Accomplishments of the last few weeks

I have graded so many papers that I lost count.

I have evaluated and ranked students for various award opportunities.

I recommended that my independent study student read Judith Bennett's History Matters, and was delighted to find that she loved it.

Summer projects

So one of my summer projects (one for which the college is actually paying me, hurrah) is to get up to speed on Crusades scholarship for a course I'm teaching in the fall.

There is a lot of Crusades scholarship, folks. Hoo boy. I ordered a huge stack of books which I'm now skimming. Some I'll assign for class, and others I'll order for the library, whose collection in this area is not very current.

When I started this reading, I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do with this class, and the process of reading has sharpened my ideas considerably. I have rejected several books for class assignments as being, to me, "too magisterial." I want my students to get a handle on what happened, but I don't want them to be too influenced by a single narrative that proclaims This Is What Happened. I am much more drawn to books that explain differing interpretations, that talk explicitly about how they handle sources, and that don't pretend to be the single definitive account of events.

I've winnowed my giant pile into rejects and books I want to take a second, closer look at. I'd also welcome suggestions.

Were medieval nuns "lesbian-like"?

This post is building on the ongoing conversation about Judith Bennett's History Matters. See part 1, part 2, and part 3. Thanks to Notorious for starting this up--great idea!

First off, I think this is a great book, immensely thought-provoking. I should also clarify that I read the book a year or two ago, and now can't find my copy, so I haven't fully refreshed my memory.

But, as I remarked in the comments to Tenured Radical's post, I have some concerns about the use of "lesbian-like" to describe medieval women, particularly medieval nuns. I can see the attraction to the term: nuns did, after all, live in primarily-female communities, and so often had their closest relationships with other women. Bennett's discussion of the term also reminds me of the need to avoid heteronormativity, which can be easy to slip into.

Nonetheless, I have some qualms. One is that I've encountered a number of people who were already eager to assume that medieval nunneries were hotbeds of women having sex with each other. Many of them were undergraduates, true, but not all; I fear that introducing "lesbian-like" only reinforces some of the more titillating notions about medieval nuns. That alone wouldn't put me off, though.

Second qualm is that women's monasteries in the Middle Ages were, in fact, not always, or even typically, female-exclusive communities. Nuns had male chaplains, confessors, and other priests on hand; some nunneries had attached communities of lay brothers; lay men did construction, farming, or other manual labor around nunneries. So, at many communities, men went in and out quite regularly. Plus, while many nuns, perhaps even most nuns, did have their primary emotional relationships with other women, there must have been many nuns who viewed men as their primary friends and emotional supports. Hildegard of Bingen's male secretary, Volmar, seems to have been a trusted aide and confidant; Elisabeth of Schonau was very close with her brother; numerous later medieval nuns had strong emotional ties to their confessors. So even on the level of emotional, rather than sexual, intimacy, many medieval nuns had important relationships with men.

Even beyond that, nuns were supposed to direct their energies--emotional, sexual, and spiritual--toward God. Much spiritual literature aimed at nuns invoked the image of a nun as Christ's bride. As I've discussed before, this was not just metaphor, but literalized. Many people, including a great many nuns and their spiritual advisors, viewed nuns as the literal brides of Jesus, the heavenly bridegroom. Nuns' relationship with Jesus could be somewhat eroticized as well as emotionally affecting and intimate. (A digression: what would that have been like for a nun whose sexual desires were for women? would she have found the bearded Jesus on the cross alienating rather than fulfilling? might she have fixed on more feminized aspects of Jesus in her personal spiritual journey?) The generally masculine figure of God was, then, theoretically at the center of nuns' existence, which perhaps makes them seem not so lesbian-like after all.

In the area of sexuality, I think a case can be made that, in the Middle Ages, virginity was a sexual identity. Whereas modern secular culture tends to view virginity as a temporary phase of life, to be moved past in one's youth, for medieval people it was a state to aspire toward, to protect vigilantly, to be constantly aware of. The preservation of virginity (or chastity) was a vital part of nuns' identity. How would this affect any sexual orientation on the part of nuns? If a nun had taken vows as a young girl, to what extent was she even aware of her other sexual preferences?

As discussed by Bennett, the term "lesbian-like" does raise some important issues of interpretation and things to think about. But for all the above reasons, I think it's too easy to apply to medieval nuns, and doesn't do enough to reflect the real complexities of nuns' daily lives.

Helfta

Heu Mihi inquired yesterday what I thought about the affiliation of Helfta (Cistercian or Benedictine). I confess I hadn't much thought about the affiliation of Helfta before that point, so I poked around a little.

As it turns out, Helfta is interestingly eclectic in its spiritual affiliations and influences. This Saxon community of nuns was founded c. 1229. According to an article I recently read in Meredith Parsons Lillich, ed., Cistercian Nuns and their World, there's a definitely-Cistercian community that served as their mother house. It's not clear to me that this was a particularly strong link, mind you. Helfta was apparently never officially incorporated into the Cistercian Order, which leads some scholars to call it simply Benedictine; yet they did adopt some Cistercian customs.

So, do they walk, talk, and act like Cistercians? Sort of. They appear to be influenced by Cistercian spirituality, as discussed in Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother. Yet according to several authorities, their spiritual advisors in the late 13th century were Dominican and/or Franciscan, possibly out of shared interests in mysticism. They thus appear to have accepted spiritual advice from many different sources and traditions. Their institutional commitment to learning is distinctive; I suspect most women's communities following Cistercian customs did not emphasize the trivium and quadrivium to the extent that Helfta's nuns did. And the Helfta nuns develop some original and distinctive devotions, such as devotion to the Sacred Heart. Rosalynn Voaden, in an essay in Medieval women in their communities, argues that the Helfta visionaries worked closely together and influenced each other, and has an interesting discussion of the Sacred Heart.

So, to sum up, Helfta is idiosyncratic; certainly following the Benedictine rule and Cistercian observances, although not officially recognized as Cistercian. The lack of oversight from a Cistercian father abbot may in fact have been helpful to them, allowing them greater autonomy in selecting spiritual guides and forging their unique community culture.

Notes from Crown and Veil, 1

I admit that art history is one of my weak points.  Certainly I am just as capable of admiring a pretty image as nearly anyone, and I can differentiate between Romanesque and Gothic to some extent, but my knowledge of art history is not that deep.

So this volume's focus on art history is a welcome corrective for me, providing a different point of view and things to think about. And it has pretty images, too.

Three of the essays in Crown and Veil really focus on the visual: Jeffrey Hamburger and Robert Suckale give a general introduction to the art of religious women, Carola Jaggi and Uwe Lobbedey deal with architecture, and Barbara Newman discusses women's "visual worlds." 

Hamburger and Suckale give what seems to be a good overview of what is known about women's art in the Middle Ages, with some interest in reconstructing how works of art were used within the cloister. This sort of reconstruction of the material world of a monastery is immensely useful, I find; it helps give a real sense of what monastic life was like. They devote attention to textiles as well as sculpture and painting, and discuss monastic works of art as functional rather than merely decorative, serving a variety of practical and devotional purposes within the community. Very different from encountering the art in museums, moved far out of its original context.

Jaggi and Lobbedey's essay on architecture emphasizes diversity: although there appear to be general patterns in the layout of many monasteries, they cite many variations, most based on the local conditions of each community. This fits in with ideas I've encountered elsewhere, that communities of nuns were often idiosyncratic and relied heavily on local founders and supporters.  Some of their comments provoke further questions.  For example, they mention the grille as a popular measure of enclosure in German houses of Dominican nuns.  I don't entirely know when this feature originated and how/when/where it spread, though. As I recall, in the 15th century a lot of Spanish nunneries had grilles installed--so they didn't have them before--yet the German Dominican houses have them in the 13th century.  An interesting question, I need to see if anyone has really looked at this.

Finally, Newman emphasizes a special connection between women and images, looking both at visionary nuns and at guidance for nuns that emphasized visualization as part of prayer.  In some ways this essay reads like a boiled-down version of work she's done elsewhere (her extensive work on Hildegard of Bingen, for example), but it's a nice summary of some of her points.

Crown and veil

Busy week ahead: the first batch of essays is in to grade, I need to finish revisions to an article imminently, and that ms. I agreed to review is due soon. Let's not even talk about job applications yet.

I also still have a large stack of books to peruse, and today I looked at Crown and Veil, edited by Jeffrey Hamburger & Susan Marti. This is a collection of essays on female monasticism intended to accompany an exhibition of artwork from women's monasteries in Germany. From my cursory overview so far, it's a good look at the state of the subject. While it focuses geographically on Germany, Hamburger's introduction discusses the need to balance examining what is distinctive about female monasticism with how it fits into, and in turn changes, the larger world of medieval church and society. Hm, now there's a familiar theme. The collection then kicks off with two essays surveying the history of foundations, orders, and so forth, and goes on to examine numerous topics, including architecture, artwork, liturgy, patronage, and economy of women's monasteries.  I plan to discuss some of these essays at greater length as I find time.

Cistercian nuns in Catalonia

I've been dabbling the last few days in scholarship on Cistercian nuns, particularly on the topic of whether there were Cistercian nuns. Well, yes, there were, but the question is when they were, and how nuns became attached to the order.

The traditional narrative holds that the early Cistercians distanced themselves from women, except for a few leaders such as Stephen Harding and Bernard of Clairvaux who offered spiritual advice to religious women only informally. Then in the late 12th century, the clamor of women seeking places in monasteries, combined with other pressure, forced the Cistercian General Chapter reluctantly to admit houses of women to the order. 

Probably the primary voice arguing against this narrative in Constance Berman's. In "Were There Twelfth-Century Cistercian Nuns?" (Church History 68:4, Dec. 1999, pp. 824-864) she attacks the question head-on, and connects it to her larger attacks on the traditional narrative of Cistercian origins found in The Cistercian Evolution.  Berman's position is that the 12th-century expansion of the Cistercian order happened through groups of reforming hermits & monastics taking up Cistercian customs, and gradually being incorporated into the developing order (rather than new houses being seeded, so to speak, directly from Citeaux and Clairvaux).  She further argues that many of these reforming groups included women, that such women viewed themselves as Cistercians, and that historians have applied overly rigid and anachronistic standards to dismiss many women's houses as only "imitating" Cistercians.  She generally argues that, where local records of a house having Cistercian customs conflict with the order's narrative sources, the local records should be trusted, because she considers the dating of the narratives to be highly questionable.  

Now, Berman has her share of critics on these issues, but the material I am looking at inclines me toward her approach. I'm looking at material related to a Catalan nunnery (Santa Maria de Vallbona) which is presented as unambiguously Cistercian in the local historiography. Catalan historians often seem to blithely ignore historiographical debates focused on other regions--in fact no Catalan article related to Vallbona appears to cite any of this controversy, or the traditional narrative.  But they do know their local sources quite well.  In fact, the foundation story that appears in the multiple histories of Vallbona I've looked at fits Berman's pattern beautifully:

A charismatic hermit called Ramon settled down in the Good Valley of Vallbona, attracting a number of followers, both male and female.  After some time the group decided to adopt a more formal set of customs and separated, the men perhaps joining the community of Poblet.  The women invited a nun from the Navarrese Cistercian community of Tulebras to come and bring them Cistercian customs, which she did c. 1175.  That is not super-early in the Cistercian chronology, but it is earlier than when the General Chapter is supposed to have been pressured to admit women.  It's a little earlier than the foundation of Las Huelgas in Castile.  I do think, based on the local accounts and sources, that Vallbona was Cistercian.  Its material seems unfairly obscure, though; it's seldom cited in studies of Las Huelgas, much less related to developments in France.  Unfortunate, as it could provide useful counterpoint.

The Great Divide

I recently read an article on the enclosure of nuns that illustrates some of the interesting questions around this issue, as well as some of my ongoing frustrations with scholarship on women and religion. I happened on the article somewhat by chance--it's in a collection of essays that caught my eye while I was looking for something else on the shelf. I'm glad I found it, though.

The article is Francesca Medioli, "An unequal law: the enforcement of clausura before and after the Council of Trent," in Christine Meek, ed. Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (Four Courts Press, 2000).  The title of the essay collections is indicative of my current complaint. Since these essays focus on Renaissance / early modern women, I hadn't previously encountered it in reading scholarship on medieval women. In short, medievalists and early modernists don't talk to each other enough. Medioli's essay further illustrates the problem. She's interested in ideas of enclosure before and after the mid-1500s Council of Trent, and she discusses some monastic rules dating from before Trent, but she doesn't deal to any significant extent with any of the scholarship on enclosure in the Middle Ages. 

This problem comes up again and again in my reading on monasticism. Medievalists pick an ending date--for historians of Spain, often 1492, for historians of England, often the Dissolution of the early 1500s--and stop there. Early modernists pick a start date, usually in the 1500s, sometimes in the late 1400s, and start there.  It's rare for a historian on either side of the medieval / early modern divide to engage systematically with work done on the other side.

Yet, for women religious, there is a lot of consistency crossing that line.  Similar rules, customs, and preoccupations dominate the theory and practice of women's monastic lives both before and after 1500.  The Council of Trent is in some ways a watershed.  But, as Medioli points out, it's a watershed of enforcement, not of ideology.  In the years after Trent, the enforcement of enclosure rules became much more stringent and effective, but the basic principle of enclosure had been established by Boniface VIII's bull Periculoso in 1298 and discussed more generally long before that.  Medioli's discussion of the Trent materials, particularly the differences between the draft and final versions of the relevant constitutions, is quite interesting.  Yet I found myself frustrated that the scholarship on earlier norms of enclosure was not more fully addressed, and also frustrated that there was little discussion of customary practices within nunneries.  We know from many anecdotes that many nunneries did not observe enclosure very strictly, but we don't necessarily know whether these nuns were working under consistent customs that just happened to be looser than the ideal, or whether there was in fact an "anything goes" mentality. And just how was it that church leaders managed to enforce enclosure more effectively after Trent, when the ideal of enclosure for nuns had already existed for centuries? Or did they succeed only in Italy (Medioli's focus)? There are some very important questions here which really require an approach that spans medieval and early modern.

Reading for inspiration 3: From Heaven to Earth

Some books make my brain practically spark with thought. Teofilo Ruiz's From Heaven to Earth is one of them. 

I put this book into my stack of things to reread for this project because its discussion of changing Castilian mentalities deals with some similar subjects: property, inheritance, wills, giving of various kinds. In addition, its focus on Castile suggests fruitful comparison with other Iberian regions. Today I went back through the book, and felt well rewarded. Ruiz's argument is complex and difficult to summarize, although the book is short. It comes down to: the 12th-13th centuries in Castile saw major shifts in attitudes about property, sin, and intercession, as people moved from an otherworldly-focused approach to a more down-to-earth practical style. Whereas earlier testators tended to entrust clergy with undifferentiated gifts, he argues, later testators divided up their legacies, using combinations of small gifts, which they expected to be spent for specific purposes. He suggests that charitable giving in particular tends to be performative: money left for clothing 12 honest paupers, for example, is symbolic and ceremonial, related to the donor's ideas about charity and poverty more than about the real needs of the poor.

Since I'm looking at later material, my testators are past this transition, but this is exactly the kind of pattern I'm seeing in 13th- and 14th-century wills and other donations. I'm seeing several variations on the pattern, however, which gives me something to talk about.

Sisters in Arms

By popular request, I'm now commenting on Jo Ann McNamara's Sisters in Arms.  Well, OK, not exactly by popular request--but Notorious put in a request, so that's one.  I do try to please my public, small though it be. 

Now over ten years old, this is still an impressive book, and an essential resource for those interested in women's monasticism, not just in the Middle Ages, but from the origins of Christianity right down to the present. Its great strength is McNamara's ability to synthesize a great mass of scholarship on religious women, on extremely diverse periods, and make a coherent whole out of it.  One of its major flaws is the flip side of that: because McNamara is wielding a quite broad brush, at times the book sweeps over variation in a given period.  

The other major flaw is the index.  It's simply not helpful.  Someone apparently decided that this book only needed an index of personal and place names.  There is, therefore, no thematic index at all: if you would like to see where McNamara discusses her favorite theme of syneisactism (roughly, partnership between religious men and religious women), or reform, or sexuality, or virginity, or charity, or...well, you get the idea.  There is no index to help you, you will simply have to hunt through this massive tome yourself.  I've spent more time than I can count riffling through the book, muttering, "I could have sworn she talks about authority and disobedience in here somewhere...maybe it was this other chapter...no, that's much too late..." etc.

Lacking time to reread the entire book, I concentrated on ch. 9-13, which cover the high Middle Ages (roughly, 1100-1400, here).  These five chapters give an excellent overview of issues in women's monasticism during this period, but don't address my current preoccupations (benefaction and patronage) to any significant degree.  McNamara notes women flocking to join charismatic preachers like Robert of Arbrissel, attempting to affiliate with the Cistercians, forming informal beguine houses, and so forth, but offers few comments on the lay supporters of such houses.  There is, nonetheless, excellent stuff here: the dominant theme is the male clerical hierarchy's desire to separate itself from religious women, while simultaneously regulating the behavior of the women.  One of the chapters is a good discussion of the financial burdens of women's monasteries, another is a fine introduction to female mysticism in the period, and yet another addresses damaging preoccupations with the sexuality of enclosed women (among historians as well as medieval churchmen).  

In short, I remain impressed with McNamara's accomplishment here.  It is hard to imagine a more thorough summation and synthesis of scholarship on religious women, c. 1996.  A revised and updated version would look rather different, since the book has itself helped to establish paths for research in the intervening years.  I only wish it were easier to make use of its wealth of information.

Reading for inspiration, 2

If it had been a while since I'd read Rosenwein, it has been even longer since I read Lester Little's Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy. I seem to recall reading it for my exams in 1999. Although I hadn't read it since then, its argument has definitely stayed with me and had a formative role on my thinking about late medieval religion. His basic narrative of the rise of the mendicant orders is definitely something I've internalized. 

In tracing the development of anxieties about money and new forms of urban religious culture, Little's work here bridges the chronological gap between Rosenwein's 11th-century monastery and my 14th-century monasteries.  In Little's discussion of religous culture, however, he deals in turn with: 1) traditional Benedictine monasteries, notably Cluny; 2) reformed monastic orders such as the Cistercians and Premonstratensians; and 3) the mendicant orders (Dominicans and Franciscans). Each group gets their turn, and then ceases to be discussed further.

The communities I'm dealing with in this paper, however, are Benedictine communities that have survived, and even flourished, despite the arrival of Dominicans and Franciscans in droves. The fact that lay people in an urban environment still supported old-fahioned Benedictine nuns at the same time as they supported mendicant orders, and the poor generally, is one of the themes I'm attempting to deal with in this paper. I'm looking at nuts-and-bolts sorts of issues, looking at everyday acts of support for various causes, which Little's work of synthesis doesn't really address. 

I would note, also, that Religious Poverty doesn't deal very much with women. There is some discussion of the beguines and of St. Clare as a follower of St. Francis. Women belonging to Benedictine, Cistercian, etc. communities don't really appear here. I think the traditional assumption was that women's communities of such orders operated much like men's communities of the same orders, although more recent work in the field tends to argue that women's houses filled different social and spiritual roles than men's houses.

None of these remarks should be considered major criticism of Lester Little; I respect very much what this book does, even though it doesn't answer all my questions. Which is good, after all, because if the questions were already answered I'd have nothing to write.

Proceeding slowly

Inspiration seems to have dried up in the last week or so. (Plus I took a brief vacation Thursday-Sunday.) I think my subconscious is mulling over how to revise the patronage paper, but has not yet deigned to fill in the conscious mind. To encourage it along, I took out several books from the library on various aspects of medieval patronage, wealth, property, and city life. These are all books I've read before, but some time ago, back in grad school. It should be interesting to revisit them with what I fervently hope is a more mature perspective. 

But what did other nuns read?

I've just finished David Bell's What Nuns Read. (marking off books from my to-read list) Most of the book is a complete list of manuscripts that can be attributed to English nunneries, preceded by a short analysis of finances, literacy, and other issues. The analytic chapters have some good hard numbers, including incomes of women's monasteries, comparisons of those incomes to the annual wages of laborers, information on costs of books, and so forth.  For English nuns, Bell concludes, there is better evidence of literacy and book-reading than has generally been supposed.  Even in Latin, in spite of frequent medieval complaints that nuns are not sufficiently Latin-literate.  He points out, also, that similar criticisms are being directed at monks at the same time, so it's not as if late medieval monks were preserving some better state of literacy and composition than nuns were.

What about nuns on the continent?  As far as I know there is no comparable study and book-list for any region.  Alison Beach has done some work on women and book production in Germany (more for the to-read list), and there are several other scholars who have worked on nuns' writing and artistic production there.  Fiona Griffiths' book on Herrad of Hohenburg makes a case for a high level of literacy, indeed of theological sophistication, on the part of Herrad, and perhaps others of her nuns.  This case might be quite exceptional, however.  The various nuns and communities which produced spiritual treatises (such as Helfta), may also be quite exceptional.  So, some communities might be especially noted for learning: what about other houses, especially smaller and poorer ones?  

Any monastery had to have some books.  In the first place, a monastery required books to perform the liturgy.  Bell notes that over half of the surviving manuscripts of English nunneries were liturgical.  One might expect similar figures for medieval survivals elsewhere.  Except that in Catholic Europe, the liturgy was substantially revised by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century.  Older books were in many cases discarded as the new ones came in, especially older books that had no particular artistic merit and therefore didn't seem worth keeping.  Thrifty religious sometimes recycled such outmoded books as end-papers for new ones.

In the second place, a community following the Benedictine rule was supposed to distribute one book annually to each member, and this was to be read over by the nun or monk during the year and then returned.  By this logic, even a small house ought to have at least as many non-liturgical books as it had members.  

For the Iberian kingdoms there seems to be not much known about writing, literacy, or book ownership among nuns at any point in the Middle Ages.  One house I've done research on kept large numbers of medieval charters, but its archive has no medieval books.  Another, in contrast, has many liturgical books and a few other devotional books still in its own archive.  The dislocations of the 19th and 20th centuries might have caused books to be lost or destroyed, or moved into larger collections.  Some translations of the Benedictine rule into Catalan might have been made for a women's monastery, for example.  There is, I think, a lot that could be done on this topic, though I don't know if I am the right person to do it.

A parting note: a lengthy article on the Benedictine congregation in Catalonia indicated that copies of the orders constitutions were kept in the two largest nunneries associated with the congregation. Why them particularly? Is that somehow a testament to the quality of the nuns' libraries or record-keeping?

Apologies for the somewhat disconnected thoughts, I am still feeling my way on these questions.

Nuns on the run

No writing today. I did, however, make progress in working through the stack of books I've checked out. Today I finished F. Donald Logan's Runaway Religious in Medieval England, c. 1240-1540. This book deals with the interesting phenomenon of religious who ran away from their monasteries, well documented in England because monastic superiors could get writs from the crown to go arrest the runaways and return them by force. The book is packed with interesting anecdotes, plus descriptions of the procedures involved and numbers of runaways.

Nuns were a pretty small portion of the documented runaways; a lot more were monks, canons, and friars. Sometimes nuns ran off with lovers; just as often they left their monasteries to attempt to claim inheritances. One of the things I really appreciated about this book is that nuns are fully represented in it. Many books about medieval monasticism treat nuns in a very cursory way, or leave them out entirely; Logan gives special attention to issues unique to nuns (pregnancy, for instance), but otherwise subjects them to the same analysis as monks. It's a pleasure to see such an evenhanded approach.