Title: Women as scribes : book production and monastic reform in twelfth-century Bavaria /
Authors: Beach, Alison I.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 2004
Subjects: Stift Admont History; Wessobrunn (Monastery) History; Schäftlarn (Monastery : Schäftlarn, Germany) History; Wessobrunn (Monastery); Stift Admont.; Schäftlarn (Monastery : Schäftlarn, Germany); Scriptoria Germany Bavaria History; Scribes Germany Bavaria History; Women in Christianity History; Books Germany History; Manuscripts, Medieval Germany Bavaria History.; Monasticism and religious orders Germany Bavaria History; Civilization, Medieval; Scriptoria Germany Bavaria.; Books Germany History; Monastic and religious life of women History; Monastic and religious life of women Germany Bavaria History
Abstract: "Professor Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria - the first full-length study of the role of women copyists in the Middle Ages - is underpinned by the notion that the scriptorium was central to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. The author examines the exceptional quantity of evidence of female scribal activity in three different religious communities, pointing out the various ways in which the women worked - alone, with other women, and even alongside men - to produce books for monastic libraries, and discussing why their work should have been made visible, whereas that of other female scribes remains invisible. Beach's focus on manuscript production, and the religious, intellectual, social, and economic factors which shaped that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest not only to palaeographers but also to those interested in reading, literacy, and religious and gender history."--BOOK JACKET.