Lecture by Sara S. Poor on "Margery Kempe's German Sisters: Anna Eybin and the Late Medieval Devotional Book"
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Speakers): Sara S. Poor
Abstract: As part of a project that explores the roles of literate women in the production and circulation of devotional literature in late medieval Germany, this paper focuses on the book production of one female scribe who, unlike many male and female scribes of her day, signs her name repeatedly in the books she made. Anna Eybin, provost of the Augustinian convent Pillenreuth near Nuremberg from 1461-1476, was according to her sisters the author/producer of "countless" books, though only four of them have survived. All of them are compilations of devotional texts and the most coherent of these is a collection of saints lives that includes an unusual combination of the lives of both ancient and local saints (Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Hs. 2261).
Sara S. Poor (Ph.D. Duke University) is Associate Professor of German at Princeton University. After holding positions at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (1995-96) and ý (1996-2002), she joined the faculty at Princeton in September of 2002. Her primary research interests are in the areas of Gender Studies and medieval German literature, interests which are reflected prominently in her teaching. Her first book, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority was awarded the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship's 2006 Prize for the best first book on a medieval feminist topic and the Medieval Academy of America's 2008 John Nicholas Brown Prize for the best first book on a medieval subject. She has three works in progress: 1) a book project on the relationship between gender and literacy that focuses on women religious and the production and transmission of devotional books; and 2) a volume of essays that grew out of the CSR-sponsored conference “Mysticism, Reform, and the Formation of Modernity” that took place at Princeton in February 2008; and 3) a translation of the Sisterbooks (female-authored chronicles of 14th-century German Dominican convents).
Sponsored by the Department of German Studies, CMEMS, and the Department of Religious Studies