Late Fifteenth Century Research Articles

Sonority distance and similarity avoidance effects in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish

AbstractThis article investigates consonant gemination in late Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-centuryhaketía, a now moribund, regional dialect of Judeo-Spanish spoken in northern Morocco since the late fifteenth century. Some, but not all, consonant clusters arising across a word boundary undergo regressive total assimilation, e.g. [n.n]siudad ninguna‘no city’ but [z.n]laz niñas‘the girls’. We present novel descriptive generalizations to show that regressive gemination is sensitive to the degree of sonority distance between the coda and the onset. Evidence of parasitic harmony comes from lateral+consonant clusters, which undergo gemination only if the target and trigger consonants are already similar in some respect. In the framework of Optimality Theory, we formalize syllable contact as a relational hierarchy of *Distanceconstraints and capture parasitic harmony effects by similarity avoidance, or Obligatory Contour Principle, constraints against adjacent consonants with identical manner and/or place features. These markedness constraints interact with other universal faithfulness and markedness constraints in a language-specific ranking that predicts the attested patterns of regressive gemination. This study lends further support to sonority distance effects and gradient syllable contact in phonological theory and shows that similarity avoidance is also necessary to give a full account of regressive gemination in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish.

An inventory of Medieval Greek Apocalyptic Sources (c. 500 – 1500 AD): Naming and dating, editions and manuscripts

AbstractThis bibliographical inventory surveys 50 medieval Greek apocalyptic sources ranging from the turn of the sixth century until the late fifteenth century. The surveyed material consists of historical and moral apocalypses, oracular prophecies and end-time calculations. The survey enumerates the various appellations and dating attempts for each text as proposed in modern scholarship. Moreover, references to editions and translations of each source are provided; they are followed by a preliminary list of the known manuscript witnesses. The purpose of the inventory is twofold: (i) it presents a quantitative estimation of the respective manuscript distribution. Altogether 1024 textual witnesses in 688 manuscripts have been identified to contain the surveyed apocalyptic texts. It has been found that about 70 % of all manuscript material dates to the fifteenth century or later. Consequently, it can be established that the period surrounding and following the halōsis of 1453 functions as a filter that, to a large extent, regulates our access to and conditions our understanding of medieval Greek apocalyptic thought. Moreover, the inventory (ii) provides a holistic yet concise overview of a large section of Byzantine apocalypticism, which appears necessary for any comprehensive research that engages in (or steps beyond) intertextual analysis.

Prices and Value of the Hunted Animals and Hunting Products in the Late Fifteenth and the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century in the Environment of the Ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

The essence of hunting as a historical phenomenon cannot be defined in the economic aspect alone. In the Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Period, it was a multi-faceted symbiotic relationship combining both the daily life of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, the economic life of the state, and even foreign policy. It also partially shaped the image of the sovereign and legitimated his power. Hunted animals provided meat, bone material, furs, skins, and other products necessary for the needs of the ruler’s court. This article represents the latest research on the prices and value of the hunted animals and the products made from them in late fifteenth century and the second half of the sixteenth century in the environment of the ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The second part of the analysis reveals the variety and prices of different products made from the hunted animals and their use.

Black and blue printing ink analysis by XRF, DRIFTS and Raman spectroscopy of recently discovered Gutenbergian Ars minor fragments

ABSTRACTIn 2017 Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections acquired a 1483 Venetian edition of the Opera of Horace, preserved in a late fifteenth century German binding. The binding contained previously undetected vellum binding waste fragments derived from an early Gutenbergian edition of the Ars minor of Aelius Donatus. Extensive portions of the printed fragments were attached to each of the wooden boards and remained hidden beneath the book’s paper pastedowns. In the paper conservation laboratory of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, the pastedowns were subsequently safely lifted from the boards via Gore-Tex damp packs to confirm the presence of unique remnants from an otherwise lost mid-fifteenth century Mainz edition of the Ars minor, a Latin grammar manual. The Ars minor was printed with the same typeface used around 1455 to print the Gutenberg Bible. The fragments featured black oil-based printing ink and a large Gothic two-line initial letter A printed in blue ink. The design of the typeface of the initial letter A mirrored the work of Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, one-time partners of Gutenberg. The pair produced the Mainz Psalter (1457), the first book printed in more than one color.The printing inks of the Ars minor were subsequently analyzed in the paper conservation laboratory in situ noninvasively by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy and fiber optic Raman spectroscopy. The analysis found amounts of copper and lead, in addition to amber resin and linseed oil, in the black oil-based printing ink. The copper-lead aspect of the Ars minor’s black printing ink formulation appeared to be the same basic recipe composition conceived by Johannes Gutenberg for printing with movable metal type. Indigo (indigotin) and lead white (basic lead carbonate) were identified as the components in the blue printing ink of the two-line initial letter A, and vermilion (mercury sulfide) in manually rubricated red ink. The Ars minor represents a very important find of a previously unknown early Gutenbergian work.

Distorted memories and power: patrons of the Teutonic Order in the fifteenth century prayer of the Livonian branch

ABSTRACTThe late medieval Livonia (Latvia and Estonia) was haunted by a conflict between the Teutonic Order and the church of Riga. This article shows how fake memories of the past and dead patrons were instrumental in this conflict and how these memories were used by the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order to create feelings of group self-awareness and identity during the late fifteenth century. In the article, it is revealed how memoria – commemoration of the dead – served for bonding groups of the living with individuals and endowments of land that had supposedly taken place centuries before.

Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Sephardim

This article highlights issues pertaining to the Sephardim ([-im] is the masculine plural Hebrew ending and Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain. Sephardim thus literally means the Jews of Spain) in Sarajevo from the time of their arrival in the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century until the present day. I describe the status quo for the Sephardi minority in post-Ottoman Sarajevo, in the first and second Yugoslavia, and in today's post-Communist Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The objective is to shed light on how historic preconditions have influenced identity formation as it expresses itself from a Sephardic perspective. The aim is moreover to generate knowledge of the circumstances that affected how Sephardim came to understand themselves in terms of their Jewish identification. I present empirical findings from my semi-structured interviews with Sarajevo Sephardim of different generations (2015 and 2016). I argue that while none of the interlocutors conceive of Jewish identification as divergent from halachic interpretations of matrilineal descent, they moreover propose other conceptions of what it means to be Jewish, such as celebrating Shabbat and other Jewish holidays, and other patterns of socialization. At the same time, these individuals also assert alternative forms of being Bosnian, one that includes multiple ethnicities, and multiple religious ascriptions. This study elucidates a little-explored history and sheds light on the ways in which historical conditions have shaped contemporary, layered framings of identification among Sarajevo's current Jewish population. This article is relevant for those interested in contemporary Sephardic Bosnian culture and in the role and function of ideology in creating conditions for identity formation and transformation.

Humor from the beginning of the lexicographic discourse in Spanish

Words meanings and their use in the language are not fixed in time. This is the case of the word humor, whose current meaning is new in Spanish, as it is attested in dictionaries. Lexicographic discourse can reveal enough data about the history of words. Therefore, the aim of this research is to find out the concept of humor that appears from the first papers in the Spanish lexicography, from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Taking Covarrubias’s dictionary (1611) as a turning point, a corpus of dictionaries has been compiled to do research on how the subject of humor was treated by the selection of voices related to it. The results are sufficiently clear in respect to the prudence with which this subject was conceived, as well as to its pragmatically marked use.

Settlement and Trade from AD 500 to 1800 at Angoche, Mozambique

Angoche was an important historic trading port on the northern Mozambique coast. A maritime archaeological survey was undertaken of the islands and mainland to study Swahili trade, clarify the sequence of settlement development and record the exploitation of resources during the medieval and post-medieval periods. Previous archaeological investigations have revealed local ceramics from the early second millennium AD and imports from the late fifteenth century. According to oral traditions and ancient sources, Angoche’s growth is associated with the arrival of coastal settlers from Kilwa in 1485. The survey revealed evidence for occupation dating from c. AD 500 and trading evidence from the late first millennium AD. Artefacts from the thirteenth to sixteenth century on the islands are similar to those found at Kilwa and Sofala, which shows a link to Kilwa earlier than the oral traditions and the name of one of the Angoche Islands ‘Quilua’, is Kilwa in Portuguese. The islands are well resourced in terms of rice, mangrove wood, seafood and farmland and offer sheltered inlets and access to the coastal trade route. The name of Angoche relates to a port of call and the presence of ninth-tenth-century- storage vessels from southern Iran supports this theory. Traded glass and ceramic artifacts and beads increase from the late medieval period revealing that Angoche became an important and wealthy entrepot. The lack of coral limestone and reef coral, on the sandy Angoche Islands, indicates some building materials would have had to have been imported. Although many buildings would have been made of wood, some stone ruins are likely to have been demolished and burnt to make lime. The original stratigraphy of many sites has been destroyed by aeolian and marine processes but the survey has shown that valuable information on settlement location and ethnographic practices can still be recovered.

A Sanctuary for Carpets: The New Installation at the MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, 2014

Abstract This article deals with the latest and quite daring installation of the one of the most famous and oldest carpet collections worldwide: the collection of the MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, which includes pieces from the former Austrian imperial household. Michael Embacher designed a sanctuary-like space in which the individual carpets are suspended from different levels and presented at varying angles. The underlying curatorial concept stresses the interconnectedness of carpet designs during the classical age of the large Islamic empires from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This unique presentation enables the visitor to experience their splendour and to contextualize them within carpet history in an atmospherically dense space.

Allestire un museo ecclesiastico: la Casa della beata Osanna Andreasi a Mantova

The contribution focuses on the House of the Blessed Osanna Andreasi in Mantua, property of the Dominican Order and entrusted in management to the Dominican Laity (formerly Third Order), assisted by the Association for the Dominican Monuments of Mantua, founded in 1993 that much engages in the development of the House with important cultural initiatives. From long time it has become a place of worship and of artistic interest. In 1997, the House entered the circuit of the AMEI (Association of Italian Ecclesiastical Museums). The House has largely retained the architectural features of the late fifteenth century, has a garden with porch and preserves inside it very significant rooms and objects, closely related to the human story of Blessed Osanna, who lived in the House for a long time, more than thirty years, and she died there in 1505, at the age of 56.

The expanding and deepening scope of historical archaeology

2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of both the Society for Historical Archaeology, in North America, and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, in the UK. Each society celebrated this milestone by publishing a collection of forward-looking essays in their respective journals (see Brooks 2016; Matthews 2016). Although each group of practitioners has followed what might be best described as parallel, but not convergent, intellectual tracks, what they have shared is a common focus on the period of European expansion and colonialism starting in the late fifteenth century. Since that time, the two fields have grown much closer, while the larger intellectual project that is historical archaeology has seen its popularity grow across the globe. In many respects, these three volumes, while different, nevertheless provide a rich collection of chapters that reveal both the widening and deepening of the field.

Visualizing the Fight Book Tradition: Collected Martial Knowledge in the Thun-Hohenstein Album

Abstract The Thun-Hohenstein album, long-known as the Thun’sche Skizzenbuch, is a bound collection of 112 drawings that visualize armoured figures at rest and in combat, as well as empty armours arrayed in pieces. The collection gathers drawings that span the period from the 1470s to around 1590. While most of the images were executed in Augsburg during the 1540s, the album’s three oldest drawings date to the late-fifteenth century. Two of these works, which form a codicological interlude between the first and second quires, find parallels in the illustrations of contemporaneous martial treatises. This article traces the pictorial lineages of these atextual images 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. This exploration situates a manuscript from which one of the drawings derives, Peter Falkner’s Art of Knightly Defense, now in Vienna, within the Augsburg book painters’ workshops that would later give rise to the Thun album. Finally, this study considers how the transmission and representation of martial knowledge in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Augsburg contributed to the later depictions of armoured bodies that populate the album.

Syphilis: The History of an Eponym

In the late fifteenth century, a hideous contagious disease, never previously seen or heard of, swept across Europe. It was “so cruel, so distressing, so appalling,” said Joseph Grünpeck (1473–1532), “that until now nothing more terrible or disgusting has ever been known on this earth”. The “never previously seen or heard of” disease was syphilis. When it first appeared, physicians and lay people had no term for it and invented various names to describe its causes and symptoms. The present essay is an ontological typology of many of those common names, before syphilis, an eponym named after a mythological figure, became the standard name for this sexually transmitted disease. Although syphilis is a common name rather than the kind of proper names generally discussed in Names, its eponymous character lends itself to some of the same ontological and epistemological analyses used to examine proper names.

THE MISSISSIPPIAN FIN DE SIÈCLE IN THE MIDDLE CUMBERLAND REGION OF TENNESSEE

Bayesian chronological modeling is used to investigate the chronology for a large-scale human depopulation event during the Mississippian period (AD 1000–1600) known as the Vacant Quarter phenomenon. The Middle Cumberland region (MCR) of Tennessee is within the Vacant Quarter area, and six villages from the final phase of Mississippian activity in the MCR have been subjected to radiocarbon dating. Complete radiocarbon datasets from these sites are presented within an interpretative Bayesian statistical framework. The results provide a unique history of each settlement and demonstrate that Mississippian occupations at each site likely terminated in the mid- to late fifteenth and possibly early sixteenth centuries AD, which is 50 to 100 years later than the most recent estimate for the timing of the Vacant Quarter. Mississippian abandonment in the MCR was relatively quick, likely occurring over less than a century. The exact reasons for abandonment are not entirely clear but appear to be linked to climate change. A radiocarbon simulation experiment indicates that future robust radiocarbon dating with well-selected samples could greatly improve the chronological precision for this late Mississippian activity. More broadly, this example demonstrates that model building with radiocarbon simulations can be used to address regional-scale chronological issues within the American Southeast and beyond.

Una lauda e uno scongiuro da un registro dell’Archivio di Stato di Udine

AbstractGiovanni Antonio Battaglia was a notary and a secular priest of the diocese of Aquileia. He was active between the late fifteenth and the first four decades of the sixteenth century in Gemona, his place of birth, in the castle of Porcia and the city of Udine. A register he compiled (Udine, Archivio notarile antico, n. 2247), contains two documents which are worthy of attention. The first one is a funeral lauda in Italian vernacular which completes the rather short list of the religious laude repertoire of the Friulian region between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The second document is the text Dolce Regina, dona la tua pace. This work can be placed within the framework of the brotherhoods of the Battuti, which Battaglia served as a priest and as a teacher. A rather composite Latin text also appears on the same page of the notarial register. It includes an invocation to the Magi, a quote from the Scriptures and an adapted liturgical oration. The presence of this exorcism, unusual if compared to the local context of traditional beliefs and therapeutic practices, requires wide-ranging comparisons. The figure of Battaglia himself also deserves further analysis especially in order to understand his cultural background as well as clarifying his relationship with the humanists whom he was corresponding with.

Concurrence et collaboration dans le monde du livre vénitien, 1469-début duxvie siècle

RésumésLe début de l’imprimerie en Europe est l’histoire non seulement d’un grand succès économique et commercial, mais aussi de risques importants pris par les individus. Le nécessaire approvisionnement en papier est l’occasion de conflits et exige une disponibilité constante en capital ; la rentabilité de l’industrie du livre est soumise à une bonne appréciation du marché de la consommation. À Venise, n’importe qui peut se lancer dans l’industrie du livre et cette concurrence est amèrement décriée par les imprimeurs à la fin duxve et au début duxvie siècle. Cette situation les conduit à formuler les risques économiques qu’ils prennent dans les suppliques de privilèges qu’ils demandent aux autorités vénitiennes et à conceptualiser des réalités de leur milieu, en particulier la concurrence. Ce terme, toujours pris dans un sens négatif, est pourtant extrêmement rare dans les documents de la pratique comme dans les textes théoriques de cette époque. Cette formalisation de la concurrence est contrebalancée par la nécessité de collaborer au sein de cette industrie. Celle-ci peut être abordée par le biais de l’analyse des réseaux sociaux. La confiance est restaurée par les collaborations dans un groupe restreint et se nouent des réseaux de collaborations denses dans lesquels les concurrents deviennent partenaires. Cela permet aussi à certains acteurs de créer autour d’eux de largesconsortia, entraînant la constitution d’une économie oligopolistique, typique des industries sans réglementation étatique.

Competition and Collaboration in the Venetian Book World from 1469 to the Early Sixteenth Century

The early history of printing in Europe is one of great economic and commercial success, but also of significant risks taken by those involved. The supply of paper, essential to the functioning of a press, could cause conflicts and required constantly available capital: the profitability of the book industry depended on the growth of the market. In Venice, anyone could set up as a printer, creating competition that was strongly criticized by printers and booksellers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. This prompted them to formulate the economic risks they faced in supplica addressed to the Venetian authorities, and to conceptualize the realities of their situation, especially in terms of competition. This word, always used in a pejorative sense, is nevertheless rare in both theoretical and practical documents of the time. However competitive this economic milieu was, it was counterbalanced by the necessity of collaboration, a phenomenon that can be studied through social network analysis. Trust was restored through the constitution of dense collaborative networks, in which competitors became partners. Yet this also enabled some actors to establish strong consortia, leading to the kind of oligopolistic economy typical of industries without state regulation.

The Quaternary plant fossil record from the volcanic Azores Archipelago (Portugal, North Atlantic Ocean): a review

Plant fossils are known from the Azores Islands, yet poorly studied. We present a comprehensive bibliographical review for the archipelago. A first pre-scientific reference dates from late fifteenth century, while the first scientific description was reported in 1821, accounting for trunks in pyroclastic units and silicified plants within hydrothermal deposits. Throughout the second-half of the nineteenth century and the first-half of the twentieth century, prospection by naturalists and geological mapping work, led to the discovery and description of plant fossils in most islands. From the 1970s onwards, the taxonomic interest ceased, and plant fossils were used mainly for 14C dating. Recently, sediment cores from lakes and peatlands were used for palaeoecological reconstructions and to measure anthropogenic impacts. Generally, plant fossils are younger than 50 ka, although older fossils may exist. Azorean plant fossils include somatofossils of leaves, stems, logs and seeds preserved as impressions, compressions, adpressions, permineralizations, lava tree casts and mummifications. The taphonomy of macrofloral elements is usually related to explosive volcanic activity, while palynological record is associated with lake sediments and peat bogs. The persistence in palaeobotanical and palaeopalynological studies will decisively contribute to disentangle the paleodiversity, palaeoecology, and add crucial information on insular plant phylogeny and biogeography.

Some Remarks on Renaissance Mythophilia. The Medical Poetics of Wonder: Girolamo Fracastoro and His Thought World (Appendix Galeotto Marzio, De doctrina promiscua [ante 1490, princeps 1548

The following pages make a case for the important role played by Aristotle’s Metaphysics α 2 982b11–21 in Renaissance poetics and especially in that of Girolamo Fracastoro. As this passage, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in general, have traditionally been denied a major role in the poetics of the Renaissance, I have been obliged to develop my argument in three sections. [1.] The first focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s roundbreaking reading of the quotation in psychological and epistemological terms, and on how he and his contemporaries were able to harmonize it both with the corpus Aristotelicum and with the development of a place for poetry in the system of the arts. [2.] The second section illustrates how the first humanists used Aristotle’s authority to invert the meaning of the passage, transforming it into an argument in defense of the primacy of poetry over the rest of the arts. This appropriation had two undesiderable effects: either depriving the passage of its theoretical implications or, worse, assimilating Aristotle’s words into a Platonizing vision of poetry. Only with the recovery of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in the late fifteenth century did the passage escape its new status as a commonplace in humanist defense of poetry, and was briefly again considered as a point of departure for the analysis of concepts such as fabula (fiction) and admiratio (wonder), based on philosophical, poetic, and medical premises. [3] The last section introduces Galeotto Marzio’s and Giovanni Pontano’s pioneering works on these two concepts—fabula and admiratio—, as an introduction to the subsequent synthesis done by Girolamo Fracastoro, who, from the positions held by Marzio and Pontano as well as Aquinas’s original intuition, was able to harmonize natural philosophy and poetry by means of their psychological implications. This is what I have called here the ‘medical poetics of wonder’ or, more simply, mythotherapy.

Frauenklöster in der Reformationszeit: Lebensformen von Nonnen in Sachsen zwischen Reform und landesherrlicher Aufhebung by Sabine Zinsmeyer

Reviewed by: Frauenklöster in der Reformationszeit: Lebensformen von Nonnen in Sachsen zwischen Reform und landesherrlicher Aufhebung by Sabine Zinsmeyer Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer Frauenklöster in der Reformationszeit: Lebensformen von Nonnen in Sachsen zwischen Reform und landesherrlicher Aufhebung. By Sabine Zinsmeyer. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016. 455 pp. On 6 October 1528, Ursula von Münsterberg and two other nuns of the religious order of Mary Magdalene left their convent in the city of Freiberg in Saxony in the middle of the night. Münsterberg's published defense of her flight made her an early heroine of the Lutheran Reformation, featured prominently in historical works from the sixteenth century to the present. While much continues to be written about Münsterberg's flight, little is known about her convent or fellow nuns. In this revised version of her 2015 dissertation at the University of Leipzig, Sabine Zinsmeyer aims to discover whether Münsterberg's reaction was typical of nuns' reactions to the reform movement in Saxony and what happened to the inhabitants of Freiberg and nearby convents after the Reformation (29). [End Page 98] Figuring that out is not an easy task. As Zinsmeyer points out in Chapter One, available sources on convents are fragmentary or simply non-existent. Zinsmeyer chose Freiberg for her research because as a large convent, it left more traces. Saxon scholars, for instance, collected documents on the convent in the Codex Diplomaticus Saxoniae Regiae, which provides substantial material for this study. Yet, significant gaps do exist. The convent fell into ruin in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, leaving little material culture to analyze. In addition, as fifteenth-century reformers opined, the nuns in the convent did not keep records, financial or otherwise. The nuns of Freiberg only started keeping a cartulary in 1522, at the insistence of their reformed-minded abbess. In Chapter Two, Zinsmeyer contexualizes developments in Saxony. Because she is interested in the eastern portion of Saxony, she highlights the unsuccessful attempts by the bishop of Meissen and the dukes to reform the Saxon convents in the late fifteenth century. She then outlines the political background of the monastic policies of the Saxon dukes in both Albertine and Ernestine Saxony from the late Middle Ages through the mid-sixteenth century. The chapter concludes with a look at Luther's teachings on monastic vows. In the 100-page Chapter Three, Zinsmeyer gives a series of short episodic discussions on the convent of Freiberg, set in generally chronological order. The middle of the chapter includes an intriguing study on Münsterberg's flight and on the visitation of the convent that followed. Following this, Zinsmeyer turns to sketches of what might have influenced the events of 1528, including the growing support of George's brother and heir, Henry and his wife Katherine of Mecklenberg for the reform in their territory centered in Freiberg. Zinsmeyer hypothesizes that their appointment of a Lutheran pastor and sending of books to Freiberg may have enabled Münsterberg, and other nuns, gradually to adopt the reforms (171), although she also points to other factors such as the convent community and relatives of the women. In Chapter Four, Zinsmeyer briefly outlines visitations and movements of nuns in seven additional convents: four (Döbeln, Großenhain, Reisa, and Meißen) located in Albertine Saxony near Freiberg and three (Sornzig, Sitzenroda, and Altenburg) located nearby in Ernestine Saxony. Despite the piecemeal survival of sources from [End Page 99] these convents, Zinsmeyer hints at a connection between the experiences of nuns in these convents with those in Freiberg, a topic she begins to elaborate in Chapter Five, her concluding chapter, dedicated to a series of short comparative vignettes on themes ranging from conversion to social status. The book concludes with two long sections: biographies of each of the Freiberg nuns and transcription of sources on Freiberg nuns and on sequestration unavailable elsewhere. As one might expect of a dissertation, the analysis hints at interesting questions without fully developing cohesive answers. Zinsmeyer, for instance, mentions but does not follow up on the correspondence between nuns and their families. The organization also leads to considerable repetition of examples and factual material. Her research, however, has...