Abstract: The manuscript Cod. Donaueschingen A III 19 of the Badische Landes-bibliothek 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 dele-tions in the manuscript make it clear that the sexually explicit texts in the col-lection experienced a distinctive reception and provoked reactions. The dele-tions of the sexually explicit passages could indicate that the texts were initially created for a specific, presumably purely male, readership, and that this reader-ship was to be expanded.

Marco Heiles, Media Systems and Genre Conventions in Transition: A German Priamel Booklet from Nuremberg, c. 1490, in: Jörg B. Quenzer (ed.), Exploring Written Artefacts. Objects, Methods, and Concepts, 2 vols, (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 25), Berlin/Boston 2021, vol. 1, p. 307-331, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753301-016.