Briefkunst und Gemeinschaft

Die Briefbücher des Benediktinerinnenklosters Lüne (KlA Lüne, HS 15, 30 und 31) in Funktion und Kontext

Book cover: Briefkunst und Gemeinschaft

Hardback (Forthcoming)

(May 2027)

ISBN: 9783162003737

6.1 x 9.13 inches

Price: $225.00

Combining linguistic, material, and contextualizing approaches, Lena Vosding offers a comprehensive historical analysis of the three Lüne letter books. They prove to be a complex testimony to the self-reflecting writing practices of a religious women’s community facing the Protestant reformation and social changes during the sixteenth century.


The letter cultures of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period are flourishing topics of research: thanks to numerous studies and editions, the picture of the circumstances, forms, and functions of written correspondence in premodern Europe is becoming increasingly detailed, while new questions of methodology and content are being posed. Lena Vosding contributes to this discussion by analyzing the both unique and diverse collection of letter texts from the former Benedictine convent of Lüne near Lüneburg. Approximately 1,800 text units, dating back to the mid-fifteenth century, have survived in three manuscripts from the mid-sixteenth century that are still preserved in the convent’s archive. They offer a remarkably broad insight into the everyday life of the nuns, which the author outlines systematically. Yet, the author not only examines the three manuscripts with regard to their textual content but also considers them as objects with their own biographies. When content and form, materiality and genesis, are viewed together, the manuscripts reveal their multifaceted value as a source and prove to be a complex testimony of the nuns’ collaborative work on their conventual identity during the crisis of the Reformation. The detailed contextualization highlights not only the nuns’ evident ability to apply the established epistolary norms, but also the circumstances of monastic communication and the curated afterlife of letters in the collection. The selectivity of their compilation reveals the nuns’ self-awareness and their aim to shape a particular rhetorical and social profile of their community. This profile’s physical manifestation, the manuscripts, fulfilled various functions over time.