Copyright

Henrike Lähnemann; Eva Schlotheuber;

Published On

2024-06-21

Page Range

pp. 59–80

Language

  • English

Print Length

22 pages

III. Nuns, Family and Community

Chapter of: The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents (pp. 59–80)

The chapter explores the interconnectedness of convent and world, starting from the example of the different ways in which Braunschweig families interacted with the Heilig Kreuz Kloster, discussing the stages of a nun’s life from their placements as girls, to their profession, to the network which included their relatives and friends once they had become fully part of the community. Examples presented here for the role of representation and status are the monumental 14th-century Tristan tapestry from Kloster Wienhausen and the statuette of the black patron saint Maurice from Kloster Medingen.

Contributors

Henrike Lähnemann

(author)
Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at University of Oxford
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1994-5157

Henrike Lähnemann is the first woman to be appointed to a chair in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where she teaches German literature of the Middle Ages and works on textual and visual evidence from the women’s convents of northern Germany.

Eva Schlotheuber

(author)
Professor of Medieval History at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3762-2818

Eva Schlotheuber is professor of Medieval History at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where she researches and teaches on the education and lifeworld of religious women. She was the first woman to chair the Association of Historians of Germany from 2016 to 2021.