Monastic Women Research Articles

Послания папы Симмаха к галльским епископам и Цезарию Арелатскому: перевод и комментарии

This article publishes a translation of the 513–514 epistles of pope Symmachus (498–514) to the bishops of Gaul and Caesarius of Arles (502–543). The main issues discussed in the epistles are the claims of the see of Arles for regional primacy in Southern Gaul, women's monasticism and church discipline. The conflict between the sees of Arles and Vienne over ecclesiastical primacy dates back to the end of the 4th century and was connected with the fact that Arles became the political capital of Southern Gaul. During the 5th century, the papal position in this dispute was variable and was not accepted as a valid argument by all the bishops of Gaul. Symmachus confirmed the decisions of pope Leo I the Great on the division of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the province of Vienne, and for the first time granted the bishop of Arles the privilege of wearing the pallium. Although Caesarius became the pope's representative in Southern Gaul, there was no real opportunity for the bishop to exercise this privilege for some time because of the political situation in the region. Regarding the property of the convent at Arles, Symmachus' decision could not satisfy Caesarius because of the vagueness of the pope's wording. As for church discipline, Symmachus could only once again condemn its violations.

Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages by Elizabeth Makowski

Reviewed by: Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages by Elizabeth Makowski Sr. Nancy Bauer, OSB Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages. By Elizabeth Makowski. Studies in the History of Medieval Religion. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 227; $64.00. In her first book, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and its Commentators, 1298–1545 (CUA Press, 1997), Elizabeth Makowski (1951–2021) made a valuable contribution to the history of canon law regarding religious life for women by providing a comprehensive study of the thirteenth century decree by which Pope Boniface VIII inaugurated what came to be known as papal enclosure for nuns. M., a historian who focused on medieval monastic women, made another contribution to the history of canon law and female religious life in her final book, Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages. The title might suggest that this is just another bawdy recounting of misdeeds of medieval nuns, but such is not the case. This is a scholarly but very readable account of the canonical fates of specific women who attempted to escape a [End Page 212] monastic life for which they were perhaps never suited and often never chose for themselves. M. selected cases that date from 1300 to 1540. The beginning date is significant because by then most of the major ecclesiastical legislation on religious life that remained in effect into the twentieth century had been promulgated. The end date coincides with the dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII. During this period, the term "apostate" applied canonically to several categories of Catholics, including vowed women and men who, without dispensations, abandoned the religious state to return to secular society. Authorities, ecclesiastical and civil, were expected to capture apostate nuns and monks, who also incurred the penalty of excommunication, and forcibly return them to their monasteries where they endured severe punishment for the crime of running away. The only reprieve from this fate was to prove that one's vows had been coerced and were therefore invalid. Thus, M. devotes the first chapter to the canon law on validity of profession. In the next three chapters, she addresses specific cases of runaway nuns. Chapter 2 deals with nuns who fled their monasteries and then petitioned to have their vows declared null based on vim et metum (force and fear), that is, on having been compelled to enter religious life and make profession. It was not uncommon in the Middle Ages that "the summons to religious life came not from God but from parents, relatives, or other interested parties" (45). For those with a genuine vocation, the monastery was a "safe haven," but for those who were forced into it, "the monastery became a prison" (45). M. uncovers the stories of girls as young as four years old given to monasteries by their parents and coerced to make profession before the canonically recognized minimum age of thirteen, often to exclude them from family inheritance. Chapter 3 deals with nuns who made valid professions, but later fled monastic life "motivated by love, whether of landed wealth or of the opposite sex" (22). In other words, they succumbed to "temptations against the vows of poverty and chastity" (78). Nuns who apostatized for these reasons, even those who married and bore children, were expected to return to monastic life unless they were able to acquire dispensations from their vows. Chapter 4 focuses on nuns who were, with or without permission, away from their monasteries for "diversions" such as pilgrimages and family visits or "disasters" such as war and pestilence, but who failed to return. It was war in the French countryside surrounding their monastery that prompted a group of Cistercian nuns to scatter to safe places in 1368. When they chose to remain in secular life at the end of the war, Pope Urban V ordered their capture and forcible return to their monastery. Chapters 5 and 6 describe the penalties, chilly reception, and difficult reintegration that often awaited apostate nuns who returned to their monasteries, [End Page 213] whether willingly and repentant or forcibly and unrepentant. Historians of canon law will appreciate M.'s review in chapter 5 of commentary by medieval decretists and decretalists...

Catherine of Siena's Advice to Religious Women

This essay begins with the paradox that Catherine of Siena, perhaps the most famous uncloistered religious woman in the Middle Ages, became after her death an authority and model for cloistered monasticism for women during the Dominican reform movement. But the dissonance in the idea of Catherine as a model for cloistered religious women is heightened by false assumptions or oversimplifications of Catherine’s religious status, and of what it meant for Catherine to be a model for this or that form of religious life. This essay surveys Catherine’s letters to religious women, including letters to penitents or mantellate and letters to abbesses and nuns in monasteries. While Catherine’s letters to penitents and other women living in the world focus on the challenges of living without a formal religious rule, her letters to nuns focus on the importance of their maintaining claustration, following their rule and on the dangers of wealth—a recognition of the generally higher social and economic standing of monastic women. Catherine seems also to identify certain kinds of prayer with monastic life. It is important to remember that Catherine herself founded a monastery, and while it remains unclear what precisely her intentions were for this community, it is another sign of Catherine’s interest in and commitment to cloistered religiosity. The essay concludes by arguing for a more nuanced understanding of what it might have meant for Catherine to be a model for specific forms of religious life.

ORTHODOX MONASTERIES OF UKRAINE CENTERS OF EDUCATION AND PREPARATION OF WOMEN FOR SPIRITUAL AND MORAL EDUCATION OF CHILDREN (XIX EARLY XX CENTURY)

The article reveals and analyzes the leading trends in the preparation of women for the spiritual and moral education of children of this period, reveals the main purpose, process, content and objectives of training. It is highlighted at which monasteries of Ukraine at that time there were women’s educational institutions where girls were prepared for the spiritual and moral upbringing of children. The historical digression clearly shows us that for centuries the centers of spiritual education, culture and education were Orthodox monasteries. In the XIX - early XX centuries. at the monasteries of Ukraine there is a rapid development of educational institutions for girls, mostly of spiritual condition. The first such institutions were: a school for orphans of the clergy at the Odessa Michael the Archangel Monastery (1844) and a theological school for girls of the clergy at the Lebedinsky Nikolaev Monastery (1859). At that time, monastic educational institutions were divided into two categories. The first category included institutions under the “patronage” of the Empress Mary, the second - schools that were subordinate to the Holy Synod, under the management of the diocesan elders and the care of local clergy and the abbess of the monastery.These educational institutions differed in goals, organization of internal regulations, curricula, staff, rights of officials and material support, but had a common goal: to give girls an education that would meet their purpose: on the one hand, to act as a wife, and with another is to become an educated mother who raises her children in a spiritual and moral environment and a housewife. Thanks to the “Statute of Women’s Diocesan Schools” of 1868, graduates received the title of “Home Teacher”, which gave them the right to teach.It is important to emphasize that the first monastic women’s theological educational institutions were planned as three-class -with a two-year course of each class. The compulsory subjects that the girls were to study included: the Law of God (short catechism and sacred history), church singing, reading, Slavic and Russian languages, short grammar, arithmetic (up to the “triple rule”), short Russian history and geography, teaching needlework and housekeeping. The main task of the monastery school was to educate the heart and will, which should strive for good. The life of the soul is determined by the heart and concentrated in it, and the will, directed to good and guided by conscience, is the basis of the moral character of man. Good upbringing indicates successful learning.

On Reading Buddhist Vinaya: Feminist History, Hermeneutics, and Translating Women’s Bodies

AbstractBuddhist monastic law codes (vinaya) are rich sources for writing the history of the early nuns’ community. If we hope to encounter these ascetic women of long ago as full real people, however, we must apply an intentional, transparent, critically informed, and sometimes interstitial reading strategy, not a theoretically naïve historiography cloaked in philological rigor. Confronting head on the issue of what the vinaya actually can tell us about the early nuns’ community, this essay offers a survey of hermeneutical approaches in vinaya studies. It articulates a revised approach based on accepted strategies within vinaya studies enhanced by innovations in the fields of religious studies, gender studies, historical linguistics, comparative law, and dharmaśāstra studies. It also analyzes several vinaya passages based on this revised approach, including a text legislating the nuns’ use of what appears to be an ancient tampon when they are menstruating. Finally, it offers observations about the possible relationship between nuns’ vinayas as texts and the realia of the early nuns’ community. These observations include the possibility that the ancient Buddhist nunnery was a place where monastic women exercised certain types of agency as practitioners, interpreters, and even authors of monastic discipline, despite their oft-mentioned subordination to the male community.

Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance by Johannes Meyer

Reviewed by: Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance by Johannes Meyer Sharon M. Wailes Johannes Meyer. Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance. Translated by Claire Taylor Jones. Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2019. 306 pp. Paper, $35.00. Claire Taylor Jones offers a contemporary English translation of Johannes Meyer’s narrative of the late-fourteenth-and early-fifteenth-century Dominican Reform movement, a narrative that focused on women’s monasteries within German regions. The word Reformation in the book’s title refers not to the Protestant Reformation but to a late-medieval effort to reform Dominican monastic communities. Those practicing what was called the Observance desired to return to the austere way of life and deliberate religious devotion, perceived as being the original ways of the order. For women’s monastic communities, enclosure— separating the community from the outside world— accompanied reform. Jones’s introduction warns that Meyer’s narrative style, although perhaps bizarre to a modern reader, is typical for a late-medieval Dominican friar. Meyer includes copious references to historical figures but also impresses with his detailed accounts of specific communities, the sisters there, and how these communities were reformed. Woven into historical accounts are depictions of miracles that come to those advocating the reform. Accounts of sisters’ visions and divine ecstasy coexist with narratives of the practical duties of their offices and the bureaucratic and political obstacles they face. Entrusted for a great deal of his career with pastoral care in women’s monasteries, Meyer writes specifically for his primary audience, Dominican nuns. For his narrative, he chooses the genre of the Schwesternbuch (sisterbook), a genre containing writings by nuns with nuns as the intended audience. Meyer makes women visible not only by telling their stories and by directly addressing his female audience but also by deliberately naming the nuns involved in starting the reform: “I have recorded here the names of these thirteen devout mothers because they were the holy foundation [ . . . ] one also reads the names of distinguished holy fathers worthily commemorated in this way” (68). The lives of monastic women are being given more visibility by an emerging corpus of editions, translations, and secondary sources. Through her translation, Jones adds to this body of literature and provides access to a specific moment in women’s history in German-speaking [End Page 123] regions. Her translation of the original (late) Middle High German is formal but deliberately not archaic. Her thorough introduction and copious footnotes offer ample scaffolding to the modern reader in order to give maximum access to the author’s world. She explains specialized terminology, gives essential information for historical figures, provides reference information for other works to which Meyer refers, gives references when certain nuns are mentioned in outside sources, and corrects Meyer’s information when it is not consistent with other sources. Beyond building a historical context, Jones also explains the meaning of certain religious practices and the significance of the religious imagery within the narrative. For scholars, connections between the translation text and the corresponding locations in the main manuscript used (Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, MS 2934) provide orientation points for comparison. Also for ease of comparison, Jones has written her translation in anticipation of a possible modern critical edition of Meyer’s text. Concise footnotes mark variations among manuscripts. Because of the book’s accessible style, it can be used in lecture and discussion material. Meyer’s book includes both positive and negative aspects of these women’s lives. He mentions different offices women held for self-governance. He praises female scribes, talented in copying both text and music. However, behind his recounting of God’s aid in reforming difficult nuns, one sees that communities were often enclosed against their will, facing excommunication and, ironically, imprisonment if they refused. Thus, in a gender studies course, one can use the text to teach about women’s autonomy, yet also about abuse. German instructors teaching cultural history must often begin in the Middle Ages with the feudal pyramid including the nobility, ministeriales, and serfs. This book offers a way to...

Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna

Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna

Women in the Medieval Monastic World eds. by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber

Reviewed by: Women in the Medieval Monastic World eds. by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber Bruce L. Venarde Women in the Medieval Monastic World. Edited by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber. [Medieval Monastic Studies.] Turnout: Brepols. 2016. Pp. ix, 377. €90,00. ISBN 978-2-503-55308-5. This excellent volume collects the work of fifteen scholars from ten countries who focus on subjects including history, spirituality, archeology, art, and architecture. It is not, as the editors put it, "a comprehensive history of female monasticism in medieval Europe" (p. 9) for good reasons that this brief review tries to demonstrate. Rather, the book presents new research, much of it quite exciting, from different eras across a wide swathe of Western Christendom. The geographical scope ranges from Ireland to the west, Sweden to the north, Transylvania to the east, and Iberia and Italy to the south, and together the studies take in the entire Middle Ages, from the sixth century to the sixteenth. Most contributions have regional and chronological foci, even when regions are large and the time-span is in centuries. (The most notable exception is Anne Müller's discussion of the symbolic meanings of space, which ranges from the era of Caesarius of Arles to the thirteenth century, with examples from across western and central Europe.) Several themes emerge: the relationship of women and their communities to male authority figures, from the Mass priest to bishops and kings; the place of women's [End Page 802] communities within pan-European monastic federations, especially the Cistercians; patrons and patronage; the internal workings of nunneries and lived experience in the spaces within them; and women's contributions to monastic and other forms of cultural life. Even in more focused studies, the accent is on diversity. Regarding Cistercian nuns in northern Italy, Guido Cariboni notes an "extreme variety […] of origins, social extractions, relations with the ecclesiastic structure, and aims" (p. 69), while Carmen Florea concludes that "Transylvanian women living in a monastic life in the Middle Ages … had several choices they could opt for when deciding to join a religious order" (p. 224). Sprinkled throughout are remarks with broad application, like Erin Jordan's bracing reminder, "Clearly, the physical presence of a woman was not in and of itself regarded as polluting. If so, nunneries would never have had patrons" (p. 294). And there are genuine insights, too, like Anne Müller's conclusion, "Social behavior, rituals, religious practice, art, and decoration (such as painting, wall hangings, pictures, and images), as well as atmospheric qualities … it was all of these elements combined that created the space of the religious, both male and female, and were vital for definitions of the sacred" (p. 320). What generalizations can we draw? Very few, for reasons already alluded to and nicely summarized by the last two chapters of the book. Matthias Untermann examines placement of the choir in nuns' churches in the medieval German lands during the central Middle Ages. He finds no fewer than seven configurations, whereas for male communities, there were only three. To conclude the volume, Hedwig Röckelein offers an interim report on an evolving research tool on women's religious houses, "Female Monasticism's Database" (http:femmodata.uni.goettingen.de). This ambitious project aims to create a complete repertory of European women's monastic communities founded from ca. 400 to ca. 1500. There are already more than 3,000 entries, but Röckelein notes that "houses in the German-speaking part of Europe dominate the corpus of the database, while other European regions are underrepresented" (p. 358). She goes on to explain the kinds of information in each entry and plans for expansion and new research projects. It says a great deal that my 1997 book on women's monasticism warrants exactly one mention in the entire book. The scholarship since has been plentiful and, as this collection demonstrates, extremely rich. Much wonderful work on the subject is being done—and much remains to be done. [End Page 803] Bruce L. Venarde University of Pittsburgh Copyright © 2017 The Catholic University of America Press

Rethinking Monastic Suppressions in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Italy: how women religious negotiated for their communities

ABSTRACTFemale religious communities and individual women religious confronted the monastic suppressions in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Italy by actively negotiating with authorities both during and after the suppression decrees. The lack of the voices of the suppressed women religious in current scholarship has led scholars to argue for top-down, predetermined reorganization and destruction of religious life in revolutionary and Napoleonic Italy. A comparison of the three main suppression decrees reveals, instead, an evolving approach to religious institutions during this period. The petitions by women religious underscore how compromise and accommodation characterized the interactions between female communities and local and central authorities. The suppression of monasteries was not imposed on monastic women unilaterally; rather, these women actively negotiated the suppressions to optimize the outcome for their communities and for themselves.

The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women’s Movement by Laura Swan, and: Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe ed. by Letha Boehringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen

Wisdom of the Beguines: Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women's Movement. By Laura Swan. (Katonah, NY: BlueBridge, an imprint of United Tribes Media. 2014. Pp. 202. $16.95. ISBN 978-1-933346-97.7.)Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe. Edited by Letha Boehringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen. [Sanctimoniales, Vol. 1.] (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. 2014. Pp. xii, 235. euro80,00. ISBN 978-2-503-55135-7.)The Wisdom of the Beguines is a general introduction to beguine spirituality written for a general readership; the edited volume Labels and Libels brings together eight studies by specialists on problems of terminology and identity of medieval beguines.Laura Swan, in her introductory study, proves to be well-read in recent scholarship, although in English only; German scholarship eludes her. She writes an emotive history of beguine spirituality into which she weaves exquisite passages from beguine authors. She is clearly on the lookout for authentic voices of medieval women authors. Although she follows the expert Walter Simons in his study of the label beguine and its connotation of praying laywomen, and although she also states herself that beguines were lay, she is not held back by her own definition and incorporates all kinds of religious women gave voice to their own experience of the Divine (p. 7). She includes monastic women such as the Cistercian nun Lutgard of Aywieres and the Dominican sister Maria de Santo Domingo, the Mantellata Catherine of Siena, and female authors who never in beguinages. For this reviewer, a European academic, her selection is questionable, but for an American general readership it yields a compelling introduction to female spirituality in the Middle Ages.For Swan, beguines are those women who lived lives of simplicity, generosity to the poor, taking care of lepers, and daily attendance at prayer in church (p. 18). Beguines on their own or in informal communities and devoted themselves to teaching and preaching. Their profound experience of the divine presence impelled to serve the hurting and defenceless around them (p. 83). But they had a keen business sense as well and earned their own living. author concludes: The story of the beguines affirms that women have contributed far more to spirituality and culture than history books have traditionally acknowledged. Their voices proclaim a divine presence that yearns for relationship with each of us (p. 179).Labels and Libels is the first publication in the new series Sanctimoniales: Religious Women-Geistliche Frauen set up by AGFEM, the Research Group of German and American Medievalists for the Study of Religious Women (composed of members both inside and outside monastic orders). …

Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions: Gender, Material Culture, and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany by June L. Mecham (review)

Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions: Gender, Material Culture, and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany. By June L. Mecham. Edited by Alison I. Beach, Constance H. Berman, and Lisa M. Bitel. [Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, vol. 29.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2014. Pp. xviii, 307. euro85,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-503-54134-1.)All books are intended to be dialogical, communicating between authors and readers and furthering scholarly exchange. This book, however, exceeds expectations in that it incorporates history with art history, church history, literary history, and musicology. An eager intellectual curiosity and hunger to avail herself of everything written within and about late-medieval women's monasticism appears to have motivated this researcher. Rather than simply following the well-trodden paths of past scholarship, Mecham explores a wide range of source material tradi- tionally belonging to different disciplines in an attempt to find new answers.The book begins with sad information: In the acknowledgments from 2009, June Mecham anticipates that she will not live to see the book in print and thanks Lisa Bitel, Constance Berman, and Alison Beach for agreeing to shepherd the manuscript through to publication. In a second note, dated 2011, Bitel states that the three editors have attempted to preserve Mecham's voice. As a reader who consulted the University Microfilms International copy of the dissertation that served as the basis for this book, this reviewer must express appreciation that the author and editors succeeded in transforming a weighty and detailed elaboration into a nuanced and very readable book.Chapter 1 introduces the heath convents that are central to Mecham's work on the multifaceted piety and devotional practices of religious women. Justifying this focus on the abundance of visual and textual source material, she hones in on six nunneries: Ebstorf, Lune, Walsrode, Isenhagen, Medingen, and Wienhausen, all of which flourished on the low flat plane of the Luneburger Heide during the late Middle Ages. Wienhausen becomes the primary focus-perhaps because of its largely extant architectural complex; its wealth of artistic furnishings, much of which is still in situ; its rich textual sources, some of which are available in published and edited form; and the plenitude of studies undertaken by Horst Appuhn and other German cultural historians. Mecham also draws on comparative material from other women's foundations in the vicinity and cast her net even wider, when appropriate, to gather comparanda from monasteries as distant as Italy.Introducing the houses, Mecham delves into the individual histories and networks that connected them to noble and patristic families. …

Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna, by Sherri Franks Johnson

Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna, by Sherri Franks Johnson

Hildegard of Bingen and her Gospel Homilies: Speaking New Mysteries by Beverly Mayne Kienzle (review)

Reviewed by: Hildegard of Bingen and her Gospel Homilies: Speaking New Mysteries by Beverly Mayne Kienzle Julie Hotchin Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, Hildegard of Bingen and her Gospel Homilies: Speaking New Mysteries (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 12), Turnhout, Brepols, 2009; hardback; pp. xvi, 338; R.R.P. €70.00; ISBN 9782503517773. This is the ‘first comprehensive study’ (p. 16) of Hildegard of Bingen’s Expositiones evangeliorum, or homilies on the Gospels. Beverly Mayne Kienzle is well known for her scholarship on Hildegard as a preacher and teacher. This fine study complements her other two works on the homilies – a critical edition, with Carolyn Muessig, in Hildegard Bingensis Opera minora (Brepols, 2007) and an English translation, Homilies on the Gospels (Liturgical Press, 2011) – and makes these lesser known Hildegardian works accessible to a broader audience. The Expositiones consists of fifty-eight homilies, most of which were delivered by the magistra of Rupertsberg to her community of nuns, and four delivered to the monks of her former community at Mt St Disibod. These homilies illustrate Hildegard’s preaching, teaching, and exegesis in practice, and present an extraordinary witness to a medieval woman instructing her community during the course of the liturgical year. As Kienzle stresses, for Hildegard the responsibility of religious leaders to instruct their communities was integral to her concept of leadership. The homilies demonstrate how Hildegard put this tenet into practice for her nuns at Rupertsberg. Hildegard’s originality is evident in her homiletic approach. Kienzle refers to her exegetical method as ‘intratextual glossing’, a form of progressive commentary through which the speaker follows the Gospel text word by word, and inserts into it a running commentary that provides her spiritual interpretation of the text. The gloss constitutes a narrative in its own right, creating a ‘dramatic narrative exegesis’ on the Gospel texts. In describing the performative quality and context of the homilies, Kienzle posits that ‘the story unfolds like the acts of a drama voiced and performed by Hildegard herself as magistra, narrator, and interpreter’ (p. 152). The author also examines three characteristically Hildegardian themes in the Expositiones – her concept of [End Page 297] salvation history, the ‘virtues’, and heresy – to situate the homilies within the context of her life and work. Kienzle’s analysis of Hildegard’s exegetical method poses questions about her claims to spiritual authority. The magistra does not adopt a visionary persona in her homilies. The absence of reference to her visions in these works indicates that she felt no need to justify her authority to preach and teach when it involved commenting on scripture to her own community of nuns. Her position as their superior, bound with the obligation to instruct, provided the authorising environment to deliver her exegesis. Importantly, Kienzle situates Hildegard and her learning within the wider context of the vibrant monastic milieu of religious reform and intellectual exchange. She deftly outlines the breadth of monastic women’s learning in Germany in the twelfth century, and their involvement in intellectual networks, emphasising the formative nature of this religious culture for Hildegard. Through the Expositiones Hildegard develops a distinctive exegesis for a female audience that in turn ‘speaks to multiple audiences’, like her other visionary and epistolary works. Julie Hotchin Independent Scholar, Canberra Copyright © 2015 Julie Hotchin

Women in Anchoritic and Semi-Anchoritic Monasticism in Egypt: Rethinking the Landscape

Outside of hagiography, the evidence for female anchorites in early Christian Egypt remains scarce. House ascetics in cities survive for us in documentary and other sources, but women monks in non-coenobitic, nonurban environments are more difficult to locate, to the point at which some scholars have begun to question their very existence. This essay seeks to change the parameters of the scholarly debate over the nature of non-coenobitic female monastic experience. It examines hagiography, monastic rules and letters, and documentary papyri to reassess the state of the field and to produce a fuller portrait of anchoritic and semi-anchoritic female asceticism. Non-coenobitic women's monasticism existed, and it crossed boundaries of geography and social status, as well as the traditional categories of lavra, eremitic, coenobitic, and house asceticism. This interdisciplinary approach provides insights not only into women ascetics’ physical locations but also into their class, education, and levels of autonomy. An intervention into the historiography of women's asceticism in late antique Egypt, this study ultimately questions the advisability of using traditional categorizations of “anchoritic,” “lavra,” and “coenobitic” to classify female monasticism, because they obscure the particularities and diversity of female ascetic history.

Spare Ribs? Early Modern Female Monasticism in the East Slavic Lands

AbstractIn contrast to the robust state of research on female Catholic monasticism in Central and Western Europe, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, the history of Orthodox and Greek Catholic convents in the Balkans and Eastern Europe remains a largely uncharted field of study. Although historical archives in those parts of Europe offer rich pickings of first‐class documentary material, the lack of up‐to‐date research methodologies in post‐Socialist countries, the current stunted condition of pre‐modern Slavic studies in Western Europe and occasional problems of archival access create obstacles against the development of this promising area of research. However, characteristic of a strong element of human interest, research on early modern women's monasticism of the Eastern Rite, has the potential to broaden the awareness of the place women held in European societies and cultures of the past and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of it at present.

The Earliest Women's Writing? Anglo-Saxon Literary Cultures and Communities

Who were the first women writers in the English literary tradition? This question continues to preoccupy feminist scholars in the twenty-first century, but very few would look back to the centuries before the Norman invasions in order to find the answer. Focusing on the religious houses of Ely and Whitby in the seventh and early eighth centuries, this article reviews some of the surviving evidence of the first monastic women's writing. Looking for traces of early texts by women, it re-examines the lives of the abbesses Æthelthryth of Ely and Hild of Whitby found in the fourth book of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, alongside the account of Hild found in the Old English Martyrology, and, more speculatively, it reconsiders the case for women's involvement in the production of the anonymous first Life of Gregory the Great. This article argues that texts by women were “overwritten” by the earliest male monastic writers, a process reinforced by later scholarship. By focusing on texts associated with religious houses ruled by women, and by seeing them as the productions not of individuals but of communities, it is possible to get a fuller and more balanced understanding of women's writing in this earliest period of English literary history.

The Lord as Their Portion: The Story of the Religious Orders and How They Shaped Our World (review)

Reviewed by: The Lord as Their Portion: The Story of the Religious Orders and How They Shaped Our World Michael W. Blastic The Lord as Their Portion: The Story of the Religious Orders and How They Shaped Our World. By Elizabeth Rapley. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. 2011. Pp. xii, 337. $24.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8028-6588-5.) Elizabeth Rapley sets out to recount the story of religious “for those people for whom monks and nuns are only a distant memory, or who have never known them at all” (p. ix). This intended audience determines the mode of her presentation without footnotes or bibliography and only brief recommendations for reading at the conclusion of each chapter. She covers approximately 1500 years of history in six chapters, and includes a helpful glossary and index. Chapter 1 begins the story in the Egyptian desert; moves to St. Benedict of Nursia; and traces the Benedictine reforms through Cluny, the eremitical reforms, and Cîteaux. The beginnings of the apostolic life movements in the eleventh century, the revival of the canons regular, the origins of military orders, and an overview of monastic women concludes the chapter. Chapter 2, covering the Middle Ages from 1200 to 1500, chronicles the origins of the mendicants, focusing on the growth of the Franciscan and Dominican orders through the Black Death and the Great Schism. Rapley describes the expansion, the pastoral role in the Western Church (and conflict with secular clergy), and the missions of the Franciscan Order to the Orient through the early-fourteenth century and the crisis of the Spirituals. The Poor Clares are treated briefly, as well as the Cistercian nuns and the Frauenfrage in general. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the “Third Orders” and the Brothers of the Common Life. Chapter 3 covers the period of the Reformation and its impact on religious life. The Reformers’ critique of religious life and the turbulent history of the sixteenth century is the backdrop for the origins of the Capuchin reform and the Jesuits in particular, as well as for the Carmelite reform of Ss. Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. The growth of new women’s orders is presented through the example of St. Angela of Merici and the origins of the Ursulines. This chapter concludes with a description of the missionary endeavors of orders in the Far East and in South America. [End Page 769] The Age of Confessionalism is the subject of chapter 4, in which Rapley describes the role of religious orders in the Catholic regions of Europe, focusing primarily on France. The attempt of religious women to move beyond the requirement of cloister imposed by the Council of Trent is portrayed with the story of Ss. Jeanne de Chantal and Francis de Sales and the foundation of the Visitation. St. Vincent de Paul and the Congregation of the Mission, St. Louise de Marillac and the Daughters of Charity, and St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle and the teaching brothers demonstrate the importance of the social ministries of charity and teaching. The reform of Armand-Jean de Rancé and the origins of the Trappists conclude the chapter. Chapter 5 focuses again on France in the eighteenth century. The suppression of the Jesuits is chronicled, as is the preference for the active social works of charity over the contemplative life by the various regimes. The founding of the Montfortian congregations by St. Louis de Montfort and the Redemptorists by St. Alphonsus Liguori are highlighted in this century of revolutions. The final chapter describes the revival of religious life in the nineteenth century. Featured here are St. John Bosco and the Salesians, St. Jeanne Jugan and the Little Sisters of the Poor, the revival of women’s communities in France, and the establishment of orders in the new world. Given the intended audience, Rapley succeeds admirably in telling the story of religious orders throughout Christian history. As she herself admits, there is much more to this story than she could include, but one learns from her work just how integral to the story of Christianity these women and men were and are who took “the Lord as...

Roving Nuns and Cistercian Realities: The Cloistering of Religious Women in the Thirteenth Century

This article uses evidence from Cistercian abbeys in Flanders and Hainaut during the thirteenth century to reconsider the role of enclosure policies in shaping the experience of religious women. The frequency with which nuns appear in the charters outside of their cloisters, when combined with the developments in medieval spirituality that produced an array of lay religious groups during this period, suggests that Cistercian policy considered enclosure to be important symbolically more than pragmatically. Unlike Periculoso, the aim was never unilaterally to confine women to their cloisters. Revising our understanding of this legislation results in repositioning monastic women within the spiritual landscape of medieval Europe, and indicates that nuns in the high Middle Ages were not nearly as disadvantaged by gender expectations as previously believed. Further, it encourages us to question the presumed relationship between enclosure and the decline and eventual dissolution of so many nunneries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Ricreationi per monache of Suor Annalena Aldobrandini

Two newly discovered manuscripts in the Biblioteca Estense provide an insight into convent culture in late sixteenth‐century Italy. They are the work of Annalena Aldobrandini, a nun at the convent of Santo Spirito in Florence. Annalena's manuscript contains eight veglie intended for performance during Carnevale and the Calendimaggio. Striking detail is preserved in the instructions for instruments, music, staging and costumes. Subject matter ranges from intellectual debates about the sciences and the arts to an appreciation of religious commitment and the difficulties of maintaining moral rectitude as part of monastic life. There is a wealth of practical information regarding music in a little‐known dramatic context as well as a unique exposition of the Divine Office as a musical, as well as a religious, experience. The veglie are testament to the creativity of the nuns, showing how they, like the Medici outside, used spectacle as a method of community bonding. Moreover, because they were transmitted in manuscript rather than in print, they are unmediated by any masculine agency. The importance of this manuscript to our better understanding of early modern monastic women, their attitudes to enclosure, education and the performing arts, and their interactions with the secular world cannot be overestimated.

Sensual Encounters: Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany (review)

Reviewed by: Sensual Encounters: Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner Sensual Encounters: Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany. By Erika Lauren Lindgren. [Gutenberg-e Online History Series.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 2009. Pp. xvi, 190. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-231-14238-0). Erika Lindgren's Sensual Encounters has a very interesting scope: The author tries to unravel the interaction between environment and experience of Dominican sisters in the upper Rhine area; she chooses six convents from a wide range of possibilities (Unterlinden in Colmar, St. Katharinenthal, Diessenhofen, and three convents in Freiburg/Breisgau: Adelhausen, St. Agnes, and the Penitents of St. Mary Magdalene). These houses offer her a broad variety of sources; three of them left so-called Sisterbooks to posterity (which Lindgren, unfortunately, uses quite uncritically). The author includes liturgical and other manuscripts, economic and legal documents, materials related to architecture, and artwork. However, Lindgren does not provide a reason why she refers to these particular convents. She does not justify her inclusion of [End Page 778] the Freiburg Penitents, which, strictly speaking, were not part of the Second Order of St. Dominic at its inception, despite its close links to the Dominicans. On the other hand, she excludes, for example, Töss and Oetenbach, the Strasbourg houses. Her decision to concentrate on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries prevents her from using the rich source material extant from the reformed convents since the end of the fourteenth century. In the first chapter Lindgren turns to the "spatial environment" (p. 27), moving from the center (church and choir) to the—arguably—less spiritually charged areas (such as kitchen, dormitory, and garden); here, she detects a tension between the legally prescribed uses of these spaces and "the female Dominicans subverting the specific officially designated functions of monastic spaces"(p. 50). The second chapter explores the visual environment that has already received wide-ranging scholarly attention, especially through the groundbreaking research of Jeffrey Hamburger; Lindgren relies predominantly on remains of St. Katharinenthal and the Freiburg convents and correlates the material sources with the written testimonies, giving a valuable insight into the sisters' spiritual interaction with and practical, hands-on use of the objects in their environment. The next chapter scrutinizes the acoustic environment, and appropriately Lindgren does equally refer to silence and sound in the sisters' environment. Silence was as much part of the official regulations as it was part of the women's spirituality; but, as Lindgren points out, the sisters could be quite noisy at times: they did not only sing the prescribed divine services but also incorporated sounds of joy and suffering into their devotion and, Lindgren argues, so defied the official regulations. The last chapter refers to the "textual environment"(p. 142); the multiple tasks fulfilled by the sisters required the daily use of written material. Since Lindgren restricts herself to the prereform period she has to rely mainly on liturgical manuscripts that were, of course, written in Latin. The author stresses the bilingual culture within the Dominican convents and concedes that "the individual devotions were often in the vernacular," but does this not contradict her earlier statement of the "prevalence of . . . [the Latin] language in their conception of spirituality"? (p. 148). On the whole, Lindgren provides an interesting insight into the lively spirituality of Dominican sisters in the context of their material environment. However, at times she overstates the antagonism of male/official regulation and female/spontaneous spirituality. Additionally, the book would have profited if Lindgren had referred to the large number of more recent publications on her subject; the omission of Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton's Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT, 2006) is especially regrettable. [End Page 779] Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner King's College, University of Aberdeen Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press