Ava’s New Testament Narratives: When the Old Law Passed Away

Ava is the first woman whose name we know who wrote in German. She wrote her poem - or poems - on the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ sometime early in the twelfth century, no later than 1127. It seems certain that she was a layperson, and her work reflects a level of learning that raises all sorts of interesting questions about the education of the laity, especially the education of lay woman, and about the nature of authorship in the Middle Ages, generally and particularly in medieval Germany.