Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages

Abstract

In this important and wide-ranging collection of essays, the editors and authors seek to re-evaluate and rewrite the role of women within the order of St John of Jerusalem, or the Hospitaller order. From the twelfth century onwards women were associated with the order, in a variety of ways, as donats, consorores, and lay sisters who did not live bound by a monastic rule, and as professed cloistered sisters who devoted their efforts to prayer and singing the liturgy. Ultimately, however, because women did not fight in the east, and, after the late twelfth century, nearly all new foundations for Hospitaller women appeared in the west, women played their most important role as part of ‘wide familial and social networks which assured the Hospital support, donations, male recruits and prayers’ (p. 41). The collection consists of nine essays, four of which are republished; and, in the case of three, translated into English for the first time. The editors begin with a useful and lengthy introduction that provides an overview of women associated with the hospital, beginning with their presence in Jerusalem in the early twelfth century, turning to their role in the west, and addressing the patterns of recruitment, the rules for everyday life, and the cultural and literary interests of the professed sisters. Two general essays, by Alan Forey and Francesco Tommasi (both republished), follow, which assess the relationship of women to the military orders in general by looking comparatively at the orders of St John, Calatrava, the Templars, and the Teutonic knights, among others. Both essays conclude that women did play a role in the military orders, but often only as lay associates to male houses or within separate and subordinate priories. When houses for women were founded, as they were for the Hospitallers, they were enclosed communities of professed and generally literate sisters who typically did not engage in active care-giving or minister to the sick. Thus, although the Hospital order was willing and able to accommodate women juridically, female members did not pursue the same active avenues to salvation.