Women as Scribes
Women as Scribes
$139.00
USDAlison Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria is based on the belief that the scriptorium was vital to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. Beach's focus on manuscript production at three rather different religious houses, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which influenced that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest to palaeographers as well as others interested in religious and gender history.
- Of importance not only to palaeographers but also to historians interested in the twelfth-century Renaissance in Germany
- A useful contribution to the study of reading, literacy and the history of the book
Reviews & endorsements
"This excellent study of female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria demonstrates how careful paleographical and codicological analysis can provide important new insights into medieval women's religious lives...This creative approach to manuscript studies makes important contributions to the scholarship on female monasticism, to the study of monastic reform in German-speaking lands and to our understanding of monastic participation in the intellectual revival of the twelfth century."
- H-Net
"Beach's study provides a thoughtful balance of general information regarding medieval spirituality and book production, valuable to a general readership, and detailed manuscript evidence and paleographical descriptions, worthy of the expert's attention." - Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Debra L. Stoudt, University of Toledo
"...if her book is indeed merely a beginning of an answer to the questio nof whether women copied books in the Middle Ages, it is unquestionably a very sound beginning, and the information it contains is of the greatest value." - Speculum David N. Bell, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Product details
May 2004Hardback
9780521792431
214 pages
244 × 170 × 13 mm
0.54kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Diemut and the nun-scribes of Wessobrunn
- 3. Claustration and collaboration: the nun-scribes of Admont
- 4. Unlikely allies in the scriptorium: the female scribes of Schäftlarn
- 5. Conclusion
- Appendix A. Codicological tables
- Appendix B. Ruling patterns
- Bibliography
- Index.
