The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages, by Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis

Abstract

In this welcome volume, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis gives us an insight into communities of Benedictine nuns in England over the time span 900 to 1225. By examining their surviving liturgical books she uncovers the nature of the ministries—liturgical and pastoral—performed by religious women. The book opens with a provocative question: in considering the meanings and implications of the term cura monialium ‘should the nuns be understood as the object or the subject of the care given?’. It is Bugyis’s argument throughout this detailed and finely argued book that religious women could, and did, fulfil ministerial roles within their communities. However, Bugyis’s sources are not limited to those we might define as ‘liturgical’. Indeed, in her introduction she draws attention to papal and episcopal privileges which suggest that religious women were perceived to have a closer engagement with, and responsibility for, cura monialium than traditional historiography has recognised. The first two...