Media Systems and Genre Conventions in Transition: A German Priamel Booklet from Nuremberg, c. 1490

The manuscript Cod. Donaueschingen A III 19 of the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe is a very thin booklet of six leafs in quarto format. It was written by a professional scribe in Nuremberg around 1490. The booklet is titled Priamel red (‘Priamel speech’) and contains a collection of gnomic texts in Early New High German. The materiality and content of the manuscript reveal it as a special product of a book market that was increasingly dominated by print and in which handmade books became niche products. The later entries and deletions in the manuscript make it clear that the sexually explicit texts in the collection experienced a distinctive reception and provoked reactions. The deletions of the sexually explicit passages could indicate that the texts were initially created for a specific, presumably purely male, readership, and that this readership was to be expanded. 1 The manuscript Cod. Donaueschingen A III 19 as a material object The manuscript Cod. Donaueschingen A III 19 of the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe is a very thin booklet of six leaves of 18.8 × 13.7 cm. It is made of three sheets of paper without watermarks. Although its contemporary version contains entries from six different hands, the manuscript was originally made by a single scribe (‘hand A’). The outer double leaf of the booklet was originally || 1 Digital images of the manuscript are provided by the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe: . A detailed description of the manuscript by Nicole Eichenberger is published in Manuscripta Mediaevalia, . 2 The chain lines of the paper run horizontally. The original sheets must have had a size of at least 27.4 × 37.6 cm and therefore had most probably chancery format (32 × 45 cm). Cf. Needham 1994 and Needham 2017 or use the Needham Calculator, , provided by the Schönberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.