Abstract
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.
