Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300-1425
Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent
edited by Jeffrey Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, Susan Marti and Margot Fassler
Written by an international team consisting of two art historians, an historian and a musicologist, this study explores the intellectual, scribal, artistic and musical culture of the Dominican nuns of Paradies from a variety of perspectives. Taking as its subject a little-known group of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century liturgical manuscripts from the Dominican convent of Paradies bei Soest (Westphalia), the book also offers a revisionary account of the development of the Dominican order in late medieval Germany. Two antiphonaries, three graduals and additional fragments made both for and by the nuns testify to a self-conscious liturgical culture closely tied to the development of the Dominican order’s female branch. One manuscript in particular, a gradual written and illuminated at Paradies ca. 1380 (Dusseldorf, ULB D 11) contains an unparalleled wealth of inscribed images which make it the most extensively illuminated liturgical manuscript of the entire Middle Ages. The learned inscriptions allow for not only a reconstruction of the nuns’ library, but also a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the learning and Latin literacy of mendicant nuns in the late fourteenth century, a period that in the accounts of modern scholars as well as medieval reformers has too quickly been discounted as a time of intellectual and institutional decline. In text, image and chant, the nuns assembled a comprehensive commentary on the liturgy, one which serves as a testament to their creativity, learning and ambition as well as their devotion.
- Edited by Margot Fassler
- Edited by Jeffrey Hamburger
- Edited by Susan Marti
- Edited by Eva Schlotheuber
"The scope of the study and the amount of information assembled here will likely make Paradies and its manuscripts the ruler by which all similar foundations with a surviving artistic, intellectual, and musical patrimony will be measured." --Diane J. Reilly, The Medieval Review 18.11.09
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