Cult and Codex: Hagiographical Writing and Carthusian Reading in Royal Library of Belgium MS 8060-64

Abstract

MS 8060-64 is a hagiographic manuscript originally produced as a Marian miracle collection in the late fourteenth century by the Carthusians of St. Alban’s monastery in Trier. The manuscript was supplemented at the beginning of the next century with additional Marian miracles and explanatory treatises, as well as numerous exempla and vitae of local charismatic women and male monastic reformers. I situate the production of this manuscript in a larger network of reform and Observant movements taking place in the fifteenth-century Low Countries and German Rhineland, emphasizing that books such as this one played an important catalytic role in efforts to revive and intensify monastic devotion. By comparing MS 8060-64 briefly with other similar compositions produced in the region, I show that reforming monks strove to gather together and collect examples of local female saints and their visions and miracles. I argue that these fifteenth-century monastic collections contributed to the creation of a hagiographic taxonomy of late medieval affective, feminine sanctity.