Product Description: This volume presents the Lives of three women of the thirteenth century, all written by contemporaries. In the late Middle Ages, almost every town in Northern Europe had its own anchoress, who would keep in touch with the citizens through a window looking onto the churchyard or through a door and window looking into the church (as shown in the cover illustration)...read more

Product Description: The most scholarly of the remarkable nuns of Helfta composed these meditations, rituals, prayers, instructions on how to pray, chants, hymns, and litanies in the late thirteenth century. Her mastery of poetic prose attests to the level of women's education in the highly cultured abbey she entered as a child of five and never, so far as we know, left even once...read more