One - The Helfta Scriptorium

Summary

This chapter addresses the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century writing culture at the convent of Helfta and its implications for the ideas about how divine matters are communicated that are contained in the resulting texts. The ‘Helfta phenomenon’ is marked by an intense period of written production towards the end of the thirteenth century, which led to the emergence of some of the most popular mystical texts in the Western tradition: The Flowing Light of the Godhead, the Liber specialis gratiae, and the Legatus divinae pietatis. Although no autographs of these texts have survived – unless they remain undiscovered – we can be certain that the mystical texts attributed to the Helfta nuns were composed in collective settings, mostly at the convent of Helfta itself. Discussions of collective authorship and gendered writing can lead to a new understanding of the crossover of textual transmission and the social practices of writing and reading, using the production of writings at Helfta and the text material related to Gertrude of Helfta’s life, in particular the Latin and German traditions, as examples for wider phenomena of scribal culture in the Middle Ages.