IMC 2024: Sessions

These sessions focus on religious communities’ responses to crises in relation to monastic libraries and book collections. We aim to investigate what happened to medieval monastic libraries and book collections in times of peril during the Middle Ages, but also the early modern period and up until our time. Session II discusses the acquisition, commission, production, and use of devotional, liturgical and theological books in response to the challenges and crises faced by religious communities. Some of the papers gathered adopt explicitly gendered approaches to crisis in religious communities and consider the continuities and disruptions in production of manuscripts, re-use, and function of books within these communities. Katie Bugyis analyses the motivation behind the acquisition and commission of liturgical, devotional and theological texts by Sibyl de Fenton, abbess of Barking abbey (r. 1393-1419) in times of political, economic, and religious turmoil. This paper considers Sybil’s need to respond to questions of her sacramental authority, particularly to address new and pressing questions about the sacrament of penance. Minela Fulurija Vučić will explore the production of manuscripts in vernacular for convents in Dubrovnik from the 14th to the 18th century, and the liturgical and devotional practices of these nuns through these sources. Finally, Katharine C. Chandler will analyse the creation, use, and afterlife of two precious liturgical sources (MS Lewis E 8 and Morgan MS M.115) part of a set of manuscript graduals copied for the Chartreuse de Champmol around 1470, as witness to the changing textual process of liturgical invention through the late Middle Ages and the early modern era.