo Gysela de Kerzenbroeck in sui memoriam Anno domini MCCC.’ Inscription from the Codex Gisle: Osnabrück, Diözesarchiv Inv. No. Ma 101, fol. 1r. Transcription from Kühne, Tönnies, and Haucap, Handschriften in Osnabrück, 139; the translation is from Oliver, ‘Worship of the Word,’ 109. A further discussion of the inscription can be found in Oliver, Singing with Angels, 33–68. 142 Codex Gisle, fol. 140. I have consulted the manuscript only by way of the plates published in the secondary literature, particularly those in Dolfen and Wackernagel, Codex Gisle and those in Oliver, Singing with Angels. ‘Hec Dies,’ for instance (Dolfen and Wackernagel, Codex Gisle, plates 17 and 18), has a gap between the single two-note pes for ‘quam’ and the start of ‘fecit’; the melisma for the final syllable of ‘exultemus,’ however, hangs off into the margin, as does the melisma at the end of the next line. The notes of ‘domino’ which follow are smaller in order to fit them in without undue crowding; then the larger notes of the first system return with the shift back to near-syllabic presentation for ‘quoniam in se[culum].’ The chant finishes at the top of the next folio. A plate of this page can also be found in Kühne, Handschriften in Osnabrück, 143, consulted via HKOL.

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Notes to pages 87–91

143 Other individuals who claimed the roles of both scribe and illuminator include one of the three women who joined Oetenbach at the time of Ita von Hoehenfels; from the fourteenth century, Loppa de Speculo (also known as Loppa von Spiegel) of the Klarissenkloster in Cologne, and Mezzi von Klingenberg of Töss; from the fifteenth century: Anna Yngramin of the Bamberg Klarissankloster; Elsbeth Töpplin (Toplin), d. 1476, from the Penitents in Freiburg im Breisgau; Gertrud von Büchel from Rolandswerth/Nonnenwerth, Margareta Scheiffartz de Meirrode of the Premonstratensian Schillingskapellen, and Sibilla of Bondorff from the Freiburg Klarissenkloster. This list is, of course, a subset of women illuminators in general; see note 58. 144 ‘Radulphus formavit, purgavit, punxit, sulcavit, scripsit, illuminavit.’ CMO #16257, CMO V/182. According to KrämerScriptores, this colophon is based on a lost manuscript, the ‘Chronique de l’abbeye de Saint-Trond’; Radulphus is likely a thirteenth-century scribe. 145 ‘Finit. Emendatus, correctum, apostillatum, rubricatum, revisum et remissum per me Ranerium manu propria. Ranerius.’ CMO #16449, CMO V/ 212. KrämerScriptores identifies Ranerius as Ranerius Maschis (Maschius) of Rimini, Italy; the manuscript in question is OxfordBodl. Digby 144, fol. 400v (a. 1466). 146 ‘Rodericus Olacthnain, prior monasterii Fontis Vivi de Lothra raris O.S.A. Laon. (Killaloe) dyoc., scripsit, illuminavit, ligavit, tabulavit istam clementinam cum suo apparatu suo fratri carnali Tatheo Olacthnai.’ Lambeth Palace 46; CMO #16775, CMO V/256. James and Jenkins, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Lambeth Palace, 63, provide a date of 1477 for this glossed copy of the Clementinae, one of the standard collections of canon law. 3. The Content of Convent Manuscripts 1 On the requirements for books within specific monastic rules and ordinals, see for example Yardley, Performing Piety, 74–9. Likewise, Felix Heinzer compares surviving liturgical books from Lichtenthal with the recommendations for book provisions in the Summa Carta Caritatis; see his ‘“Ut idem libri ecclesiastici et consuetudines sint omnibus,”’ 43–7. 2 The large literature on books of hours can be accessed through Wieck, Time Sanctified, and Painted Prayers. On women’s involvement with books of hours generally, see Penketh, ‘Women and Books of Hours’; and Scott-Stokes, Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England; 149–61, especially 155–7. David Bell reminds us that in England, books of hours ‘were more important to lay-people than to religious, and, among religious, to women rather than men.’

Notes to pages 92–6

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

259

See his What Nuns Read, 35. The data for German women’s convents suggests a similar situation in German-speaking lands; sixty books of hours from German women’s convents survive (ten of which can be ascribed to a particular scribe), in comparison with roughly two hundred psalters (sixteen of which are signed). This assertion rests primarily on systematic examinations (by microfilm) of several hundred surviving manuscripts that stem from the Benedictine abbey of Nonnberg in Salzburg and from the collections of the four Dominican women’s houses in Freiburg im Breisgau. Criteria examined included (1) worn or discoloured page corners, broken or abused binding, smudges and other physical signs of wear; (2) inscriptions; (3) marginal additions; (4) additions, emendations, and corrections ranging from single-note corrections, paste-overs and markings in a variety of hands, some beautiful and some inelegant; (5) pragmatic emendations which support performance such as the regular barring to aid text placement that was added throughout FreiburgAM 11729, an Adelhausen antiphonal, a manuscript which also boasts editorial ficta and occasional instructions in the vernacular. This crossover literature would potentially include the Nuremberg copy of Aesop owned by the Nuremberg Clarissans and now found as WolfenbüttelHAB 81. 16. Aug. 2o (2806); see Klaus Grubmüller: ‘Nürnberger Prosa-Äsop’ 2VL, Bd. 6, cols 1259–61. Berthold Steinbuel, who served from 1475 to 1505 as provost for the Cistercian women’s convent of Wiebrechtshausen near Mainz, for instance, copied a statement of accounts for the monastery, which is now found as Hannover LB Ms XXIII 806. See Härtel and Ekowski, Handschriften der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover, Teil 2, 260, consulted via HKOL. Margot Fassler, ‘Making History: Actions and Agents within the Liturgical Framework of Time,’ plenary lecture, International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo Michigan, 7 May 2004. The concern of chronicles with spiritual history rather than with modern ideas of biography is elucidated in several recent studies, particularly Woodford, Nuns as Historians, chapter 2. For the broader context of chronicles and sister-books, see Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur ; Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, Garber, Feminine Figurae; and Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, esp. 25–38. For a review of standard genres of liturgical books, see Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office; Harper, The Forms and Orders; and Jeffery, ‘Music Manuscripts on Microfilm in the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library.’ The various divisions of the antiphonal provide access to information about liturgical practice within women’s houses, an issue that is too complicated to be addressed here.

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10 On the psalter and the choir psalter, see Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, sections 873– 85, pp. 224–36; Harper, Forms and Orders, 67– 72 and 242–63; McKinnon, ‘The Late Medieval Psalter’; and the work of Judith Oliver, particularly ‘Worship of the Word’ and ‘Devotional Psalters and the Study of Beguine Spirituality.’ 11 A review of illuminated graduals in monastic circles is found in Oliver, Singing with Angels; see especially the inventory she provides in Appendix 4, 229– 50. She discusses the ‘[p]roduction of Gothic choirbooks by monks and nuns’ on pp. 30–1. 12 The tractatulus is found in FreiburgAM 11729, formerly Adelhausen 1 (HMML 43563). This manuscript appears to have been heavily used, for it contains marginalia and corrections in a variety of hands. 13 Anne Bagnall Yardley discussed polyphonic music making in women’s convents in her ground-breaking article, ‘“Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne,”’ 24–8. She provides a listing of polyphony in manuscripts from medieval nunneries. Her table 1, however, mistakenly lists WilheringStiftsB IX.40 as a women’s manuscript; the Wilhering convent was a male Cistercian house. Thanks to Professor Yardley for drawing my attention to this mistake. Seven of these manuscripts containing polyphony appear to stem from late medieval German women’s houses. 14 On the processional, see Huglo, Les Manuscrits du Processionnal, and Husmann, Tropen- und Sequenzenhandschriften; on the presence of processionals and obsequials in women’s houses, see Cyrus, ‘Obsessed with Death in Freiburg.’ 15 Crocker, The Early Medieval Sequence, 235 and 373–4. 16 Fassler, Gothic Song, 79. Fassler notes that Frank Harrison finds that late medieval English practice similarly placed the sequence in the hands of the choir; she cites Music in Medieval Britain, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 67. John Caldwell and Alejandro E. Planchart likewise opine that ‘the performing practice history of the sequence is ambiguous. It apparently began as a solo chant but became a choral one in a large number of establishments, and thus did not develop beyond a simple two-voice discant style during the 13th and 14th centuries, when the more complex forms of polyphony were the province of soloists.’ Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, ‘Sequence (i), §11: The Polyphonic Sequence’ (accessed 23 November 2005). Regional practices, venue, and context evidently mattered, and both solo and choral performances may have been options in late medieval culture. Systematic investigation of Germanic sources for the late medieval sequence from the perspective of such performance practice issues has yet to be undertaken.

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17 FreiburgEA 8 (Adelh. 08), for instance, is 15.5 x 11 cm; see HMML 43511 and Gottwald, Die Musikhandschriften der Universitätsbibliothek, 60. Similarly, FreiburgSA B1 (H) 122 measures only 11.5 x 9; see HMML 43451 and Gottwald, 117–18. This latter manuscript, however, also contains a processional and so may reflect different patterns of usage than the individual sequentiary; the manuscript is inventoried in Huglo, Les Manuscrits du Processionnal, entry D-69. 18 Wright, ‘Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores, King Solomon’s Temple, and the Veneration of the Virgin,’ 434–7 and the edition on 440–1. 19 Elsbeth Töpplin’s manuscript is FreiburgUB 1131, which comes from the late fifteenth century. The manuscript has also been tentatively associated with Sibilla Bondorff, a Clarissan illuminator who contributed to LondonBL Add. 15686 (Rule of St Clare) and LondonBL Add. 15710 (Life of St Francis) in this same generation. An early twelfth-century sequentiary was incorporated into a larger liturgical compilation, MünchenSB Clm 11004, copied by Diemud for Nonnberg Abbey. 20 The same disposable quality can be found in the rituals prepared by the individual cantrix. Upon assuming the office, a cantrix often prepared a sort of instructional guide to the community’s liturgy in her own hand, drawing on but also potentially deviating from the model provided by her predecessor in the office. This genre of book has been underserved by scholars of later medieval monasticism. 21 On the pontifical and benedictional, see Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, section 628, pp. 118–20; and Leroquais, Les pontificaux manuscrits; particularly useful are the many plates provided in the latter. On ceremonies for abbesses and other religious found in such volumes, see for example Yardley, Performing Piety, 159–77. 22 The relationship among the various Salzburg liturgical communities has been elucidated by Engels and by Niiyama; see above, chapter 1, note 17. Niiyama has also written extensively about the liturgical practices of Nonnberg Abbey in Zum mittelalterlichen Musikleben im Benediktinerinnenstift Nonnberg zu Salzburg. This is complemented by substantial work focused on the development of Nonnberg’s library during the late medieval and early modern periods by Lang, ‘Die mittelalterliche Bibliothek des BendiktinerFrauenstifts Nonnberg.’ 23 Ulrich von Hohen-Rechburg also owned a breviary associated with St Stephanus, Augsburg. The manuscript is now found as BrixenFP 48. Ulrich served as dean at the Augsburg Cathedral and died in 1501; see KrämerScriptores, ‘Hohen-Rechberg, Ulrich von.’ 24 EssenMünsterA Miss. Assind. 1.

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Notes to pages 103–7

25 Gisela Muschiol, for instance, addresses the role of the abbess within the liturgy for monasteries of the Merovingian period, but no equivalent work has yet been issued regarding late medieval practices. See Muschiol, Famula Dei, and ‘Psallere et legere.’ 26 Eva M. Synek remarks, ‘It is unquestionable that abbesses (sometimes called deaconesses) of houses of canonesses, just like the abbesses of cloistered monasteries, were granted jurisdictional and liturgical competencies which were seen as principally clerical in contemporary canon law.’ She goes on to describe abbesses who ‘consecrated their own nuns, heard their confession, read the gospel and preached in public.’ The decretal of Innocent III (1198–1216) describing these practices was trying to ban them, of course, but the documentation of such activity confirms the important overlap between abbey political leadership and liturgical leadership. See ‘“Ex utroque sexu fidelium tres ordines,”’ 601–2. See also Ansorge, ‘Der Diakonat der Frau.’ 27 On the breviary, see Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, section 844–72, pp. 197–224 and 889–95, pp. 238–42; Harper, Forms and Orders, 61– 2; Jeffery, ‘Music Manuscripts on Microfilm,’ 10. Breviaries were among the most common of liturgical books to stem from German women’s cloisters; see for instance SigmaringenFDA Klosterwald Rubr. Nr. 23, K. XXXV, an early fourteenth-century breviary copied by Adillindis for the Cistercians at Wald; St GallenStiftsB 406, a fifteenth-century breviary for the Dominicans of St Katharina in St Gall (CMO #3152, CMO I/390); and the volume KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 47, a breviary prepared for Lichtenthal by Margaretha dicta Regula and Elisabeth Entzberg in 1480. 28 Hamburger’s discussion of the Erfurt nuns at the convent of the Holy Cross who cut images out of books to be held in the private stalls, and of Johannes Busch’s reforms, which drew those images back into public circulation, are telling in this perspective. See ‘Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium,’ 121 and note 159. 29 Harper, Forms and Orders, 60–1; Harper notes that ‘the Calendar, Ordinal and Consuetudinary (or Customary) ... established the when, what, and how of a foundation’s worship.’ Peter Jeffery groups the ordinal, customary, and ceremonial together as ‘directories’; see ‘Music Manuscripts on Microfilm,’ 13. 30 Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, 257. 31 On the private ownership of psalters, see McKinnon, ‘The Late Medieval Psalter,’ 133–57; Oliver, ‘Worship of the Word,’ 106–7. Susan Marti compares private book ownership at Wöltingerode, where small psalters and breviaries as well as many prayerbooks were in the private possession of the sisters and were passed from hand to hand as ownership entries elucidate,

Notes to pages 107–10

32

33

34

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with similar practices at Engelberg in Switzerland; see Marti, Malen, Schreiben und Beten, 74 and 247–61. See also Rüthing, ‘Die mittelalterliche Bibliothek des Zisterzienserinnenklosters Wöltingerode,’ 195 and 205; Rüthing finds that 40 per cent of the cloister’s early books were psalters. Judith Oliver’s seminal work on women’s monastic psalters has demonstrated the ways in which manuscript decoration in these volumes encouraged lectio divina. See Gothic Manuscript Illumination in the Diocese of Liège, and ‘Devotional Psalters and the Study of Beguine Spirituality.’ I base this observation on the many ownership inscriptions in processionals and obsequials I have examined stemming from Nonnberg, from the Dominican and Clarissan houses in Freiburg im Breisgau, and from Straβburg, Basel, and Munich. See Cyrus, ‘Obsessed with Death.’ The literature on prayerbooks is vast. See especially Peter Ochsenbein, ‘Deutschsprachige Privatgebetbücher vor 1400’; Ruh, ‘Deutsche Predigtbücher des Mittelalters’; and Schromm on the prayerbooks at Kirchheim am Ries, Die Bibliothek des ehemaligen Zisterzienserinnenklosters Kirchheim am Ries; the index of surviving manuscripts from Kirchheim is on pp. 203–312. Walther Lipphardt’s historic work on Medingen Gebetbücher and their musical legacy is complemented – and in some measure refuted – by Achten, ‘De Gebedenboeken van de Cistercienserinnenkloosters Medingen en Wienhausen,’ 173–88 and by the work of Henrike Lähnemann. For Lipphardt, see for example his ‘Zwei neu aufgefundene Nonnengebetbücher,’ ‘Zu den Quellen mittelniederdeutscher Kirchenlieder,’ and ‘Mittelalterliche Musikhandschriften aus dem Kloster Medingen.’ For a more complete bibliography on the Medingen manuscripts and details of Henrike Lähnemann’s ongoing research, see Lähnemann, ‘Medingen Manuscripts / Die Medinger Handschriften.’ In this view, I join scholars like Ulrike Wiethaus who see a coexistence of vernacular and Latinate experience within the convent experience. See Wiethaus, ‘Thieves and Carnivals,’ 225. This view gives somewhat more prominence to Latin than does Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, who sees German largely replacing Latin outside of the liturgy in ‘“Puellae litteratae.”’ Not every woman religious would have been Latin-literate, of course; scribe Anna Jäck comments that she translates so that ‘the unlearned who do not understand Latin will ... read over other books’; see Schmidt, ‘Kleben statt malen,’ 273. But for the more educated members of the community, Latin and the vernacular clearly coexisted in daily life. For a recent review of the place of Latin and German in women’s houses, see Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung, 268–96.

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36 Wiethaus comments usefully on the intersection between Latin and German in the text of Margaret Ebner, describing a passage in which Ebner asked to hear the Passion read in German and reminded the reluctant sister ‘how much good the Passion had done me during the mass ...’ As Wiethaus then elucidates, ‘In Ebner’s monastery at least, Latinate and vernacular literacies thus seem to have coexisted seamlessly, albeit with community-appropriate functions.’ Wiethaus, ‘Thieves and Carnivals,’ 225. 37 This observation is based on a reading of surviving library inventories from Kirchheim (1436), Günterstal (1457), and Altenhohenau (1482–1513). Library inventories from medieval German regions are gathered in two large series: Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz (1918–62) and Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs (1915–69). 38 Sara S. Poor directs attention to the place of the women monastic reader in the creation of devotional anthologies within the context of the Observant reforms of fifteenth-century Germany; see Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book, 132–72. For treatment of the parallel literature of England during this period, see Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, 1–33. For a slightly different view of reader as creater, see Reiter, ‘The Reader as Author of the UserProduced Manuscript.’ 39 This manuscript, AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2o 8, pairs the Gesta Romanorum with an interpretation of the Song of Solomon. It was copied by Kunigund Niclasin in 1437 and corrected by a later hand (formerly identified as Conradus Frackendorffer, an identification apparently not accepted by cataloguer Karin Schneider; see Deutsche mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsbwg, 162, consulted via HKOL. 40 The great popularity of Die vierundzwanzig Alten should be noted. Eleven women’s convents have surviving copies, though only the Lynnich copy, now housed as KölnDB Codex 238 (copied by ‘suster Ayllet van Lych’), and the copy for St Leonhard in St Gall, St GallenStiftsB 983 (copied by ‘swester endlin’) are known to have been copied by a woman scribe. St Katharina’s in Nuremberg owned at least three copies of the treatise. Surviving examples of the treatise, including 113 manuscript copies, are indexed in Schmidt, Die vierundzwanzig Alten Ottos von Passau. 41 This judgment is based on the author’s direct consultation of roughly 200 manuscripts that stem from French women’s convents. Thanks to the staff of the manuscript collections at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal for advice and support during a fall 2000 research trip to examine these manuscripts from a codicological perspective. 42 Katharina Tucherin’s volume, KarlsruheLB Donaueschingen 421, is identified by KrämerHandschriftenerbe as including a German translation of the

Notes to pages 112–15

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44 45 46

47

48

49

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Golden Epistle. According to Ehrenschwendtner’s discussion of the St Katharina collection, sister Katharina Tucherin, who entered the convent as a widow, brought twenty-four books with her when she joined St Katharina’s and as a member of the community contributed her own book of visions. See ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns,’ 124; she cites Karin Schneider, ‘Die Bibliothek des Katharinenklosters in Nürnberg und die städtische Gesellschaft,’ 70–82, esp. 73. William of Saint Thierry, The Golden Epistle, chapter XXXI.121, p. 52. A study of the manuscript transmission and of the popularity of the text within the various monastic orders is available in Honemann, Die ‘Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei’ des Wilhelm von Saint-Thierry; a description of KarlsruheLB Donaueschingen 421 is found on pp. 120–4. William of Saint Thierry, The Golden Epistle, paragraph 124, p. 52. Ibid., paragraphs 122–3, p. 52. Ehrenschwendtner, ‘“Puellae litteratae,”’ 52–3. Ehrenschwendtner notes that once the St Katharina nuns were given formal permission to use the vernacular, the Latin readings dropped out all together. See also the study by Hasebrink, ‘Tischlesung und Bildungskulture in Nürnberger Katharinenkloster,’ esp. 202ff. Basic reasources on vitae include Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur; Williams-Krapp, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert’; and the sister-book literature cited above in note 7. Jutta’s copy of the Legenda aurea is now found as OxfordBodl. Laud. misc. 415 (SC 835). Though she was a nun at Alzey, she intended the manuscript for a male patron, as her scribal colophon on fol. 4 indicates: ‘a.d. 1294 Iutta discreta virgo O.C. in monasterio s. Spiritus apud Alzeyam complevit hunc librum scribens eum ad peticionem Henrici prespiteri de Schimischem. Laus sit Deo. Amen’ (In 1294 Jutta, Cistercian virgin recluse at the monastery of St Spiritus at the house of Alzey completed this book written at the request of Henry, priest of Schimeschem. Praise be to God. Amen). CMO #12102, CMO III/580; see also Palmer, Zisterzienser und ihre Bücher, 202–3 (including the reproduction of the colophon in plate 148 on p. 202). Scribe Elselin de Bisel, Heiligen Leben, Unterlinden (ColmarBM 364 [343]; scribe Susanna Weglyn with the assistance of Johannes Kursi, Heiligen Leben, Soeflingen Clares, 1493 (BerlinSBPK Germ. 2o 1259 [Phill. 1152]; and scribe Dorothea Schurstabin of St Katharina in Nuremberg, supplement to Heiligen Leben in the manuscript copy for Altenhohenau (MünchenSB Cgm 244). Udalricus, chaplain at Nonnberg, prepared a copy of the winter portion of Heiligen Leben in 1453; see SalzburgNA 28 D 1 and its 1453 companion summer manuscript prepared for Abbess Agatha Haunsberger,

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51

52

53

54 55

Notes to pages 115–16

SalzburgNA 28 D 6 (see fol. 298b). On the Heiligen Leben more generally, see Williams-Krapp, ‘The Erosion of a Monopoly,’ 250 and ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert,’ 45–6. The manuscript in question, Berlin SBPK Germ. 4o 1241, was assigned by Hermann Degering in Kurzes Verzeichnis, 214, to the nuns at Heggbach; KrämerHandschriftenerbe entry for Heggbach wrongly follows this assignment. Krämer’s more recent work in KrämerScriptores, however, shows that the manuscript more properly belongs to the convent at Inzigkofen, where it was copied by Schwester Eufraxia in 1478 under Prioress Hilaria von Gumppenberg. Krämer here follows Fechter, Deutsche Handschriften des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts aus der Bibliothek des ehemaligen Augustinerchorfrauenstifts Inzigkofen, 105, who quotes the colophon on fol. 198r: ‘Dis bvch jst vs geschriben an dem nästen tag näch sant anna tag in der jär do man zalt von cristus geburt tusen vir hundert vnd im lxxviij Jär von mir schwester evfraxia spáni Confent schwester dis gotz hus gedenckent ir durch got mit ainem aue maria der mvter gotz vmb ain gvt end amen jhs- maria.’ On the dissemination of Vienna School authors, see Williams-Krapp, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert,’ and ‘The Erosion of a Monopoly,’ 244–6. On catechetical literature more generally, see Bast, Honor Your Fathers; Weidenhiller, Untersuchungen zur deutschsprachigen katechetischen Literatur des späten Mittelalters; and Adam, Katechetische Vaterunserauslegungen. Weidenhiller notes that the number of catechetical texts created within women’s convents is surprisingly small (201–3). The 1457 copy of Langenstein’s Erkenntnis der Sünde by Georgius Stromer is NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 80; that by Anna Ammanin for the Petersfrauen is SalzburgEA b VI 12. Peuntner’s writings were copied by Agnes Pabenbergerin and Ursula Geiselherin in 1446–48 for St Katharina in Nuremberg (NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 58); Johannes K (surname otherwise unknown) of Bopfingen in 1464 for the Cistercians in Kirchheim (AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 4o 8); Erentrudis Schöttlin for the Petersfrauen around 1500 (SalzburgEA a IV 22); and Barbara Hubmerin, whose affiliation is uncertain (SalzburgEA a II 12). Williams-Krapp, ‘Erosion of a Monopoly,’ 243. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book (145–7), speculates that a female scribe or compiler prepared KoblenzLHA Best. 701 Nr. 149, a manuscript associated with Schönensteinbach; this collection of mystical writings includes a chapter of Mechthild along with ‘didactic devotional texts that address the everyday and contemplative life of religious men and women’ (ibid., 139). Anna Jäck copied MünchenSB Cgm 5292, which included writings of Gertrude of Helfta, in 1448 for the nuns at Inzigkofen; she also contributed a copy of Ludolf of Saxony (NürnbergGNM 28441) in 1449. The

Notes to pages 116–17

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57 58

59

60

61

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writings of Marquard von Lindau were copied at Inzigkofen by Anna Jäck (BerlinSBPK Germ. 4o 1110 and BerlinSBPK Germ. 2o 1041); by Sister Beatrix, also of Inzigkofen (BerlinSBPK Germ. 2o 79); by Els, who describes herself and her unnamed collaborator at a Swabian women’s convent as ‘schriberinun’ (MünchenSB Cgm 5139, fol. 128r; see Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften aus Cgm 4001–5247, 487); and by Kunigund Schreiberin of St Katharina’s in Nuremberg (NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 46c). The copy of Marquard’s work in MünchenSB Cgm 480, a volume owned by scribe Elisabeth Warrüssin of St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’ in Augsburg, was actually signed by Sigmund Pütterich (fol. 114r); Warrüssin’s own selections follow in the manuscript. See Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Cgm 351–500, 413. Of the large corpus of surviving manuscripts with works by Seuse, EngelbergStiftsB cod. 141 was copied by Elsbeth Stagel in the fourteenth century; AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 8o 1 was copied by Conrad Erlacher in 1408 for the Cistercians at Kirchheim; Brünn (Brno) UB R(aigern) 360 was crafted by Johannes Liebhardus in 1424 for St Katharina in Nuremberg; SalzburgEA b V 40 was copied by the prolific Anna Ammanin (d. 1487) of the Petersfrauen; and DarmstadtLB 1827 was copied by Katharina von Grolle in 1482 (pt 1) for the canonesses at Herzebrock. For more on the dissemination of Seuse’s works, see Blumrich, ‘Die Überlieferung der deutschen Schriften Seuses,’ and Hofmann, ‘Seuses Werke in deutschsprachigen Handschriften des Mittelalters.’ The Kirchheim collection with its emphasis on Meister Eckhart’s sermons is now AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 4o 33. The German sermon literature, vast and still largely unpublished, has not yet been adequately surveyed. For an entré into this literature, see Morvay and Grube, Bibliographie der deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter; and Ruh, ‘Deutsche Predigtbücher des Mittelalters.’ On Nider’s 24 Golden Harps, see Williams-Krapp, ‘Erosion of a Monopoly,’ 247–8; the volume is typically unsigned, but is broadly distributed in women’s convents. Winston-Allen addresses the inspired copying of sermons by nuns who had heard them preached in Convent Chronicles, 188–95. In addition to the literature cited by Winston-Allen, see Schiewer, ‘Sermons for Nuns of the Dominican Observance Movement’; and Ruh, ‘Deutsche Predigtbücher des Mittelalters.’ Schiewer, ‘Sermons for Nuns of the Dominican Observance Movement,’ 77, explains: ‘The explosion in literary production in the fourteenth century is

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Notes to pages 118–20

followed by an explosion in transmission in the fifteenth century.’ Schiewer, like Williams-Krapp, sees the production of manuscripts (as opposed to texts) as inextricably linked to the religious reform movements. See WilliamsKrapp, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert.’ According to my data, twenty-three sermon manuscripts survive from women’s convents in the fourteenth century; 130 from the fifteenth century, and another fifteen from the sixteenth century, and more than thirty named women scribes contributed to sermon volumes. Note, however, that the vast majority of sermon manuscripts are undated, and therefore a causal relationship between observant reforms and sermon production cannot yet fully be established. The Augustinian canonesses at Dorstadt evidently had three vocabularies. The first of these was a Vocabularius brevilogus (WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 400 (435) from 1404), signed by scribe Johannes Brokelden; see CMO #9031, CMO III/197 and KrämerScriptores, ‘Brokelden, Johannes.’ The second was a Latin vocabulary of 1444 (WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 720 (784)). The third Dorstadt vocabulary was an undated Latin dictionary that was purchased from, or perhaps by, a citizen of Wevelingen named Abel (‘Accommodavi d[omi]no Abel plebano in Weuelingen sex solidos antiq. brunsv. super istum vocabularium 1482 circa festum Michael,’ WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 370 (405), as quoted in Schönemann, ‘Zur Geschichte und Beschreibung der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel,’ 84). Other grammar and vocabulary materials also abound. The Cistercian nuns at Lichtenthal owned a copy of the Vocabularius ex quo (KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 73 copied by Michael Mürer in 1456), as did the nuns of St Katharina in Nuremberg (DresdenLB A. 199a) and the Salzburg Petersfrauen (SalzburgEA a VI 13, which bears the scribal sign of sister Katharina Pschachlin). Similarly, the Althaldensleben Cistercians owned a 1521 copy of Alexander of Villa Dei’s Doctrinale (WolfenbüttelHAB Novi 797). On the history of vocabularies, and particularly ex quo, see Grubmüller, Vocabularius ex quo. The manuscript copies of grammars and vocabularies would presumably have been supplemented in fifteenth-century monastic libraries by the many incunabula available. See Borchling, ‘Litterarisches und geistiges Leben im Kloster Ebstorf am Ausgange des Mittelalters,’ 361–420; Uhde-Stahl, ‘Figuerliche Buchmalereien in den spätmittelalterlichen Handschriften der Lüneburger Frauenklöster’; and Schlotheuber, ‘Ebstorf und seine Schülerinnen in der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts.’ See most recently Classen, Late-Medieval German Women’s Poetry. The two categories of ‘miscellaneous’ and ‘unknown’ manuscripts that are excluded from discussion in this chapter include 88 of the 501 manuscripts

Notes to pages 120–9

66

67

68

69 70

71 72

73

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(18 per cent) known to have been copied by female scribes and roughly 800 of the 4000 manuscripts (20 per cent) that survive from women’s monastic libraries. Note that these figures do not fully take into account information now available in KrämerScriptores, which was published after most of the data here was compiled. Both theological and scholastic writings have traditionally been considered more typical of male convents than female ones, but it should be remembered here that the manuscripts in question were produced by men for women readers in women’s convents. Although they were copied by men, these ‘learned manuscripts’ were either intended for or came to serve a female monastic audience. ‘im 14. Jahrhundert eine “Explosion” der Schrifttumsproduktion ... im 15. Jahrhundert eine “Explosion” der Überlieferung ...’ Williams-Krapp, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert,’ 41. Scholars have embraced the metaphor; see Schiewer, ‘Sermons for Nuns,’ 77 (cited above, note 61); Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 11; and Bast, Honor Your Father, 9; Bast provides further bibliography in note 61. D’Avray, ‘Printing, Mass Communication, and Religious Reformation,’ 56 and 57. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book, 268–9. A further corrective to the idea of reform as the central driver behind book productive can be found below in chapter 5. Beach, ‘Claustration and Collaboration between the Sexes in the TwelfthCentury Scriptorium,’ and Women as Scribes. Frediswindis de Malborch of the Cologne Clarissan convent has manuscripts dating to 1345 (the gradual KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. s.n.) and ca. 1360 (DarmstadtLB 949). Loppa von Spiegel also copied liturgical books before and after the Black Death; see the early antiphonal fragments from 1340 to 1345 (KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. 65–6); the antiphonal from 1350 (StockholmKB A 172); and the late gradual (ca. 1360) KölnDB Codex 1150. Undated fragments give a measure of her other scribal production (a gradual, KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. 1–23, 17–35, 37–45, and 72). Of the thirty-six datable mid-fourteenth century manuscripts, eighteen fall before the Black Death and eighteen fall afterwards. Of these, ten of the earlier manuscripts are liturgical versus eight of the later manuscripts; seven earlier manuscripts are devotional literature versus six of the later manuscripts; and one manuscript from earlier has unknown contents versus four educational manuscripts from after the Black Death.

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74 See Kammeier-Nebel, ‘Frauenbildung im Kaufmannsmilieu spätmittelalterlicher Städte,’ vol.1, 78–90; and Beer, Eltern und Kinder des späten Mittelalters in ihren Briefen. I am grateful to the Press reader who suggested exploring this literature. 75 The rise of lay literacy during the fifteenth century and its impact on the circulation of spiritual literature in England has been explored by Susan Groag Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners,’ Meale, ‘“Alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch”’; Tarvers, ‘“Thys ys my mystrys boke.”’ For the rise of lay literacy in German regions, see Williams-Krapp, ‘Erosion of a Monopoly,’ and ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert’; Dennis Howard Green, Medieval Listening and Reading, 8–10; and Scribner, ‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print in the Early German Reformation,’ esp. 237–42. 76 That is not to say that all nuns of a convent were literate and educated, or even that all convents had women capable of being scribes. Nevertheless, the blame accorded a few nuns at a few convents in visitation records and reform literature of the era has been too often taken as a condemnation of women’s educational achievements as a group. 4. Scribe as Individual 1 Drogin, Anathema!; Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 491–534. The most substantial collection of scribal colophons can be found in CMO, a work to which I am deeply indebted. See also the recent study by Reynhout, Formules latines de colophons. 2 Qui culpat carmen ... Drogin, Anathema! 69. 3 Translation adapted by the author from ibid., 77–8. 4 Judith Anne Duncan, A Small Book of Book Curses 2nd ed. (Minneapolis; Scholar Gipsy Press, 1977), as quoted in Drogin, ibid., 86. 5 Regrettably, it is also just the colophon portions of the closing material that tend to be included in catalogue citations; explicits are typically given in abbreviated form if at all. Only rarely do modern day cataloguers provide the full combination of explicit and colophon. This can make challenging any full assessment of the scribe’s control over the information he or she has provided in a particular manuscript. 6 A study of colophon clichés can be found in Reynhout, Formules latines de colophons; for a study of colophon formulas with information on pen grip, see Rosenfeld, ‘Tres digiti scribunt.’ 7 Two hundred and eighty-five individual database entries can be assigned to specific dates, but this includes roughly forty-five manuscripts that have two or three women scribes.

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8 See the discussion of Margareta Kartäuserin above, chapter 2, p. 77–9. 9 An occasional explicit might give information about the author and the formulation of the text being copied. The colophon, on the other hand, quite frequently gives dates for the creation of the manuscript but almost never gives dates for its texts. 10 KoblenzLHA Best. 701 Nr. 119, a necrology from 1406. The colophon is provided in CMO #12344, CMO IV/29: ‘a.d. 1406 venerabilis ac religiosa d.d. Lysa de Ermiberch priorissa monasterii sanctimonialium in Angelica porta (Engelport an der Mosel) hoc martyrolgium conscribi procuravit librumque animarum cum quibusdam aliis insertis per manus religiosi viri fr. Laurentii de Weda professi monasterii in Hemmenrode quorum animae requiescant in sancta pace. Amen.’ 11 This is an impressionistic observation based on a reading of CMO. While many a manuscript contains the name of a secular lord or lady, that information on the person of privilege who came to own the book is more often drawn from inscriptions, from dedications, and from patterns of decoration than from colophons per se. 12 The sisters at Kentrup, for instance, cited the epidemic of plague that was found throughout the region, along with the year, 1473, in which their copying was completed; see DüsseldorfUB 38, CMO #2539, CMO I/319. 13 ‘Dicz puch ist ausgeschriben worden do man czalt ... M. CCCC. und in dem XXXVI ior an dem abent unser lieben frawen als sie geporen ward (= 7 Sept) ...’ Colophon to Vita s. Dominici, AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2o 7, fol. 170rb. See Schneider, Deutsche mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg; Die Signaturengruppen Cod.I.3 und Cod.III.1, 161, consulted via HKOL. 14 Scribes do not bother to tell us anything of the nitty-gritty day-to-day scheduling that surely must have been part of the copying process. Copying is a laborious activity and takes time, time that must be eked out of a daily existence that revolved around the cyclic round of prayers and services of the Opus Dei. Yet to the medieval scribe, the minutiae of hours did not appear to matter, only the larger schedule of copying mapped onto the church year. 15 ‘...in cenobio Wynhusen in expulsione monasterii nostri.’ The full colophon is found at note 55. 16 See chapter 5, p. 178–9 for further details. 17 KrämerScriptores, ‘Merin (Merhiltin, Meyrin), Margaretha,’ consulted 31 March 2008. Margaretha copied StuttgartLB, HB. I. 99, a manuscript thought to belong to the Schlettstadt Dominikanerinnen of Sylo. 18 KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. 68 (fol. 147); CMO #324, CMO I/42. 19 KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. 84 (fol. 2), CMO #17899, CMO V/407; this volume is discussed more below, p. 143.

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20 ‘closter zum heilligen grab prediger ordens neben Bamberg’; AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2o 12, fol. Ir. The citation is from a sixteenth-century librarian’s inscription, and is quoted here from Karin Schneider, Deutsche mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg, Die Signaturengruppen Cod.I.3 und Cod.III.1., 168. 21 Adelheydis Strosserin, a Nuremberg Clarissan, claims to have finished her copy of Bonaventura, Legenda maior, on St Francis’s Day in 1444; see MünchenSB Cgm 65, CMO# 253, CMO I/32, cited below, p. 193 and chapter 5, note 84. Ottilia Schede finishes her book in 1572 on the octave of St Francis and calls upon the ‘most holy’ Clare; see KarlsruheLB St Georgen perg. Germ. 103 (fol. 425), CMO #14719, CMO IV/330. 22 The Cistercian scribe Iohansen is not identified further, nor do we have a record of the Frau von Mulheim who received the book, which is now found as St GallenStiftsB 1344. The colophon is paraphrased in CMO #8509, CMO III/134. KrämerScriptores lists this scribe as Nr. 38 in the article ‘Johannes (15.Jh.) scriptor’; she speculates that he may be identical with Bruder Joh [annes] Rutiner. Johannes Rutiner (Rütiner, Ruthineri) was provincial (oppidanus) of St Gall who died in 1556; CMO #11295, CMO III/477. Rutiner’s copying efforts stem from 1512 through 1556, however, which is somewhat later than the period for ‘Brother Iohansen.’ Note: KrämerScriptores (consulted 30 March 2008) has two articles on Rutiner as scribe, each with slightly different information; one is listed as ‘Ruthiner (Rütiner), Johannes’ and the other as ‘Rütiner (Ruthineri), Johannes.’ 23 Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 173–4. 24 KrämerScriptores, ‘Kursi (Kursius, Kurfi), Johannes,’ consulted 31 March 2008. Kursi was chaplain at Urspring and scribe for Soeflingen; he also worked for Kunigunde von Fryberg. 25 Connections of confessors and other individuals to the convents they served is discussed above, p. 51–4. 26 Librarians often enter an assertion that a book belongs to a particular convent. Such statements may end with that single assertion or may, as recommended by Humbert of Romans or other Ämterbucher, mention important donors. They do not, however, tend to specify where a book was from if it was not acquired as a gift. Purchased books are therefore harder to trace. Monastery accounts do give evidence that many books were bought and some sold, but those financial memoranda do not connect easily to the surviving manuscript legacy of any given convent. 27 See Scheepsma, ‘“For hereby I hope to rouse some to piety,”’ esp. 31. 28 Explicit expliceat / Scriptrix deo gratias / Que me scribebat / Gerdrudis nomen habebat. Gertrude’s nationality is unknown. The colophon from Escorial e. IV. 7, fol. 57, is cited in CMO #5354, CMO II/217.

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29 Other popular names among women scribes include Dorothea (twenty individuals), Agnes (nineteen), Barbara (seventeen), and the various Ursulas, Adelheids, and Magdalenas. Certain popular names among scribes from earlier centuries had evidently dropped out of fashion in this late medieval period; Diemudis, Ermengarda or Irmingart, and Guta/Guda have left the scene. Curiously, neither the name Maria nor Susanna was particularly popular in Germanic regions; these names were found more commonly among scribes from francophone and Italian-speaking regions. It may be significant from a viewpoint of status that scribes do not, as a group, adopt diminutives for use within their scribal signatures. Names are almost always spelled out in full. 30 Some of what appear to be patronymics may in fact be geographical identifiers or nicknames, but they function much like the modern-day last name to help distinguish one individual from another. 31 ‘Anna Gropengheter, professa in Monte Beatissime Virginis Marie,’ that is, professed in Marienberg-bei-Boppard (ParisBN n.a. lat. 667, fol. 118; according to Samaran and Marichal, Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, 4:324, Anna is responsible for the additions to the collection after she professed in 1507); ‘... Erwirdigen und gaistlichen frowe frow Kungundis von fryberg ...’ the venerable and spiritual Frau ... (KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. Germ. 67 fol. 543; note that Kunigundis was the dedicatee and not the scribe; see Eberl, Geschichte des Benediktinerinnenklosters Urspring bei Schelklingen, 1127–1806, 215); ‘... wolgepornen frowen frowen Annan von Zymmern,’ the well-born Frau ... (DonaueschingenFB 117, fol. 118; CMO #895, CMO I/114). Curiously, the term ‘Iuncfrow’ (Jungfrau, meaning damsel or virgin), though used rather extensively during this period to refer to nuns, is only rarely used selfreflexively by the nuns who served as scribes. 32 Early women scribes identified as lay sisters include Diemudis of Admont and Schäftlarn’s Adelhait. Alison Beach makes the point that in naming Adelhait ‘as both conversa and scriptrix,’ the necrology proves that the Schäftlarn ‘scriptorium did, in fact, employ lay sisters’; see ‘Claustration and Collaboration between the Sexes in the Twelfth-Century Scriptorium,’ 70. Later examples of lay sisters who served as scribes may include Mahthilt de Nifen, a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century resident at Zweifalten, cited in KrämerScriptores as a lay sister but listed in the convent necrology both as ‘conversa congregationis’ (Mews, ‘The Witness of Zwiefalten and the Hirsau Reform,’ 186) and elsewhere as ‘ma n.c.’ which would seem to indicate that she was a nun (‘Necrologium Zwifaltense (OSB)’ in NecGer I, 244); and the early sixteenth-century Margaretha Rensing, donata (lay sister) of Herzebrock whose hand appears in DarmstadtLB 1883, a prayerbook from 1530; see Klueting, Das Bistum Osnabrück, 271.

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33 Adelhaid Vögtin’s biography is included in Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, ch. XL, p. 100. 34 Neither her autograph, NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 57 section #28, nor DonaueschingenFB 421, which includes William of St Thierry’s Epistle, identify Katharine Tucher as lay sister at St Katherina’s in Nuremberg, but the volumes may predate her entry into the cloister as a widow in 1440. While we have not securely identified any volumes created while she served as lay sister, Tucher certainly brought to the convent the capacity to do so. Note that Karin Schneider believed that Tucher entered the cloister in 1433, but more recent work by Ulla Williams and Werner Williams-Krapp suggests that Tucher entered at the earliest in 1440 and that the bulk of her manuscript copying stemmed from the period before 1428. See Karin Schneider, ‘Tucher, Katharina,’ 2VL, Bd. 9, col. 1132; Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Bd. 1: Die deutschen mittelalterlichen Handschriften, 189–93, esp. 193; Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 178; and Williams and Williams-Krapp, Die Offenbarungen der Katharina Tucher, 1. 35 For some reason, the identity as prioress was much more commonly claimed among the working scribes than a position as abbess, which must typically be deducted from the convent records. For instance, an unnamed prioress from ‘the island in Koblenz [Confluencie]’ (TrierStadtB 313, fol. 174; see CMO#19130, CMO VI/31) and Anna Jäck (NürnbergGNM 28441; see Kurras, Die Handschriften des Germanischen Nationalmuseums Nürnberg, Bd. 1, T. 1, 100–1) both name their leadership position in their colophons. Abbesses more often are listed as having had the book made; Agatha Haunsberger of Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg, for instance, commissioned SalzburgNA 23 B 6 in 1459; see below, chapter 5, note 8. Cloister documents, however, must be used to identify the scribal activity of such abbesses as Katharina Hoffmann of the Klarissenkloster of Nuremberg in the fourteenth century and Anna Flötzerin of Gnadental in Basel in the fifteenth century. Hoffmann is identified in KrämerScriptores as abbess, but signs herself as ‘Swester’ in CMO #2526, CMO I/318. Flötzerin is identified in Bruckner, ‘Zum Problem der Frauenhandschrift im Mittelalter,’ 176. Like abbesses, lay sisters too are known more from the literature about them than by the products of their own scribal hands. Johannes Meyer identifies Adelhaid Vögtin as a lay sister of Schönensteinbach who ‘lesen tüsch and latyn und schriben’ (Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, ch. XL, p. 100) but no manuscript appears to have come down in her own hand. Similarly, only a few colophons actually refer to the position of cantrix; more often that identity too must be ascertained through cloister documents. ‘Odilia Sengerin’ of Lichtenthal (professed 1483; died 1515), for instance, provided an

Notes to pages 140–3

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ownership statement in the fourteenth-century psalter KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 36 on fol. 226v (‘Item dißer selter gehört in die sengeri. hab ich gelühen Odilia, sengerin, der von Büschten’), but her scribal activity must be deduced from handwriting and documentary evidence; see Heinzer and Stamm, Die Handschriften von Lichtenthal, 43 and 127. An exception to this pattern is found with the identity of ‘closter frau’ Elisabetha Hyttlen who updated a gradual in 1462; the information is given at the colophon: she ‘war 35 jahr cantorin’ (served 35 years as cantrix). See LondonBL Add. 16950; CMO #3734, CMO II/22. Such self-deprecation on the part of scribes is akin to the authorial trope of the ‘ignorant woman’ (ignota) adopted by women such as Hildegard von Bingen. The humble servant works at the direction of others, overcoming her own weaknesses and personal faults to provide the best possible text that she can. ‘Dis bůch wart vollenbracht vff sant Johannes abent des touffers [modern German: Täufer] in dem jare do man zalte nach Cristus geburte tusent vierhundert xxix iare. Bittent got fůr die schriberin, die dis bůch mit irre hant geschriben hat, vnd fůr den priester, der es corrigieret und gebessert hat. 1429.’ LeipzigUB Ms 560. Colophon from Pensel, Verzeichnis, 31–4. Of course, roughly 80 per cent of the manuscripts come without any scribal attribution, so the presence of even minimal self-identification is worthy of notice. ‘Explicit sermo tercius de beatissimo Johanne ewangelista et appostolo anno domini Mo cccco 81o in vigilia sancti Mathie appostoli [23 Feb. 1481]. Margareta Schlicherin tunc priorissa in Medlingen.’ Pensel, Verzeichnis, 102–6, citing the colophon from LeipzigUB Ms 763, fols 242r–58v, a section of a theological-ascetic composite manuscript in which Margaretha Schleicherin copies three sermons on John the Evangelist. Schleicherin served as prioress at Medingen (1) until at least 1499, when she requested a gradual from one of the convent nuns as discussed below, p. 173 and chapter 5, note 10. Schleicherin also donated to the convent a printed copy of Leonardus de Utino’s Sermones (Ulm: Johann Zainer, 1475); see Geldner, ‘Handschriftliche Einträge in Wiegendrucken und ihre Druckgeschichtliche Bedeutung,’ 130. ‘Hunc librum scripsit devota ac deo religiosa S. soror Sibilla de bondorff amatrix sincera seraphici ac sigillo dei vivi insigniti patris stz cu (trium?) ordinum fundatoris dignissimi Francisci nuncupati cuius meritis post hanc vitam labilem eius attingat felicitatem per usui venerabilem dominarum 2 ordinis ipsius melliflui sancti in friburgo inferiori in perpetuum relinquitur ubi a.d. 1478 ... sub ferula dne Susanne de falckenstein istius monasterii abbatisse mitissime fr. Conradus de Bondorff baccalarius argentinensis inmeritus hoc scripsit anno 1. sui bacalariatus 1478.’ CMO #2886, CMO I/360; Schraut and Opitz, Frauen und Kunst im Mittlealter, 28–34 and fig. 31. There is

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some speculation that Sibilla might have been translator as well as copyist for the work. I have chosen to retain the somewhat awkward literal translation ‘made it be written’ for the phrase scribi fecit in lieu of the more common and idiomatic ‘had made’ or ‘had written’ for it is precisely in that act of agency – the abbess’s act of making someone else produce the book by putting ink on paper or parchment (in contrast to the passive implications of having something done to one or for one of the more common translations) that the import of such scribal citations lies. ‘Hoc opus scribi fecit dna Meliora ab Greudt (von Grüt) abbatissa monasterii Hermatschwill. Constant 9 Corona francia.’ The colophon stems from Abtei Muri-Gries n. 23 and is cited as CMO #13642, CMO IV/197. According to the Muri-Gries catalogue, the colophon entry is found on fol. 161v and is in a hand other than that of the principal scribe. The manuscript shows several signs of the abbess’s ownership: there is an ownership inscription in the middle of the front cover (‘Meliora vom Grüth 1554’), and her coat of arms appears on fol. 9 at the start of the section of hymns, immediately after the calendar. A paraphrase and translation – probably abbreviated – of the colophon is provided as CMO #17581, CMO V/363: ‘Written at Dürgenhaim by T. Schwartz parson, during the time of Apollonia Schröttlin as abbess in Kyrchaim.’ The manuscript in question was formerly identified as ‘Cleveland (Ohio), Alfr. Mewett Libr. 28 (Horae O. Cist.)’ and its whereabouts are currently unknown. The Cleveland manuscript was omitted from the inventory of Kirchheim manuscripts in Schromm, Die Bibliothek des ehemaligen Zisterzienserinnenklosters Kirchheim am Ries, who lists Apollonia Schrötl (Schretl) as abbess of Kirchheim from 1584 to 1631 (163). The village of Dirgenheim (Ostalbkreis) is in close geographical proximity to Kirchheim am Ries. ‘Hunc librum fecit priorissa soror Yoles Viennensis scribi sororibus in Valle s. Marie a.d. 1269 ut habeatur ibi in memoriam sui.’ Colophon for this manuscript, BrusselsBR 694 (139), fol. 218v, taken from CMO #11983, CMO III/ 563. Valle S. Marie is the Cistercian women’s convent of Frauenthal known by that name. Vincent Corrigan believes that ‘Yoles’ might be identical with Yolanda von Vianden, who entered Marienthal (a third name for Frauenthal) on 6 January 1248 and became prioress in 1258; see Corrigan, ‘Critical Editions of the Liturgical Manuscripts,’ 88. ‘Summus honor celi / Filius ipse ipse pater / Hoc opus explerunt / Inde sibi veniam / Qui te sustulerit / spes grata Maria fideli / remanes in virgine mater / Aleith Claricia querunt / te venerando piam / hunc anathema ferit.’ (fol. 192v). The adjacent page has a second inscription: ‘Mater Ide

Notes to pages 143–5

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Lifmundis fecit hec scribi. anima eius requiescat in pace’ (fol. 193). The colophon(s) from TrierStadtB 1286/43 are drawn from CMO #246, CMO I/ 31; the identification of the convent as that of St Mathias in Trier comes from KrämerScriptores. ‘Ain buchlin ... hond ich bruder Thomas Finckh gedacht ze schribn ... für die fraw Helena von Hürnheim maisterin des gotshuss ursprung sant Benedictiner ordens,’ KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. 84, fol. 2. Colophon from CMO #17899, CMO V/407. Finck later dates the manuscript with two brief exclamations of praise: ‘Got sy lob (14)92’ (fol. 53) and ‘Laus deo (14)92’ (fol. 55v). Finck’s role as reformer and as translator and author is traced in Fasbender, ‘Finck als Übersetzer, Textbearbeiter und Autor.’ According to KrämerHandschriftenerbe, Urspring, a Benedictine convent founded in 1127 and not closed until 1801, has a surviving book register (StuttgartHStA, E 221 Bü 2701) and four surviving books or book fragments in addition to Finck’s book. The 1475 reform of the Urspring cloister under a previous abbess, Gredanna von Freyburg (1463–80) is recounted in Eckenstein, Woman Under Monasticism, 421; Helena von Hürnheim’s role as prioress during that reform is recounted in Fabri, Tractatus de Civitate Ulmensi, 184–6; see also Eberl, Geschichte des Benediktinerinnenklosters Urspring bei Schelklingen, 1127–1806, 214. ‘Das buchlin ist der tugendsamen unnd gaystlichenn frawen Veronica Welsserin zu sant Katherina zu Augspurk Unnd is geschriben unnd vollendet in dem iar der genadenn 1501 am samstage vor dem suntag Exaudi. Bruder Albrecht.’ (CambridgeFW 157, fol. 172v, CMO #141, CMO I/18). The discussion of the cycle of paintings at St Katharina’s in Augsburg can be found in Cuneo, ‘The Basilica Cycle of Saint Katherine’s Convent.’ ‘Istud collectaneum est completum a. ab incarn. d. 1342 in vig. Pentecostes sub dna Margareta de Brunecke abbatissa in Frauwental ex procuratione et ordinacione ac mera devocione sororis Elyzabeth dicte Tunnein ob reverenciam et honorem scissime dei genitricis v. Marie. Et ideo non inmerito predicte sororis memoriam in suis oracionibus tenetur habere quicumque in posterum in ipso legerit vel usum ipsius imperpetuum habuerit cum devocione quia revera eundem cum magnis laboribus comparavit. Constitit autem in pergameno 3 t. et 1 sol. hlln. Precium vero scriptoris 3 t. et 28 hlln. Summa tocious 7 t. et 14 den. Sed pro illuminatura 9 sol. brevium insuper ligatura cum clausuris 10 sol.’ ErlangenUB Perg. 136, fol. 1. CMO #3744, CMO II/23. The collection was for the Cistercian cloister of Frauenthal, also known as Vallis S. Mariae. The inscription is reproduced in Schraut, ‘Zum Bildungsstand fränkischer Zisterzienserinnenkonvent,’ pl. 7.

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51 Rainer Metz identifies the Heller in the ‘Currency Exchange (Metz) data set’ in the Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank, a website developed by the Scholarly Communication Center from the Rutgers Libraries and Prof. Rudolph M. Bell from Rutgers’ History Department, http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/ memdb/, consulted 9 October 2005. Metz has determined approximate values for Cologne coinage. To quote: ‘Relationen des Kölner Rechengeldes: 1 Gulden = 4 Mark = 24 Albus = 48 Schilling = 288 Heller.’ Unfortunately, our scribe blithely skips among monetary units, but it seems that the Taler is roughly equivalent to the Albus, that the Schilling is here called solidus, and that heller and denarii (or pennies) are roughly equivalent but inexactly so. 52 The colophon is from a collection of vitae which includes that of St Clare, now found in BambergSB Hist. 146, fol. 224v, CMO #2526, CMO I/318. Katherina Hoffmann, who was abbess of the Nuremberg Klarissenkloster from 1380–93, also copied BambergSB Hist. 148, Dietrich von Apolda, Vita S. Elisabeth. 53 The colophon from BambergSB Hist. 148 is given as CMO #2527, CMO I/318. 54 ‘Margaretha von Schonbergk hat diss geschriben mit yrer lyncken hant. nemet vor gut libe Swester Juliana und bittet och got vor mich. amen.’ PragUB XVI. G. 18, fol. 141v, cited here from CMO #13026, CMO IV/118. Margaretha’s name also appears on the inner cover of PragUB XVI. G. 25. According to Dolch, Katalog der deutschen Handschriften der k.K. Öff. und Universitätsbibliothek zu Prag, 70 and 79–80, these manuscripts were likely for the Clarissan convent in Eger. 55 ‘(14)56 completus est liber iste per me sororem inutilem Alheydem Kalves religiosam ac professam in monasterio Stederborch. pro quo sit Deus benedictus in secula. Pacienciam habete quia male scripsi in anno meo 73 cum magno labore in cenobio Wynhusen in expulsione monasterii nostri. Oretis deum pro me unam angelicam salutationem vel Requiem eternam in xpi amore.’ Alheydem Kalves entered her colophon in a book of hours, Wolfenbüttel 566. CMO #249, CMO I/32. 56 Neske, Die lateinischen mittelalterlichen Handschriften, Teil 2, 138–9 and plates 2, 3 and 4 (from manuscripts signed by Kartäuserin) and plate 5 (the false colophon from NürnbergStadtB Hert. 8, fol. 92v). The colophon (as transcribed from the plate by the author) reads ‘Nach Christi gepurt. M. CCCC. in dem LXIII Iar hat diss puch geschriben Swester Margareta Karteuserin.’ The first folio of Kartäuserin’s 1463 missal has a similar inscription: ‘Nach Christi gepurt M.CCCC. in dem LXIII iar hat diss boch geschriben swester Margareta Karteuserin zu nucz irem closter zu sant Katherina zu Nuremberg prediger ordens. Pit got für sie’ (fol. 1va). 57 If so, the image is adapted, for Barbara Gewichtmacherin’s nun adores St Katharine, while the nun of the Hert. 8 manuscript stands alone. Yet the

Notes to pages 149–52

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image may not be greatly adapted, for in the Hert. 8 image, the nun gazes longingly with hands clasped high at what is, at least in its modern binding, the blank back cover of the volume. (The final gathering is missing two leaves of its three bifolios, but it is not clear from the catalogue description whether one or both leaves might have followed the current final folio.) It seems that this later version of the nun could have been adoring a holy figure at the top of the facing page of the opening, mimicking the adoration of her model yet perhaps lacking the visual justification for the gesture. I base this speculation on a catalogue description of the Gewichtmacherin image, for I have not yet been able to consult a reproduction of this page in the earlier source. Andrew Hughes has articulated a view of the noted missal as model or ‘master copy ... from which standardized rites could be copied.’ See Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, 123, paragraph 633. CMO #22937, CMO VI/445, WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 667 (717) (fol. 247v), a. 1458. According to KrämerHandschriftenerbe, this manuscript was copied in 1458 and is connected with Elizabeth Borchtorpe, one of the monastics at Wöltingerode. Borchtorpe, whose surname is also found as Burgdorf, was responsible for purchasing a number of manuscripts; she is described in the pages of one of the books as ‘venerabilis domina et pia mater’; see WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1319 (1432), fol. 1, as quoted in Wienand, ‘Skriptorium und Bibliothek,’ 469. A colophon from one of her manuscripts is provided below in chapter 5, note 9. Wienand, ‘Skriptorium und Bibliothek,’ 469. Note that Wienand cites the manuscript as Helmst. 667, presumably adopting the new numbering; KrämerHandschriftenerbe II/842 cites the manuscript as Helmst. 667 (717). Wienand does not list the CMO colophon, and CMO, which cites the manuscript as 717 (its old numbering) does not provide the contents of the manuscript. Given the renumbering of the Helmstedt collection, the identity of the two citations of the manuscript in question is likely, but not certain. KrämerHandschriftenerbe includes the manuscript under her listing for Wöltingerode, and describes it with the inexact content descriptor of ‘Misc. theol.’ It is the only Wöltingerode manuscript listed with the date of 1458. KrämerHandschriftenerbe, ‘Wöltingerode,’ II/843, citation of WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1234 (1342), dated 1478. CMO #19919, CMO VI/113, colophon for WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1234 (1342), fol. 153. CMO assigns the manuscript to Wöltingerode bei Goslar and dates it 1478. Anna Gropengheter was a scribe for Marienberg bei Boppard who copied additions to a volume containing Alexander de Villa Dei’s Doctrinale and Johannes

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de Garlandia’s Opuscula; the manuscript is now ParisBN n.a. lat. 667. The additions date from after 1507, according to her note at the bottom of fol. 70v, while her full name and convent affiliation – ‘Anna Gropengheter, professa in Monte Beatissime Virginis Marie’ – are given on fol. 118 (Samaran and Marichal, Catalogue des Manuscrits in Écriture Latine, 4:324). Anna Grumpenberger is the scribe of a 1446 lectionary for St Katharina in Nuremberg, listed in KrämerHandschriftenerbe 2:617 as Leipzig, Museum für Kunst und Schrift, K1. 139; this is probably the Deutschen Buch- und Schriftmuseums in Leipzig; many of their former holdings are now found in Moscow, Russian State Library, but I have been unable to determine if this manuscript is among them. Karin Schneider provides these miscellaneous versions of Kunigund Schreiberin’s signature in Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Bd. 1: Die deutschen mittelalterlichen Handschriften, which can be searched via HKOL. Our scribe signs herself as Clos (Cloß) Schreiberin in NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 6 and Cent. VI, 53; as Küngünt Schreyberin in Cent. IV, 37 and Cent. VII, 1; and as Swester Kungund Clos Schryberin in Cent. IV, 14, Cent. VI, 43h, and Cent. VI, 44. She also owned Cent. VI, 46c, Cent. VI, 54, and Will II, 19.oct. See Schneider, ibid., 10, 11, 35, 103, 139, 172, 266, 525, 528. The identity is confirmed in Hayer, Die deutschen Handschriften des Mittelalters der Erzabtei St. Peter zu Salzburg, 286–96. Karin Schneider elucidates Ammanin’s role in transmitting the Buch der Vollkommenheit, one of the items in SalzburgEA b V 40, from Augsburg to Salzburg; see Pseudo-Engelhart von Ebrach, xxvi. In addition to SalzburgEA b V 40 and SalzburgEA b I 24, Ammanin also copied or contributed to SalzburgEA a II 7, SalzburgEA a VII 35 (dated 1455), and SalzburgEA b VI 12. Often, an association between the initials provided by the scribe and a patron saint can be conjoined to give a firmer identity; sister ‘A.K.’ of the Erfurt Weissfrauen who prepared MünnerstadtKlosterB 406 in 1497 is shown to be ‘Agnes’; see Zumkeller, ‘Vom geistlichen Leben im Erfurter Weißfrauenkloster am Vorabend der Reformation,’ 234–5. For a discussion of signs and symbols (what Gummlich calls ‘crypto-signatures,’ p. 35) as clues to scribal activity, see the recent work by Mattick, ‘Drei Chorbücher aus dem Kölner Klarissenkloster im Besitz von Sulpiz Boisserée’; and Gummlich-Wagner, ‘Neue Zuschreibungen an das Kölner Klarissenskriptorium.’ See chapter 3, p. 128–30. The increase in surviving manuscripts is marked. Even preliminary figures are suggestive. In a rough sampling of 2500 manuscripts from women’s convents, 364 manuscripts stem from the fourteenth century, of which 111 are likely from the last generation. The first generation of the fifteenth century has 118 surviving manuscripts. This number jumps to 361 manuscripts at mid-century and 528 manuscripts from the final generation of the fifteenth

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century. Additionally, there are 875 other fifteenth-century manuscripts which cannot yet be grouped by generation. Signed manuscripts show similar increases, as can be seen in table 3.5. This increase in book signing seems to have been done across the board; the mid-fifteenth-century distribution of manuscript types for women scribes resembles closely the distribution of such manuscript types over all. It is likely significant that the fourteenth century was also witness to an increased emphasis on named composers and named authors; the identity of the creator becomes intermingled with the reception of his or her work. This shift of culture is not exactly de novo; the self-positioning of a fourteenthcentury poet-composer such as Guillaume de Machaut, for example, owes much to the tradition of the troubadours and trouvères on whom he drew. But it is nevertheless striking that the increased presence of composer attributions in musical manuscripts, for instance, coincides with the increased presence of named scribes in manuscripts of all sorts. The late medieval scribe, then, seems to have benefited from a broad-based cultural trend towards identifying the individual. I consciously point towards the earlier reforms as occasions for renewed interest in convent resources including books. Recent literature, for instance the discussions in Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, and the work on convent scriptoria by Karin Schneider have emphasized the rise of the Observant movement in the fifteenth century as a motivation for scribal undertaking. While it is quite true that Observants were deeply involved in the creation and circulation of manuscript materials, we should not neglect the non-Observant houses. Nonnberg Abbey, for instance, experienced a burst of copying efforts under the reforming abbess Agatha Haunsperger in the fifteenth century, but these reforms are not directly connected to the Observant movement. See Lang, ‘Die mittelalterliche Bibliothek des Bendiktiner-Frauenstifts Nonnberg,’ chapter 2. Spiritual renewal of all sorts seems to have inspired increased efforts to expand a convent’s collection of devotional art and its material books, a point made much earlier in Christ, The Handbook of Medieval Library History, 24. Further details of literate practices within women’s convents and especially of the growth and contents of women’s monastic libraries can be found in the author’s work in progress, tentatively entitled Libraries, Learning and Liturgies: Books for Nuns and Canonesses in Late Medieval Germany. The impact of Humbert of Romans’s teachings on libraries and scriptoria on other orders is traced in Christ, The Handbook of Medieval Library History, 22– 3. As Christ points out (23–4), Humbert’s text was a model for the statutes of the Benedictine Abbey of Lüttich, which were in turn adopted by Johannes Rode in the Bursfeld reforms. Other notable guidelines were produced by

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the Carthusian and the Windesheimer reformers. The Windesheim reforms in turn influenced the handling of books and libraries within the Third Order of St Francis. Humbert of Romans, Regulations for the Operation of a Medieval Library, ‘Concerning the Books’ (n.p.); Humbert also requires the librarian to keep a list of books and manuscripts and to provide what amounts to call numbers, ‘a notation marked in writing ... so that it may be known where one may find what he seeks.’ Ibid., ‘Concerning the Library.’ The library inventory for St Katharina in Nuremberg item N 28 indicates that ‘the life of Saint Margaret was sent to us from Tulln.’ After bringing the Observant reforms from Schönensteinbach to St Katharina in 1428, a group had continued on to Tulln in 1436, showing the close connection between the two convents. See Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 173 and 104–5. The fact that scholastic texts were identified by scribe fully half the time helps to explain their anomalous position within the copying efforts of each gender, as discussed in chapter 3, pp. 119–26. Men had double the number of scholastic texts one would expect, and women had two and a half times as many manuscripts as predicted. The habits of attribution for this kind of writing suggests that it had a special place vis-à-vis scribal authority. For the thirteenth century, A.J. Minnis has shown a four-fold division of literary activity: ‘The literary role of the auctor, considered in its widest sense, was distinguished from the respective roles of the scribe (scriptor), compiler (compilator) and commentator (commentator) ... The auctor contributes most, the scriptor contributes nothing, of his own. The scribe is subject to materials composed by other men which he should copy as carefully as possible, nihil mutando.’ See Medieval Theory of Authorship, 94. From this standpoint, the scribe who enters a colophon steps outside of the ‘role’ of scribe in so doing; he or she might perhaps be a ‘commentator’ who ‘add[s] something of his own by way of explanation’ (95), but I believe the modern and more casual term ‘author’ (not auctor, a term loaded with a notion of the significant individual, but ‘author’ as creator of text) will suffice. See especially Johns, The Nature of the Book, 147: ‘The name of the Stationer on a book’s title page could tell a prospective reader as much about the contents as could that of the author. This was particularly the case with radical tracts, which often appeared anonymously. If the Stationer were an agitator like Henry Hills, Giles Calvert, or John Streater, then a reader’s attitude to the work might be prefigured accordingly ...’ Within the group of early colophons, Marc Drogin has found little by way of chronological development. As he remarks, ‘If the earliest anathemas were short and simple and then, as time progressed, became more volatile and

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vituperative, they would best be displayed chronologically. But they meander from brief to bellicose with no respect for time and place ... In fact, many anathemas appear virtually unchanged from century to century.’ Drogin, Anathema! 64. My own investigation, however, suggests a topical change within the colophon as we move into the late Middle Ages – a period that lies for the most part outside of the scope of Drogin’s study. Drogin does not expressly limit himself to the earlier period, but the majority of his examples do come from the thirteenth century and before. This makes a useful chronological comparison with the collection of monastic colophons examined for the current study, which range from the thirteenth through the early sixteenth century. ‘Quisquis quem tetigerit / Sit illi lota manus.’ Note in a manuscript at the Monastery of Monte Cassino (Cat. Monte Cassino, II. 299). Translation, quotation, and manuscript information quoted here from Drogin, Anathema! 17. The manuscript is identified in Newton, The Scriptorium and Library at Monte Cassino, 222, as Monte Cassino 80. Drogin, Anathema! 18. From LondonBL Add. 11695. Ibid., 19. From The Sefer Chasidon (Book of the Pious), Regensburg, Germany, 1190. Ibid., 25. As Drogin identifies them in the body of the text, the words come from Rabbi Judah ben Samuel Sir Leon Chassid. In a copy of Pope Gregory’s Homiliae super Evangelia, with the book curse entered by a twelfth-century Cistercian monk in the Monastery of Santa Maria della Colomba; see ibid., 67. In a manuscript from St Alban’s Monastery; see ibid., 68. LyonsBM Ms 463 (392) fol. 171; see ibid., 68. ‘Sit utenti gratia, largitori venia, fraudanti anathema.’ ‘Sit maledictuus per Christum, Qui librum subtraxerit istum.’ Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72. ‘Quicumque istum librum rapuerit aut furaverit vel aliquo malo ingenio abstulerit ab aecclesia S. Caeciliae sit perpetua damnatione damnatus et maledictus nisi reddiderit vel emendaverit. FIAT FIAT AMEN AMEN.’ Ibid., 81. OxfordBodl Ms. Rawlinson C. 882, a copy of the Pore Caitiff. Tarvers, ‘“Thys ys my mystrys boke,”’ 317–18. I know of only two exceptions in which German monastic colophons for this later period provide threats of anathema or other kinds of curses. The first is a thirteenth-century manuscript, TrierStadtB 1286/43, fol. 192v, in which scribes Aleith and Claricia (who, according to a later entry on fol. 193r works for Mater Ide Lifmundis) express their hope that one who steals the book or sells it for gain might face anathema; the inscription is cited in full in note

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45, above. The second is a fifteenth-century manuscript copied by scribe Walburga Grashof (?), WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1400 (1524), dated 1467. She incorporates her anathema (‘Si quis abstulerit anathema sit’) in a longer colophon discussed below on p. 191. See also CMO #18541, CMO V/489. 91 Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 5. 92 Anne Clark Bartlett, who provides an index of books owned by medieval English nuns, cautions that just because ‘a convent owned books doesn’t automatically mean that its inhabitants were able to read them or that they were interested in reading them ...’ Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, 150. That caveat is important, but in point of fact many, perhaps even a majority, of the books from German monastic collections show signs of literate use. 5. Why Scribes Serve 1 A discussion of scribal training can be found above in chapter 2, p. 79. 2 De Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators, 43. 3 I base this assertion on the patterns of book copying exhibited by male scribes who copied books for women’s houses; further details can be found above in chapter 2, p. 000. 4 For example of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century scribes’ specimen sheets, see de Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators, 39, and plates 30 and 31. 5 Müller, Holzfunde aus Freiburg-Augustinereremitenkloster und Konstanz, 163, and the index of writing tools, 284–6. According to the list provided in the introduction (20), 3916 wooden items came from Freiburg and 2792 from Constance. 6 This story is found in the Oetenbach sister-book and is summarized in Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 273. More details of their activities are provided below, p. 180 and note 40. 7 The scribe who copies because she is asked to is not necessarily an unwilling scribe. These are women who were serving their community in a capacity perhaps more specialized than their illiterate sisters but nonetheless making a significant contribution to a life in God. 8 ‘Anno 1459 Item Fraw Agatha hawnspergerinn dye zeyt Abtessin auff dem Nunnberg hadt das püch schreyben lassen dem Gottshauss zu Nunnberg und ist vollenndt an sand Marteins abendt da man zalt von Christi gepurdt MCCCC undt lviiij jar.’ SalzburgNA 23 B 6 (HMML 10829). 9 ‘Liber beatissime v. Marie in Woltingerode quem scribi fecit reverenda dna dna [sic] Elyzabeth de Borchtorpe abbatissa huius loci zelatrix sancte religionis mater nostra’ (fol. de garde au Vo). WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1120 (1227), CMO #3731, CMO II/21. (Elizabeth Borchtorpe is discussed further in chapter 4,

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11

12

13

14

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note 59.) The formula scribi fecit was quite common and can be found again, for example, in a Hermetschwil manuscript: ‘Hoc opus scribi fecit dna Meliora ab Greudt (von Grüt) abbatissa monasterii Hermatschwill. Constant 9 Corona francia ...’ (Lady Meliora ab Greudt, abbess of the monastery of Hermetschwil had this work written). The colophon stems from Abtei Muri-Gries n. 23 and is cited as CMO #13642, CMO IV/197. A modern-day catalogue of the Muri-Gries collection is in preparation by Charlotte Bretscher-Gisiger and Rudolf Gamper; their project, entitled ‘Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften des Benediktinerstifts Muri-Gries in Sarnen’ is SNF-Projekt Nr. 1214–050696, under the direction of Martin Steinmann. ‘a. 1499 die s. Ambrosii ego soror Dorothea Deriethain professa monasterii mariae in Medlingen O.P. mandato Margarethae Schlicherin priorissae incepi Graduale istud de tempore quod complevi a. 1500 altera Assumptionis Mariae ...’ MünchenSB Clm 23014, CMO #3519, CMO I/438. There are two Dominican women’s convents in Medingen; this gradual appears to come from Medingen (1) since it is for Maria-Medingen, but Sigrid Krämer assigns the manuscript to Medingen (2); see KrämerHandschriftenerbe 2:564. LeipzigUB Ms 761, which contained Hartwig von Erfurt’s Postille, and LeipzigUB Ms 763, a miscellany from 1481, also belonged to Margaret Schlicher. KrämerScriptores prefers the spelling ‘de Riethaim’ for this scribe. ‘Liber iste pertinet domine Agnete de Tußlingen (Tusselingen) abbatisse in Günterstal. Scriptum per me fratrem Johannem Strentzlin sabbato ante trintiatis finitum anno LXXXX (5.6.1490).’ KarlsruheLB St Peter pap. 29, a copy of Alanus ab Insulis, Distictiones. Quoted here from Niebler, Die Handschriften von St. Peter im Schwarzwald, Teil 1, Die Papierhandschriften, 49. Margot Fassler traces the merging of the tasks of cantor and librarian in the period of the tenth to twelfth century; ‘The Office of the Cantor in Early Western Monastic Rules and Customaries.’ Anne Bagnall Yardley’s research on English convents confirms that these two sets of tasks remained conjoined in the later Middle Ages; see, for example, Performing Piety, 53–69, esp. 58–60. Propst Heinrich Gärtner leaves 20 marks in his 1450 testament to the Isenhagen Sangmeisterin for the purchase of new books. The document is found in the Urkundenbuch des Klosters der Mutter Maria zu Isenhagen (= Lüneburger Urkundenbuch, V. Abt.), Hannover 1870, Isenhagen Nr. 243 as cited in GermBen XII, ‘Isenhagen,’ 256. Ferdinand Vetter, ed. Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töss bescreiben von Elsbet Stagel, Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters 6 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1906), 45–6. For more details on Mezzi von Klingenburg, see chapter 6, p. 206. ‘xy mer denn XXX iar obre sengerin waz, hatt sy gar grossen fliss zv den götlichen dienst des cores und alles, daz zv dem selben ampt gehört, und

286

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17

18

19 20 21

Notes to pages 175–6

daz alle bvcher wol und gerechtiklich wurdent corrigiert.’ Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, 1:69. Clara von Ostren is discussed more fully in chapter 6, p. 209. Two separate Seligenthal Cistercians appear to have copied the gradual LondonBL Add. 16950, if the dates published in the secondary literature are to be believed. It was begun by a scribe named Elisabetha, who signed the manuscript in 1260, and (according to an internal memoranda) worked at the request of Frau Abbess Agnes, countess of Preyssing. Two centuries later, another ‘closter frau’ with the name of Elisabeth – Elisabetha Hüttlen – took her turn at copying in the manuscript: ‘1462 Closter Frau Elisabetha Hyttlen also made the Gradual; she was 35 years the cantorin.’ ‘1260 Bey erster frau abbatissin Agnes graffin Preyssing dis grosse ambt buech geschriben worden von kloster frau Elizabetha. / 1462 Hat auch eine closter frau Elisabetha Hyttlen das Gradual Buech verfertiget war 35 jahr cantorin.’ CMO #3734, CMO II/22; the colophons are also available from the LondonBL on-line catalog, which additionally notes that the entries appear in a memoranda on fols 4b and 5. I have not been able to examine the manuscript directly to determine if in fact the two dates (1260 and 1462) are plausible and if there are two Elizabeths or if a date has been entered in error. For a brief introduction to rituals, also known as manuales, agendas and ordos, see Vogel, Medieval liturgy, 257–64. Vogel groups the obsequial under the heading of ritual, but I distinguish between the two categories since the independent obsequial, which contains directions and/or texts for the liturgy surrounding death and dying, was a central text in women’s monastic communities of this late medieval period. See Cyrus, ‘Obsessed with Death.’ On the role of cantor, see particularly Christ, The Handbook of Medieval Library History, 26–8 (and on the scriptorium, 28–34); and the excellent article by Fassler, ‘The Office of the Cantor in Early Western Monastic Rules and Customaries.’ On the cantrix per se, see Yardley, ‘“Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne,”’ 15–38, esp. 20 and 22ff, and her, Performing Piety, 53–69. Monica H. Green, ‘Female Religious Institutions Owning Medical Books.’ See Humbert of Romans, Regulations for the Operation of a Medieval Library, ‘About an Annex for Study’ (n.p.). Humbert explicitly asks that ‘one or more scribes are retained in the House or outside it to copy [the expensive books]’ (ibid.). Neither in this section, headed ‘Concerning the Books,’ nor in the following section (which enumerates the ‘books which are in frequent use’) does Humbert choose to address liturgical resources. This suggests that the person who copies books for the library might be separable from the cantor/cantrix, who was

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responsible for the convent’s liturgical resources. 22 The Bursfeld document is summarized in Buzás, Deutsche Bibliotheksgeschichte, 88. He cites its title as ‘Ceremoniae sanctimonialium ordinis S. Benedicti sub observantia Bursfeldensi famulantium’ but gives no manuscript reference. 23 The Gaukirchkloster copy of the Bursfeld statutes can now be found in PaderbornPfA der Gaukirche St. Ulrich, s.n. See Hengst, Westfälisches Klosterbuch, 2:224–30. The Willebadessen copy is found in the parish archives. Ibid., 2:494–500. Both monasteries, and both sets of statutes, are omitted from KrämerHandschriftenerbe. 24 ‘Ordinarius für die benediktinerinnen der Bursfelder Observanz’ (fols 1r-66v); it is followed in the manuscript by the ‘Konstitutionen für Benediktinerinnen’ (fols 66v-168v). The manuscript is now housed as LeipzigUB Ms 858. It is a big manuscript, 30.3 x 21. Description taken from Pensel, Verzeichnis, 116–17. 25 The Koblenz set of Bursfeld rules are now BerlinSBPK Germ. 4o 555. The scribe Gertrud von Büchel was a member of the Rolandswerth monastery (now known as Nonnenwerth), where she was quite active as a scribe, copying not only this manuscript but also two graduals and four antiphonals, all listed as lost in KrämerHandschriftenerbe:, ‘Rolandswerth’ (2:691). Rolandswerth had joined the Bursfeld congregation in 1466. 26 The Windesheim demands are summarized in Buzás, Deutsche Bibliotheksgeschichte, 91. The statutes themselves survive in a copy from St Agnes in Xanten; see BerlinSBPK Germ. 4o 1940 from ca. 1475. An edition of the statutes is available in van Dijk, De Constituties der Windesheimse Vrouwenkloosters vóór 1559. 27 Scheepsma, ‘“For hereby I hope to rouse some to piety,”’ 30–1; Scheepsma cites K. Ruh, ‘Geistliche Prosa’ in Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft 8: Europäisches Spätmittelalter, ed. W. Erzgräber (Wiesbaden, 1979), 565–605. 28 The best discussion of convent reform in any language can currently be found in Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles. In the paragraph that follows I offer a critique of a few problematic assertions within her discussion, ‘Libraries and Literary Activities,’ but much of the discussion there and elsewhere in the book is invaluable and should prove highly significant as we continue to rethink monastic practices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the perspective of women’s houses as well as the more traditional stories that draw so extravagantly on men’s experiences of the monastic life. 29 These statistics are based on the author’s own tally of total surviving manuscripts by cloister; information on Observant and reformed houses (including Bursfield, Windesheimer, and devotio moderna houses of the fifteenth century as well as houses that participated in the Melk reforms in

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30

31

32

33 34

Notes to pages 177–8

the fourteenth century) is drawn from Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, and from Matrix Monasticon. Of the 102 German women’s monasteries that have the largest pool of surviving manuscripts, thirty houses were Observant. Note, however, that the count of women scribes from these Observant cloisters does not distinguish between those who predate reform and those who are truly ‘scribes from Observant houses.’ The quote is from Winston-Allen, Concert Chronicles, 171, who cites Regina Schiewer, ‘Sermons for Nuns of the Dominican Observance Movements,’ in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 78. Admittedly, the statement may be true for sermons per se, but the pattern is not reproducible across a broader span of women’s convents and a broader span of genres. Note that in the introduction to her study, Winston-Allen inadvertently generalizes the assertion, claiming that ‘even though only ten percent of cloisters belonged to the Observance, this small number of houses produced ninety percent of the manuscripts from the period’ (11). That assertion cannot be sustained. The total number of manuscript that I can identify with Observant women’s houses is 1488; this is out of 4051 manuscripts known to survive from German women’s monastic houses, so roughly 37 per cent of the surviving manuscripts come from houses which became Observant. (Again, note that the number of manuscripts associated with Observant houses also includes those manuscripts prepared before the reform.) Both figures given here combine Latin and vernacular texts, but the proportion does not appear to be drastically different when the sample is limited to vernacular texts alone. Of the 740 vernacular manuscripts for women’s houses that I have identified thus far, 297 (40 per cent) come from Observant houses. Information on actual manuscript production is impossible to come by, but perhaps further study of the surviving library inventories from women’s houses can shed additional light on the impact of Observant practices on manuscript production. This manuscript is now lost. The episode is discussed in GermBen XII, ‘Wienhausen,’ 763. The manuscript in question is TübingenUB Md. 456. Johannes Meyer’s Buch der Reformatio is found on fols 81r–245r and was copied by an unnamed nun; material both before and after that central text is found in the hand of Elisabeth Muntpratin (fols 2v–86r and 245v–9v). Elisabeth Muntpratin entered St Katharina in St Gall on 14 July 1472. The St Katharina chronicle for the year 1484 remarks on the gift of the book to Inzigkoven: ‘vund ain schwostren buch schanckent wir den von vntzkofen’ (fol. 43v). For a discussion of this

Notes to pages 178–80

35

36

37

38 39

40

41

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manuscript, see Fechter, Deutsche Handschriften des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts aus der Bibliothek des ehemaligen Augustinerchorfrauenstifts Inzigkofen, 118–20; the text of the chronicle entry is found on p. 120. Elisabeth had a personal connection to Inzigkoven, for her niece, Elisabeth Muntpratin the Younger eventually joined the Inzigkoven convent. The entry in KrämerScriptores conflates the works of the two scribes, for it is likely Elisabeth Muntpratin the Younger who copied StraßburgBNU 2797 (olim L germ. 664), fols 96r–189v for the Inzigkoven convent in the jubilee year of 1500; see ibid., 139–42. Hamburger, ‘Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium, 121. A more extensive discussion of the reform can be found in Conrad Borchling, ‘Litterarisches und geistiges Leben im Kloster Ebstorf am Ausgang des Mittelalters.’ GermBen XI, ‘Lüne,’ 393. Further details on the Ebstorf reform team can be found on Matrix Monasticon, ‘Lüne,’ consulted 8 March 2008 and in GermBen XI, ‘Lüne,’ 383. During the reform period, Ebstorf reformers took over the positions of prioress, subprioress, sacristan, cellaress, and choir-mistress. The information on Kremer’s offices is summarized in Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 264, note 45. She cites [Magdalena Kremer], ‘Wie diß loblich closter zu Sant Johannes baptisten zu kirchen under deck prediger-ordens reformiert ist worden und durch woelich personen,’ in Geschichte des Herzogtums Wuerttemberg unter der Regierung der Graven, ed. Christian Friedrich Sattler, 2nd ed.(Tübingen: Reiss, 1773–7), 4:152–247. Kartäuserin’s specialty is elucidated in Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns,’ 125. Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, xviii; Hindsley cites Gustav Voit, ‘Geschichte des Klosters,’ in 750 Jahre Engelthal (Simmelsdorf: Altnürnberger Landschaft e.V., 1994), 11. Information on the Oetenbach scriptorium is derived from the sister-book, also known as the Stiftungsbuch, 231; the relevant passages describing the arrival of widow Ita von Hohenfels with her companions are quoted in Halter, Geschichte des Dominikanerinnen-Klosters Oetenbach in Zürich 1234–1525, 62: ‘Es kament auch mit ir ir drei junkfrawen, der kond eine schreiben und luminieren, die andre malen, die dritt würken ... also schribent si und ander swester, dass von luminieren und von schreiben alle jar aus der schreibstuben gieng X mark.’ Halter points out that the workroom in the new buildings were not only large but also well-lit (62). Similar information is found in Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 273. Meliora ab Greudt’s colophon from CMO #13642, CMO IV/197 is provided above in note 9. Elizabeth Tunnein’s role in crafting ErlangenUB Perg. 136 and its lengthy iteration of associated costs is discussed in chapter 4, p. 145.

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Notes to pages 181–4

42 Druda de Elfenhusen’s colophon is quoted in chapter 1, note 56. 43 GermBen III/3, ‘Salzburg, Petersfrauen,’ 421, citing the Registrum Ottonis fol. 22v; the psalter was dated 1404. 44 ‘Inzigkoven: Manuscripts Produced,’ Matrix Monasticon, consulted 8 March 2008. 45 Loppa von Spiegel’s manuscripts are KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. 17–35 and 37–45, and StockholmKB, A 172. 46 The inscription attesting to Gertrud van dem Vorst’s role appears next to an image of the scribe in KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. 67. In Mattick’s transcription it reads: ‘Soror Gertrudis van dem Uorst qu[a]e hunc librum scribere incepit, sed non perfectit, quia morte pr[a]euenta est. Orate pro ipsa.’ See Mattick, ‘Choralbuchfragmente aus dem Kölner Kloster St Klara,’ 296. 47 See above, chapter 1, note 59. 48 GenevaBPU cod. lat. 155, fol. 180: ‘Ich bin angesa von Mandorf und hat es mir min liebi besi elsbet staibelin geschenkt ...’ The manuscript in question was a sequentiary for a south German or Swiss Dominican house. See Husmann, Tropen- und Sequenzenhandschriften, 34–5. Yardley notes that this manuscript contains polyphony; see ‘Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne,’ 26. 49 The story is summarized in Matrix Monasticon ‘Isenhagen: Foundation Information,’ consulted on 8 March 2008. 50 Matrix Monasticon, ‘Himmelkron, Miscellaneous Information,’ consulted on 8 March 2008. 51 GermBenXI, ‘Neuenwalde,’ 442 and Matrix Monasticon, ‘Neuenwalde: Architecture Archaeology,’ consulted on 8 March 2008. 52 This sampling of plundered convents was obtained through a series of keyword searches of Matrix Monasticon conducted on 8 March 2008. 53 Nonnberg Abbey’s reactions to Tridentine reforms is the focus of Cyrus, ‘The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns: A Salzburg Abbey Case Study,’ forthcoming. The 1581 resistance to reform stems from a bishop’s attempts to impose the printed breviary on nuns accustomed to their muchused Hofnagel manuscripts. 54 Halter, Geschichte des Dominikanerinnen-Klosters Oetenbach in Zürich 1234–1525, 62 points out that the Oetenbach nuns copied from books on loan from other libraries; she distinguishes between that kind of copying and the preparation of choirbooks. 55 Both Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles (173) and Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns’ (124–5) discuss the exchange of books between St Katharina in Nuremberg and other Observant convents. As Winston-Allen records, the cataloguer of the list of table readings from St Katharina, a document which covers the years 1455–99, explains that

Notes to pages 184–7

56

57 58 59

60

61

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‘there were so many surplus books and often three and four copies of the same work, which were too many, and the sisters at Regensburg, Gotteszell, and elsewhere had such a deficiency.’ Such attitudes promoted what Winston-Allen characterizes as an ‘active interchange’ between convents ‘both within and across orders.’ Ehrenschwendtner notes that the prioress of St Gall thanked the Nuremberg sisters ‘for lending books and teaching the reformed Dominican way of life’ (124), and that Altenhohenau and Frauenaurach were also recipients of book-gifts (125). Ursula Kollerin makes those claims in the colophon to her manuscript: ‘Explicit feliciter 1492. a.d. 1491 hat swester Ursala Kollerin die 12 rett des heiligen ewangeliums geschriben das der wirtig Andechtig vatter Heinricus Vigilis in unser kirchen gepredigt hat dem got genedig sey. 1492.’ BambergSB Patr. 58 (B V 43), fol. 603; CMO #18331, CMO V/459. Ursula Kollerin was a Clarissan nun from Nuremberg; see Degler-Spengler, Das Klarissenkloster Gnadental in Basel 1289–1529, 64. Barbara Stromer was from the same convent and died in 1494; she copied BambergMKB, Man. 29; there is a photo in Schraut and Opitz, Frauen und Kunst in Mittelalter, 31. Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, xi. This colophon from PragUB XVI. G. 18, fol. 141v, is transcribed in chapter 4, note 54. ‘Meine alleliebste Schwester Gertrud, Ihr sollt wissen, daß ich Euch hier nun ein Buch sende, das ich Euch geschrieben habe, wie Ihr mich batet, als ich bei Euch und bei meiner Schwester saß. Zwar ist es nicht so säuberlich, wie ich wohl wollte; aber doch ist es mein bestes, und so nehmet meinen guten Willen für das Werk! Denn ich habe es mit großer Arbeit geschrieben und aus vielerlei Büchern gesammelt, wonach ich hoffe, daß es Euch wohl dienen sollte....’ The letter is edited in Oehl, Deutsche Mystikerbriefe des mittelalters, 1100–1550, 637–44 with notes on 831; emphasis mine. Drogin, Anathema! 24. As Mary Jeremy Finnegan reminds us, ‘A weary scribe at St. Gall wrote: Tres digiti scribunt, totum corpus laborat (three fingers write and the whole body labors).’ Finnegan continues, however, with a reminder of the positive side of that labour: ‘The best use of the hands, says Mechtild of Hackeborn, is to raise them in prayer or to write (Livre 3.48.245).’ See Finnegan, The Women of Helfta, 10. For further citations of the ‘tres digiti’ formula, see Reynhout, Formules latines de colophons, 1:95, and Rosenfeld, ‘Tres digiti scribunt,’ especially the tables of colophons as evidence for pen grip, pp. 53–9. None of the identified colophons of the ‘tres digiti’ variety are yet associated with women’s convents. The colophon reads, ‘libro completo saltat scriptor pede leto,’ in CambridgeCCC 528, fol. 424a, cited in James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2:481.

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62 ‘Expliciunt decretales per manus Gerdrudis que solebat ludere cum nudis.’ Berkeley, UC-Berkeley, Robbins Ms 105, fol. 192r; cited in the Digital Scriptorium; most recently consulted at http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/ds/ucb/ images/DS004239aB.jpg on 29 March 2008. The provenance of this particular manuscript has not been ascertained, though it likely comes from Germany. 63 ‘Qui bene scribit ille bene bibit.’ Praha Kapit. 1356, fol. 48v; CMO #15469, CMO V/79. 64 ‘Detur pro penna scriptori pulchra puella.’ Erfurt 2o 236, fol. 305; CMO #5427, CMO II/226. 65 This is not to suggest that the male monastic population avoided statements of praise. Just within the keyword section of volume 6 of CMO (devoted to anonymous colophons organized by place or by key words), there are ninetysix entries that are indexed to some form of ‘Laus Christo,’ ‘Laus deo,’ and ‘Laus domino,’ while such conventional phrases of praise crop up as imbedded text regularly in other colophons. But while for male monastics this is just one option of many, it seems to have been the primary expression of joy for the women scribes whose colophon texts survive. It is possible that there is a bias of indexing at work; twenty-four of the sixty women’s colophons cross-checked against the secondary literature proved to have been abbreviated at some point in the collection of CMO colophons. I suspect, however, that similar winnowing down of text was at work in the male entries as well. Scribes as a lot were a verbose crowd, and a project which offered all of the closing words of all of the scribes of medieval Europe would be unwieldy and so less useful. 66 A transcription of the Scheiffartz colophon from BudapestNM 259 is provided above in chapter 2, note 126 following CMO #13025, CMO IV/ 118. The colophon is also presented in Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 307. Schillingskapellen was founded as a Premonstratensian women’s monastery, one of seventeen similar houses founded in the twelfth century in northwest Germany, as discussed in Wolbrink, ‘Women in the Premonstratensian Order of Northwestern Germany, 1120–1250,’ but affiliated with the Augustinian order as canonesses (Chorfrauen) ca. 1450. Margareta’s fifteenth-century manuscript could have been copied on either side of the switch of order. I have not been able to consult this manuscript directly, but its liturgy should provide additional clues to its date of origin. 67 This colophon is quoted in chapter 2, note 127. 68 The inscription from Osnabrück, Diözesanarchiv Inv. Nr. Ma 101, the socalled Codex Gisle, is transcribed in chapter 2, note 141. See Schraut and Opitz, Frauen und Kunst in Mittelalter, 19, and Oliver, Singing with Angels, 7–8.

Notes to pages 189–90

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71 72

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An edition of the Codex was issued between the two World Wars by Dolfen and Wackernagel, though Oliver’s more recent study refutes several of their claims. This manuscript was discussed above in chapter 2, p. 67. Oliver, ‘Worship of the Word, 108–9 and 120, notes 20–4. Likely, as Oliver has suggested, the name of the scribe is a stand-in for the leader of a workshop. The frequency of scriptoria within women’s convents supports this supposition, and the workshop model may have been a norm for manuscript production in women’s houses, just as it was the norm for their male colleagues. This pride might sometime extend to the whole group of active scribes in a given convent. The Villingen chronicle reports in 1494: ‘The convent sisters with great diligence, loyalty, and labour wrote, rubricated, and rendered the three antiphoners and the new songbooks, also the new sequentiary, so therefore all of us [work] that the Lord and King of the Heavenly Jerusalem will be praised the more in the seven holy signs and would become more honoured’ (Item ist zu wissen, daß im 94. Jahr (1494) die würdigen Conventschwestern ... mit großem Fleiß, Treue und Arbeit geschrieben, rubriziert und gerissen haben die drei Antyphoner und neuen Gesangbücher, auch den neuen Sequentzer. Darum daß der Herr und König des himmlischen Jerusalem von uns allen in den heiligen sieben Zeichen desto mehr gelobt und verehrt möcht werden.’ Villingen Clares; Chronicle entry 1494, as quoted in Loes, ‘Villingen Klarissen,’ 61. I have been unable to locate this passage in the published edition of the Villingen Convent Chronicle. Drogin, Anathema! 14. Curiously, the Holy Spirit is not referenced in any of the scribal colophons I have compiled, although devotion to the Holy Spirit was important enough to have occasioned the copying of an officia for the ‘heiliggeist-offizium’ in St Katharina Nuremberg during the fifteenth century (NürnbergGNM 114263b, fols 1r-20v, a section copied by Cecilia Rotin; see Kurras, Die Handschriften des Germanischen Nationalmuseums Nürnberg, Bd. 1, T. 1, 125). Within the body of colophon texts, however, the term ‘geist’ is only used in its adjectival form ‘geistlichen,’ where it describes a particular individual, as in the phrase ‘geistlichen und andechtigen schwester Anna Lowlin’ (holy and devoted sister Anna Lowlin), a reference to the owner of SarnenBK Muri-Gries, Codex 65, a German translation of the Pseudo-Bonaventurian ‘Psalter Maius’ from 1515. (The manuscript is identified in Degler-Spengler, Das Klarissenkloster Gnadental in Basel 1289–1529, 61.) The terms ‘heiliggeist,’ ‘heilige geist,’ or the variant spelling ‘heilegeist’ (the latter used, for instance, by Walther von der Vogelweide) do not appear at all. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret Winkworth. See, for instance, where she reports a vision in which the Lord told her: ‘It is

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77 78

79

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Notes to pages 190–2

also the various kinds of useful employments, which are carried out for my honor and love, which draw me to abide and to dwell with delight among the children of men ...’ (232). And again, in the author’s vision the Lord offers direction to an illiterate person: ‘She should carry out all her work for my praise, with the same intention that she would have if she were praying ... And whenever she does this it will seem to me as if each of her works and labors were a dish which she is seasoning for me with some particularly tasty sauce’ (242). ‘Laus sit Deo,’ found for example in a colophon by Jutta of the Cistercian cloister of Alzey in a colophon from 1294; see OxfordBodl Laud. misc. 415, discussed in chapter 3, note 48. ‘Got sy lob (14)92,’ a concluding formula on KarlsruheLB S. Georgen pap. 84, fol. 53; the book was copied by Brother Thomas Finckh for abbess (‘maisterin’) Helena von Hürnheim of the Benedictine house at Urspring. The same scribe entered the Latin formula ‘ Laus deo’ and the date on fol. 55v. CMO #17899, CMO V/407. ‘Finito libro – laus sit Cliristo [sic: should read Christo]. Orate pro scriba – que scripsit hunc librum – nomen ejus Elysabeth.’ LondonBL Add. 16950, fol. 1, CMO #3734, CMO II/22. Ibid. ‘… geschriben und vollendt mit der hilff Gotes am obent des heiligen Erczengels sant Michaelis als man schreib nach Cristi unssers lieben herren gepurt 1500 und in dem 14 jar … pit got für die letzte schreiberin Appolonia Pollanderin … die ewigen seligkeit. Amen.’ PragUB XVI. A. 2, fol. 312v, cited here from CMO #1295, CMO I/160. Appolonia Pollanderin, a member of the Eger Clarissan convent, also copied at least one other manuscript; see below, note 96. ‘Das puch hat geschriben swester Adelheydis strosserin ... durch got.’ MünchenSB Cgm 65, CMO #253, CMO I/32. The colophon is cited in full at note 84, below. ‘Finito libro laus sit xpo. a.d. 1467 in die Agnetis feria 5. / Christi sit dilectrix Walburgis libri huius scriptrix.’ CMO #18541, CMO V/489, WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1400 (1524), a breviary. The manuscript index questions the surname Grashof, but the attribution is accepted in the secondary literature. The affiliation of Walburga with the Augustinian house of Steterburg is drawn from KrämerScriptores, who further identifies the scribe as the daughter of Windelbergis Grashof. ‘To the praise and glory of God is this book made and was perfected through ... Anna von Freyberg, abbess ... of Saint Stephan ... 1527.’ (Zuo lob vnd eer got ... ist diss buch gemacht vnd verordnet worden durch ... Anna von Freyberg äptissin ... zuo sant Steffen ... 1527.) AugsburgBO 27a, CMO#890, CMO I/114.

Notes to pages 193–4

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82 ‘czu lob vnd ere der höhsten trinitat ...’ says scribe Barbara Pfinczigin of Pillenreuth, who identifies herself as an Augustinian canoness of that house; see MünchenSB Clm 28638, fol. 405v; Neske, Katalog des lateinischen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 28615a–28786, 48, consulted via HKOL. 83 ‘Das puch Ist geordnet worden dem Allmechtigen got zu lob und ere und dem heilign sand Mertn durch die Ersam Fraw Magdalena Rosentalerin ...’ BudapestNM 219, fol. 1 (Missale Posoniense), Bartoniek, Codices Latini Medii Aevi, 194–5; see also CMO #12893, CMO IV/99. 84 ‘Das puch hat geschriben swester Adelheydis strosserin zu lob und eren got dem almehtigen und dem heiligen vater sant franciscen und zu trost dem covent [sic] leüterlich durch got und ist volent worden da man zalt von Christi gepurt 1444 Iar zu sant franciscen tag.’ MünchenSB Cgm 65, a copy of a German translation of Bonaventura Legenda maior. CMO#253, CMO I/32. 85 ‘Item Das puch hat geschriben Conrad Wernt. und ist Complirt und volbracht worden An dem heyligen Oberst Abent. Anno dni. 1462. Und ich Swester Margret Ortlibin habe das puch geczecht. ze lob ... got etc ... und unser heiligen muter sant ////// [erased] und meinem wirdigen Convent zu trost.’ Leitschuh and Fischer, Katalog der Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Bamberg, 616, and CMO #3126, CMO I/386, BambergSB Theol. 65 (Q. VI. 63), fol. 211v, a volume for the Nuremberg Klarissenkloster containing Das Buch von der Gemahelschaft Christi. 86 Found in a Clarissan book of hours: ‘Orate pro me sorore Angnese de mülheim.’ CMO #328, CMO I/43, BambergSB Lit. 110, fol. 45. KrämerHandschriftenerbe identifies this as a lectionary for the Freiburg Klarissen. See also Leitschuh and Fischer, Katalog der Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Bamberg 1: 257–8. 87 ‘Dit bock is geendeiget up sante Iurigens avent a.d. 1507. Biddet God vor de schriverschen myt enen Ave Maria. Dyt bock hort dem convente tom Lyliendale.’ CMO #19379, CMO VI/57; see also Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 376. Both citations are derived from Hoffmann, Verzeichniss der altdeutschen Handschriften der k. k. Hofbibliothek zu Wien, 356, item Nr. 365 (2985 N 627), but unfortunately, CMO inverts the shelf number and incorrectly cites the manuscript as Wien 2895. The manuscript in question proves to be WienÖNB 2985 [Nov. 627], a volume which contains ‘Das Spinnbuch’ and ‘Geistlische Medizin, Gespräch zwischen Weisem und Laien.’ While Goovaerts, ‘Spoelberck (Pierre),’ 189, had associated this ‘splendid manuscript of 1507’ with ‘Leliendael near Mechelen,’ Menhardt locates it in Stift Liliental in Hannover; see Verzeichnis der altdeutschen literarischen Handschriften der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 2:730. According to KrämerHandschriftenerbe, 1:322, this is

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90 91

92

93 94

95

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Notes to pages 194–6

the only surviving manuscript from that convent. (Note that the manuscript is unlikely to be associated with Lilienthal near Bremen, which was a men’s convent during this period.) ‘Dicz Puch ist ausgeschriben worden am Freytag vor Sant Michelstag der war an einem Suntag a.d. 1443 jar. Pitt Gott für die Schreyberin die dicz Puch geschriben hat.’ Found in a manuscript copied by Kunigund Niclasin, NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 43, CMO #3224, CMO I/400. ‘... Bittent got ouch trüwlich für mich arme ellende schryberin und Maria syn werde [=wërde/wirde] müter.’ WolfenbüttelHAB Blankenb. 274 (olim 108), fol. 138r. See Butzmann, Die Blankenburger Handschriften, 259. Wildsgeferd commissioned these books from professional scribe, Clara Hätzlerin; Edmunds, ‘The Life and Work of Clara Hätzlerin,’ 4. The book was copied by Loppa von Spiegel (de Speculo) for the Cologne Klarissen, and is now found as StockholmKB A 172. The citation of the colophon is taken from Oliver, ‘Worship of the Word,’ 108. ‘Dis bûoch wart vollenbraht vff sant Johannes abent des touffers in dem jare do man zalte nach Cristus geburte tusent vierhundert xxix iare. Bittent got fûor die schriberin, die dis bûoch mit irre hant geschriben hat, vnd fûor den priester, der es corrigieret und gebessert hat. 1429.’ LeipzigUB Ms 560, a manuscript for Straßburg, St Nicolaus in Undis. See Pensel, Verzeichnis, 31–4. ‘Sprecht der schreiberin ein Ave Maria, dem pintter auch so vil, und ein gutz iar.’ CMO #23598, CMO VI/516, MünchenSB Clm 23172, fol. 204. ‘Requiescat in pace und bitten got für die armen schriberinen das begert sy von gantzen hertzen. amen.’ CMO #2520, CMO I/317, EinsiedelnStiftsB 653 (final fol., recto), a manuscript copied by Katharina von Karpfen for the Villingen Klarissen. The same scribe also copied EinsiedelnSB 652 and EinsiedelnSB 654. ‘Item das puch ist volendt worden da man zalt 1400 und in dem 89 jar und hat geschriben Swester Margaret Zurlin und begert durch got ein Ave Maria.’ CMO #13032, CMO IV/119, Eichstätt St. Walb. Germ. 5, fol. 236v. ‘Amen. Dyss puch ist geschriben und volendt am abent des heiligen apostel und ewang. Mathei als man zalt nach Cristi gepurt unssers lieben herrn 1517 iar. Pytt got fur die schreiberyn swester Appolonia Polanderijn.’PragUB XVI. D. 18, fol. 171r, as quoted in CMO #1296, CMO I/160. Appolonia, a sister of Clarissen house in Eger, also copied PragUB XVI. A. 2; compare its colophon as cited above, note 78. According to Dolch, Katalog der deutschen handschriften der K.K. Öff. und universitätsbibliothek zu Prag, Teil 1, 117–18, three letters to Appolonia are known: PragUB Brst. 30a, 30b, and 30c (his items 194, 195, and 196). In the third of these, Clara Rapoltynn requests that Appolonia copy her a small book.

Notes to pages 196–7

297

97 ‘Bitten got für geistlich schwester cleophe von baden in dem closter zu gnodental sanct claren ordens die diss büchlin geschriben hat, a.d. 1516.’ CMO #2777, CMO I/348, St. Paul im LavanttalStiftsB 76/1 (olim XXV/1, 18). Cleopha was, as she states, a scribe in the Basel Clarissan convent of Gnadental. 98 ‘für die arme schrieberinen,’ EinsiedelnStiftsB 653 (1323); the passage is quoted in full in note 94. Sister Dorothea Leynacher likewise describes herself as ‘Dis arme swesterlin’; see FreiburgUB 490, fol. 197r. 99 ‘Ich armes und ellendes schriberlin ...’ AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 8o 3 (fol. 160v), a manuscript for Augsburg, St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries.’ This colophon is quoted in full below in note 107. 100 ‘Beg God for me, wicked scribe, Dorothea von Hertenstein’ (Bittend Gott für mich bösse schriberi Dorothea von Hertenstein), CMO #3521, CMO I/438, St GallenStiftsB 990, a. 1521, 1522 p. 75, 200. Dorothea von Hertenstein was a nun in St Katharina in St Gall. Villingen Clarissan scribe Katherina von Karpfen too described herself as bössen in EinsiedelnStiftsB 652 (1322) and in Einsiedeln StiftsB 654, fol. 150; see CMO #2519, CMO I/316. 101 Gnadental scribe Dorothea Schermanyn asks for ‘ein gůt selig end’ (a good holy end); SarnenBK Codex Muri-Gries 65; Bretscher-Gisiger and Gamper, Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Klöster Muri und Hermetschwil, 251–2; see also Bruckner, ‘Zum Problem der Frauenhandschrift im Mittelalter,’ 173, 181. Salzburg Petersfrauen Sister Katharina Puchlerin asks for ‘ewige frewd’ (eternal happiness) on fol. 151v of SalzburgEA b I 1; see Hayer et al., Die deutschen Handschriften des Mittelalters der Erzabtei St. Peter zu Salzburg, 124. Eger Clarissan Appolonia Pollanderin, who is especially rich in clichéd formulas, requests ‘ewigen seligkeit’ (eternal bliss); see PragUB XVI. A. 2., discussed above, note 78. 102 An Ave Maria is requested, for example, in seven manuscripts and both an Ave Maria and the Pater Noster are requested in at last three manuscripts. 103 ‘Mater Ide Lifmundis fecit hec scribi. anima eius requiescat in pace.’ TrierStadtB 1286/43, fol. 193r, CMO #246, CMO I/31. 104 ‘Oretis deum pro me unam angelicam salutationem vel Requiem eternam in xpi amore.’ WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 518a (566), CMO #249, CMO I/32. 105 ‘Wa sy ir gebet vff messenn / Dyß buchlins schryber nit vergessen.’ Stuttgart LB Brev. 54, fol. 57r, cited in Fiala and Irtenkauf, Die Handschriften der Württembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Reihe 1, Bd. 3, Codices breviarii, 74. They quote Gand Nr. 183 who describes the scribe, Margaret Vesslerin, as ‘likely ... a Wildberger beguine.’ This is a plausible interpretation; lines 5–8 of the 16-line poem identify her as coming from the little city within Wilperg and describe her as a ‘praiseworthy sister ... [who] wishes to affirm God’s power with all her sisters young and old’ (Ain werde schwester lobesan / zü

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112 113

Notes to pages 197–200 Wilperg in dem stetlin clan [ = klang (klingen)] / Wel [ = wille] sie bestetgen gottes gwalt / Mit all irn schwestern jüng und alt). My thanks to Sara Eigen Figal of Vanderbilt University for help with the translation. ‘O scriptrix cessa, quia manus tibi fessa. Scriptricis munus sit missa una.’ WilheringStiftsB 139, CMO #22687, CMO VI/418. ‘Ich armes und ellendes schriberlin beger umb gottes willen von ainem yeglichen menschen ain paternoster und ain avemaria wer in disem büchlin lisset.’ AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 8o 3, fol. 160v, Karin Schneider, Deutsche mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg: Die Signaturengruppen Cod. I.3 und Cod. III.1, 386, consulted via HKOL. This addition to the manuscript was made by Elisabeth Warrüßin, who also copied and signed MünchenSB Cgm 5234. ‘Omnes legentes in eo ob speciale ipsius anime refrigerium devoto corde dicant: Requiescat in pace. Amen.’ Sister Mechtildis Wolders in Wolfenbüttel HAB Helmst. 1178 (1286), fol. 52v, CMO #13618, CMO IV/194. ‘Pitt got fur mich aller liebsten swester.’ PragUB XVI. G. 24, fol. 323, CMO #325, CMO I/43; CMO’s reference to DH 148 should be to this manuscript, which is DH 146. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love, book III, chapter 9: ‘Dispensation of Divine Grace,’ 161. Further benefits of prayer (e.g., releasing sinners on earth from the stain of sin) are discussed later in the same chapter. For a broadranging discussion of the place of purgatory in the lives of religious women, particularly beguines, see Newman, ‘On the Threshold of the Dead.’ For a further discussion of visions of the release of souls from purgatory in response to prayer, including Adelheid Langmann’s vision of the release of ‘some 30,000 souls,’ see Lentes, ‘Counting Piety in the Late Middle Ages,’ here 57; for the portrayal in the sister-books of convent women as serving ‘to mitigate the suffering of souls in purgatory,’ see Anne Winston-Allen, ‘Rewriting Women’s History,’ 150. Burns, Colonial Habits. Susan Ramirez in her review of Burns’s Colonial Habits (543) summarizes Burns’s understanding of spiritual economy: ‘By spiritual economy Burns refers to the dense network of interests and investments that tied the sacred world inhabited by nuns to the material world beyond enclosure.’ German nuns too found themselves obligated to, dependent on, and responsible to the members of their broader urban community. I have discussed in chapter 2 the role that kinship played in the commissioning of books, for example, and take this sort of activity as a sign that women monastics were no more likely to shed their ties to the lay community than were their married sisters.

Notes to pages 200–3

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114 Sweetinburgh, The Role of the Hospital in Medieval England, 209. 115 Ibid., 210. 116 Sweetinburgh enumerates a threefold scheme of rewards that donors potentially could receive following the founding of a small hospital in their home town: (1) ‘their works of Christian charity provid[e] them with spiritual merit’; (2) ‘they might expect specific intercessory services, as James Terumber intended at his almshouse at Trowbridge, where the inmates prayed twice daily in the local parish church for the benefit of his soul’; and (3) ‘such a charitable act was also likely to bring prestige, enhancing the founder’s social standing among his fellow townsmen ...’ Ibid., 61. 117 Note, however, that I am not making claims about the medieval scribe’s personal belief or behavioural patterns. We moderns, with our assertions ‘Have a nice day,’ avow a respect for civility in our twenty-first century American culture, one that we can in the next instance disallow through nasty, backbiting meanness to one another. We put forth through the cliché an idealized version of what we wish our lives would be like. So too the scribal request for prayer might not always have accorded with a demeanour that made such prayer seem suitable or even possible. Yet the request itself shows an idealization of prayer as a kind of useful activity. We should not read into these statements much more than that they offer a glimpse of an ideal way of being in the world. Such sayings are not always going to be personal testaments of faith. Rather they are a depiction of an ideal, and ideal and lived reality are often far apart. But neither should we ignore this particular ideal which has, for the most part, become distant from our own. The ideal expressed in these monastic colophons – that work might be rewarded by prayer, and perhaps its corollary, that such prayer was efficacious – was an important reference point for anyone who inhabited a convent or who sought by other means to dedicate her life to prayer. 6. Conclusion 1 Holmes, ‘The Frate Dipintore,’ 83. 2 Ibid., 84. 3 On the social make-up of German guilds, and particularly of women’s place within such structures, see Wensky, Die Stellung der Frau in der stadtkölnischen Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter, esp. 61–186 and 302, and, ‘Women’s Guilds in Cologne in the Later Middle Ages’; Wiesner, esp. Working Women in Renaissance Germany, although it addresses a slightly later period. On the decline of working women’s involvement in craft guilds in Germany during the midfifteenth century, see Wiesner, ‘Guilds, Male Bonding and Women’s Work in

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Early Modern Germany’; Rosser, ‘Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town’; and Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Franz Irsigler’s work on Cologne is also important for understanding the overall shape of guild involvement, but places its focus on the mercantile; see Die wirtschaftliche Stellung der Stadt Köln im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. One should note that this finding for German-speaking lands is at odds with guild membership in the Low Countries; Douglas Farquhar has found that female membership in the painters’ guild in Bruge reached 12 per cent in 1454 and was almost 25 per cent by 1480. This information is cited in Carr, ‘Women Artists in the Middle Ages,’ 9. 4 S.R. Epstein sees the guild system as centrally focused on skills enhancement; he argues that this ‘might also explain why female guilds were so unusual. Women were mostly restricted to activities learned informally at home and formally in female religious houses and orphanages.’ See ‘Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe,’ esp. 687, n. 10. 5 Whereas for men, the dual allegiance to monastic order and to guild might seem a logical and even natural combination for the highly skilled artisan, for women, professional opportunities for training and access were less widely available. Studies of medieval craft guilds, especially the work of Margret Wensky and Martha Howell on Cologne (see n. 3), have demonstrated that women had access to a number of guilds, and indeed for silk weavers, yarn-makers, and spinners of gold thread women made up the majority of members. But as Wensky demonstrates, by the fifteenth century, women’s membership in guilds declined dramatically. Moreover, there is little in current scholarship to suggest that women involved in the book arts had ready access to guild membership; Wensky, for instance, mentions only one woman scribe (schryverse) who has been identified, although Brigitte Corley has found that Cologne guild regulations (23 April 1449) allow a widow to inherit responsibility for painters’ apprentices, suggesting women’s more active involvement in artistic pursuits; see Corley, Painting and Patronage in Cologne: 1300–1500, 299. If, as Epstein has argued, craft guilds were centrally instituted to formalize training through the apprenticeship system, then the model does not work well for the monastic scribes studied here. 6 Holmes, ‘The Fratre Dipintore,’ suggests another complementary perspective. As she points out for the painter within a Florentine environment, ‘the convent artist, in so far as this existed as a concept or a position, would thus have been a very conditional title, no longer applicable once the lay or religious artist had terminated a project, or if the monk or friar were assigned to another religious house’ (85). That same perspective likely held true for the scribe within a German monastic environment: once the commission was over, or

Notes to pages 204–6

301

once the scribe left the community, she lost whatever identity she had possessed as ‘scriptrix’ for the convent. A sister who died ‘out of office’ might be remembered not for her work in book production but solely for her role as a member of the community. 7 On sister-books and chronicles, see Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women; Garber, Feminine Figurae; Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, and ‘Rewriting Women’s History’; Ringler, Viten und Offenbarungsliteratur, esp. 4–15; Ruth Meyer’s introduction to the Katharinental sister-book, 44–52; and Langer, Mystische Erfahrung und spirituelle Theologie. For an important assessment of convent histories produced by German women after the start of the Reformation, see Woodford, Nuns as Historians, and ‘Women as Historians.’ References to individual sister-books are intended as citations of the editions listed in the bibliography unless otherwise noted. 8 Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 263–83. 9 Lewis explores the position of erudition within the sister-book narratives; see ibid., 263–83. 10 Meyer, Das Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, book 3, chapter 40, 1:100. 11‘Disu sälig swester gelernet nie latin noch schriben vnd schreib doch die vier passion in tútsch mit ir hant.’ Katharinental sister-book, 122. A slightly different translation can be found in Lindgren, ‘Environment and Spirituality of German Dominican Women, 1230–1370,’ 196. 12 ‘mit großem Fleiß, Treue und Arbeit geschrieben’; the entire inscription is quoted in chapter 5, note 70. 13 Hövelmann, ‘Das Emmerischer Süsternbuch,’ esp. 47. For an extensive discussion of scriptoria in women’s convents in the Windesheimer orbit, see Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries, 65–70 and passim. There appears to be sufficient difference in practice between German lands and Dutch-speaking areas to warrant further study. 14 Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 170. Unlike the Emmerich sisters who may have been producing books for market, the Ebstorf nuns were copying replacement books during the period of the convent’s reform. The reform accounts are edited in Borchling, ‘Litterarisches und geistiges Leben im Kloster Ebstorf am Ausgange des Mittelalters,’ 388–407; on Elisabeth von Nigendorp’s contributions, see 407. The long cycle of book copying at Ebstorf during this period of reform is also discussed in Hamburger, “Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium,’ 121. 15 ‘Arbeit’ or work is frequently cited as approbation, particularly by the Villingen Chronicle author. Such references to ‘work’ of all sorts seem to extend beyond the concept of labour integral to the Benedictine Rule. Instead, these activities are singled out for special praise in the lives of a few sisters, often because of the

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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Notes to pages 206–12

qualities (diligence, cheerfulness, prayerfulness, humility) that the sister in question brought to her endeavours. The discussion that follows is a close paraphrase of the account of Mezzi von Klingenberg’s life found in Töss sister-book, chapter 17, 45–6. ‘Ich far uff von der trurikait zv den fröden, und von der klag zv den obresten fröden,’ lines 19–20 of the spiritual biography of Mezzi von Klingenberg, ibid., 45. ‘Wir hand och fil nach alle únser gvtten bild von ir; fil túscher bücher hat sy gefrúmet.’ She was also able to translate the meaning of Latin texts: ‘Sy verstund ainest ales das man sang und las, und kund doch nit latin in túscht verston.’ Ibid. Garber, Feminine figurae, 71. The full narrative is found in the Unterlinden sister-book, 317–517, here 430–3. Tauler, ‘Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity,’ trans. Winkworth, 410. Ibid., 408. Unterlinden sisterbook, 411, as quoted in Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women, 274. The narrative on Adelheid of Apiaco (or Efflich/Efftich) is found in the Unterlinden sister-book, 410–12. Meyer, Das Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, Book 3, chapter 10, 1:69. On the ut-re-mi meditation, see Kathi Meyer, ‘Das “Amptbuch” des Johannes Meyer,’ 166–78. Note that Clara uses the hexachordal system of solfège associated with Guido d’Arezzo, in which six syllables, ut – re – mi – fa – sol – la, are used to show the placement of the half-step (which always falls between ‘mi’ and ‘fa’). This system was a standard component of educational treatises used in monasteries for chant instruction; it is utilized as part of the teaching apparatus in a short treatise at the front of a fourteenth-century Freiburg antiphonal intended for the Dominican nuns of Adelhausen, for instance; see FreiburgAM 11729 (Adelh. 1), fols 1r–3r, consulted via HMML 43563. Meyer, Das Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, Book 3, chapter 11, 1:69–71. Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 169–75; Ehrenschwendtner, ‘A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns, 123–32; and Loes, ‘Villingen Klarissen.’ Here, the twelfth-century scriptrix Diemud of Wessobrun is an exception; the listing of forty-five books that she was said to have copied is an unusual form of recognition for what was surely extraordinary effort. See Beach, Women as Scribes, 32–64, especially 40–5.

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Index of People

See pages xiii–xv for the conventions of spelling and citation practice adopted here. Note that authors and translators are listed in only the general index.

A.K. See Agnes, scribe of Erfurt Weissfrauen Abel, citizen of Wevelingen, book owner, 268n62 Adelhaidis, 42, 233n45 Adelhaid Vögtin, lay sister of Schönensteinbach, 32, 66, 140, 205, 230n27, 247n65, 274nn33, 35 Adelhait, lay sister and scribe for Schäftlarn, 273n32 Adelheid, librarian and scribe at Admont, 30, 229n22 Adelheid (Ayllet) van Lych, scribe for Lynnich, 112, 264n40 Adelheid von Efftich (Efflich), also known as Adelheid von Apiaco, scribe of Unterlinden, 208–9, 302n23 Adelheid von Smaehing, scribe of Altenhohenau, 80, 253n115 Adelheydis Strosserin, scribe for Nuremberg Klarissen, 193, 272n1, 294n79, 295n84

Adillindis, scribe for the Cistercians at Wald, 262n27 Agatha Haunsperger, abbess of Nonnberg Abbey, 29, 52, 173, 228–29n12, 237n7, 265n49, 274n35, 281n70, 284n8 Agnes, abbess and scribe of Quedlinburg, 247n62 Agnes, abbess of Seligenthal and Countess of Preyssing, 286n16 Agnes, scribe of Erfurt Weissfrauen, 280n65 Agnes Bützlin, Clarissan scribe, 137 Agnes (Angnese) de Mülheim, scribe for Freiburg Klarissen, 194, 295n86 Agnes de Tusselingen, abbess and book owner in Günterstal, 174, 285n11 Agnes Pabenbergerin, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 266n53 Agnes von Waldeke, scribe of Altenhohenau, 80, 253n115

346

Index of People

Agnese Lyell, English book owner, 162 Albertus Sartoris of Biberach, scribe for Kirchheim, 116 Albrecht, scribe for Veronica Welsserin, 59, 144, 243n44, 277n48 Aleith, scribe with Claricia for Ide Lifmundis of St Mathias in Trier, 143, 197, 276–7n45, 283–4n90 Alheydem Kalves, scribe for Steterberg while at Wienhausen, 66, 137, 148, 197, 278n55 Angela of Folino, author-collaborator, 53 Angesa von Mandorf, gave book to friend, 181, 290n48 Anna, copyist with Kunigund at St Katharina in Nuremberg, 78, 251–2n105 Anna Ammanin, scribe for Salzburg Petersfrauen, 63, 115, 152, 245– 6n57, 253n118, 256n134, 266n52, 267n56 Anna Ebin, prioress and scribe of Pillenreuth, 65, 70, 256n134 Anna Egingen, scribe, 232n41 Anna Flötzerin, ‘scriptrix superior’ of Gnadental, 42, 83, 234n51, 247n62, 274n35 Anna Gropengheter, scribe for Marienberg bei Boppard, 152, 273n31, 279–80n63 Anna Grumpenberger, scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 152, 280n63 Anna Jäck (Jäckin) of Inzigkofen, as prioress and scribe, 65, 70, 256n134, 266–7n55, 274n35; as translator 226n2, 263n35 Anna Kyttelers, scribe, 253n117

Anna Lowlin, owner of a book made for Gnadental in Basel, 62, 293n72 Anna Maria Stöcklin, scribe for Seligenthal, 230n26 Anna von Buchwald, reforming prioress of Preetz, 251n97 Anna von Freyberg, abbess and commissioner of Augsburg, St Stephanus, 294n81 Anna von Zymmern, 273n31 Anna Yngramin (Ingamin), illuminator, probably of the Bamberg Klarissankloster, 246n58, 258n143 Anna Zineris, prioress of Altomünster, 230n32 anonymous compiler of a manuscript for Schönensteinbach, 266n55 anonymous Corigirerin, St Katharina in Nuremberg, 86, 256n135 anonymous priest as proofreader, 86, 257n137 anonymous Schreiberin. See Schreiberin (unnamed) Apollonia Schröttlin (Schrötl, Schretl), abbess in Kirchheim, 143, 276n43 Appolonia Pollanderin (Polanderijn), scribe of Eger Clares, 196, 294n78, 296n96, 297n101 Barbara, scribe of Marienberg bei Boppard, 222n6 Barbara de Gaysberg, Clarissan book owner from Villingen, 232n41 Barbara Gewichtmacherin of St Katharina in Nuremberg, illuminator, 64, 78, 79, 149, 252nn107, 111, 278–9n57 Barbara Hubmerin, scribe for Salzburg (affiliation uncertain), 266n53

Index of People 347 Barbara Pfinczigin of Pillenreuth, 295n82 Barbara Rutzin, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 78 Barbara Schedlingerin, dean and book donor in Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg, 181 Barbara Stromer, scribe of Clarissen convent in Nuremberg, 184, 291n56 Barbara von Rottenburg, scribe of Dominican women’s convent at Reuthin, 256n134 Beatrix, sister and scribe of Inzigkofen, 267n55 Bernhard Brantz, scribe for his sister Dorothea, 56, 240n27 Berta (Berchtta) Beyttingerin of Kirchheim, book owner, 56, 240n28 Berthold Steinbuel, provost for Wiebrechtshausen, 259n5 Brigida Liespergin, ‘subscriptrix’ of Gnadental, 83, 234n51 Brother A, collaborator with Angela of Folino, 53 Catharina Ingoltin, scribe of Straßburg St Magdalena, 62, 245n54 Catharina von Barr of Rulle, 69, 233n48 Cecilia Rotin, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 293n72 Christian Hofhaymer, professional scribe for Nonnberg Abbey, 29 Christina Ebner, 238n15 Christina von Haltern of Rulle, 6, 42, 69–70, 222n7, 233n48 Clara Hätzlerin, scribe from Augsburg, 3, 55, 239n23, 296n90

Clara Paumgartner, scribe from St Katharina in Nuremberg, 233– 4n49 Clara Rapoltynn, commissioner of book from Eger Clarissan Appolonia Polanderin, 296n96 Clara von Ostren, founding member of Schönensteinbach, Sengerin, who corrected all the books, 175, 209–10, 285–6n15, 302n25 Claricia, scribe with Aleith for Ide Lifmundis of St Mathias in Trier, 143, 197, 276–7n45, 283–4n90 Cleopha (Cleophe) von Baden, scribe of Gnadental, 196, 232n41, 297n97 Conrad de Bondorff, book owner, 257n140, 275n40 Conrad Durren, rubricator for Unlingen, 84, 255n129 Conrad Erlacher, scribe for Kirchheim, 267n56 Conrad Wernt, scribe for Nuremberg Klarissenkloster, 295n85 Conradus Frackendorf, male scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 79, 264n39 Conradus Rossner, Klosterschreiber for St Maria und Theodor auf dem Kaulberg in Bamberg, 242n37 Cordula von Schönau, scribe at St Katharina in St Gall, 250n92 Cunradus, Frater, male scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 79 Diemud (Diemoth), abbess and scribe of Nonnberg, 230n32, 247n61, 261n19 Diemud (Diemudis), scribe of Wessobrunn, 230n32, 302n28

348

Index of People

Diemudis, lay sister and scribe of Admont, 273n32 Dorothea Brantz of Lichtenthal, book owner, 56, 240n27 Dorothea Deriethain (von Riethain), scribe of Medingen (1), 173, 244– 5n51, 246n58, 247n62, 285n10 Dorothea Kechetter of Lichtenthal, book owner, 56, 240n26 Dorothea Leynacher, scribe of Pillenreuth, 246n60, 297n98 Dorothea Schermann, scribe of Gnadental in Basel, 30, 62, 229–30n23, 297n101 Dorothea Schurstabin, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 114– 15, 265n49 Dorothea von Hertenstein, scribe of St Katharina in St Gall, 297n100 Druda de Elfenhusen, scribe, 47, 181, 235n56, 290n42 Ekbert von Schönau, collaborator with Elisabeth of Schönau, 53, 241n33 Elisabetha, thirteenth-century scribe of Seligenthal, 286n16, 294n76 Elisabetha Hyttlen (Hüttlen), scribe and cantrix for Seligenthal, 175, 275n35, 286n16 Elisabeth de Strabach, scribe at Görresbusch, 66, 247n64 Elisabeth Entzberg, scribe of Lichtenthal, 80, 253n116, 262n27 Elisabeth Grücklerin, book owner, 232n41 Elisabeth Muntpratin, scribe from St Katharina in St Gall, 58, 178, 242–3n40, 288–9n34 Elisabeth Muntpratin (the Younger), scribe of Inzigkofen, 243n40, 289n34

Elisabeth of Schönau, collaborator with Ekbert, 53, 57, 241n33 Elisabeth (Elizabeth) Schmidin, book owner, 84, 255n129 Elisabeth Schmidin, tertiary of Unlingen, 255n129 Elisabeth Schmidin von Oedenhusen, associated with Pfarrkirche von Schaffhusen, 255n129 Elisabeth (Elsbeth) Stagel, scribe, 267n56. See also general index: Stagel, Elisabeth (Elsbeth) Elisabeth (Elsbeth) Töpplin, scribe and illuminator at Convent of St Clare in Freiburg, 100, 246n58, 258n143, 261n19 Elisabeth von Cellinkon, scribe in Töss, 83 Elisabeth von Nigendorp, scribe of Ebstorf, 206, 301n14 Elisabeth von Temritz, abbess and miniaturist of Marienstern, 246n58, 247n62 Elisabeth von Winsen, scribe and illuminator at Medingen (3), 83, 189, 254n127 Elisabeth Waraus (Warrüßin), scribe and translator for St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’ in Augsburg, 85, 256n134, 267n55, 298n107; book owner, 267n55 Elizabeth Borchtorpe (Burgdorf), abbess of Wöltingerode, 150, 173, 279n59, 284n9 Elizabeth de Duba, scribe, 223n13 Elizabeth (Elyzabeth) Michlen, Klosterschreibers hausfraw, 59, 244n47 Elizabeth (Elyzabeth) Tunnein, scribe of Frauenthal, 145–7, 180, 277n50, 289n41

Index of People 349 Elpert Swertin, male scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 79, 135 Els, scribe of an unidentified Swabian women’s convent, 267n55 Elsbet Staibelin, book owner who received book as gift, 181, 290n48 Elselin de Bisel, scribe of Unterlinden, 114, 265n49 Endlin, scribe for St Leonhard in St Gall, 264n40 Erentrudis Schöttlin, scribe of Salzburg Petersfrauen, 253n118, 256n134, 266n53 Ermengarda, scribe of Lamspringe, 71, 249n80 Eufraxia Span, scribe at Inzigkofen under prioress Hilaria von Gumppenberg, 115, 266n50 Euphrosina (Eufrosina) Gärtnerin, librarian and scribe of Munich Püttrichhaus, 30, 229n22 Eva [Hisingin?] of Lichtenthal, book owner, 56, 240n29 Frau [unnamed] von Mulheim of Günterstal, book owner, 138, 272n22 Frediswindis de Malborch, scribe for Cologne Clarissan convent, 128, 269n72 Georgius Beyttinger, scribe for his sister Berta, 56, 240n28 Georgius Stromer, scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 115, 266n52 Gertrud Bungen, scribe of Wienhausen, 6, 222n5 Gertrude, recipient of a book and a letter from her uncle, 186–7, 241n33, 291n59

Gertrude (Gerdrudis), thirteenthcentury scribe of decretals, 187, 292n62 Gertrude von dem Brake, reforming prioress of Ebstorf, 73–4, 178, 289n35 Gertrud van dem Vorst, illuminator of the Cologne Klarissenkloster, 64, 181, 290n46 Gertrud von Büchel, illuminator of Rolandswerth, 85, 176, 177–8, 230n32, 246n58, 256n134, 258n143, 287n25 Gertrud von Hackeborn, abbess of Helfta, 228n12 Gertrud von Rheinfelden, scribe of Unterlinden, 208–9 Gertrude, fourteenth-century scribe of unknown nationality, 139, 273n28 Gisela (Gisle, Gysela) de Kerzenbroeck of Rulle, scribe and illuminator, 64, 67, 69–70, 83, 86–8, 189, 230n32, 247n66, 248n74, 252n107, 257n141, 292–3n68 Gredanna von Freyburg, reforming abbess of Urspring, 277n47 Guibert of Gembloux, collaborator with Hildegard of Bingen, 53 Guta (Gutta, Guda), scribe and illuminator of Schwarzenthann, 71, 86, 230n32, 249n80, 257n138 Gysela de Kerzenbroeck. See Gisela de Kerzenbroeck Gysela von Beysten, scribe of Bersenbrück, 6 Hafftner, G., scribe from Laibach [Ljubljana], Slovenia, v Hans Burgkmair, artist for Veronica Welsserin, 243n44

350

Index of People

Hans Holbein the Elder, artist for Veronica Welsserin, 243n44 Hans (Johannes) Seybolt. See Johannes Seybolt Hans Wildsgeferd, commissioner of book for Salzburg Petersfrauen, 55, 194, 296n90 Heinrich, priest of Schimscheim, book owner, 47, 235n57, 265n48 Heinrich Gärtner, provost who leaves money for books for Isenhagen, 33, 174, 285n13 Heinrich Höcher, scribe for Eppenberg, 59 Heinrich Krauter, author and scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 55 Helena von Hürnheim, ‘Maisterin’ of Urspring and dedicatee, 137, 143, 277nn46–7, 294n75 Henry of Nördlingen, 11–12, 53, 55, 223n18, 238n15, 239n21 Herrad von Landsberg, 230n32 Hildegard of Bingen, collaborator with Guibert of Gembloux, 53 Hilaria von Gumppenberg, prioress of Inzigkofen, 266n50 Iacobi de Duzenberg, book owner, 47, 181, 235n56 Ide Lifmundis, convent ‘Mater’ in St Mathias in Trier, 143, 197, 276– 7n45, 283n90, 297n103 Iohansen, brother and scribe for Frau von Mulheim of Günterstal, 138, 272n22 Ita von Hoehenfels, Oetenbach Dominican, 83, 171, 180, 258n143, 289n40 Jakob Wolgmuet, professional scribe for Nonnberg, 29

Jodoc. Schussler, book owner, 232n41 Johannes Brokelden, scribe for Augustinian canonesses in Dorstadt, 268n62 Johannes Burgtor, Klosterschreiber, 58 Johannes de Bacheym, cantor of Benedictine men’s house of St Pantaleon, Cologne, book owner, 235n58 Johannes Felix, scribe for Pforzheim, 60, 244n49 Johannes Hising, scribe for his sister Eva, 56, 240n29 Johannes Höfflin, lector, 52, 237n9 Johannes K. (surname otherwise unknown) of Bopfingen, scribe for Kirchheim, 266n53 Johannes Kreutzburg, Klosterschreiber for St Cyriacus in Erfurt, 242n37 Johannes Kursi, scribe of Soeflingen Clares and Urspring Benedictines, 114, 138, 265n49, 272n24 Johannes Liebhardus, scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 267n56 Johannes Meyer, scribe, 52, 55, 248n13. See also general index: Meyer, Johannes Johannes Rutiner (Rütiner, Ruthineri), perhaps identical to ‘Iohansen,’ scribe for Frau von Mulheim in St Gall, 272n22 Johannes Saltkotten, scribe at Soest, 239n16 Johannes Seybolt, Klosterschreiber for Seligenthal in Landshut, 52, 59, 242n37, 244n48 Johannes Strentzlin, scribe for Agnes de Tusselingen, abbess in Günterstal, 174, 285n11

Index of People 351 Johannes Swarcz, confessor and rubricator for Adelhausen, 52, 84, 238n11, 255n130 Johannes Tretter, scribe for St Katharina in Nuremberg, 60, 244n50 Johannes Uelin (Velin) of Bebenhusen, scribe for sisters Katherina and Margareta, 240n28 Johannes Würzburger, chaplain of Sonnenburg, 52, 237n8 Jörg Roggenburg, book owner, 55 Jutta Alfter, Cologne Klarissen, commissioner of a book from Loppa de Speculo, 194–5, 296n91 Jutta of Alzey, scribe for Heinrich, priest of Schimeschem, 47, 66, 114, 235n57, 247n63, 265n48, 294n74 Jutta, wife of scribe Rudgerus at Seligenthal, 59, 244n46 K.N. See Kunigund Niclasin Kaspar Waldner, donor of books to ‘seiner fraun,’ 56 Katerina de Westhouen, scribe, 253n117 Katerina Regis, scribe, 253n117 Katharina Ber of Gnadental, book owner, 56 Katharina de Disyngen, scribe of Marienberg bei Boppard, 222n6 Katharina Hoffmann (Katherin Hofmenin), abbess and scribe of the Nuremberg Clares, 147–8, 247n62, 274n35, 278n52 Katharina Pschachlin, scribe of Salzburg Petersfrauen, 256n134, 268n62 Katharina (Barbara) Püchlerin, scribe of Salzburg Petersfrauen, 297n101

Katharina Tucherin, lay sister and scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 112, 140, 264–5n42, 274n34 Katharina Velin of Hedingen, book owner, 240n28 Katharina von Grolle, scribe for Herzebrock, 267n56 Katharina von Karpfen, scribe for Villingen Klarissen, 195, 296n94, 297n100 Katherina de Brugg, scribe, 230n32 Klara Keiperin, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 79, 252–3n112 Klara Ridlerin, scribe St Katharina in Nuremberg, 79 Konrad von Rennenberg, book owner, 235n58 Kunigund Holzschuherin, corrector at St Katharina in Nuremberg, 86, 256n136 Kunigund Niclasin, librarian and scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 3, 77–9, 86, 112, 135, 251n104, 252–3n112, 256n135, 264n39, 296n88 Kunigund (Clos) Schreiberin, of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 78, 152, 251–2n105, 267n55, 280n64 Kunigunde von Fryberg, dedicatee, 273n31; employer of scribe Johannes Kursi, 272n24 Laurence of Weda (Laurentius de Weda), scribe for Engelport an der Mosel, 134–5, 271n10 Leonhard Waizhofer, professional scribe for Nonnberg Abbey, 29 Leonhard Zeilhofer, professional scribe for Nonnberg Abbey, 29 Leukardis of Mallerstorf, scribe, 230n32

352

Index of People

Loppa von Spiegel (de Speculo) of Cologne, illuminator, 3, 64, 85, 128, 172, 181, 194–5, 256n134, 258n143, 269n72, 290n45, 296n91 Ludwig Ber, donor of books to his sister Katharina Ber in Gnadental, 56 Lysa of Ermiberch, prioress of Engelport an der Mosel, commissioner of a manuscript, 134–5, 271n10 Magdalena Becht, subprioress and scribe of Esslingen-Weiler, 65, 256n134 Magdalena Kremer, reformer at Kirchheim unter Teck with multiple offices including scriptrix, 179, 289n37 Magdalena Rosentalerin, commissioner of book for parish church in Pressburg (Slovakia), 295n83 Magdalena Topplerin, scribe and subprioress for Medingen (1), 256n134 Mahthilt (Mathilt) de Nifen, lay sister and scribe of Zweifalten, 273n32 Margareta, scribe of Marienberg bei Boppard, 6, 222n6 Margareta de Brunecke, abbess in Frauenthal, 145–6, 277n50 Margareta Imhoff, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 78, 79, 252n108 Margareta Kartäuserin, reformer and scribe, 58, 77–9, 149–50, 179, 251n101, 251–2nn103–5, 252nn108, 110, 279n56, 289n38 Margareta Kartäuserin, false attribution to, 149–50, 279n56, 279– 80n57 Margareta Läschin of Hedingen, book owner, 240n28

Margareta Merin, reformer and scribe for Colmar, Sylo, and Engelport zu Gebweiler, 137, 271n17 Margareta of Merode. See Margaret Scheiffartz de Meirrode Margareta Scheurerin, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 79 Margareta (Margret) Schleicher, prioress and scribe of Medingen (1), 141–2, 173, 244–5n51, 247n62, 275n39, 285n10 Margaret Finkin, teacher, 227n2 Margaretha dicta Regula, scribe of Lichtenthal, 3, 54, 80, 114, 253n116, 256n134, 262n27 Margaretha of Meerbeke, scribe, 43, 234n52 Margaretha Rensing, lay sister and scribe of Herzebrock, 273n32 Margaretha Trutwyn, scribe of Esslingen-Weiler, 256n134 Margaret of Zurich, sister of Töss who experienced a vision, 206 Margaret Scheiffartz de Meirrode, illuminator of Schillingskapellen, 83, 189, 230n32, 246n58, 254n126, 258n143, 293n66 Margaret Vesslerin, scribe and Wilberger beguine, 197, 297–8n105 Margaret von Klingenberg, illuminator of Töss. See Mezzi von Klingenberg Margaret (Margaretha) von Schonbergk (Schönberg), left-handed scribe for Eger Clarissans, 148, 185, 278n54 Margaret Zurlin, sister and scribe for unknown convent, 195, 296n95 Margret Ortlibin, commissioner of book for Nuremberg Klarissenkloster, 193, 295n85

Index of People 353 Margret Schreiberin, wife of ‘our scribe Johannes,’ 59, 244n48 Marie Bruckerin, ‘monialis’ and scribe, 247n64 Martha Peurlin, scribe of Heiligen Grab, Bamberg, 137 Martinus Vissegradensis, confessor for St George in Prague, 52, 237– 8n10 Mathilt de Nifen. See Mahthilt de Nifen Mechthilt of Wangen, scribe of Katharinental, 205 Mechtildis Wolders, ‘soror’ and scribe, 298n108 Mechtild von Niendorf, Ebstorf reformer who travelled to Lüne with scriptrix, 179 Meliora ab Greudt (von Grüt), abbess of Hermetschwil, book commissioner, 143, 180, 276n42, 285n9, 289n41 Mezzi von Klingenberg, cantrix and scribe of Töss, 85, 174–5, 206–7, 258n143, 285n14, 302nn16–18 Michael de Löwenburg, scribe for Himmelskron, 60 Michael Mürer, scribe for Lichtenthal, 268n62 Odilia Sengerin, scribe and cantrix of Lichtenthal, 274–5n35 Oetenbach nun, illuminator and scribe who joined the community with Ita von Hoehenfels, 83, 171, 180, 258n143, 289n40 Oetenbach nun, painter who joined the community with Ita von Hoehenfels, 289n40 Oetenbach nun, scribe from within the community at the time of Ita

von Hoehenfels, 83, 171, 180, 289n40 Ottilia Schede, Clarissan scribe, 272n21 Ottilia von Absberg, abbess of Niedermünster and book owner, 63 Otto II Chalchosperger, abbot and book owner, 181, 235n58 ‘Peregrinus scriptor’ of Oelinghausen, 42, 51, 237n5 ‘pintter,’ unnamed, 195, 296n93 priest, unnamed, corrector for St Nicolaus in Undis, 86, 141, 195, 257n137, 275n37, 296n92 Radulphus, scribe with multiple production tasks, 87, 258n144 Ranerius (Maschis of Rimini), Italian scribe with multiple production tasks, 87–8, 258n145 Regilindis, abbess and scribe of Hohenburg, 246n61 Regula Keller, scribe of St Katharina in St Gall, 250n92 Relindis, abbess and scribe of Hohenburg, 246n61 Roderic Olacthnain, Irish scribe with multiple production tasks, 88, 258n146 Rudgerus, scribe of Seligenthal, 59, 244n46 S.A.A. See Anna Ammanin Schreiberin (unnamed), 4, 86, 197, 205, 222n8, 230–1n32, 233n46, 257n137, 267n55, 296n93, 297n99 Schreiberin (unnamed) of Straßburg, St Nicolaus in Undis, 86, 141, 195, 275n37, 296n92

354

Index of People

scribe, female (unnamed) Cistercian nun, 42 scribe, female (unnamed) nun of St Katharina in St Gall, 58, 178, 242n40, 288n34 scribe, female (unnamed) of Emmerich, 205–6 scribe, female (unnamed) of Niedermünster, 230–1n32 scribe, female (unnamed) of Venice, 230–1n32 scribe, female (unnamed) of Villingen, 205 scribe, female (unnamed) of Wilhering, 197 scribe, female (unnamed) prioress of Koblenz, 274n35 scribe, female (unnamed) sister at Ebstorf, 206 scribe, female (unnamed) sister of Liliental, 295–6n87 scribe, female (unnamed), Swabian, 267n55 scribe, male (unnamed) monk who copied for his niece Gertrude, 186–7, 291n59 scribe, male (unnamed) of Elbing, 187 scribe, male (unnamed) of Hildesheim, 70 Sebastian Fabri, 52, 223n13, 238n14 Sibilla (Sibylla) of Bondorff (15th c.), illuminator from the Freiburg Klarissenkloster, 86, 143, 246n58, 256n134, 257n140, 258n143, 261n19, 275–6n40 Sigmund Pütterich, scribe for St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’ in Augsburg, 267n55 Sintramus, collaborator with Guta, 249n80

Sophia, 230n32 Sophie, daughter of Count Mansfeld, scribe and illuminator at Helfta, 86 Stephan May of Ulm, scribe for Kirchheim and Medingen (1), 60, 244n51 Susanna of Falckenstein, abbess of the Freiburg Klarissenkloster, book commissioner, 143, 257n140, 275– 6n40 Susanna Weglyn, scribe of Soeflingen, 114, 265n49 Tatheo Olacthnain, book owner, 88, 258n146 Tecla, teacher, 226n2 Thomas Finck (Finckh), author and scribe for Urspring, 137, 143, 277n46, 294n75 Thomas Jud von Bruckberg, book owner, 237n6, 244n48 Thomas Ritter von Hall, scribe of Maihingen and of Kirchheim, 60, 245n52 Thomas Schwartz, parson of Dirgenheim and copyist for Kirchheim, 143, 276n43 Tylemann de Bavenstede, provost at Medingen (3), 83, 189, 254n127 Udalricus, chaplain and scribe of Nonnberg 29, 52, 115, 237n7, 265–6n49 Ulrich II of Königstein, founder of Engelthal who required book production of the nuns, 179 Ulrich von Hohen-Rechberg, dean at Augsburg Cathedral and book owner, 102, 261n23 Ursula Geiselherin, scribe of St Katharina in Nuremberg, 79, 266n53

Index of People 355 Ursula Haider, reforming abbess of Villingen, 205 Ursula Kollerin, scribe of the Nuremberg Klarissans, 184, 223n13, 291n56 Verena von Stuben, abbess of Sonnenburg, 52, 237n8 Veronica Welsserin, book owner of St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries,’ 59, 144, 243n44, 277n48 Walburga Grashof, scribe of Steterburg, 191, 284n90, 294n80

Werner Haselbeck, book owner, 103 Wilhelm Kechetter (Kecheller) of Herrenalb, scribe for his sister Dorothea, 56, 240n26 Wöltingerode nun, probable copyist from purchased manuscript, 150–1 Yolanda von Vianden, possible identity for Yoles Viennensis, 276n44 Yoles Viennensis, prioress and scribe of Frauenthal (Valle St Marie), 143, 247n62, 276n44

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Index of Convents

Convents are listed by name when the convent is widely known; otherwise they are listed first by city and then by convent name or order. Thus, there are listings for the Püttrichhaus and for Nonnberg Abbey, whereas the Nuremberg Klarissankloster is identified by city first since there are so many Clarissan houses. The letter t following a page number denotes a table. See pages xiii–xv for other conventions of spelling and citation practice adopted here.

Adelhausen, Freiburg im Breisgau, 10, 52, 55, 84, 218, 238nn11, 13, 242n38, 255n130, 259n3, 260n12, 261n17, 302n25 Admont, 30, 31, 128, 222n8, 273n32 Altenhohenau, 80, 114, 218, 264n37, 265n49, 291n55 Althaldensleben, Cicstercians, 268n62 Altomünster (Altmünster), 230n32 Alzey, St Spiritus, 47, 66, 114, 235n57, 247n63, 265n48, 294n74 Amtenhausen, 58 Augsburg, St Katharina 'auf dem Gries,' 59, 85, 144, 218, 243n44, 256n134, 267n55, 277nn48–9, 297n99 Augsburg, St Stephanus, 102, 261n23, 294n81

Bamberg Klarissenkloster, 218, 246n58, 258n143 Bassum, 182 Bebenhusen (men), 240n28 Benediktbeuern (men), 245n56 Bersenbrück, 6 Biberach (men), 116 Bickenkloster in Villingen. See Villingen Böddeken, 241n35 Bopfingen (men), 266n53 Boppard. See Marienberg bei Boppard Bornheim, 189, 254n126 Brunnepe, 226n2 Brunshausen, 182 Buxtehude, Altkloster, 182 Colmar. See Unterlinden in Colmar

358

Index of Convents

Cologne Klarissenkloster, 3, 85, 181, 218, 235n58, 246n58, 256n134, 258n143, 269n72, 296n91 Cologne Weiherkloster, 25, 229n19 Cologne Weissfrauen, 218 Dorstadt, Augustinian canonesses, 268n62 Ebstorf, 12, 20, 59, 73–4, 118, 123, 171, 178, 179, 206, 209, 211, 224n22, 226n2, 250n86, 268n63, 289nn35, 36, 301n14 Eger Clarissan convent, 278n54, 294n78, 296n96, 297n101 Elbing Brigittine convent, 187 Ellerbach (men), 33 Emmerich, 205–6, 301nn13–14 Engelberg in Switzerland, 262–3n31 Engelport an der Mosel, 134–5, 271n10 Engelport zu Gebweiler, 137 Engelthal [KrämerHandschriftenerbe 1:208 cites this as ‘Engelt(h)al (2)’], 179 Eppenberg (men), 59, 243n43 Erfurt, Convent of the Holy Cross, 262n28 Erfurt, Weissfrauen, 280n65 Essen, 10, 103 Esslingen-Weiler, 36, 65, 69, 218, 231n36, 256n134 Ewig (men), 58, 241n35 Frauenalb, 218 Frauenaurach, 291n55 Frauenthal (Valle St Marie, Marienthal), 143, 145–6, 180, 247n62, 276n44, 277n50

Freiburg im Breisgau, Augustinian (men), 170–1, 284n5 Freiburg im Breisgau, Dominican women’s convents, 10, 55, 98, 218, 221n1, 242n38, 256n132, 259n3, 263n33. See also Adelhausen, Freiburg im Breisgau; Freiburg im Breisgau, St Katharina; Freiburg im Breisgau, St Maria Magdalena Freiburg im Breisgau, Klarissenkloster, 100, 143, 218, 246n58, 256n134, 157n140, 258n143, 263n33, 275–6n40, 295n86 Freiburg im Breisgau, St Katharina, 218 Freiburg im Breisgau, St Maria Magdalena, 85, 242n38, 255– 6n133, 258n143 Frose, 251n97 Gandersheim (S. Marien), 127t Gaukirchkloster, 176, 287n23 Gernrode, 227n2, 251n97 Gertrudenberg, Osnabrück, 218 Gnadental, Basel, 30, 42, 56, 62, 83, 218, 232n41, 234n51, 247n62, 274n35, 293n72, 297nn97, 101 Gnadenzell, 26, 229n15 Görresbusch, 66 Gotteszell, 291n55 Grünenberg, 59, 243n43 Günterstal [KrämerHandschriftenerbe 1:307 cites this as ‘Günterst(h)al’], 127t, 138, 174, 264n37, 272n22, 285n11 Hedingen, 240n28 Heggbach, 266n50

Index of Convents 359 Heiligen Grab, Bamberg, 137, 218, 242n38, 272n20 Heiligen Kreuz, Regensburg, 69, 182, 218 Helfta, 86, 103, 108, 119, 199, 211, 228–9n12, 293–4n73 Hermetschwil in Switzerland, 143, 180, 276n42, 285n9 Herrenalb (men), 56, 240nn26–7, 242n38 Herzebrock, 70, 218, 267n56, 273n32 Himmelkron (Bamberg diocese), 182, 290n50 Himmelskron (Worms diocese), 60 Hohenburg, 246n61 Inzigkofen, 25, 36, 58, 70, 76, 138, 178, 181, 219, 226n2, 231n39, 242nn39–40, 256n134, 266n50, 266–7n55, 274n35, 288–9n34, 290n44 Isenhagen [the nuns’ foundation, discussed in MatrixMonasticon, is omitted from KrämerHandschriftenerbe], 33, 174–5, 182, 285n13, 290n49 Katharinenkloster. See St Katharina in Nuremberg Katharinental bei Diessenhofen, Thurgau, 205, 224–5n25, 301n11 Kentrup (Kentrop), 80, 219, 271n12 Kirchheim (Kirchheim am Ries; KrämerHandschriftenerbe 1:393–6 cites this convent as ‘Kirchheim (1)’ to distinguish it from Kirchheim unter Teck), xiv, 10, 56, 60, 116, 127t, 143, 219, 223n14,

240n28, 245n52, 263n34, 264n37, 266n53, 267nn56, 57, 276n43 Kirchheim unter Teck (Krämer’s ‘Kirchheim (2)’), xiv, 179, 223n14, 289n37 Klingental in Basel, 219 Klosterneuburg, 56, 240–1n31 Koblenz Cistercians, 176, 177–8, 287n25 Koblenz [Confluencie], unidentified convent, 274n35 Kochel, Benedictines, 127t Lamspringe, 25, 71, 249n80 Langendorf, St Marien, 117, 287n24 Leliendael near Mechelen, 295–6n87 Lichtenthal (Lucida Vallis), BadenBaden, 3, 10, 54, 56, 69, 80, 114, 219, 240nn26, 29, 242n38, 253n116, 356n134, 258n1, 262n27, 268n62, 274–5n35 Liliental (Lilienthal) in Hannover, 295–6n87 Lilienthal (men) near Bremen [KrämerHandschriftenerbe 1:241 cites as ‘Falkenhagen’], 295–6n87 Lippoldsberg, Benedictines, 127t Lüne, 59, 179, 182, 289n36 Lüttich (men), 281n72 Lynnich (Linnich), 112, 264n40 Maihingen, 60, 245n52 Marienberg bei Boppard (St Eucharius), 6, 12, 219, 222n6, 224n21, 226n2, 273n31, 279–80n63 Marienrode, 177 Marienstern, 246n58, 247n62 Marienthal. See Frauenthal

360

Index of Convents

Medingen (1) (Dominicans), xiv, 36, 45, 55, 60, 69, 141, 219, 223n18, 231n36, 244–5n51, 246n58, 247n62, 256n134, 275n39, 285n10 Medingen (2) (Dominicans), xiv, 219, 231n36, 285n10 Medingen (3) (Cistercians), xiv, 67, 69, 74, 83, 189, 219, 231, 234– 5n55, 239–40nn24–5, 248n67, 254n127, 263n34 Mont-Dieu, Carthusian (men), 112 Monte Cassino (men), 283n79 Munich Püttrichhaus. See Püttrichhaus Münster Liebsfrauenstift, 25 Neuenwalde, 182, 290n51 Niedermünster bei Regensburg, 63, 230–1n32, 245n56 Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg, 10, 27, 29, 30, 52, 115, 173, 181, 183, 184, 211, 219, 221n1, 228–9n12, 229nn17, 20, 230n32, 237n7, 246–7n61, 255n132, 259n3, 261nn19, 22, 263n33, 265–6n49, 274n35, 281n70, 285n8, 290n53 Nonnenwerth. See Rolandswerth Nuremberg Klarissankloster, 36, 49, 52, 69, 184, 196, 219, 223n13, 238n14, 247n62, 259n4, 272n21, 274n35, 278n52, 291n56, 295n85 Oelinghausen, 42, 51, 237n5 Oetenbach, 58, 67, 69, 74, 85, 171, 180, 184, 219, 258n143, 289n40, 290n54 Paderborn Cistercians. See Gaukirchkloster Paradiese near Soest, 181, 235n56

Pforzheim, 26, 60 Pillenreuth, 65, 70, 219, 242n39, 256n134, 295n82 Preetz, 151n97 Püttrichhaus, Munich, 30, 36, 63, 219, 245n56 Quedlinburg, 219, 247n62 Reuthin (Dominicans), 69, 220, 241n35, 256n134 Rolandswerth, also known as Nonnenwerth, 85, 176, 220, 230n32, 246n58, 256n134, 258n143, 287n25 Rulle, 6, 42, 64, 69–70, 86–7, 220, 222n7, 233n48 Rüthen near Soest, Schwestern, 58, 241n35 Salzburg Petersfrauen, 36, 47, 49, 55, 63, 69, 80, 115, 181, 194, 196, 220, 235n58, 245–6n57, 253n118, 256n134, 266nn52–3, 267n56, 268n62, 280n65, 290n43, 297n101 Salzburg, St Peter’s Abbey (men), 27, 261n22. See also Salzburg Petersfrauen Santa Maria della Colomba (men), 283n83 Schäftlarn, 128, 222n8, 247n61, 273n32 Schillingskapellen, 83, 189, 230n32, 246n58, 254n126, 258n143, 292n66 Schlettstadt Dominikanerinnen. See Sylo Schönensteinbach, 32, 58, 66, 69, 77, 140, 175, 179, 209–10, 220,

Index of Convents 361 242n38, 266n55, 274n35, 282n74, 285–6n15 Seligenthal, Landshut, 52, 59, 175, 220, 223n13, 230n26, 242n37, 244nn6–48, 275n35, 286n16, 294n76 Soeflingen (Söflingen) Clares, 114, 138, 220, 266n49, 272n24 Soest Sisterhouse, 239n16 Sonnenburg Abbey, 52, 237n8 St Agnes in Straßburg (Strasbourg), 242n38 St Alban’s monastery, 283n84 St Caecilien in Cologne, 220 St Cyriacus in Erfurt, 242n37 St Eucharius in Boppard. See Marienberg bei Boppard St Gall, monastery of (men), 72–3, 249n82, 272n22, 291n60 St George in Prague, 52 St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’ in Augsburg. See Augsburg, St Katharina ‘auf dem Gries’ St Katharina in Nuremberg (Katharinenkloster), 3, 10, 26, 36, 49, 55, 58, 60, 69, 76, 77–80, 86, 105, 109– 10, 112, 114–15, 127t, 140, 149–50, 172, 175, 179, 220, 222n8, 229n16, 231n39, 233–4n49, 242nn38–9, 244n50, 256n134, 265nn40, 49, 266n53, 267nn55–6, 268n62, 274n34, 278–9nn56–7, 280n63, 282n74, 290–1n55, 293n72 St Katharina in St Gall, 58, 74, 127t, 138, 178, 196, 220, 242n39, 242– 3n40, 250n92, 262n27, 288–9n34, 291n55, 297n100 St Leonhard in St Gall, 264n40 St Margaretha in Straßburg (Strasbourg), 242n38

St Maria Magdalena in Freiburg im Breisgau, 85, 242n38, 255–6n133, 258n143 St Maria Magdalena in Hildesheim, 70, 248–9n78 St Maria Magdalena in Straßburg (Strasbourg), 62 St Maria und Theodor auf dem Kaulberg in Bamberg, 242n37 St Mathias in Trier, 197, 276–7n45 St Nicolaus in Undis, Straßburg (Strasbourg), 86, 141, 296n92 St Pantaleon (men), Cologne, 235n58 St Walburg, Eichstätt, 226n1 Steterburg (Stederborch), 66, 137, 148, 191, 197, 220, 223n13, 284n90, 294n80 Stift Liliental (Lilienthal) in Hannover. See Liliental (Lilienthal) in Hannover Straßburg, St Clara auf dem rossmarkt, 246n58 Sylo (Silo), Schlettstadt, 26, 137, 271n17 Töss (Töß), 69, 85, 128, 174–5, 206– 7, 220, 224–5n25, 258n143, 302nn16–18 Tulln, 156, 282n74 unidentified Swabian women’s convent, 267n55 Unlingen Tertiaries, 84, 255n129 Unterlinden in Colmar, 10, 36, 74, 114, 137, 208–9, 211, 220, 231n36, 250n88, 265n49, 302nn19, 22–3 Urspring, 33, 137, 138, 143, 220, 272n24, 277nn46–7, 294n75

362

Index of Convents

Valle St Marie. See Frauenthal (Valle St Marie, Marienthal) Villingen (Bickenkloster), 36, 84, 138, 205, 211, 220, 224–5n25, 232n41, 242n39, 255n131, 293nn70–1, 296n94, 297nn100–1, 301n15 Wald, 220, 262n27 Weissfrauenkloster in Mainz, 232n43 Wessobrunn, 127t, 128, 222n8, 230n32, 302n28 Wiebrechtshausen near Mainz, 259n5 Wienhausen, 6, 127t, 137, 148, 177, 220, 222n5, 288n33

Wildberger (Wilperg) beguinage, 197, 298–9n105 Wilhering (men), 197, 260n13, 298n106 Willebadessen, 176, 287n23 Wislikofen in Aargau (men), 58, 242n36 Wöltingerode, 10, 69, 150–1, 173, 220, 224n22, 262–3n31, 279nn59–62, 284–5n9 Wonnenstein, 127t Xanten, St Agnes, 287n26 Zweifalten (men), 274n32

Index of Manuscripts

Please see pages xiii–xv for the conventions of spelling and citation practice adopted here.

Aachen, private collection, Liber usualis, 233n46 Abtei Muri-Gries n. 23, 276n42, 285n9 AugsburgBO 27a, 294n81 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. II. 1. 2° 43, 245n52 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2° 7, 271n13 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2° 8, 264n39 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2° 12, 272n20 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2° 17, 245n52 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2° 18, 245n52 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 2° 37, 245n52 AugsburgUB Oett. Wall. III. 1. 2° 43, 245n52 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 4° 8, 266n53

AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 4° 33, 267n57 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 8° 1, 267n56 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 8° 3, 297n99, 298n107 AugsburgUB Oett.-Wall. III. 1. 8° 35, 240n28 BambergMKB Man. 29, 291n56 BambergSB Hist. 146, 247n62, 278n52 BambergSB Hist. 148, 247n62, 278nn52–3 BamburgSB Hist. 154, 251nn103–4 BambergSB Lit. 110, 295n86 BambergSB Msc. Patr. 5 (B.II.5), 253n121 BambergSB Patr. 58 (B V 43), 223n13, 291n56 BambergSB Theol. 65 (Q. VI. 63), 295n85 BaselStA St. Albanurkunde 326, 234n51

364

Index of Manuscripts

Berkeley, UC-Berkeley, Robbins Ms 105, 292n62 BerlinSBPK Germ. 2° 79, 266–7n55 BerlinSBPK Germ. 2° 1041, 266– 7n55 BerlinSBPK Germ. 2° 1259 (Phill. 1152), 265n49 BerlinSBPK Germ. 4° 555, 287n25 BerlinSBPK Germ. 4° 1110, 266– 7n55 BerlinSBPK Germ. 4° 1241, 266n50 BerlinSBPK Germ. 4° 1940, 287n26 BerlinSBPK mgq 886, 240n25 BethesdaNLM E 68, 230n26 BrixenFP 48, 261n23 BrixenFP 62, 102 Brünn (Brno) UB R(aigern) 360, 267n56 BrusselsBR 694 (139), 276n44 BrusselsBR 3416–24, 234n52 BudapestBUA K. 538, 240n28 BudapestNM 219, 295n83 BudapestNM 259, 254n126, 292n66 BudapestSzNB s.n. (identical to BudapestNM 259), 254n126 CambridgeCCC 524, 227n2 CambridgeCCC 528, 187, 291n61 CambridgeFW 157, 243n44, 277n48 Cleveland (Ohio), Alfr. Mewett Libr. 28 (Horae O. Cist.), 276n43 Codex Gisle. See Osnabrück, Diözesanarchiv Inv. No. Ma 101 ColmarBM 364 (343), 266n49 DarmstadtLB 949, 269n72 DarmstadtLB 1827, 267n56 DarmstadtLB 1883, 273n32 DonaueschingenFB 117, 273n31

DonaueschingenFB 421, 274n34. See also KarlsruheLB Donaueschingen 421 DresdenLB A. 199a, 268n62 DüsseldorfUB B 38, 253n117, 271n12 DüsseldorfUB B 44, 247n64 Eichstätt St. Walb. Germ. 5, 296n95 EinsiedelnStiftsB 652, 296n94, 297n100 EinsiedelnStiftsB 653, 296n94, 297n98 EinsiedelnStiftsB 654, 296n94, 297n100 EinsiedelnStiftsB 744, 237n9 EngelbergStiftsB cod. 141, 267n56 Erfurt 2° 236, 292n64 ErlangenUB Perg. 136, 278n50, 289n41 Escorial e. IV. 7, 272n28 EssenMünsterA Miss. Assind. 1, 261n24 FrankfurtStadtB Batt. 2, 257n138 FreiburgAM 2536, 254–5n133 FreiburgAM 11729 (Adelh. 1), 98, 259n3, 260n12, 302n25 FreiburgEA 8 (Adelh. 08), 261n17 FreiburgSA B1 (H) 107, 238n13 FreiburgSA B1 (H) 108, 238n13 FreiburgSA B1 (H) 122, 261n17 FreiburgUB 6, 255n129 FreiburgUB 107, 238n13 FreiburgUB 136, 105 FreiburgUB 490, 246n60, 297n98 FreiburgUB 1131, 257n140, 261n19 GandersheimStiftsB 248, 227n2

Index of Manuscripts 365 GenevaBPU cod. lat. 155, 290n48 GrazUB 30, 233n45 GrazUB 1550, 105 Guta Codex. See Straßburg Grand Seminaire 37 HannoverLB Ms XXIII 806, 259n5 HildesheimDomB J. 27, 254n127 HildesheimDomB J. 38, 70, 248– 9n78 HildesheimDomB Gymnas. Josephinum 55 (18), 254n127 HoustonPL 4, 240n26 Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesarchiv, Cod.2336, 237n8 KarlsruheLB Donaueschingen 421, 264–5n42, 265n43, 274n34 KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 36, 274–5n35 KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 44, 253n116 KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 47, 253n116, 262n27 KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 53, 240n27 KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 54, 240n27 KarlsruheLB Lichtent. 73, 268n62 KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. 8a and 8b, 256n136 KarlsruheLB St Georgen 18, 242n36 KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. Germ. 67, 273n31 KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. 68, 271n18 KarlsruheLB St Georgen pap. 84, 143, 271n19, 277n46, 294n75 KarlsruheLB St Georgen perg. Germ. 103, 272n21 KarlsruheLB St Peter pap. 29, 285n11

KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 34, 244n50 KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 34a, 244n50 KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 53a, 244n50 KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 57a, 244n50 KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 68, 244n50 KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 103, 244n50 KarlsruheLB St Peter perg. 106, 244n50 KarlsruheLB Tennenb. 4, 257n140 KoblenzLHA Best. 701 Nr. 119, 271n10 KoblenzLHA Best. 701 N. 149, 266n55 KölnDB Codex 149, 235–6n58 KölnDB Codex 238, 264n40 KölnDB Codex 1150, 235n58, 269n72 KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. 1–23, 17–35, 37–45, and 72, 269n72, 290n45 KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. 65–6, 269n72 KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. 67, 290n46 KölnWallraf-Richartz Inv. Nr. s.n., 269n72 Lambeth Palace Ms 46, 258n146 Leipzig, Museum für Kunst und Schrift Kl. I 39, 280n63 LeipzigUB Ms 560, 257n137, 275n37, 296n92 LeipzigUB Ms 761, 285n10

366

Index of Manuscripts

LeipzigUB Ms 763, 244–5n51, 247n62, 275n39, 285n10 LeipzigUB Ms 858, 287n24 LondonBL Add. 11695, 283n81 LondonBL Add. 15686, 257n140, 261n19 LondonBL Add. 15710, 257n140, 261n19 LondonBL Add. 16950 (Seligenthal gradual), 175, 223n13, 275n35, 286n16, 294n76 Lost manuscript described in Luzern Gelhofer-Ranschburg catalogue, 56, 240n26 Lost manuscript, the ‘Chronique de l’abbeye de Saint-Trond,’ 258n144 LyonsBM Ms 463 (392), 283n85 MagdeburgKönigl. StaatsA, Copialbuch 1515, 242n37 MainzStadtbibl. Ms II.138, 232n42 ManchesterRL Lat. 152, 223n13, 238n14 MariensternKB Antiphonale, 247n62 Monte Cassino 80, 283n79 MünchenSB Cgm 65, 272n21, 294n79, 295n84 MünchenSB Cgm 244, 265n49 MünchenSB Cgm 288, 230n26 MünchenSB Cgm 331, 237n6, 244n48 MünchenSB Cgm 480, 267n55 MünchenSB Cgm 783, 255n129 MünchenSB Cgm 4566, 240n29 MünchenSB Cgm 4597, 245n56 MünchenSB Cgm 5139, 267n55 MünchenSB Cgm 5234, 298n107 MünchenSB Cgm 5292, 266n55 MünchenSB Clm 2694, 230n26 MünchenSB Clm 4422, 237n6, 244n48

MünchenSB Clm 11004, 261n19 MünchenSB Clm 23014, 244–5n51, 247n62, 285n10 MünchenSB Clm 23046, 233n45 MünchenSB Clm 23172, 296n93 MünchenSB Clm 23287, 253n115 MünchenSB Clm 26859, 238n11, 255n130 MünchenSB Clm 28638, 295n82 MünnerstadtKlosterB 406, 280n65 MünsterUB 360, lost manuscript copied by Johannes Saltkotten, 239n16 MünsterUB 366 (291), lost manuscript copied by Druda de Elfenhusen, 47, 235n56 New York, ColumbiaUL 6 (X. 242. 1. S.), 245n54 NürnbergGNM 28441, 266n55, 274n35 NürnbergGNM 114263b, 293n72 NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 40, 252– 3n112, 256n135 NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 41, 252– 3n112 NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 42, 253n112 NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 43, 252– 3n112, 296n88 NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 86, 252n108 NürnbergStadtB Cent. III, 87, 252n108 NürnbergStadtB Cent. IV, 14, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. IV, 18, 251nn103–4 NürnbergStadtB Cent. IV, 37, 280n64

Index of Manuscripts 367 NürnbergStadtB Cent. IV, 83, 252n110 NürnbergStadtB Cent. V, App. 34p– w, 252n109 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 6, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 43h, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 43y, 252n110 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 44, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 46c, 267n55, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 46d, 251n103 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 53, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 54, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 57, 274n34 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 58, 266n53 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VI, 100, 251n103 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 1, 280n64 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 20, 251nn103–4 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 80, 266n52 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 89, 252n110 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VII, 94, 239n20 NürnbergStadtB Cent. VIII, 4, 239n20 NürnbergStadtB Hert. 8, 149–50, 278–9nn56–7 NürnbergStadtB Will II, 19.oct, 280n64

Osnabrück, Diözesanarchiv Inv. No. Ma 101, the Codex Gisle, 67, 69, 83, 189, 247n66, 248n74, 252n107, 257nn141–2, 292n68 Osnabrück, Gymnasium Carolinum, Mss 90–1, the Rulle Bible, 6, 42, 222n7, 233n48 OsnabrückUB IV 608, 6, 222n7, 233n48 OxfordBodl Digby 144, 258n145 OxfordBodl Laud. misc. 415 (SC 835), 235n57, 247n63, 265n48, 294n74 OxfordBodl Ms. Rawlinson C. 882, 283n89 PaderbornEAB Cod. 437, 242n35 PaderbornPfA der Gaukirche St Ulrich, s.n., 287n23 ParisBN lat. 1315, 107 ParisBN n.a. lat. 667, 273n31, 279– 80n63 Petersfrauen psalter: lost manuscript recorded in the Registrum Ottonis, 47, 181, 235n58, 290n43 PragUB XVI. A. 2 (Praha Univ. DH 117), 294n78, 296n96, 297n101 PragUB XVI. D. 18 (Praha Univ. DH 120), 296n96 PragUB XVI. G. 18 (Praha Univ. DH 140), 278n54, 291n58 PragUB XVI. G. 24 (Praha Univ. DH 146), 298n109 PragUB XVI. G. 25 (Praha Univ. DH 147), 278n54 PragUB Brst. 30a (Praha Univ. DH 194), 296n96 PragUB Brst. 30b (Praha Univ. DH 195), 296n96 PragUB Brst. 30c (Praha Univ. DH 196), 296n96

368

Index of Manuscripts

Praha Kapit. 210, 223n13 Praha Kapit. 1356 (M III), 292n63, Praha Mus. Nat. 3671, 237–8n10 Rennenberg Codex. See KölnDB Codex 149 Rote Buch, lost manuscript copied by Dorothea Schermann of Gnadental in Basel, 30, 229–30n23 Rulle Bible. See Osnabrück, Gymnasium Carolinum, Mss 90–1 SalzburgEA a II 7, 246n57, 253n118, 280n65 SalzburgEA a II 12, 266n53 SalzburgEA a IV 22, 266n53 SalzburgEA a VI 13, 268n62 SalzburgEA a VII 35, 246n57, 280n65 SalzburgEA b I 1, 297n101 SalzburgEA b I 24, 152, 245n57, 280n65 SalzburgEA b V 40, 152, 246n57, 267n56, 280n65 SalzburgEA b VI 12, 246n57, 266n52, 280n65 SalzburgNA 23 B 6, 274n35, 284n8 SalzburgNA 23 E 11, 237n7 SalzburgNA 28 D 1, 237n7, 265– 6n49 SalzburgNA 28 D 3, 181 SalzburgNA 28 D 6, 237n7, 265– 6n49 SarnenBK Muri-Gries 65, 229– 30n23, 245n55, 293n72, 297n101 Schlägl, Stiftsbibliothek, 133. Cpl. (816.b.) 162, v Seligenthal Gradual. See LondonBL Add. 16950

SigmaringenFDA Klosterwald Rubr. Nr. 23, K. XXXV, Fasz XV, 262n27 St GallenStiftsB 406, 262n27 St GallenStiftsB 983, 264n40 St GallenStiftsB 990, 297n100 St GallenStiftsB 1344, 272n22 St Paul im LavanttalStiftsB 76/1 (olim 25.1.18), 232n41, 297n97 StockholmKB A 89, 232n41 StockholmKB A 172, 269n72, 290n45, 296n91 StraßburgBNU 306 (lat. 254), 247n64 StraßburgBNU 2542, 114 StraßburgBNU 2797 (olim L germ. 664), 289n34 Straßburg Grand Seminaire 37 (anc. 78), the ‘Guta Codex,’71, 86, 249n80 Stuttgart, HStA, E 221 Bü 2701, 277n47 StuttgartLB Brev. 54, 297–8n105 StuttgartLB, HB. I. 99, 271n17 TrierStadtB 313, 274n35 TrierStadtB 355, 6, 222n6 TrierStadtB 1286/43, 276–7n45, 283–4n90, 297n103 TübingenUB Mc 160, 227n2 TübingenUB Md. 456, 242–3n40, 288–9n34 WeimarHAAB Germ. 2°, codices 3–8, 244n49 WeimarHAAB Q 59a, 247n64 WienÖNB 2895 [sic]. See WienÖNB 2985 WienÖNB 2985 [Nov. 627], 295– 6n87

Index of Manuscripts 369 WienÖNB 3006, 243n43 WilheringStiftsB IX.40, 260n30 WilheringStiftsB 139, 197, 298n106 Willebadessen PfA, Bursfeld statutes, s.n., 287n23 WolfenbüttelHAB 17. 9. Aug. 4°, 78, 251–2n105 WolfenbüttelHAB 81. 16. Aug. 2° (2806), 259n4 WolfenbüttelHAB Blankenb. 274 (olim 108), 296n89 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 204 (237), 249n80 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 370 (405), 268n62 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 400 (435), 227n2, 268n62 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 518a (566), 278n55, 297n104

WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 576 (624), 227n2 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 667 (717), 150–1, 279n59 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 720 (784), 268n62 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1120 (1227), 284–5n9 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1178 (1286), 298n108 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1234 (1342), 150–1, 279nn61–2 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1319 (1432), 279n59 WolfenbüttelHAB Helmst. 1400 (1524), 191, 223n13, 283–4n90, 294n80 WolfenbüttelHAB Novi 797, 268n62

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General Index

The letter t following a page number denotes a table. See pages xiii–xv for the conventions of spelling and citation practice adopted here.

abbess as book commissioner or owner, 16, 29, 32–3, 44, 48–50, 65, 115–16, 140, 142–4, 173–4, 178, 205–6, 228–9n12, 237nn7–8, 274n35, 276nn41–3, 281n70, 284–5n9, 286n16, 294n75; as deacon, 103, 262nn25–6; as scribe, 42, 65, 83, 140, 147, 246–7n61, 247n62, 274n35, 278n52, 294n81 abecedaria, 107 Adelhausen music theory tractatulus, 98, 260n12, 302n25 Adelheid Langmann as author, 298n111 administrative books, 30, 67, 91, 93– 5, 242n37 administrative roles. See convent administrative structure; monastic office Admont necrology, 31 Aesop, 259n4 agenda. See obsequials; ritual Alanus ab Insulis, Distictiones, 285n11

Alexander of Villa Dei, 118; Doctrinale, 268n62, 279–80n63 Altenhohenau library inventory of 1482–1513, 264n37 amanuensis, 53 anathema, 8, 16, 132, 160–3, 276– 7n45, 282–3n78, 283n–79, 283nn82–8, 283–4n90 anchorite, xv, 75–6 anonymous scribal hands, 6–7, 41–2, 67, 71, 100, 104, 122–3, 141, 154, 205–6, 222n8, 233n46, 243n40, 288n34. See also scribes, unnamed antiphonal, 39, 42, 68, 78, 84, 95–8, 122, 178, 181, 183, 205, 232n42, 233n45, 247n62, 259n3, 260n9, 269n72, 287n25, 293n70, 302n25. See also diurnal apprenticeship, 172, 204, 300nn4–5 architecture, 72–6, 249nn82–4, 249– 50n85, 250nn88, 90–3, 251n99 archival material, 5, 6, 22, 30, 67, 91, 93–5, 171, 230n23, 237n8, 248n71

372

General Index

archivist, 5, 30, 41, 91, 93, 176, 232n40 armaria. See librarian artist, xiv, 57, 63–4, 83–4, 192, 195, 203–4, 222n2, 226n1, 234n54, 246n58, 299–300n3, 300–1nn5–6. See also illuminators/ illustrators artwork, commissioned, 59, 144, 243n44, 277n49 ascetic practices, 177, 206–7, 209–11 atelier, 48–50, 55, 57–8. See also workshop Augustine, 71, 115, 160 Augustinian order, 35, 38, 45, 69, 70–1, 176, 215–16, 248n76, 249n79, 251n97 Augustinian rule, 19, 21, 60, 227n4, 227–8n6 author as scribe, 54–5, 137, 239nn20–1, 277n46 authorial production, 12, 53–5, 264n38, 282n76 author-scribe collaboration, 53–4, 57, 80, 92, 223n18, 238n15, 239nn17–19 authority. See colophons and authority bailiffs, 32 Beach, Alison, 6, 33, 42, 128, 222n8 beauty, 40, 49, 67, 86–7, 107, 160, 173, 189, 209–10, 246n59 beguine/beguinage, xiv–xv, 11, 12, 25, 37, 187, 197, 216, 223n16, 297–8n105, 298n110 Beichtvater. See confessor Benedictine order, 10–12, 35, 36, 38, 45, 69, 137, 138, 215–16, 224n20, 228n11, 249n83, 251n97

Benedictine rule (RB), 19, 21–2, 107, 123, 227n5, 227–8n6, 228n7, 301–2n15 benedictional, 96t, 101–2, 261n21 Bernard of Clairvaux, 118; sermons, 80; tractatus, 150–1 Bersenbruck convent register of 1354, 6 Bible, 6, 23, 42, 60, 79, 86, 121t, 125, 127t, 157t, 158, 222n7, 233n48, 252–3n112; German translation of, 79, 86, 205, 252–3n112, 264n36 biblical exegesis, 92, 111, 115, 123, 158 Birgitten order. See Brigittine order Black Death, 126, 128–9, 153–4, 194– 5, 227n2, 269nn72–3. See also plague Bonaventura, 118; Legenda maior (German translation) 272n21, 295n84; The Life and Miracles of St Francis, 86, 143; Psalterium Marianum, 30, 229–30n23 book: circulation, 4–5, 11–12, 24, 33, 34, 38–9, 45, 57, 49, 53–4, 56, 58, 62, 68, 71, 92, 94, 106, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 154, 162, 163– 4, 184, 187, 211, 223n18, 232n41, 262n28, 270n75, 281n70; copying (see program of book copying); exchange, 11–12, 24, 26, 34, 42, 47, 49, 58, 59, 106, 128, 138, 155, 161–2, 181–2, 184, 211, 212, 224n23, 236n1, 242nn38–9, 242– 3n40, 288–9n34, 290n54, 290– 1n55; function, 18, 40, 56, 57, 61, 64–5, 91–2, 95, 99, 104, 107–8, 114, 123–4, 147, 156–7, 163–4, 175, 209

General Index 373 book(s) of hours, 60, 91, 96t, 105, 107, 109, 143, 144, 184, 232n41, 244n50, 258–9n2, 276n43, 278n55, 295n86 Book of Spiritual Poverty (Buch von geistlicher Armut), 84, 86, 255n129 book production, images of, 81, 87, 253n121 (see also images of scribal activity); as signal of piety, 11–12, 26, 205–7, 209–10, 211 book provision, 25–6, 68, 71, 131, 154, 161–4, 173, 176, 224n22, 239n16, 248n70, 258n1, 262– 3n31. See also reforms, as occasions for book copying book trade, 32–3, 36, 40, 47–9, 55, 58, 67–8, 138, 151, 161–2, 174, 180–2, 184, 217, 224n23, 242n38, 268n62, 272n26, 279n59, 285n13 Bouveret, Benedictines of, xii, 13 bragging rights, 88, 185–6, 188–9, 224n24, 293n70. See also scribes, claims of multiple tasks breviary, 80, 96t, 104–5, 107–8, 145– 6, 184, 191, 250n92, 253n116, 254n127, 261n23, 262n27, 262– 3n31, 290n53, 294n80 Brevilogus. See Vocabularius brevilogus Bridget of Sweden, Revelations, 60, 245n52 Brigittine order, 27, 35, 55, 60, 187, 215–16, 245n52 Brigittine rule, 19, 60 brother-sister gifts, 56–7, 240nn28, 29 Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life. See devotio moderna Bruckner, Albert, 6, 222n3, 222n8 Buch der Vollkommenheit. See pseudoEngelhart von Ebrach

Burgkmair, Hans, artist, 243n44 Bursfeld reforms. See reforms, Bursfeld Bursfeld statutes, 12, 75, 176, 281n72, 287nn22–5 Busch, Johannes, 176, 262n28; Windesheimer constitutions, 176–7 Caesarius of Arles, rule of, 227–8n6 calendar, 19, 62, 93–4, 95, 96t, 135, 248n70, 262n29, 276n42 canoness (chorfrau), xiv–xv, 11, 12, 25, 58, 76, 110, 131, 244n48, 251n97, 262n26, 267n56, 268n62, 292n66, 295n82. See also Augustinian order cantatory, 96t, 100 cantor, 175, 235n58, 285n12, 286n18, 286–7n21 cantrix (cantrices, cantorin, sengerin, Sangmeisterin), 29, 31, 33, 43, 77, 79, 85, 94, 100, 101, 140, 171, 174–5, 179, 206–7, 209–10, 261n20, 274–5n35, 285n13, 285– 6n15, 286nn16, 18, 286–7n21 cantrix as scribe, 31, 77, 79, 94, 101, 174–5, 179, 206–7, 209–10, 274n35, 285–6n15, 286n16, 286–7n21 Carthusian order, 112, 230n24, 249n83, 281–2n72 Carthusian statutes, 230n24, 281– 2n72 Cassian, 115 Cassiodorus, 255n129 ‘cataloguing problem,’ 155, 162 catechetical literature, 115, 121t, 130t, 223–4n20, 266n51 cell as space for copying, 37, 59, 75– 6, 230n24, 251n97

374

General Index

cellarer/cellaress, 31, 289n36 Ceremoniae sanctimonialium (Bursfeld ceremonial), 176, 287n22 chant treatise. See Adelhausen music theory tractatulus chaplains, 29, 33, 46, 48, 51–4, 102, 103, 115, 237n7, 265–6n49, 272n24 choirbook(s), 95, 96t, 97–9, 101, 137, 178, 181, 182, 208, 209, 260n11, 290n54. See also antiphonal; liturgical books; psalter choir mistress, 37, 289n36 choir nuns, xiv–xv, 20, 32, 37, 40, 65, 66, 106, 171, 172 Christus als Kaufmann, 251n103 chronicle(s), 14, 73, 81, 117–18, 297n7. See also convent chronicles chronological trends: in identification of author and composer, 281n69; in manuscript production, 11, 33, 75, 122, 126–30, 129t, 130t, 139, 153–5, 269–70n73, 280–1n68, 281n69 (see also colophons, chronological differences in) Church Fathers, 115, 120, 121t, 125, 157t, 251n103 Cinderella codices, 9, 39, 55–6, 64–5. See also manuscripts, deluxe vs inelegant circulation of books. See book circulation Cistercian order, 10, 12–13, 27, 35, 36, 38, 64, 69, 138, 196, 197, 215– 16, 248n70, 249n83 Cistercian Summa Cartae Caritatis, 68, 138, 197, 248n70, 258n1 Clarissan order/Franciscan Tertiaries, 11, 12, 35, 36, 38, 45, 52, 64,

69, 104, 137, 138, 196, 215–16, 272n21, 282n72 Clarissan rule, 32, 228n6, 230n28, 257n140, 261n19 Classen, Albrecht, 118–19 clausura /enclosure, xv, 26, 50–1, 58, 76, 93, 95, 119, 154, 178, 181–2, 188, 242–3n40 Clementinae, collection of canon law, 88, 258n146 clerics. See chaplains; confessors; lectors collaborative book production. See author-scribe collaboration; scribal, teams collectars, 68, 96t, 104, 178 colophon as genre, 8–9, 133, 149, 153, 159–64, 190–202, 282n76, 282–3n78; as proto-autobiographical note, 8, 139–41, 164 colophon formulas, 8–9, 124, 132, 133, 145, 148, 153, 159, 173–4, 187–8, 190–3, 196, 201–2, 212, 223n13, 154n123, 270n6, 284– 5n9, 291nn60–1, 292nn62–5, 294nn74–80. See also anathema colophons, 5–6, 8–9, 16, 31, 41–2, 70–1, 132–65, 185–9, 194–6, 198– 9, 201–2, 270nn5–6, 271n9, 282– 3n78; and authority, 16, 88, 134–5, 137, 141–4, 153–6, 159–60, 163– 4, 173–4, 186–7, 282n75; chronological differences in, 122, 128–9, 153–6, 160–4, 236–7n4, 273n29, 282–3n78; and genre, 156–9, 157t, 282n75; and person, 5, 42, 70–1, 83–4, 88, 139–45, 148–9, 152, 211 (see also monastic office); and place, 5, 136–8, 152, 156; and play, 145, 147–8, 151, 159, 187–8,

General Index 375 291n61, 292nn62–4; as risky evidence, 149–53; scribal, compared to printer’s colophons, 160, 163, 282n77; and time, 134–6, 149–52, 160 Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux (CMO), xii, 13, 188 commissions, 15–16, 26, 29, 31, 33, 44, 48–50, 55–7, 67–8, 142–4, 146, 156, 158, 164, 170, 173–4, 176, 178, 180–1, 203, 241n34, 247n62, 274n35, 276n41, 296n90, 300– 1n6 commentator, 282n76 community, experience of, 12–13, 19–21, 24–5, 62, 63, 71, 89, 93–4, 168, 190–1, 194–5, 198, 200, 204, 211, 213, 232–3n44 (see also literate communities); regional, 22–3, 60, 115, 135, 137–8, 182, 200, 298n113 (see also geographical regions) compiler, 5, 9, 109–10, 160, 266n55, 282n76 computus, 123 conditions for copying, 167–72, 176– 8, 182–4. See also scriptorium; workroom confessors, 27–8, 48, 51–4, 58, 84, 184, 231n39, 237n10, 238nn11– 12, 14–15, 239n20, 242n40, 255n130 convent: administrative structure, 15–16, 27, 29–34, 48–51, 65–6, 173–6, 229n19 (see also monastic office); affiliation/identity, 12–13, 24–7, 204, 228n11 (see monastic order); chronicles, 6, 14, 84, 91, 94, 117–18, 154, 178, 204–7, 210– 11, 217, 224–5n25, 238n13,

255n131, 259n7, 288–9n34, 293n70, 301n7 (see also chronicle(s); sister-book); registers, 6, 33, 57, 67, 242n37 conversae. See lay sisters cook, 31, 169, 205 copying table. See writing desks copyist. See scribes corrector. See proofreader correspondence. See letters /correspondence cost of book production. See financial costs of book production Council of Constance, 10 crises. See fire; plundered convents crypto-signatures, 152, 235–6n58, 280n66 customaries, 96t, 103, 106, 262n29 decretals, 187, 292n62; decretal of Innocent III, 262n26 dedicatee. See ownership, statements of Deventer book trade, 138 devotio moderna (Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life), 58, 177, 205–6, 241n35, 287n29 devotional manuscripts, 11, 61–2, 76, 91–2, 109–14, 120, 121t, 124–5, 128, 157t, 240n25, 264n38, 266– 7n55, 269n73 dictation, 53, 72, 74 didactic literature, 111–14, 121t, 264n39, 266n55 Dietrich von Apolda: Life of St Dominic, 135, 271n13; Vita of St Elisabeth, 247n62, 278n52 directorium monialium, 52, 237n9 display manuscripts, 9, 20, 31, 39–40, 57, 97, 156, 192, 209. See also manuscripts, deluxe vs inelegant

376

General Index

distribution of books, 21–2, 30, 117, 227–8n6 diurnal, 52, 60, 80, 95, 96t, 238n14, 240–1n31, 244n50, 253n116. See also antiphonal divine office, 19–21, 29, 30–1, 95, 97, 107, 196, 197, 208, 226n1, 271n14 Dominic, St, Primitive Constitutions, 227n6 Dominican order, 10, 11–12, 35, 36, 38, 45, 69, 74–5, 124, 154, 155, 215–16, 228n11, 236n59, 291n55 Dominican provincials on use of workroom, 74 donata. See lay sister donation of books, 155–6, 164, 194– 5, 224n23, 241n32, 272n26. See also gifts, books as donors, rewards to, 155–6, 197, 200– 1, 299n116 Drogin, Marc, 8, 73, 132, 160–1, 222n10, 282–3n78 Dufay, Guillaume, 98; ‘Nuper rosarum flores,’ 100 Durandus, 118 Dürgenhaim, parish church of, 276n43 Ebner, Christina, 238n15 Ebner, Margaret, xvi, 53, 55, 238n15, 264n36 Eckhart (‘Meister Eckhart’), 116, 152, 245–6n57, 267n57 economy of information, 9 economy of salvation, 124, 198–9. See also spiritual economy education /erudition 18, 21–4, 28, 32, 34, 46, 65, 110, 117–19, 121t, 123–4, 131, 135t, 154, 157t, 158, 172, 176, 226–7n2, 270n76, 300n4, 301n9, 302n25

Elisabeth of Schönau, 53, 57, 211, 241n33 Emmerich sister-book, 205–6, 301n14 enclosure. See clausura/enclosure endowments, 22, 199, 241n33 epistolaries, 96t, 104, 156, 240–1n31, 248n70 evangeliaries, 96t, 97, 103–4, 121t, 156, 249n80 explicits, 133, 155, 270n5, 271n9, 244n51 Fabri, Felicis, Tractatus de Civitate Ulmensi, 277n47 family as scribes, 48, 56–7, 186–7, 240nn26–9 family connections, 22–3, 32, 48, 56– 7, 186–7, 240–1n31, 241n33 feminized rules. See monastic rules, feminized Filippo Lippi, 203–4 financial costs of book production, 33, 46–7, 97, 143, 145–6, 180–1, 276n42, 277n50, 278n51, 289n41 Finck (Finckh), Thomas, 277n46, 294n75; Seven Daily Meditations (Von den VII Tagzeiten), 137, 143 fire, 182, 225n29, 290nn49–51 florilegia, 115 Franciscan rule, 228n6 Franciscan tertiaries. See Clarissan order/Franciscan Tertiaries Fridolin, Stephen, sermons, 117 furniture. See writing desks Gebetbuch. See prayerbook (gebetbuch) Geistlische Medizin, Gespräch zwischen Weisem und Laien, 295n87

General Index 377 geographical regions, 22–3, 60, 115, 137–8, 200, 225n29, 254nn120, 126, 273n30 German language. See vernacular Gernrode document of 1325 regarding a scholastica, 227n2 Gertrude of Helfta, 108, 116, 190, 199, 266n55; Herald of Divine Love, 293–4n73, 298n110 Gesta Romanorum, 112, 264n39 gift giving, 22, 200–1. See also brothersister gifts; donation of books; donors, rewards to; gifts, books as gifts, books as, 33, 40, 42, 56–7, 59, 61, 62, 142, 181–2, 193–4, 201, 217, 224n23, 240nn28–30, 240– 1n31, 241n32, 272n26, 275n39, 288–9n34, 290–1n55, 300n48. See also book exchange Gnadental document of 1438, 42, 83, 234n51, 247n62, 254n124, 274n35 Golden Epistle. See William of Saint Thierry Gospels, 23, 205, 248n70, 262n26, 301n11. See also Bible graduals, 68, 80, 86–7, 96t, 98–9, 122, 149–50, 173, 175, 178, 181, 223n13, 235n58, 244–5n51, 247n62, 248n74, 260n11, 269n72, 275nn35, 39, 285n10, 286n16 grammars, 118, 123, 227n2, 268n62. See also vocabularies Gregory the Great: Dialogues, 115; Homilies on the Gospels (Homiliae super Evangelia), 283n83 guides to holy living, 109, 111–14, 124 guilds, 203, 299–300n3, 300nn4, 5 Günterstal library inventory of 1457, 127t, 264n37

handwork, 23, 45, 73, 74, 169, 176, 179, 182. See also Nonnenarbeiten, Nonnenbüchen, Nonnenwerk Hartwig von Erfurt, Postille, 60, 185n10 hebdomadaria. See Wochnerin Heiligen Leben, Der (The Lives of the Saints), 15th c. vernacular legendary, 52, 114–15, 237n7, 265–6n49 Heinrich Herp, 118 Heinrich of St Gall, 118; Passionstraktat, 56 Heinrich of Langenstein, 246n57; The Recognition of Sin (Erkenntnis der Sünde), 115, 266n52 Henry of Nördlingen, translator of Mechthild. See Mechthild of Magdeburg herbal texts. See medical books Hildegard von Bingen, 53, 211, 275n36 Hiltgart of Hürnheim, German translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, 230n26 HKOL, 28, 225n28 Holbein, Hans, the Elder, 243n44 Holy Ghost /Holy Spirit, 293n72 homiliaries, 86, 96t, 103–4. See also Gregory the Great hortatory literature, 54–5, 56, 77, 116, 123–4, 184, 233n49, 251n103 hospitals, 23, 200–1, 230n26, 299n116 Humbert of Romans, commentary on the Rule of St Augustine, 60, 155– 6, 272n26; ‘Regulations for the Operation of a Medieval Library’ 155–6, 167, 176–7, 281–2n72, 282n73, 286n21 hymnal, 68, 78–9, 96t, 97, 252n110

378

General Index

illuminators /illustrators, 64, 67, 79– 80, 83–4, 86–7, 145–6, 189, 195, 205–6, 212, 246n58, 252n107, 254nn125–6, 258n143. See also Index of People under Anna Yngramin (Ingamin); Barbara Gewichtmacherin; Dorothea Deriethain; Elisabeth (Elsbeth) Töpplin; Gertrud von Büchel; Gertrud van dem Vorst; Gisela (Gisle, Gysela) de Kerzenbroeck of Rulle; Guta (Gutta, Guda) of Schwarzenthann; Loppa von Spiegel (de Speculo); Margaret Scheiffartz de Meirrode; Margaret von Klingenberg; Oetenbach nun, illuminator and scribe who joined the community with Ita von Hoehenfels; ‘pintter,’ unnamed; Sibilla of Bondorff; Sophie, daughter of Count Mansfeld images of nuns, 40, 42, 181, 233nn45–6, 251n100, 278–9n57, 290n46; of scribal activity, 42, 73, 76, 81, 87, 251n100, 233nn45–6, 253n121 impetus for book copying, 53, 58, 167–84 incunabula. See print (incunabula) Indersdorf. See Johannes von Indersdorf infirmaria, 31, 176. See also medical books instructions to illuminators, 79–80 intellectual tradition in women’s houses, 21–2, 33, 44–7, 53, 55, 65, 68, 71, 89, 92, 110, 118, 131, 161– 2, 211–12 inventories, library, 6, 42, 74, 79, 97, 111, 126–8, 127t, 175, 176, 182,

250n92, 264n37, 277n47, 282nn73–4, 288n32 invitatory, 97 Isenhagen, testament of 1353, 33; testament of 1450, 33, 174, 285n13 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend (Legenda aurea), 47, 114, 247n63, 265n48 Johannes de Garlandia, Opuscula, 279–80n63 Johannes von Indersdorf, 152, 246n57; Passionstraktat, 246n57; sermons, 80 Judah ben Samuel Sir Leon Chassid, Rabbi, 283n82 Kanonissenstift. See Augustinian order Katharina Tucher, Die Offenbarungen, 274n34 Katharinentaler sister-book, 205, 301n11 kinship, 22–3, 56–67, 76–7, 88, 186– 7, 240nn26–9, 241n33, 291n59, 318n113. See also brother-sister gifts; family as scribes; family connections Kirchheim am Ries, library inventory of 1436, 127t, 264n37 Kirchheim unter Teck, account of reform by Magdalena Kremer, 179, 289n37 Klosterneuburg, 1456 will regarding gift, 56, 240–1n31 ‘Klosterschreiber,’ 51–2, 58, 59, 242n37, 244nn46–8, 300–1n6 Koblenz set of Bursfeld rules, 176, 177–8, 287n25

General Index 379 Konstitutionen für Benediktinerinnen, 287n24 KrämerHandschriftenerbe, 13, 70, 224n23 KrämerScriptores, 15, 225n30, 225– 6n31 Krauter, Heinrich, Contemplation of the Sufferings of Christ (Betrachtung des Leidens Christi), 55, 239n20; Instructions for Confession (Beichtanweisung), 55, 239n20 Kremer, Magdalena, 179, 289n37; ‘Wie diß loblich closter zu Sant Johannes baptisten,’ 289n37 Latin, knowledge of, 11, 20–1, 32, 34, 46, 66, 84–5, 110, 118, 123, 140, 171, 176, 205, 207, 226–7n2, 239n17, 263n35, 264n36, 265n46, 268n62, 288n32, 301n11, 302n18; training, 20, 34, 171, 226–7n2; vocabulary (see vocabularies) ‘Laus sit Deo’ and other formulas of praise, 190–4, 277n46, 292n65, 294nn74–81, 295nn82–5 lay sisters (conversae), xiv–xv, 20, 32, 66, 140, 169, 172, 205, 247n61, 273n32, 274nn34–5 Leben der Altväter, 251n103 Leben der Heiligen. See Heiligen Leben Leben des hl. Meinolf, 241n35 lectionary /lectionaries, 63, 78, 96t, 103–4, 121t, 152, 156, 178, 245n57, 248n70, 280n63, 295n86 lectors, 51–2, 237n9 Legenda Aurea. See Jacobus de Voragine legendaries, 54; 96t, 103, 104. See also Bonaventura; vita /vitae left-handed scribe, 148, 185

Leonardus de Utino, Sermones, 275n39 letter-parlour. See Schreibstube letters /correspondence, 42, 52, 57, 237n8, 241n33, 291n59; anonymous monk to niece Gertrude, 186–7, 291n59; to Appolonia Pollanderin, 296n96 liber precum. See book(s) of hours Liber usualis, 42 librarian (armaria, Bibliothekarin), 30, 31, 37, 79, 155–6, 175–7, 229n22, 272nn20, 26, 282n73, 285n12, 286–7n21 library, 7, 10, 12, 24, 28, 29, 36–7, 74–5, 115, 126–8, 127t, 155–6, 163, 176–7, 182–3, 224n23, 264n37, 281–2n72, 282n73. See also inventories, library Liederbuch, 55 Lipphardt, Walter, 45, 67, 69, 234– 5n55 literacy, 5, 11, 18, 20–4, 32, 46, 66, 101, 110, 118, 123, 129, 140, 154, 163, 170–1, 196, 205, 226–7n2, 227n3, 227–8n6, 228nn8–9, 230n24, 239n17, 259n3, 263n35, 264n36, 265n46, 270nn75–6, 284n92, 293–4n73, 301n11; as miracle, 204–5 literate communities, 20–1, 23–4, 46, 71, 89, 228nn8–9 literature, 92, 118–20, 121t, 157t, 259n4 liturgical books, 10, 26, 27–8, 40, 52, 73, 85, 91, 95–108, 96t, 121t, 125, 128–9, 130t, 131, 156–8, 157t, 174–5, 178–9, 182–3, 208, 210, 223–4n20, 258n1, 259n8, 262n27, 269nn72–3, 286–7n21

380

General Index

liturgical cycle, 19–20, 135, 271n14 Lives of the Saints. See Heiligen Leben Luce, Nicholas, sermons, 187 Ludolf of Saxony, 116, 266n55 luxury volumes. See manuscripts, deluxe vs inelegant Machaut, Guillaume de, 281n69 Magdalenes. See Penitent order Malogranatum, 70 manual. See obsequials; ritual manuscript layout as interpretation, 45–6 manuscripts: deluxe vs inelegant, 9, 39–40, 48–9, 51, 55–8, 61–5, 79, 91, 192, 240n25 (see also Cinderella codices; display manuscripts); size, 39, 95, 105, 232nn41–3, 261n17, 287n24; survival, 10, 28, 69, 120, 124, 126–9, 153–4, 160, 177, 267–8n61, 280–1n68, 287– 8nn29–32 Marienberg bei Boppard, necrology (TrierSB 355), 6, 222n6; statutes of, 12 Marquard von Lindau, 116, 266– 7n55; sermons, 245n52 Marriage of Christ with the Believing Soul, The (Das Buch von der Gemahelschaft Christi), 193 Mass, 20, 21, 30–1, 40, 96t, 98–9, 103–4, 115, 197, 264n36, 297n105 Matrix Monasticon, 15, 225n29 Matthias of Sweden, On the Apocalypse (Super Apocalypsum), 60, 245n52 matutinale, 95 Mechtild of Hackeborn, Livre, 291n60 Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fließende

Licht der Gottheit), 12, 55, 116, 223n18, 266n55 medical books, 31, 123, 176, 230n26, 245n52, 286n19 Medingen manuscripts, 45, 67, 69, 234–5n55, 239–40n24, 240n25, 248n67, 263n34 memoria /memorial, 93–4, 99, 124, 136, 185–6, 197, 213 metonym, book as, 209 Meyer, Johannes, 26, 52, 75, 94, 115; Ämterbuch, 52, 55, 75, 155, 238n13; Book of the Reforms of the Dominican Order (Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens), 32, 58, 66, 69, 175, 178, 205, 209, 242–3n40, 247n65, 248n73, 274nn33, 35, 285–6n15, 288–9n34, 302n25; on libraries, 75, 115 miracle. See literacy, as miracle missals, 33, 56, 68, 78, 83, 86, 96t, 102–3, 105, 149, 181, 183, 252n108, 256n136, 278n56, 279n58, 295n83; noted, 149, 279n58 monastic affiliation. See monastic order monastic office, 29–32, 37–8, 42, 65, 140–1, 142–4, 173–6, 178–79, 204–6, 289nn36–7. See also under individual monastic offices monastic order, 7, 12–13, 25–7, 35– 6, 38, 44–5, 63, 69–71, 228n11; changes of, 12, 25–7, 58, 60, 63, 102, 138, 228n11, 242n39, 292n66. See also Augustinian order; Benedictine order; Brigittine order; Carthusian order; Cistercian order; Clarissan order; Dominican order; Penitent order; Premonstratensian order; reforms

General Index 381 monastic rules and statutes, 12, 19, 21, 25, 28, 68, 75, 91, 96t, 114, 121t, 125, 138, 156, 157t, 169, 176–8, 227–8n6, 228n7, 230nn24, 28, 257n140, 258n1, 261n19, 281–2n72, 287nn23–6, 301n15; feminized, 228n7 music treatise, 98, 260n12, 302n25 mystic/ ascetic literature, 11–12, 34, 58, 86, 92, 111, 116, 121t, 125, 152, 157t, 158, 184, 211, 266n55 mysticism, 12, 108, 191, 199, 223n19, 238n15 names, conventions for, xiii, 139, 152, 273nn29–30 Napoleonic wars, 182 necrology, 6, 14, 31, 59, 81, 91, 94, 140, 175, 222n6, 225n26, 233n48, 244nn46–8, 271n10, 273n32 New Testament, 252–3n112, 264n36. See also Bible; Gospels Nicholas of Cusa, 237n8 Nider, Johannes, 94; 24 Golden Harps (Die vierundzwanzig güldene Harpfen), 117, 267n59 nocturnal, 95, 96t Nonnenarbeiten, Nonnenbücher, Nonnenwerk, 45, 64, 232–3n44, 234n54 Nonnenregel von Bursfeld, 176, 287n25 Norbertines. See Premonstratensian order notation, 45, 82, 87, 149, 239– 40n24, 255–6n133, 257n142 novice mistress, 37, 179, 226–7n2, 289n37 nuns as virgins, 66, 86, 235n57, 257n141, 265n48, 273n31

obits, 6, 42, 222n6, 231n35, 233n48 obsequials, 84–5, 96t, 99, 108, 122–3, 255n132, 255–6n133, 260n14, 263n33, 286n17. See also ritual Observant reforms. See reforms, Observant Oelinghausen convent payment record of 1220, 42, 51 Oetenbach document of 1332, 58 Oetenbach scribes, 67, 74, 83, 171, 180, 184, 258n143, 289n40, 290n54 Oetenbach sister–book (Stiftungsbuch), 69, 83, 180, 284n6, 289n40 officia, 99, 238n13, 293n72 Of the Ten Commandments and of the Love of God (Von den zehn Geboten und von der liebe Gottes), 52, 237n7 Old Testament, 6, 252–3n112, 256n136. See also Bible Opus Dei. See divine office ordinal, 96t, 106, 176, 258n1, 262n29, 287n24 Ordinarius für die benediktinerinnen der Bursfelder Observanz, 176, 287n24 Otto II, Emperor, privilege for Frose, 251 Otto of Braunschweig-Göttingen, wars of, 182 Otto of Passau, The 24 Elders or the Golden Throne of Loving Souls (Die vierundzwanzig Alten oder der goldene Thron der minnenden Seele), 112, 264n40 outsiders, 16, 47, 48, 50, 51–60, 158, 171, 174 ownership, statements of, 13, 30, 61– 2, 100, 107–8, 123, 155, 181, 184, 241n35, 243n43, 244n51, 262– 3n31, 263n33, 272n20, 275n35, 276n42

382

General Index

page layout, 41, 43, 45, 78, 80–3, 85, 87, 234n53, 245n53 paintings, commissioned, 144, 243n44 Paradise of the Soul (Paradisus animae), 111 passion, treatise(s) on, 115, 186, 240n29. See also Heinrich of St Gall; Johannes von Indersdorf; Seuse, Heinrich patron, 9, 22, 47, 57, 144, 170, 174, 200, 203, 265n48. See also commissions patronymics. See names, conventions for payment records, 6, 42, 56, 93, 231n35 pecia system, 170, 253n119 pen grip, 270n6, 291n60. See also ‘tres digiti scribunt’ Penitent order, 62, 247n64, 248– 9n78, 258n143 Peuntner, Thomas, 115, 266n53 plague, 135, 145, 195, 271n12. See also Black Death plays, 119 plundered convents, 182–3, 290n52 poetry, 43, 118–19, 297–8n105 polyphony, 98–9, 232n42, 241n34, 260nn13, 16, 290n48 pontifical, 96t, 101–2, 106, 261n21 Pope Gregory. See Gregory the Great Pore Caitiff, 283n89 portress (Schaffner), 38 Possessed Sister, The (Die besessene Schwester), 59, 243n43 poverty, monastic, 45, 61, 226n1, 228n6 Praemonstratensian order. See Premonstratensian order

prayerbook (Gebetbuch), 10, 56, 61–3, 91–2, 109–11, 184, 199, 232n41, 262–3n31, 263n34, 273n32 prayers, 19–20, 32, 62, 63, 93–4, 110, 113, 136, 146, 148, 186–7, 190–2, 196–202, 205, 211, 213 (see also readers, prayers on behalf of the scribe); request for, 70, 78, 86, 148, 194–202 Predigten. See sermons Premonstratensian order, 25, 35, 55, 83, 216, 258n143, 292n66 Pressburg, Slovakia (Posoniense), parish church of, 295n83 priest, books for, 47, 96t, 102, 104–6, 265n48; officiating, 27, 102–4 print (incunabula), 12, 127, 129, 144, 163, 268n62, 275n39, 290n53 prioress, 29, 55, 58, 65, 73–4, 96t, 103, 134, 137, 140–4, 173, 178, 194, 230n32, 243n44, 244–5n51, 247n62, 251n97, 266n50, 274n35, 275n39, 276n44, 277n47, 289n36, 291n55; as scribe, 65, 137, 141–2, 204, 230n32, 244n51, 247n62, 274n35, 275n39 private books /private objects, 11, 20, 31, 39–40, 49, 61–3, 76, 92, 96t, 100, 105, 106–10, 122–3, 127, 142, 184, 226n1, 232n41, 237n4, 262–3n31, 263n33 private contractors, 50, 51–7 private devotions, 18, 21–2, 24, 75–6, 104–5, 107–14, 197, 226n1, 227n6, 232–3n44, 262n28 processional, 56–7, 85, 96t, 99, 108, 122–3, 183–4, 240n27, 255–6n133, 260n14, 261n17, 263n33

General Index 383 program of book copying, 7, 25–6, 205–6, 229n12, 267–8n61, 269n68 proofreader (corrector), 70, 80, 81, 85–8, 141, 158, 175, 195, 209–10, 248n77, 256nn135–6, 257n137, 258n145, 264n39, 276n37, 285– 6n15, 296n92 provenance, 8, 71, 98, 133, 160, 224n23 psalter, 23, 47, 58, 61–2, 68, 83, 96t, 97, 105, 107, 122–3, 181, 189, 197, 229n23, 232–3n44, 235n58, 236n59, 240n26, 245n53, 247n64, 259n2, 260n10, 262–3n31, 263n32, 275n35, 290n43 Psalterium Marianum, 30, 229–30n23 pseudo-Augustine, 115 pseudo-Bonaventurian Psalter Maius, 229n23, 293n72 pseudo-Engelhart von Ebrach, Buch der Vollkommenheit, 280n65 purgatory, 198–9, 298nn110–11. See also salvation Quadrigesimale, 60 quality. See manuscripts, deluxe vs inelegant readers, 21, 39–41, 62, 63, 75, 85–6, 103, 107, 108, 112–13, 133–4, 136, 145–9, 160–2, 183, 186, 194–201, 212, 223n18, 226n1, 259n3, 264n38, 269n67, 282n77, 284n92 readers’ prayers on behalf of the scribe, 194–8, 200–1, 212, 295n86, 295–6n87, 296nn88–96 reading and study, 20–2, 30, 39–40, 49, 92, 107–9, 112–13, 117–19,

123–4, 162–4, 226–7n2, 227–8n6, 263n32, 284n92 reference book(s), 96t, 104–5, 149 Reformation, 12, 65, 200, 301n7 reformers as scribes, 52–3, 58–9, 77, 114–15, 137, 177–9, 236n2, 277n46, 288–9n34 reforms: accounts of, 11–12, 14, 26–7, 73–6, 94, 122, 154, 177–8, 205–6, 224n22, 226n2, 229nn13, 16, 250n86, 251n97, 255n131, 262n28, 277n47, 287n28, 288–9n34, 289nn35–6, 290–1n55, 301n14; Bursfeld, 12, 26, 75, 126, 176, 281n72, 287nn22–5, 287–8n29; Carthusian, 281n72; devotio moderna, 177, 241n35, 287–8n29 (see also devotio moderna); Dominican, midthirteenth century, 154, 281n72; Melk, 12, 26, 154, 223–4n20, 287– 8n29; Observant, xv, 12, 26–7, 52, 58–9, 75, 126, 129–31, 137, 176–9, 211, 224n22, 224–5n25, 227n2, 229n13, 230n24, 251n96, 264n38, 268n61, 281n70, 282n74, 287n28, 287–8n29, 288nn30–2; as occasions for book copying, 12, 14, 26–7, 29, 44, 48, 52–3, 58–9, 73–6, 122, 129, 137, 154–5, 174, 176–9, 205–6, 211, 223–4n20, 224n22, 230n24, 238n14, 241n35, 242–3n40, 255n131, 281n70, 281–2n72, 287– 8n29, 288nn30–2, 290–1n55, 301n14; Tridentine, 175, 183, 290n53; Windesheimer, 26, 75, 126, 176–7, 262n28, 282n72, 287n26, 287–8n29, 301nn13–14 region. See geographical regions Registrum Ottonis. See Salzburg, Registrum Ottonis

384

General Index

responsories (responsoriale), 6, 95, 96t, 222n5 Reynhout, Lucien, 8–9, 124 ritual, 78–9, 96t, 106, 252n110, 286n17. See also obsequials Rode, Johannes, 281n72 Romance of the Rose, 105 Rote Buch, 30, 299–30n23 rubricator, 52, 65, 84–5, 87–8, 238n11, 241n34, 255nn129–30, 258n145 rubrics, 5, 52, 65, 75, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84–5, 104, 106, 108, 176, 293n70 rule. See monastic rules and statutes Rulle, death notices, 69–70; death notice for Christina von Haltern, 6, 42, 69–70, 233n48 sacristan, 30–1, 37, 179, 289nn36–7 salvation, 20, 70, 124, 188, 190, 194– 202, 207, 297n101 Salzburg, 27–8, 102, 229n17, 261n22 Salzburg, Registrum Ottonis for 1404, 235n58, 290n43 Sangmeisterin. See cantrix Schaffner(in). See portress Scherle, Johannes, Historisches Lied, 58, 178, 242–3n40, 288–9n34 Schneider, Karin, 6, 77, 79, 222n8 scholastica, 226–7n2 scholastic texts, 92, 118, 119–20, 121t, 125–6, 131, 156–7, 157t, 158–60, 269n67, 282n75 Schreibstube, 74, 250nn91–2, 289n40 scribal: activity, timing of, 134–6, 168–9, 271n14; curses, 8, 132, 160–2, 163, 283n83, 283–4n90 (see also anathema); initiative, 54, 82, 253–4n122; teams, 36, 40–1, 49, 57–8, 67, 77–80, 205–6, 293nn69–70

scribes, claims of multiple tasks, 67, 86–8, 188–9, 257nn138, 141, 258nn143–6 (see also bragging rights); definition of, xiv, 5, 30 41, 168–70, 183, 282n76, 300–1n6; gender of, 5, 7, 8, 38–9, 43–4, 46– 7, 70, 119–26, 121t, 131, 156–8, 157t, 231n38, 282n75; hierarchy of, 77–81, 83, 189, 234n51, 241n34, 247n66, 252n111, 254n124, 293n69; identified, 4, 6– 7, 13–14, 31, 41–4, 59, 70, 139–45, 225–6n31, 231n35, 231–2n39, 274–5n35, 290n46; identified through handwriting, 6–7, 14, 42, 45, 149–50, 152, 222n8, 275n35; images of, 42, 73, 76, 81, 87, 233nn45–6, 251n100, 253n121; male, 5, 38–9, 51–4, 58, 59–60, 87–8, 120–6, 121t, 157t, 158, 188, 216, 231–2n39, 236–7n4; numbers of, 4, 34–7, 35t, 70, 121t, 129t, 130t, 216, 231–2n39, 236n3, 236– 7n4; scope of work, 5, 39, 41, 43–4, 54, 63, 81–3, 212; self-deprecation of, 140–1, 148, 196, 275n36, 296nn89, 94, 297nn98–100; training of, 79, 84–5, 122, 131, 166, 170, 171, 172, 180, 204, 234n53, 284n4, 300n5 (see also training); unnamed, 4, 6, 7, 34–5, 35t, 42, 67, 70–1, 86, 100, 122–3, 129t, 141, 154, 186–7, 197, 205–6, 215, 222n8, 230–1n32, 233n46, 241n33, 267n55, 274n35 (see also anonymous scribal hands); visitors as, 48, 77, 137, 148–9, 236n2, 254n126, 278n55 scriptoria, evidence for, 36–7, 67– 70, 217

General Index 385 scriptorium, 4, 7, 33–4, 36–7, 47–9, 50, 57–8, 66–1, 77–81, 89, 128–30, 154, 172, 180–1, 217–20, 221n2, 235–6n58, 281n70, 281–2n72, 289n40, 301n13; as physical space, 36–7, 72–7, 181–2, 221n2, 249nn82–3, 250n91, 250n93, 289n40 scriptrix. See scribes, identified; scribes, unnamed; second-hand trade in books. See book trade Seelmeisterin, 38 Sefer Chasidon (Book of the Pious), 283n82 Seligenthal necrology (Necrologium Saeldentalense = NecGer IV, 482), 59, 244nn46–8 Sengerin. See cantrix sequence, 100, 260n16 sequentiary, 100, 260n16 sermons, 34, 41, 46, 54–5, 62, 80, 92, 104, 110, 111, 116–17, 121t, 125, 141–2, 157t, 158, 184, 187, 198, 208, 239n19, 244n51, 245n52, 246n57, 249n80, 251n103, 267nn57–60, 267–8n61, 275n39, 288n31, 291n56, 302n20. See also under authors’ names service books. See liturgical books Seuse, Heinrich, 116, 152, 246n57, 267n56; Hundred Meditations on the Passion (Hundert Betrachtungen zur Passion), 186; The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom (Büchleins der Ewigen Weisheit), 116, 186 Seven Daily Meditations. See Finck, Thomas Singerin. See cantrix sister-book, 6, 11, 14, 32, 42, 69, 83, 93–4, 136, 159, 174, 180, 204,

205–11, 217, 223n17, 224–5n25, 227n2, 229n12, 243n40, 250n88, 254n128, 259n7, 284n6, 289n40, 298n111, 301nn7, 9, 11, 302nn16–19, 23 solmization /solfège, 210, 302n25 soloists’ manuscripts, 96t, 100–1, 260n16 songbooks, 55, 84, 205, 239–40n24, 293n70 Song of Solomon, interpretation of, 264n39 Spinnbuch, Das, 295–6n87 spiritual biography/spiritual history, 93–4, 114, 204, 206–11, 259n7, 302nn16–18 spiritual: economy, 200–2, 298n113, 299nn116–17; exchange, 16, 190– 200, 213; exhortations, 77, 233– 4n49, 251n103; redemption, 189, 198, 201, 213 (see also salvation) St Gall monastery, plans of, 72–3, 249n82 St Katharina in St Gall, chronicle (St Katharina Klosterchronik), 242– 3n40, 288n34; inventory (Stadtarchiv St. Gallen, Trucke XVIII, Nr. 53), 74, 127t, 250n92 St Katharina in Nuremberg: inventory of library, 79, 127t, 282n74; inventory of table readings, 233– 4n49, 290–1n55; instructions to illuminators, 79–80 Stagel, Elisabeth (Elsbeth), 174–5; Töss sister-book, 69, 83, 85, 174–5, 206–7, 225n25, 302nn16–18 statutes. See monastic rules and statutes Stock, Brian, 24, 228n8 Stöcklin, Anna Maria, Arzeney Büch (medical book), 230n26

386

General Index

study. See reading and study stylus, 171 subprioress, 37, 65, 289n36 Summa Cartae Caritatis, 68, 138, 197, 248n70, 258n1 Suso, Henry. See Seuse, Heinrich table readings, 18, 21, 92, 94, 114–17, 143, 156, 163, 227n3, 233–4n49, 253n116, 265n46, 290–1n55 tasks of copying, xiv, 57, 81–8, 176, 241n34, 256n134. See also scribes, scope of work Tauler, Johannes, 80, 116, 152, 246n57; Grunde aller Bosheit, 246n57; sermons, 80, 117; ‘Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity,’ 208, 302n20 Tecla, Latin teacher, 226n2 tertiaries. See Clarissan order /Franciscan Tertiaries textual communities, 24, 89. See also literate communities theological texts, 60, 115–16, 121t, 124–6, 131, 150–1, 156–60, 157t, 247n62, 269n67, 275n39, 279n60 Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (Imitatio Christi), 62, 245n54; Spruch from Vitas Patrum Albertus Magnus, 246n57 Töss sister-book. See Stagel, Elisabeth training, 24, 28, 46, 65, 101, 123, 172, 176, 204, 301nn4–5. See also education /erudition; scribes, training of translation, 5, 11, 12, 60, 61, 65, 85, 143, 205, 223n18, 226n2, 228n7, 230n26, 239n21, 263nn35–6, 264–5n42, 275–6n40, 277n46, 294n72, 295n84, 302n18

translator as scribe, 54–5, 85, 205, 275–6n40, 277n46 ‘tres digiti scribunt’ (three fingers which write), 83, 187, 254n123, 291n60 Trier, General Chapter of the Order of Preachers (1249), 47, 181, 236n59 troper, 96t, 100 Unterlinden sister-book, 208–9, 225n25, 250n88, 302n19, 302nn22–3 Urspring, document of 1441, 33 vernacular, 10–11, 21, 34, 46, 84–5, 109, 110, 114, 116, 128, 143, 196, 205, 207, 227n3, 228n7, 251n103, 255–6n133, 259n3, 263n35, 264n36, 265n46, 288n32, 302n18; literature/texts, 10–11, 34, 46, 65, 85, 92, 116, 128, 205, 223–4n20, 228n7, 264n36, 288n32 Vienna School, authors of, 115, 266n51. See also Heinrich of Langenstein; Peuntner, Thomas Vigilis, Heinrich, sermons, 184, 291n56 Villingen convent chronicle, 84, 205, 225n25, 255n131, 293n70, 301– 2n15 visions, 57, 94, 108, 190, 199, 206–7, 208, 265n42, 293–4n73, 298n111 visitator, 21, 188, 232–3n44, 239n16 visual imagery, importance of, 22, 26, 40, 43, 45, 64, 67, 71, 83–4, 86–7, 105, 107, 144, 157, 189, 192, 207, 209, 226n1, 232–3n44, 234nn53, 54, 235n58, 245n53, 251n100, 252n107

General Index 387 vita/vitae, 54, 55, 66, 77, 111, 114– 15, 121t, 124–5, 128, 131, 137, 156, 157t, 158–9, 238n13, 241n35, 247n62, 251n103, 257n140, 261n19, 265n47, 271n13. See also Bonaventura; Heiligen Leben; Jacobus de Voragine; legendaries Vita of St Clare, 247n62, 257n140, 278n52 Vita of St Dominic. See Dietrich von Apolda Vita of St Dorothea, 238n13 Vita of St Elizabeth. See Dietrich von Apolda Vita of St Francis, 261n19. See also Bonaventura Vita of St Katherine de Alexandria, 251n103 Vita of St Margaret, 282n74 vocabularies, 20, 118, 123, 227n2, 268n62 Vocabularius brevilogus, 268n62 Vocabularius ex quo, 268n62 Voragine, Golden Legend. See Jacobus de Voragine walkways, 73 Walther von der Vogelweide, 293n72 Wattenbach, Wilhelm, 34, 132, 221– 2n3, 230–1n32 wax tablets, 170–1 widow, 20, 23, 186, 264–5n42, 274n34, 289n40, 300n5

Wienhausen, document of 1478, 6 Wilhering sermon collection, 197 William of Saint Thierry, The Golden Epistle (Epistola [aurea] ad fratres de Monte-Dei), 112–13, 264–5n42, 265n43, 274n34 wills/testaments /inheritance, 32–3, 56, 57, 61, 78, 108, 174, 181–2, 184, 240–1n31, 285n13. See also private books /private objects Windesheim statues, 75, 176–7, 287n26 Wochnerin (hebdomadaria), 20, 96t, 103, 104, 227n5 work: attitudes toward, 186–8, 190–2, 205–10, 291n59, 293–4n73, 301– 2n15; as offering, 63, 190–2, 206, 208, 293–4n73 workroom, 36, 68, 73–4, 77, 167, 180, 217, 250nn88, 90, 289n40. See also scriptorium, as physical space workshop, 48–50, 55–8, 66–7, 80, 83, 206, 241n34, 248n66, 252n107, 293n69 writing desks, 73, 76–7 writing tools, 167, 170–1, 284n5 Zweifalten necrology (‘Necrologium Zwifaltense (OSB)’ = NecGer I, 244), 273n32