Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Fellows und Mitarbeitende des ZI sowie Gastwissenschaftlerinnen und Gastwissenschaftler berichten über laufende Arbeiten. Die offene Form des Workshops ermöglicht eine intensive Diskussion.

Beginning in 1428, St. Katherine’s Dominican convent in Nuremberg underwent monastic reform, the community renewing its commitment to the Dominican Rule and to enclosed life within the convent walls. As part of this reform the sisters of St. Katharine’s amassed a library of 500-600 religious and historical texts in only a few short decades. Many of these texts were scribed by the nuns themselves, making St. Katharine’s one of the most important sites of women’s book production in all of medieval Europe. While the sisters were prolific scribes, few of the manuscripts at the convent appear to have been illustrated. This presentation will examine one of those rare examples, Lilly Library MS Ricketts 198, a program of historiated initials which illustrates Johannes Meyers’ Amptbuch describing offices of the convent (prioress, sacristan, cellarer, etc). 

Painted by nuns, the miniatures of Ricketts 198 remain understudied. They belong to a category of “cute” or “amateur” convent art which is often assumed to be essentially feminine in style and literal in its content. Placed into an appropriate historical and art historical context, the miniature program instead reveals unexpected confidence in the representation of the gendered body and a productive experimentation with the representation of enclosed space. My analysis of Ricketts 198 establishes one of the key claims of my dissertation project: that nuns experienced monastic enclosure as a layered and often porous phenomenon. 

[Caption: Der Dormitorin, detail of Lilly Library MS Ricketts 198 fol. 110r., Photo: Margaret Wilson.]