Pulp Mysticism and the Late Medieval Laity

This paper focuses on incunibiles and xylographs from two early geographic printing centers, Germany and the Low Countries, that have manuscript sources in convent libraries and were known to lay readers. These small devotional books were expensive but also marketable, and not just to women religious. Connections between the innovations of printing technologies and popular religious renewal are clear, though contested. Women’s religious communities produced and consumed vernacular mystical treatises. However, the connections between the devotional and mystical literature of women’s communal libraries, the production of popular vernacular early print devotional material, and the late medieval laity’s engagement with mystical theology remains largely unexplored. Networks of nuns, artists, and printers contributed the dissemination of late medieval mystical theology to pious layfolk. I demonstrate how the enthusiastic mysticism of late medieval convents was translated to and transformed for an equally enthusiastic audience of pious lay readers in the towns along the Rhine.