The principal and most constant occupation of the learned Benedictine nuns was the transcription of manuscripts. It is difficult to estimate too highly the extent of the services rendered by these feminine hands to learning and to history throughout the Middle Ages. They brought to the work a dexterity, an elegance of attainment, and an assiduity which the monks themselves could not attain, and some of the most beautiful specimens of caligraphy which have been preserved from the Middle Ages are the work of the nuns. The devotion of nuns as scribes began indeed with the early ages of Christian times. Eusebius speaks of young maidens whom the learned men of his time employed as copyists.[63] In the fifth century, S. Melania the younger distinguished herself by the beauty and exactness of her transcripts.[64] In the sixth century, the nuns of the convent at Arles, incited by the example of the Abbess of St. Césaire, acquired a no less brilliant reputation. In the seventh century, S. Gertrude, who was learned in the Holy Scriptures, sent to Rome to ask not only for works of the highest Christian poetry, but also for teachers capable of instructing her nuns to comprehend certain allegories.[65] In the eighth century, S. Boniface begged the abbess to write out for him in golden letters the Epistle of S. Peter. Cæsarius of Arles gave instructions that in the convents which had been founded by him and the supervision of which rested with his sister, the “Virgins of Christ” should give their time between their prayers and psalms to the reading and to the writing of holy works.[66] In the eighth century the nuns of Maseyk, in Holland, busied themselves in a similar fashion, not only in writing, but particularly in illuminating (_etiam scribendo atque pingendo_), in which they became proficients.[67] In the ninth century, the Benedictine nuns of Eck on the Meuse, and especially the two abbesses Harlinde and Renilde, attained great celebrity by their caligraphic work and by the beauty of the illuminated designs used in their manuscripts.[68] In the time of S. Gregory VII., a nun at Wessobrunn, in Bavaria, named Diemude, undertook to transcribe a series of important works, the mere enumeration of which would startle modern readers. These works formed, as we read in the saint’s epitaph, a whole library, which she offered as a tribute to S. Peter. The production of this library still left time for Diemude to carry on with Herluca, a nun of the neighbouring convent of Eppach, a correspondence remarkable as well for its grace of expression as for its spiritual insight.[69] A list of her transcripts is given in the section on the _scriptorium_.