The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350-1540 by Marilyn Oliva

Abstract

300BOOK REVIEWS more useful to provide a selection of more varied sources. The editor states that it was suggested to her that she should publish merely extracts of the more interesting depositions, but argues that "only a full and complete version can be truly useful." Yet the case for a full version in English has not been sufficiently made out. A.J. Forey Kirtlington, Oxford The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese ofNorwich, 1350-1540. By Marilyn Oliva. [Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, Vol. 12.] (Rochester, NewYork: The Boydell Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 271. $90.00.) This is a work of historical revision which challenges the model of late medieval female monasticism established for England by Eileen Power threequarters of a century ago. Dr. Oliva convincingly argues for a new interpretation informed by modern feminist perspectives, and more sensitive to the multifaceted service of the nunneries to their local society. These houses did not have the wealth to dominate the countryside like some of their male counterparts , but there is plenty of evidence arrayed to substantiate the relatively modest claim that they were "important features of the local landscape." Whereas Power's pioneering Medieval English Nunneries is a broad-ranging survey, Dr. Oliva confines her attention to the single diocese of Norwich and provides a detailed study of eleven religious houses for women from the midfourteenth century to the Dissolution. The difference in scale is extremely important , because generalizations supported by evidence from houses in widely different locations over more than two and a half centuries of their existence do not stand up to scrutiny, when the focus is changed to the continuous history of a coherent group of nunneries in one region. It is not simply a question of denigratory comments about the moral standards of nuns or their capacities as financial managers. Recruitment to these communities and their place in local society are demonstrably different from traditional stereotypes of aristocratic institutions. At least in Norwich diocese the nuns are drawn predominantly from the middling ranks of society and lesser gentry; office-holders are mostly drawn from the same class; and it is with such modest landowners that they seem, from wills at least, to have their closest connections. A justification in the past for neglect of the nuns by monastic historians has been an assumed lack of evidence. This study suggests strategies for addressing a problem that is not illusory, but which has almost certainly been exaggerated. Dr. Oliva has explored a wide range of sources effectively and demonstrated the significant results that the patient researcher can extract from them. At the BOOK reviews301 heart of her evidence is an examination of 3,000 wills. Paradoxically one of the significant results of her researches is to demonstrate the very small proportion of testators who left a bequest to the nuns at all. Most wills contained no legacies to religious houses, and of those that did, just 18% went to the female religious . Dr. Oliva has made an important contribution to the growing literature on medieval nunneries, which brings a breath of fresh air to tired debates and indicates directions that further research might take. It demonstrates the diversity that existed among the small religious houses, and the need for similar sympathetic studies of the many male institutions within this group. Perhaps in regional studies of this kind we might hope also to see explored the extent to which the small houses were able to adapt to the radical changes (demographic , social, and religious) of the late medieval period. John Tillotson Australian National University "Songes of Rechelesnesse": Langland and the Franciscans. By Lawrence M. Clopper. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1997. Pp. xviii, 368. $52.50.) Lawrence Clopper's "Songes of Rechelesnesse" a provocative, challenging, and fascinating book, is one of the most important studies ofWilliam Langland's Piers Plowman published in the past twenty years. It confronts directly the commonplace view that this fourteenth-century poem—along with Chaucer's "Summoner's Tale"—is the artistic culmination of the antifraternal tradition in England, a view strongly argued in Penn Szittya's highly influential book, The Antifraternal Tradition in...