[1] Some of the sister-books begin with brief, mostly legendary, outlines of the founding history of the monastery, but less attention is paid to the historical facts than to the sentiments and heroic actions of founders.
[4] The sister-books are also characterized by both the forms and structures of legendary narrative and the vocabulary and motifs of mysticism; the texts take images and metaphors quite seriously.
None of the original manuscripts of the sister-books survive to this day; scholars rely on later copies, some of which were done as early as the fifteenth century.
[2] While the sister-books were often devalued in older scholarship as products of naive nuns and as an expression of a flattened mysticism, today they find new attention as authentic testimonies of a women's monastic writing culture.
In the discourse on women's religious experiences, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Seuse and others developed their mystical theology and pastoral care.