Manuscript Studies

In the middle of the 20th century the texts of two waqf documents, drawn up in the 11th century in Arabic in Samarḳand, were discovered, which are of great significance for studying the history and culture of Central Asia of the Ḳarakhanid period. One of them was drawn up for madrasa, and the second for the hospital in Samarḳand, which were donated for public use as a charitable donation by the Ḳarakhanid ruler of Samarḳand Ṭamghādj Bughrā Khān (ruled in 444-460/1052-1068) in the month of Radjab 458/June 1066. The originals of these two documents have not reached us, but their text was included in some works on jurisprudence by medieval jurists. Many manuscripts of these works, containing copies of these two documents, are kept in various manuscript collections of the world. In the Shāh-i Zinda complex at the Afrāsiyāb settlement in Samarḳand, the remains of a monumental building were excavated, which were identified with the madrasa of Ṭamghādj Bughrā Khān. The present book consists of a critical edition of two waqf documents of Ṭamghādj Bughrā Khān, a Russian translation and a detailed historical-geographical and archaeological-topographic commentary with the involvement of data from archaeological and toponymical studies.

Internation conference organized by the United Scientific Council for Social Science and Humanities, the Saint Petersburg Institut of History, the German Historical Institute in Moscow, the National Library of Russia and the State Hermitage Museum

A group of medical historians and paleographers has teamed up informally to create a "Medicine in the Long 12th Century Working Group."  More than 500 extant manuscripts from this period have been identified as containing Latin medical texts.  Adding in citations from 12th-century catalogs, we have at least 650 witnesses to the “common library” that made up learned medical knowledge throughout Europe in the long 12th century:  around 150 different texts in circulation, in some cases found in a single copy but in others in several dozens.  A revolution in medicine did indeed happen in this period.  But it was not a “revolution” based on wholesale absorption of new work made suddenly available in Latin from Arabic.  Nor was it a "revolution" based entirely at the southern Italian city of Salerno, which has long been centrally featured in narratives about medicine in this period.  This project aims to use the collected expertise of the contributors, and the ever-growing availability of digitized manuscripts (many made freely available on the Internet by their holding libraries), to create a comprehensive picture of medicine in this crucial period of change.  Our hope is that many subsidiary projects will emerge out of this, whether they be studies of individual texts, centers for copying manuscripts or studying medicine, or larger questions about the modes or impacts of programs of medical and scientific translations.

In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, _Sardanapalo_, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned when work began on an edition of what Liszt notated: almost the entirety of Act 1. This article draws on an array of sources – published and unpublished – significantly to update our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Liszt’s composition and abandonment of _Sardanapalo_. In light of his inconsistently Italianate music and idiosyncratic treatment of the libretto, it also reinterprets Liszt’s mid-century aesthetic orientation, as a confidant of Wagner and would-be pillar of Franz Brendel’s future neudeutsche Schule. By contextualizing key aspects of the uncovered musical score and libretto within Liszt’s mid-century writings on aesthetics, it posits character, declamatory melody and the visuality of the stage as (initially) critical criteria in the communication of a literary narrative, and suggests that Liszt’s impulse towards symphonic poetry may first have been kindled within the aesthetic potential of opera.

It was not until the second decade of the twelfth century that Carolingian script started to be used in Galicia, closing the cycle of more than 200 years of use of Visigothic script as the main graphic system in the north-western Iberian Peninsula. A new period of openness to European cultural currents put then an end to the graphical and liturgical particularism of the territories that would become Spain, meaning a drastic change for all literate and illiterate people that was not received with equal eagerness in all areas. Some ecclesiastical institutions, led by ambitious bishops and abbots, saw an opportunity to grow and present themselves as the new main cultural centres of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, taking away the political and cultural prominence of those that had once been instrumental in the reorganization of the Christian peninsular realms after the Muslims’ arrival. Others seem to have been reluctant to accept a new rite and to adopt a new script, neither of which was a national product. Caroline minuscule had not evolved gradually, like Visigothic script had, from the previous documentary and book hand writing systems used, but was imposed, like the Roman rite, mostly by political interests of kings, ecclesiastical elites, and cultural pressure. Acceptance of change would lead to a cultural unification in which the glorious Visigothic past, Visigothic script, and Visigothic rite were no more than a memory.
In analysing the extant manuscript sources, codices and charters, that speak of liturgical imposition and graphical acculturation, the present work discusses not only how the process occurred, but what it must have meant, politically and culturally speaking, for major cultural peninsular institutions both old and new, for those closer to the Carolingian Empire and those geographically distant but very much in the political and ecclesiastical centre of northern Christian Iberia. After a brief historical and graphical review of how the process of change developed in Septimania and Catalonia as early as the ninth century, and in Aragon, Navarre, and the Leonese-Castilian kingdoms well into the eleventh century, attention will be given to what was the old kingdom of Galicia, in the far north-western corner of the peninsula. A thorough look at the extant written sources produced in the two main Galician sees, Lugo and Santiago de Compostela, from the late eleventh to the mid-twelfth century, and their historical context, highlights the steps of graphical and cultural change, simultaneously providing valuable evidence about how the transition from the old Visigothic script system to the new European Carolingian one must have been experienced by the scribes and copyists who lived it.

This article traces the pictorial lineages of images collected in one of the two Thun-Hohenstein albums through comparative analyses of fight books produced in the German-speaking lands, and considers how the representational strategies deployed in martial treatises inflected the ways that book painters and their audiences visualized the armoured body.

The illustrations of the Benedictine monk, artist, and chronicler Matthew Paris offer a gateway into the thirteenth-century world. This new study of his cartography emphasizes the striking innovations he brought to it, and shows how the maps became an investment and repository of certain medieval spatial practices: travel through the world, the occurrence of history in that world, and the religious practices and devotional attitudes that were assiduously cultivated within the larger visual culture of St. Albans abbey [in great measure produced by Matthew's own images]. Travel [i.e. space], history [time], and devotion [liturgy], then, are the primary issues and meanings deposited in and registered by Matthew Paris's cartographic landscape. In searching out these contexts, the book explores the paradigm of imagined pilgrimage as an organizing principle that pushes into greater relief medieval understandings of their arrangements of places and of histories. Thus traveling through geography could enact its meanings in a dynamic, religious, even devotional performance of the maps' materials. Richly illustrated with black and white and colour plates.

Le succès rapide que connut la facture traditionnelle de Robert Boyvin dans les années 1490 et son adaptation difficile au contexte des années 1510, marquées par l’adoption croissante du goût à l’antique, font de lui un témoin privilégié de la période hybride que constitue le règne de Louis XII pour les arts de la couleur en France. Sans vouloir faire de Robert Boyvin l’artiste original qu’il n’était pas, je souhaite revenir sur la carrière de cet enlumineur fécond pour mieux saisir la nature de la production rouennaise vers 1500.

À cette fin, j’interrogerai pour chaque décennie de son activité reconnue, de 1480 à 1520 environ, l’évolution de sa situation par la répartition de sa production entre œuvres d’étal et commandes, l’identité de ses collaborateurs réguliers et ponctuels et l’ouverture de son art aux milieux rouennais, tourangeau et parisien. Cette étude offre également l’occasion d’introduire vingt-trois manuscrits inédits, méconnus ou apparus depuis 1995, qui font de la production de Robert Boyvin l’une des plus importantes de son temps, avec au moins quatre-vingts manuscrits conservés.

Actes du colloque international organisé à Genève les 28 et 29 avril 2017.

The paper provides a translation of the colophons to the Persian Gospels’ manuscripts in Armenian script (Matenadaran N 8492 and N 3044), in which the history of the manuscripts is recounted. This leads us to interpret the reasons to translate Gospels in Persian and write in Armenian script. The data of colophons assume to reveal many question concerning the Armenians living in Eastern Transcaucasia in 18th century. As per colophons the Gospels have been translated into Persian for the Christians living in the above mentioned area, as they needed this vast religious knowledge to resist the Muslim preachers who were engaged in religious discourse. Religious discourse was one of main tools of Spreading Islam and Islamisation in the time of Safavid Shah Soleyman and his son Shah Sultan Husayn.
Despite living among the Persian speaking population, Armenians were preserving their Armenian identity by holding into Christianity and the Armenian writing. Starting from the middle ages when religious ideology was dominant, Armenian writing, literature and particularly Alphabet and the letters had been sanctified and held a sacred content. At the core of writing the translation of Gospels in Armenian script was residing the same idea of sacredness.

This article presents a manuscript that significantly enriches the textual corpus of ›Helfta Mysticism‹ with a series of hitherto unknown writings. Aside from this, it contains what is by some distance the oldest copy of the ›Legatus divinae pietatis‹, in the form of a ›special edition‹ that consists of excerpts from the known text as well as new material. This is preceded by a prologue and a florilegium which is marked in an epilogue as Gertrude’s own work. We argue that the epilogue of the florilegium, the prologue and the ›special edition‹ itself were probably composed by ›Sister N‹ of Helfta herself. The article provides a full description of the manuscript (Ms 827), a breakdown of the new ›special edition‹ of the ›Legatus‹-text, and an edition, translation, and close reading of the prologue.

Im Folgenden soll eine Handschrift vorgestellt werden, die die Textbasis der Helftaer Mystik mit einer Reihe von bislang unbekannten Schriften bereichert. Außerdem enthält sie die mit Abstand älteste Abschrift des ›Legatus divinae pietatis‹ in Form einer ›Sonderausgabe‹, die aus Exzerpten aus dem bekannten Textcorpus und aus weiterem bislang nicht bekanntem Material besteht. Dieser geht eine Vorrede und ein im Epilog als Gertruds Werk ausgewiesenes Florilegium voraus, Texte, die wie die ›Sonderausgabe‹ selbst von Schwester N von Helfta stammen dürften. Die vorliegende Studie bietet eine Beschreibung von Ms 827, die Aufschlüsselung der ›Sonderausgabe‹ des ›Legatus‹ sowie Abdruck, Übersetzung und inhaltliche Analyse der Vorrede.

So far, studies of Pelplin's manuscripts have focused exclusively on selected, most prominent volumes with signatures 23 (19), 43 (79), L 13. Some scholars have attempted to attribute to Pelplin's Cistercian scriptorium also manuscripts 2 (3), 3 (4), 5 (1), 8 (5), 28 (20), 30 (90), 50 (78), 85 (186), L 21, though their analysis tend to omit calligraphic decorations (M. Nierzwicka being a notable exception). The analysis of penwork, however, is an invaluable tool for identifying the provenance and dating of manuscripts.
The collection of volumes in Pelplin currently includes two manuscripts with confirmed origin and creation date: "Summa Confessorum" 30 (90) and Gradual L 13. The first one has a colophon while the latter was subject of extensive provenance studies. Both were written in Pelplin: "Summa" in 1319 and the Gradual in the 2nd half 14th C. Comparative studies of other codices indicate that they too were most likely made by local monks. Decoration of manuscript 57 (66) and 27 (44) are nearly identical with those adoring pages of manuscript 30 (90). Though executed with less skill, the penwork of a group of writings marked with signature 17 (27) and dating probably to before 1319, are also similar to those in the "Summa". Nicholas of Lyra's "Commentaries" [sygn. 5 (1)] were made later which is indicated by both their content and its decorations which appropriate elements from manuscripts 30 (90) and, at the same time, serve as source of inspiration for Gradual L 13. The latter volume's decorations are also linked with the characteristic motif of swelling bulbs drawn in the manuscript 67 (134). The decoration of the initial incipit from manuscript 67 (134) was copied with almost no alternation in Nicholas of Lyra's  "Commentaries" which, according to their colophon, were written in 1416 and are marked with signature 22 (11). It seems likely, that the distinct form of penwrok from the 'circle' of "Summa Confessorum", developed earlier. This process can be seen in volumes with signature 3 (4), 66 (116) and the Antiphonary L 9. Finally it can also be added that decorations in manuscript 20 (47) are analogous to some of those in L 9. It is very likely that the Antiphonary L 9 is either one of Pelplin's scriptorium earliest work or that it was used by local monks as a model for their works.

Parmi les œuvres conservées du Moyen Âge, il en est certaines qui, fortes de l’aura de chef-d’œuvre qui leur est associée, incarnent l’émergence de nouvelles formes et de nouvelles techniques picturales. Deux d’entre elles sont exposées de part et d’autre de la cimaise introduisant les salles de peinture française du musée du Louvre : le portrait de Jean II le Bon, premier portrait indépendant peint sur bois depuis l’Antiquité, et le Parement de Narbonne, seul parement d’autel peint à l’encre sur soie à nous être parvenu. Exposée dans les salles du département des Objets d’art, une troisième, plus discrète, consiste en un médaillon de cuivre peint d’émail, figurant un homme coupé à la poitrine, coiffé d’un bonnet et encadré du nom de Jean Fouquet. En dépit de sa petite taille, ce chef-d’œuvre d’émaillerie atteste l’invention au XVe siècle d’une peinture de rehauts d’or appliqués sur fond monochrome qui demeure, aujourd’hui encore, un peu négligée des historiens : le camaïeu d’or.

Pourquoi consacrer aujourd’hui une étude à la pratique du camaïeu d’or dans les manuscrits enluminés en France du règne de Charles VI à celui de Louis XII ? D’abord, pour définir les modalités de diffusion d’une technique en réalité inventée à Paris au début du XVe siècle, renouvelée à Tours par Jean Fouquet et diffusée dans la seconde moitié du siècle auprès des principaux centres de production livresque du royaume. Ensuite, pour interroger les modalités de production d’une technique de réduction du coloris dans les étapes de fabrication d’un manuscrit et identifier l’intervention du miniaturiste dans son exécution. Enfin, pour esquisser les modalités de réception et surtout de perception d’un tel monochrome, par ceux qui l’ont intégré dans la conception polychrome de leurs miniatures comme par ceux auxquels ces œuvres étaient destinées.

Cette étude s’articulera donc en deux temps. Il s’agira d’abord de définir la diffusion et la fortune de la réception du camaïeu d’or dans les différents centres de production picturaux du domaine royal. Chronologique et géographique, cette trame restituera les éléments de contexte propices à une analyse casuistique de l’usage du camaïeu d’or, menée sur une portion représentative de la production d’un artiste, d’un atelier et d’un milieu donné. Fondées sur la récurrence ou non de ces déductions formulées au cas par cas, les conclusions de cette enquête pourront ainsi avancer une courte synthèse d’ensemble des modalités de diffusion, de production et de réception de cette technique de réduction du coloris dans l’enluminure en France au XVe siècle.


Liste des milieux considérés :
Paris (1400-1440)
Angers (1445-1470)
Tours (1450-1475)
Bourges (1465-1500)
Duché de Bourgogne (1475-1500)
Lyon (1475-1510)
Tours (1475-1510)
Paris (1470-1500)

Liste alphabétique des artistes et productions considérés :
Atelier de Jean Charpentier
Atelier du Maître de Guillaume Lambert
Entourage du Maître du Boccace de Munich
François Le Barbier fils (Maître de Jacques de Besançon)
Frères de Limbourg
Jacquelin de Montluçon
Jean Bourdichon
Jean Colombe
Jean Fouquet
Jean de Montluçon
Jean Poyer
Jean d'Ypres (Maître des Très Petites Heures d'Anne de Bretagne)
Maître d'Adélaïde de Savoie (Maître du Poitiers 30)
Maître d'Antoine de la Roche (Guido Mazzoni?)
Maître de Boucicaut
Maître de Charles de France (Jean de Laval?)
Maître de Guillaume Lambert
Maître de Jehan Boudet
Maître de Jouvenel
Maître des Prélats bourguignons (Pierre Changenet?)
Maître du Boccace de Munich (François ou Louis Fouquet)
Maître du cardinal de Bourbon
Maître du Getty ms. 10
Maître du Keble 7
Maître du Latin 18015
Maître du Missel de Yale (Guillaume Piqueau?)
Maître du Walters 447

With their rich pictorial content, the illustrated manuscripts have been of high interest for the scholars and researchers of art history. An Ottoman- Turkish illustrated manuscript, Süleymanname is an official history book produced in the Ottoman Court in the 16th century that documents and depicts the events during the reign of Süleyman I. The pictorial content of these manuscripts is studied as a painting from an art history point of view where they are referred as miniature paintings. There is a need to study the images from a graphic design and illustration point of view. This paper investigates the making of the images in the manuscript as an illustration by graphically analyzing the illustrated pages of Süleymanname. Particularly, the paper presents an analysis on how the natural and the architectural elements are represented in the pictorial plane to create the main space of the illustration.

"The sea monsters on medieval and Renaissance maps, whether swimming vigorously, gamboling amid the waves, attacking ships, or simply displaying themselves for our appreciation, are one of the most visually engaging elements on these maps, and yet they have never been carefully studied. The subject is important not only in the history of cartography, art, and zoological illustration, but also in the history of the geography of the marvelous and of western conceptions of the ocean. Moreover, the sea monsters depicted on maps can supply important insights into the sources, influences, and methods of the cartographers who drew or painted them. In this book the author analyzes the most important examples of sea monsters on medieval and Renaissance maps produced in Europe, beginning with the earliest mappaemundi on which they appear in the tenth century and continuing to the end of the sixteenth century. The book is heavily illustrated in color, and will be the standard work on the subject for years to come.

Featured, with images on the British Library's blog at featured on the British Library’s blog, at http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/magnificentmaps/2013/08/whimsical-sea-monsters.html

Interview with the author at http://traffic.libsyn.com/skeptic/069_Monstertalk.mp3

Review by Vicki Ellen Szabo in Nautical Research Journal 58.4 (December 2013) available at
http://www.thenrg.org/sea-monsters.php

Review by Darren Naish in a Scientific American blog available at
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2014/11/16/chet-van-duzers-sea-monsters/

The teachings of the tantric lineage of the Zur clan, which flourished in West Tibet during the early second millennium, have remained a missing element in the history of the “ancient,” Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. While the historical importance of the clan is well known and significant lines of transmission are attributed to it, few authentic works stemming from the Zur and detailing their tradition have appeared. The recent discovery of a major synthetic treatise, The All-Encompassing Lamp of Awareness, by a 12th century successor to the Zur and treating all major aspects of their doctrinal heritage, permits us for the first time to consider their contribution in substantial detail. The present article examines the provenance and authorship of this remarkable work.

Liber antiphonarium
Ms. 8, Archivo Capitular de León
Copistas: Totmundo y Arias.
Procedente del Monasterio de San Cipriano de las Riberas del Porma.
s. X, aunque varios folios añadidos del s. XI.
Pergamino, 306 f., 330 x 240 mm.

Realizado entre los siglos X y XII, el Antifonario de León es un libro litúrgico musical que contiene más de una centena de oficios del rito hispánico, con sus correspondientes cantos particulares variables en cada fiesta y solemnidad atendiendo tanto a las horas canónicas como a las partes cantadas de la misa. El manuscrito, conservado actualmente en el Archivo Capitular de la Catedral de León, se atribuye al copista Totmundo del Monasterio de San Cipriano de las Riberas del Porma, gracias a una dedicatoria al comienzo del libro. El calendario de las primeras páginas, así como la ordenación interna de los oficios son un rico ejemplo del santoral hispano-visigodo de la época. La notación que acompaña a los textos, llamada visigótoca, ha despertado gran interés entre los musicólogos medievalistas, aunque no puede leerse en la actualidad por la ausencia de referentes en la altura de los sonidos. El manuscrito es el mejor ejemplo conservado de los antifonarios de la liturgia hispánica y una de las fuentes que más información nos aporta en la actualidad para comprender esta forma ritual, que fue sustituida por el rito romano desde el siglo XII y que era fruto de la riqueza cultural hispana en la Antigüedad Tardía y Alta Edad Media.

The colophons of the Armenian manuscripts take a special place with their original and rich information among the medieval Armenian written monuments.
In the work we have attempted to thoroughly examine the components of the Armenian colophons, the latters’ diverse ways of expression. We have done some classifications of the Armenian colophons, according to the time of writing, the authors of colophons and the content. We have individually represented the units we encounter in the Armenian colophons, if possible, comparing this all with the identical manifestations occurring in other manuscript traditions.

The Diocesan library in Pelplin contains several manuscripts which originate from its mother monastery in Doberan. They probably came here with the first monks from Doberan to the newly founded monastery in Pogódki (1258) which moved to Pelplin a few years later (1276). The stock consists of six manuscripts with a definite possession note of Doberan Monastery and seven further handwritings which are classified by research work as originating from Doberan. The article presents the manuscripts and the current state of research.

Bu makale, Suleymaniye Kutuphanesi, Yazma Bagislar, no. 2461'da bulunan mecmuanin icerigini tartismaktadir. Bu mecmuaya dayanarak Michael Reinhard Hes, Hurufilik hakkinda bazi sonuclara ulasmis ve "Qualified heterodoxy in a 17th century Ḥurūfī muḳaddime." isimli makalesinde bunlari zikretmistir. Bu makale bir dizi hatalari da icinde barindirmaktadir. Calismamizin asil amaci, ozellikle bu yazma eser uzerindeki ve genel olarak da Hurufilik hakkindaki yanilgilari duzeltmektir. Calisma ayni zamanda Hurufi ideolojisinin donusumu ve Hurufilik tarihinin donemsellestirilmesini analiz etmektedir.

Hillel Zeitlin (1871-1942) was the leading figure of what may be called philosophical neo-Hasidism among Eastern European Jews in the pre-Holocaust era. A tireless author, journalist, and polemicist, he published constantly in both the Yiddish and Hebrew press, offering a bold new vision of contemporary spiritual life grounded in his reading of Hasidic sources. But Zeitlin sought to become an activist as well as a literary figure. He was especially concerned with the situation of the rootless Jewish youth. Throughout his career as a public figure, beginning shortly after World War I, he issued calls for a new organization of Jewish life. In a series of articles published in the 1920s he sought to form an elite Jewish spiritual fraternity to be called Yavneh, the most fully elaborated of his attempts at intentional community. The present study collects together Zeitlin’s Yiddish writings on the Yavneh fellowship, which are here re-printed and translated for the first time. Alongside these we present a newly discovered manuscript signed by Zeitlin, a single-sheet four-sided signed text in which he describes more succinctly and clearly the nature of the group and its intended function.

A discussion of how G.R.S. Mead shaped 20th-century Anglophone discourse about Gnosticism decades prior to the Nag Hammadi discovery, through his interpretation of the Askew and Bruce Codices, and his popularization of the work of Berlin Coptologist Carl Schmidt. Thanks in part to Mead, the reception-history of the Askew and Bruce Codices goes straight through histories of esotericism, occultism, and magic in the twentieth century.

This article discusses the content of a manuscript which is kept in Süleymaniye Library, Yazma Bağışlar, no. 2461. Based on this manuscript, Michael Reinhard Heß reached some conclusions on Hurufism in his article "Qualified heterodoxy in a 17th century Ḥurūfī muḳaddime." Unfortunately, the article features a number of mistakes. The main objective of this present article is to clarify some confusion about the manuscript, in particular, and Hurufism, in general. This article also examines the transformation of Hurufi ideas and offers a periodization of Hurufi history.

"Jeder Lumpenhund sagt: nur Weiber können Briefe schreiben; denn Briefe erfordern eine Leichtigkeit, ein ungezwungenes Uebergehen von einer Materie zur andern, und Männer bleiben immer bei der Schnur.” — Diese Passage aus einem Brief David Veits an Rahel Varnhagen vom November 1795 gab den Ansporn zur Veranstaltung einer wissenschaftlichen Tagung vom 3. bis 5. März 2017,  die sich mit der weiblichen Kultur nach 1750 auseinander setzt. Zugleich wurde die Travestie des oben zitierten Satzes zum Motto für die hiermit präsentierte Ausstellung von Handschriften, die in der Jagiellonen-Bibliothek aufbewahrt werden. Während Forscherinnen und Forscher im Laufe der Tagung mit Korrespondenzen von Autorinnen vorwiegend aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum wissenschaftlich befasst sind, ist der geographische und sprachliche Umfang der Ausstellung wesentlich breiter. Das Hauptziel ist es nämlich, nicht so sehr die Vielfalt von Briefe schreibenden Frauen nach 1750 zu zeigen, sondern vielmehr deren immensen Beitrag zur europäischen, darunter der polnischen und der deutschen Kultur zu veranschaulichen, der auch durch Korrespondenzen erfolgt ist.  Als Eckdatum wurde dabei das Jahr 1750 festgesetzt.  Selbstverständlich führten Frauen auch in den früheren Epochen nicht selten rege Briefwechsel, jedoch erst mit der Aufklärung und der Verbreitung von emanzipatorischen Bemühungen — und in der Konsequenz auch mit einer immer größer werdenden Präsenz von Frauen im gesellschaftlichen, kulturellen und  intellektuellen Leben — erlebt auch deren Epistolographie eine besondere Blüte. Und genau darauf möchte die Ausstellung hinweisen.