Cynthia J. CyrusBesprekingen

The Scribes For Women's Convents in Late Medieval Germany is a solidly-argued and well-written study of book production by and for women religious in the period beginning in the early thirteenth century and running roughly up to the Reformation. Cynthia Cyrus has identified about 600 named scribes who carried out such work in the period, of whom approximately two-thirds were women. Much of the meat of Cyrus' study comes from the colophons—the "proto-autobiographical notes" (164) as Cyrus terms them—which offer us some tantalising glimpses of who produced these manuscripts and why. Many of her arguments about the social, cultural and religious purposes of such scribal activities I found convincing.

However, those who work on the history of the book may have reservations about the basis of the statistics which Cyrus presents here. Rather than basing her manuscript count on wholly independent archival research (which could, admittedly, be the work of a lifetime), Cyrus drew heavily on Sigrid Krämer’s Handschriftenerbe des Mittelalters, which itself was a compilation of data from manuscript catalogues. This book must therefore be one of the first rather than last words on the subject, as its arguments await further testing and refinement in the light of new archival research. It is, however, as the medieval women who are its subjects would have put it, gut geschrieben.

Review by Kathleen Kamerick in SHARP News 19.2 (Spring 2010).