Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany

Abstract

Nuns as Historians introduces women's contributions to a discourse generally considered to be the province of men: history writing. It examines the tradition of history writing and chronicles in Catholic convents in the German Empire during the early modern period, which is overlooked even in most studies of monastic historiography. The study analyses a wide range of little-known primary sources from convents, some of which are only available in manuscript form. They include the Denkwürdigkeiten by the abbess Caritas Pirckheimer, a defence of her convent during the Reformation. Several accounts of nuns' lives during the Thirty Years' War are examined, such as the diary of the prioress Clara Staiger from Eichstätt, and a history of the Swedish War by Maria Anna Junius from Bamberg. A history of Oberschönenfeld by the Cistercian abbess, Elisabeth Herold, criticises her predecessor for allowing the convent to be pillaged in the Thirty Years' War, while Juliana Ernst's biography of the visionary Ursula Haider from Villingen is an attempt to renew convent spirituality in the Counter Reformation. All the chronicles are placed in the context of the broader traditions of reading and writing in early modern convents, as well as the social history of the convents from the monastic reforms of the fifteenth century until the Counter Reformation. This book traces the changing functions of history writings for a convent as an institution and the way in which individual nuns took ownership of works, sometimes by writing short works of autobiography.