The Ladies on the Hill: The Female Monastic Communities at the Aristocratic Monasteries of Klosterneuburg and St. George's in Prague ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Eva Schlotheuber (review)

Review of The Ladies on the Hill: the Female Monastic Communities at the Aristocratic Monasteries of Klosterneuburg and St. George’s in Prague, edited by J. F. Hamburger, E. Schlotheuber, Bӧhlau, Vienna 2024.

The eighteenth century was a turbulent period in the history of Russian Orthodox monasticism. During this century monastic communities were merged, dissolved, stripped of their land and peasants, and subjected to closer regulation, with the result that their number, membership, and wealth declined sharply. The main impetus for these developments arose from the expanding imperial state. But they also reflect the complex relationship between the state and the Orthodox Church that emerged during the imperial period.1 While the efforts of state officials to direct monastic wealth and the monastic clergy toward purposes deemed useful to the state and society led to tension with church leaders, both state officials and the Orthodox hierarchy shared a desire to regularise and assert greater control over monastic communities.2 Although scholars have explored several aspects of this process of monastic reform, its impact on female monasticism has received little scholarly attention.3 This chapter seeks to help fill this gap by tracing the development of female Orthodox monasticism in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod during the eighteenth century. Such an examination demonstrates that while female monastic communities were indeed reshaped significantly by state reform during the early imperial period, they were shaped no less powerfully by their institutional structure and their social, economic, and cultural environment.

Even though after the October Revolution in 1917 the Bolsheviks enjoyed uninterrupted power and pursued radical secularist objectives, the majority of female monastic communities in Nizhnii Novgorod province were able to survive much longer than their counterparts in the French and Mexican Revolutions. Using the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross as a case study, this article shows how—despite extremely challenging conditions and the hostility of the Soviet state—female monastic communities proved to be remarkably resilient and managed to exploit openings created by both the Bolsheviks’ strategy for subverting them and conflicts between Soviet authorities. The resiliency of the community at the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross stemmed from the solidarity, flexibility, and leadership skills it cultivated prior to World War I through the combination of its religious character and practices and its communal organization. By the early 1920s, the community had adapted effectively to post-civil war Soviet urban conditions and was able to survive local attempts to dissolve it. But by the late 1920s, the survival of the community had become intolerable for Soviet authorities, who—like the revolutionary regimes in France and Mexico—ultimately resorted to compulsory means to “liquidate” the community between 1927 and 1935.

This study contributes to the analysis of the ecclesiastical-monastic system during the Synodal period of the Russian Orthodox Church, prior to the sweeping changes brought about by the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War. It characterizes all women’s monasteries that emerged and operated in the North Caucasus during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first female monastic community in the region was established in Mozdok in 1797, though it was short-lived. It was not until the 1840s to 1860s that women’s monasteries began to supplement the existing male monastic establishments in the North Caucasus. The study notes that subsequent legal reforms enabled the transformation of convents into monasteries. It has been determined that most women’s monasteries in the North Caucasus originated from female communities, with only a small fraction being founded as monasteries by regional authorities. The research illustrates the evolving status of women’s monasteries within society, linked to the development of female Orthodox asceticism. Through an analysis of this theme, it highlights the missionary and educational focus of provincial women’s monasteries. It has been revealed that all monasteries in the region operated on principles of communal living, sustained themselves through their own earnings and donations, had opportunities for constructing church complexes, and organized educational activities.

This chapter details how Abbess Mariia led the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross during a challenging period. Less than two years after her installation, Nizhnii Novgorod and the surrounding region erupted into social and political unrest. Attempting to quell this unrest and restore order, in April of 1905, Nicholas II expanded religious toleration for non-Orthodox faiths and in October granted civil and constitutional reforms that legalized a form of modern politics. In this environment of division and anxiety, intensified by accelerating social, economic, and cultural change, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross reached the apogee of its growth, wealth, and significance as a focal point for Orthodox piety. Although this flourishing represented a continuation of trends that had shaped female monasticism in the diocese throughout the post-emancipation period, it was conditioned by the social, political, and cultural turbulence taking place in the region and the empire more broadly in the decade prior to World War I. Monastic communities appeared to many Orthodox clerics and lay believers to provide both vital bastions for the preservation of the faith and Russian cultural identity and important mediums for the promotion of Orthodox understandings of social and moral order. But while remarkably successful, female monastic communities in the empire generally were perceived by some as too restrictive to meet the needs of a changing and conflicted society, leading to efforts for both monastic reform and an expansion of the role of women within the church.

This chapter assesses how the outbreak of war and then revolution subjected all Orthodox monastic communities in the Russian empire to a confluence of economic, social, and political challenges that ultimately led to their dissolution. While this outcome is not surprising given the ideology and goals animating the Soviet regime, it was not inevitable. On the contrary, like most female monastic communities in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese, the community at the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross demonstrated a resiliency during the decade and a half after the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917. This resiliency stemmed from the solidarity, flexibility, and leadership skills developed prior to the war by the combination of the community's religious character and practices and its communal organization. Confounding Bolshevik expectations, the community disappeared in the end not because it could not survive in the conditions of early Soviet socialism, but because it embodied a competing ideal for communalistic life and an alternative system of beliefs that could not be tolerated by a revolutionary regime committed to the implementation of a radical secularist vision of socialism.

The article provides an overview of the history of some women’s monasteries in the South of Russia in the first post-revolutionary years. The conclusion is made about the organizational and economic stability of the women’s communities. The destruction of the monastic households and the nun`s communities themselves occurred as a result of the targeted efforts of local Soviet authorities, and sometimes even direct repression. However, separate groups of nuns in many places continued their religious life and influence on the population until the 1980s. The phenomenon of women’s monastic communities in Russia in the 20th century requires further comprehensive study.

Advances in geochemical and physical anthropological studies have provided new tools to reconstruct ancient lifestyles, especially of those minorities not commonly mentioned in historical texts. In comparison to males, little is known about everyday life in female monastic communities, and how it has changed over time. In this paper, we present a paleodietary (δ13C and δ15N in bone collagen) study of human (n = 58) and animal (n = 13) remains recovered from the former Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena in Belmonte (Cuenca, central Spain). Two funerary areas used by Dominican nuns were sampled: one dated to the sixteenth (n = 34) and the seventeenth (n = 15) centuries, and the other dated in the nineteenth and twentieth (n = 9) centuries. The isotopic values for sheep (n = 7) suggest the animals consumed at the convent came from diverse ecosystems or were raised under a range of management strategies. The human samples reflect a terrestrial diet, and those from the nineteenth to twentieth century, in some cases, reveal the presence of C4 plants (millet, corn or sugar cane). Due to their religious practice, the consumption of terrestrial animal protein was restricted, and although they were allowed to eat fish, the isotopic signatures show little evidence of this. The individuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth century show a continuous shift in δ15N (9.7–12.7‰), with few significant differences in relation to the period, age, or pathologies (osteoporosis, periostitis, and brucellosis). The nineteenth- to twentieth-century samples can be divided into two groups: (a) one that fits the trend of previous centuries, albeit with a higher δ15N, possibly related to extensive access to animal protein; and (b) a second group with elevated δ13C values (up to − 15.7‰). Different customs in the assumed homogeneous monastic life are discussed as possible sources of isotopic variation, including access to luxury products such as animal protein or sugar, or the practice of periods of food abstinence, which were especially popular with these communities, according to historical records.

This study of an old female monastic communities, present in Galatina from the early seventeenth century up to nineteenth century, it is proposed to certify as to inside of the flourishing monastery Capuchin Poor Clares, it has been able, for centuries, to educate young girls to a poor lifestyle, through fasting and corporal mortification, as well as through sacred reading and prayer, imitating and celebrating the Sequela Christi. Therefore, in spite of their name Clarisse, which immediately recalls Santa Chiara and her ideal of "absolute poverty", personal and community, will emerge as this privilegium both been married only under a strictly educational profile.

Female monastic communities and the church from the 13th to 14th c.

The Battel Hall Retable – created around the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century and once belonging to the Dominican nuns of Dartford Priory – offers a rare glimpse into the visual lives of late medieval English nuns, inviting an insight into the intersections of communal identities for these women religious. This article builds on scholarship that has predominantly addressed Dartford's textual history, and of the piety and experiences within female monastic communities more widely, by exploring the intersections of English, female and Dominican spiritual identities for the community within, reflected by and provoked by this visual culture. It argues that the iconography, the specific portrayal of the figures and the potential positioning of the altarpiece speak to the engagement of these women with key facets of their identities, partially forming and enhancing a community identity that enabled them to withstand the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the role of women in the history of Buddhist culture in medieval Japan. The article examines the formation of the first female Buddhist monastic community in Japan. It is noted that the formation of the first Buddhist monastic community here was associated with women of Korean origin. A significant role in the institutionalization of Buddhism in Japan and its transformation into the dominant ideology was played by the Japanese empresses, who were impressed by the Buddhist approach to the religious status of women. The Japanese empresses actively supported the construction of Buddhist temples, donated land and significant funds to them. While pursuing a policy of strengthening the Buddhist church, they simultaneously contributed to its centralization and the establishment of strict control over the sangha by the state. The social and confessional status of women in the history of medieval Japan was constantly changing. If, until the end of the Nara period, nuns had the same social and confessional status as monks, then in the Heian era, nuns were removed from government positions and state ceremonies, and in religious treatises the opinion that women could not find salvation until will not be reborn as men. During the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, women again began to play an active role in society, including in religious institutions. During this period, new directions of Buddhism appeared (Amidaism, Soto-Zen, the Nichiren school), in whose doctrines the attitude towards women was more respectful. In the subsequent period, there was an increase in the influence of Confucianism and a weakening of the position of Buddhism in Japanese society, which negatively affected the social status of women and the state of the female monastic community.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality and the Arts in the Middle Ages

Clares in Procession:The Processional and Hours of the Franciscan Minoresses at Aldgate Anne Bagnall Yardley (bio) The cranston library, England's oldest public lending library, houses a fifteenth-century manuscript from the English Franciscan convent of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Francis outside Aldgate, near the Tower of London. This manuscript, Cranston 2322, has been cataloged as an "Horae, etc.," or book of hours, but is in fact a volume that contains a substantial quantity of noted liturgical music as well as the hours of the Virgin, devotional material in Middle English, and a variety of other prayers and antiphon texts.1 Although a complete general description of this manuscript has been available since 1992, scholars have not examined the extensive liturgical material in the manuscript as a reflection of the communal musical-liturgical life of the convent.2 Indeed, the continued listing of the manuscript as an "Horae, etc.," has almost certainly obscured the fact that this manuscript is the only extant English Franciscan processional. This volume provides the modern liturgical historian a unique opportunity to study the chants for processions, the commendatio animae (commendation of the soul), and the profession of nuns for an English Franciscan house. In this article I will describe and analyze the contents of the manuscript, comparing it to both Franciscan and English sources. This analysis reveals the ways in which the practices at Aldgate were drawn from the corpus of Franciscan repertoire [End Page 1] but influenced also by English monastic practices. The texts and notated chants in this single volume expand the concept of the processional beyond its usual liturgical function to include processions to and from the frater, the chapter house, and the bedside of dying nuns. On the basis of this analysis I will argue that this manuscript would more appropriately be entitled "Processional and Hours" and suggest that it may have been created for the use of the cantrix of the order.3 In the broader scholarly sense this article contributes to feminist reclamation history through a detailed source study depicting the musical life of a particular musical community. It also adds to the burgeoning literature of material on female monastic practices and women's spirituality in medieval England. Many authors have focused on the reading practices of nuns or women more generally, but few have given any detailed attention to their musical practices other than a general nod to the importance of liturgical life.4 Thus, in this article I illuminate many aspects of practices in one female monastic community through a study of a particular manuscript from the house. As much as possible my work attempts to create this picture without reliance on assumed norms from studies of male monastic practices.5 This approach partakes of the postmodern rejection of metanarratives and emphasizes the important lens of particularity in the study of historical documents.6 The Liturgical Context of the Manuscript The Minories The Minories is the name commonly given to the house of Franciscan women (minoresses) founded in 1293 at Aldgate, immediately outside of the walls of London.7 The founder of the Minories, Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, and his wife, Blanche, Queen of Navarre, imported nuns from the community at Longchamp in France to inaugurate the house. The one surviving English version of a rule for Franciscan nuns is a Middle English version of the Isabella rule created for the nuns at Longchamp.8 Thus, Aldgate and [End Page 2] Longchamp are connected both through the written rule and through the presence of sisters who followed that rule and could transmit the unwritten traditions and expectations of the order. The Minories grew to be a moderately large establishment, as indicated by the fact that at the time of the dissolution of the house in 1539 there were twenty-four nuns and an abbess who received pensions.9 David Bell lists five extant manuscripts from the Minories: The Doctrine of the Heart, Walter Hilton's The Ladder of Perfection and Mixed Life, the Rule for Enclosed Minoresses, a Psalter, and the volume under discussion here. Bell also indicates other volumes that have been associated with the Minories through wills.10 The volumes indicate that...

An Early-Fourth-Century Female Monastic Community in Egypt?