George. Good morning.
Welcome, everybody, to the master class meeting manuscripts.
You are here at a historic moment. It's for the first time.
But the three manuscripts that you see on the top shelf there and the one
manuscript Martin Kaufmann is just arranging all together since probably 1722.
So we are I'm very pleased, but also chemical.
It's allowed the exceptional transport of a down the road from Akiba College here to the library.
Thanks a lot, Yvonne, for for making this possible.
Thanks a lot to Martin for doing this.
The way we are running it is there will be a mix of comparative slides and the use use of the.
Visualiser. So what you now see are multiple fingers and the assembly of the meeting nuns and the Lunenburg
townspeople as pictured in the prayer book from around 1500 in the Bodleian Library.
And just just to start from this image,
which I think is it's quite iconic for how the nuns viewed their own manuscript production as something that would bring together a town and gown,
as it were. And so the people from the convent and the lay people from Lüneburg, so they are together worshipping.
And the town people say in or sing in low German.
Or that their voice is to be believed. Oh, sweet day.
If only you could stay with us. So I feel a bit like that.
And it has been really splendid to have so many come together to focus on on this manuscript of Switch Back to the Lectern.
Yeah. What we are going to do sort of is to have some kind of spotlight presentations on different aspects of the manuscript running through.
And you're welcome to interrupt in between and put up questions and then.
After that, there should hopefully be another hour of time left to really come forward and look at the manuscript in the flesh,
as it were, and discuss further.
But I thought it such a unique opportunity to have together in one place experts from all these different fields.
I had tried to put together a panel of interdisciplinary competitions to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of manuscript studies.
Just as a very, very brief introduction where we are.
And so we are in northern Germany. We are at the time of the Hanseatic League, late 15th century.
And we are in the region of the northern German convents.
And we have today with us the ABS here from McKinsey.
One of the kind like converts the wrong ones on the comeback comment.
And. The time we are talking about is really the time frame between 1479 when the reform took place and 1526
to the date when the nuns through or the abbess threw the Luther Bible into the brewery fire and.
What we have between the two is it's really, I think,
quite an exceptional explosion of manuscript production and also an attempt to disseminate knowledge and to show things.
And I've reproduced the alphabet from a little primer.
MARTIN Could you just hold that if we don't have a chance in getting a but I've done a mock up of it which can pass around,
just to give you the idea, if you want to, just and of how the nuns achieved this style of how to write proper gothic.
So you have a simple alphabet and you have simple prayers to copy out.
And so to to reach this style of a whole community of writing in the spirit of the reform together.
And those are what we talked before.
So probably most of you will have heard the little poem,
which I think is just a good introduction in this kind of spirit of enterprise connected with manuscript production,
meeting the lunches at Prelude,
you'll sit at this enormous studio wall and soft frost on Cocina stuck in Orzo closed Carla's hoy evokes your mist leaves and is overdone.
So really this injunction of not engaging with reading and writing is something that is not merely
lazy but decidedly evil can explain part of this amazing production as a way of introduction,
I want to show you three.
Pieces. So this is the menu for the meeting proposed.
We're the one that was heavily reworked in 1479.
And this has. The ownership mark of the convent or the novel Use Ecclesia is anchored in multilevel gayness, its sanctimony in meeting.
It's one of the few ownership marks that we have in the extant manuscripts because the nuns
and their personal prayer books would of course not write the ownership mark of the convent.
So this is the one for for the provost done by the nuns.
And in there they. It's a bit of a kind of copyright for this particular form of liturgy that was only really used in the meeting.
So of the four manuscripts that we have, this is the only ownership mark for all the other manuscripts.
We have to go. Yeah. Detective work.
Finding comparative elements, linking elements.
And we'll hear about different ways in which these manuscripts are linked either while why are binding via their content,
via their prayers or via the punctuation, as we'll also see.
The next. I think I would like to show is something I showed yesterday in the lecture, but only in the on a slide.
And that is the way in which the new orderly and meeting souls are can be located.
At meeting you see the different size of it. It's very good to have a multi-centre.
So that is the calendar page for December.
Oh, I think. No, you're right. It's not to say I'm sorry. It's the Ed entry for McCarthy to pull from on the day of.
So. Margaret. So you see Mark.
Martin, could you point at the blue initial? We probably see on the top.
Yeah. All right.
Sorry. Yeah. The blue initial here is for the day of Marguerita and the day of the Virgin.
Margaret with the eye of it.
And then. Behind it, you see the o of abbreviation for the obits.
And then you have a linking line going down to a dominant magazine to perform a baptism of fidelity to a cleric called the Alzheimer Martyr,
which is linked. You can just see it in the fold up there.
And we know from charters that she indeed died on the 13th of July on St Margaret's day.
And you see this characteristic mix of red and blue ink for a name which is used in the soul to always to mark out especially important names.
And both Marguerite the saint and Marguerite the abbess have this mix of colours.
So this is another way of localising by looking at the calendar entries.
And then in the manuscript we saw at the beginning the prayer book we have on the one hand,
the image we just saw of the nuns and the town people and their their habit is the give away.
Could you show it again and please. And we will discuss this binding later.
I think that it has all of the same binding stems that a prayer book is one in Berlin has.
Yeah, I think the Venus could.
So. You see, the first three have the, uh,
they all have the white habit of the cistercians and they changed their habits to sport red crosses on a vale in the reform.
So this shows that it's post reform. And the last one is a late sister who is included in the train community of the comments.
And they had a round.
I'm always better with terminology on closing,
but however with the less strict stigmata and not quite and and that they are very proudly
showing off the same white dress that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was wearing as his Babygro.
So yeah. Why the layup line? That's on the best.
All right. And then in the same manuscript, if I could have a 28 version.
I'm. If you look at that line.
You see the name Luna, both of written out.
So this is a prayer for exile.
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prayer that includes the community within the convent and the community of the birth family,
as it were, in Lunenburg.
So that is the other way to locate.
And they. The manuscript dates because only a before the reform, the other highest office in the convent was the Prioress,
and the convent then applied successfully to be upgraded,
as it were, after the reform, to have an Ebbers, which they claimed was usual for Cistercians, and they were fully Cistercian.
So now that Prioress should be called abbess, and this also meant a reversal of hierarchy.
So the abbess was above the provost while before the provost had higher spiritual authority than the Prioress, despite being prior.
And so this tells us this was after the date because it invokes.
The evidence on that was in the.
No, no, no. 1479 was the convention reform.
And then they took a decade of lobbying to be upgraded.
94? Yeah. 94. Yeah. So moderate Popham, who had managed to the reform very successfully, then became from Prioress.
That first episode. That's it for my part.
I'll hand over to. Andrew.