Professor Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria - a full-length study of the role of women copyists in the Middle Ages - is underpinned by the notion that the scriptorium was central to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. The author examines the exceptional quantity of evidence of female scribal activity in three different religious communities, pointing out the various ways in which the women worked - alone, with other women, and even alongside men - to produce books for monastic libraries, and discussing why their work should have been made visible, whereas that of other female scribes remains invisible. Beach's focus on manuscript production, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which shaped that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest not only to palaeographers but also to those interested in reading, literacy, religion and gender history.

Originally published by Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 1988.

Tools to powerfully write about and manifest your life using the power found in the sacred sites of ancient Egypt • Reveals how to create meaning from one’s life experiences and manifest new destinies through spiritual writing • Contains meditations and creative writing exercises exploring sacred themes in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and other hieroglyphic texts of ancient Egypt • Shares transformative and inspiring pieces written by those who’ve attended the authors’ Egyptian sacred tours Within each of us is a story, a sacred story that needs to be told, of our heroic efforts and of our losses. The scribes of ancient Egypt devoted their lives to the writing of sacred stories. These technicians of the sacred were masters of hieroglyphic thinking, or heka--the proper words, in the proper sequence, with the proper intonation and the proper intent. Learning heka provided scribes with the power to invoke and create worlds through their words and thoughts. To the writer, heka is a magical way to create meaning from experience. Through heka we manifest new visions and new relationships to ourselves and to others. We can make new art filled with beauty and light. Revealing the spiritually transformative power of writing, the authors take us on a journey of self-discovery through the sacred sites of Egypt, from the Temple of Isis to the Great Pyramid of Giza. Through meditations and creative writing exercises exploring the powerful themes found in the hieroglyphic texts of ancient Egypt and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, they show how, through writing, we can live beyond the ordinary, give our dreams form, and discover who we really are and what our lives really mean. Sharing transformative and inspiring pieces written by those who’ve attended their Egyptian sacred tours, the authors reveal how writing your spiritual biography allows you to reconnect to the creativity and divine within, face your fears, offer gratitude for what you have, manifest new destinies, and recognize your life as part of the sacred story of Earth.

Important intervention in Middle English studies that challenges widely accepted narratives on the identities of Chaucer's scribes.

Scribes and Schools is an examination of the processes which led to the canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Philip Davies sheds light on the social reasons for the development of the canon and in so doing presents a clear picture of how the Bible came into being. Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple disciplines--such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and literary criticism--to illuminate the everyday realities and social subtleties these ancient cultures experienced. This series employs sophisticated methods resulting in original contributions that depict the reality of the people behind the Hebrew Bible and interprets these insights for a wide variety of readers.

"Books before print -manuscripts- were modified continuously throughout the medieval period. Focusing on the ninth and twelfth centuries, this volume explores such material changes as well as the varying circumstances under which handwritten books were produced, used and collected. An important theme is the relationship between the physical book and its users. Can we reflect on reading practices through an examination of the layout of a text? To what extent can we use the contents of libraries to understand the culture of the book? The volume explores such issues by focusing on a broad palette of texts and through a detailed analysis of manuscripts from all corners of Europe"--Publisher's description.

The fifteenth century, one of the most curious and confused periods in recorded history, witnessed amazing developments in the printing industry and in the production of books. The present volume surveys the history of the manufacture of books throughout the fifteenth century, whether written by hand or produced by the press, and points out that both methods faced very similar problems and found almost identical solutions for them. Actually, the fifteenth century itself saw no material difference between manuscripts and incunabula (fifteenth-century printings), and regarded the latter simply as codices produced by "a new method of artificial writing." Curt F. Bühler discusses the impact of the epoch-making invention on the scribes as well as the attitudes that the contemporary book-lovers adopted toward the products of the press. The author also studies the types of men who were attracted to the new industry and the nature of the books that they believed to be readily vendible. In addition, certain familiar beliefs regarding the history of the early presses are challenged, and possible solutions are presented for the problems are still imperfectly understood. To illustrate the text, beautiful reproductions of illuminated manuscript pages, printed pages, colophons, woodcut illustration, and early typefaces have been included. The author's discussion of the decoration in books is not so much a study in the fine arts but, rather, an analysis of the types of volumes which lent themselves to decoration, and the various forms of such work.