Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe
Three conferences on ‘Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe’ took place at the University of Hull from 20–23 June 2011, the University of Missouri-Kansas City from 5–8 June 2012, and the Universiteit Antwerpen from 4–7 June 2013. The resulting papers from these conferences form the chapters of published volumes. The first two volumes are available: Virginia Blanton, Veronica O'Mara, and Patricia Stoop, Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013 (Series Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 26) and Virginia Blanton, Veronica O'Mara, and Patricia Stoop, Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015 (Series Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 27). The third volume, Virginia Blanton, Veronica O'Mara, and Patricia Stoop, Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017 (Series Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 28), is currently in print.
The collections of essays, focused on the literacies of nuns in medieval Europe, bring together specialists working on diverse geographical areas to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts nuns read, wrote, and exchanged, primarily from the eighth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. Contributors to this volume investigate the topic of literacy primarily from palaeographical and textual evidence and by discussing information about book ownership and production in convents. Whereas the first volume focused primarily on Northern Europe (England, Germany, the Low Countries, and Sweden), the second expanded the range to include material in minority languages such as Old Norse and Old Irish and focused particularly on education and other textual forms, such as the epistolary and the legal. The third volume expands the geographical range by including a larger selection of female religious, for instance, tertiaries, and further languages (for example, Danish and Hungarian), as well as engaging more explicitly on issues of adaptation of manuscript and early printed texts for a female readership.
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