Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts

Cambridge University Library MS Additional 2604 contains a unique collection of prose saints’ lives evenly divided into eleven universal and eleven native saints (predominantly culted at Ely). Clearly intended for the devotional life of nuns presumably in an East Anglian convent the volume comprises nineteen female figures all of whom are virgins martyrs or nuns and three male saints (two apostles and a hermit). These late Middle English lives are translated from a variety of Latin sources and analogues including material by Jacobus de Voragine John of Tynemouth and others. The collection demonstrates an interest in showcasing native saints alongside their universal sisters. Luminaries of the English Church such as Æthelthryth of Ely and her sister Seaxburh are found in the company of notable virgin martyrs like Agatha and Cecilia. Famous saints like John the Evangelist and Hild of Whitby feature alongside others such as Columba of Sens and Eorcengota. Fully analysed and contextualised in its companion volume Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns I: A Study of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library MS Additional 2604 these texts are edited here for the first time. Alongside the edition of the twenty-two saints’ lives and full textual apparatus there are extensive overviews and commentaries providing details of the sources and analogues as well as explanatory historical and literary notes. The edition concludes with three appendices a detailed select glossary and a bibliography of works cited.

The conjunction of medieval religious studies and gender studies in the past several decades has produced not only nuanced attention to medieval mystics and religious thinkers but a transformation in the study of medieval culture more broadly. This volume showcases new investigations of mysticism and religious writing in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. It also presents groundbreaking explorations of the feminized divine from medieval to modern and the many debts of medieval secular texts and cultures to the religious world that surrounded them. Medieval crossover also defines this volume: the contributors examine the crossovers between male and female cloister and saeculum divine and human and vernacular and Latin that characterized so much of the complexity of medieval literary culture. These collected chapters examine mystics from Hildegard of Bingen and Juliana of Cornillon to Richard Rolle Julian of Norwich and Tomás de Jesús; the modern theologies of Philip K. Dick and Charles Williams; goddesses like Fame Dame Courtesy and Mother Church; and the role of religious belief in shaping conceptions of pacifism obscenity authorship and bodily integrity. Together they show the extraordinary impact of Barbara Newman’s scholarship across a range of fields and some of the new areas of investigation opened by her work.

Contributors: Jerome E. Singerman Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Jesse Njus Andrew Kraebel Nicholas Watson Laura Saetveit Miles Bernard McGinn Carla Arnell Maeve Callan Katharine Breen Lora Walsh Susan E. Phillips and Claire M. Waters Carissa M. Harris Stephanie Pentz Craig A. Berry Dyan Elliott.

The present volume is the third in a series of three integrated publications the first produced in 2013 as Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue and the second in 2015 as Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue. Whereas the first volume focused primarily on Northern Europe the second expanded the range to include material in minority languages such as Old Norse and Old Irish and focused particularly on education and other textual forms such as the epistolary and the legal.

The third volume expands the geographical range by including a larger selection of female religious for instance tertiaries and further languages (for example Danish and Hungarian) as well as engaging more explicitly on issues of adaptation of manuscript and early printed texts for a female readership. Like the previous volumes this collection of essays focused on various aspects of nuns’ literacies from the late seventh to the mid-sixteenth century brings together the work of specialists to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts that were read written and exchanged by medieval nuns. Contributors to this volume investigate the topic of literacy primarily from palaeographical and textual evidence and by discussing information about book ownership and production in convents.

Sacred Communities Shared Devotions takes us behind the gates of six medieval convents in Lower Saxony and into the lives of rich and noble nuns going about their daily labour of religion just before the Lutheran Reformation. Drawing on writings by and about the nuns as well as an analysis of the costly art and architecture of their monasteries June Mecham reveals how monastic women wielded their wealth to create a ritual environment dense with Christian images and meanings. Mecham argues that nuns chose devotions and rituals within the framework of a distinct material culture influenced by local religious customs gender structures and social protocols. She questions perceived differences between monastic and lay piety emphasizing instead the shared religious culture in which monastic and laywomen actively participated and the continuity that shaped female devotion. Looking through lenses of art history and spirituality Mecham describes the spiritual and social tensions caused by women who vowed poverty but lived a seemingly lavish life funded by private income. Medieval reformers as well as modern scholars suggested that profligate nuns hastened the decline of medieval convents but Sacred Communities Shared Devotions proves that these women did not oppose reform. They simply fought to maintain their traditional devotions and religious environments even as they adapted to new religious sensibilities.

Partners in Spirit focuses on relations between chaste men and women within religious life in Germany (c. 1100-1500) concentrating on the complex set of negotiations that governed contact between a male priest and his female charge. Although religious women were undeniably reliant on priests for pastoral care (the cura monialium) throughout the medieval period it does not follow that men saw such care as burdensome or that women were spiritually subordinate in their relations with priests. Within the context of the cura ordained men and professed women met regularly often developing intimate friendships and providing each other with crucial spiritual support despite prevailing fears that contact between the sexes must result in sexual temptation and sin.

Examining the various interactions of priests with religious women Partners in Spirit traces the ways in which both viewed the cura highlighting the fluidity of gender and authority within the medieval religious life. In doing so the volume suggests new ways of considering the intersection of gender religion and spiritual power within the medieval world.

How does one construct a saint and promote a cult beyond the immediate community in which he or she lived? Italian mendicants had accumulated a good deal of experience in dealing with this politically explosive question. The posthumous description of the life of Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) written by the Master General of the order Bonaventure (d. 1274) could be regarded as paradigmatic in this regard. A similarly massive intervention in the production and diffusion of a cult can be observed in the case of the Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) who in many respects (e.g. the imitation of Christ and her stigmatization) ‘competed’ with Francis of Assisi. Raymund of Capua (d. 1399) the Master General of the order established the foundation for the dissemination of the cult by writing the authoritative life but it was only the following generation that succeeded in establishing and disseminating the cult on a broad basis by means of copies adaptations and translations. The question of how to make a cult which stands at the centre of this volume thus presents itself in terms of the challenge of rewriting a legend for different audiences. The various contributions consider the role not only of texts in many dfferent vernaculars (Czech English French German and Italian) but also of images whether separately or in connection with one another.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) the only medieval woman known to have authored systematic works of exegesis composed fifty-eight little-studied Expositiones euangeliorum homilies on twenty-seven Gospel passages. Hildegard described her divine charge to restore the tottering faith of her era through the revelation of hidden mysteries in the Scriptures. She was to continue the exegetical tradition of the Fathers and to construct moral fortifications with the words of Scripture in order to defend her sisters against the forces of evil. Hildegard of Bingen and her Gospel Homilies constitutes the first in-depth study of Hildegard’s Expositiones and of her exegesis preaching and use of sources. It explores the Expositiones in the context of Hildegard’s intellectual and cultural milieu and underscores the central role of biblical interpretation in the seer’s works. Furthermore this book re-examines Hildegard’s self-depiction in the context of monastic education for women the magistra’s exchange with her mentors and friends and her rich use of divine voice to empower her own expression. This is a new exciting and erudite study on one of the most influential female mystics.

Saints Edith and Æthelthryth: Princesses Miracle Workers and their Late Medieval Audience narrates the lives of two Anglo-Saxon princesses who were venerated as saints long after their deaths. St Edith the daughter of King Edgar was renowned as a patron of the arts and the church during her lifetime; her posthumous miracles included protection of Wilton Abbey and the English royal family. St Æthelthryth who retained her virginity through not one but two royal marriages also worked numerous miracles at her tomb at the Abbey of Ely. The poems composed at Wilton Abbey in the early fifteenth century allow us to see how late medieval religious women practised their devotion to early medieval women saints. The Middle English verse texts are presented here in the original and in translation with explanatory notes and glossary. A thorough introduction provides extensive contextualization and analysis of the two poems as well as description of the manuscript and its language and prosody. These primary source texts are important contributions to the study of English history language literature religion and women's studies.

This collection of prose vitae of four virgins and scholars - Saints John the Baptist John the Evangelist Jerome and Katherine of Alexandria - was almost certainly copied and the texts very likely composed at Syon Abbey or Sheen Charterhouse in the mid-fifteenth century. The lives cover a wide range of hagiographic modes from hagiographic romance to affective devotional appreciation to doctrinal treatise in narrative form. From the life of Jerome composed by a monk for his aristocratic spiritual daughter to the life of Katherine reputedly translated for Henry V to those of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist which set their subjects in a recognizably Birgittine context they show the interaction of men and women lay and monastic in the production of devotional literature. The diversity of their approaches and sources moreover shows the links between English dynastic politics and continental religious literature and spiritual traditions. As examples of translation practices of monastic politics and of religious instruction these lives provide a window onto the devotional culture and literary worlds of fifteenth-century Europe.

Elizabeth of Spalbeek Christina Mirabilis and Marie d'Oignies were three of the famous late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century 'holy women' from the region of Brabant and Liège: their life stories (written in Latin by Philip of Clairvaux Thomas of Cantimpré and Jacques of Vitry) were read throughout later medieval Europe and Margery Kempe modelled her Book and her life upon Marie’s. The Latin lives of these beguine saints were not well known in England but they were translated into English in the fifteenth century and survive in a single manuscript together in Oxford Bodleian Library Douce 114.

Three Women of Liège is the first critical edition of these Lives which represent some of the only evidence of English interest in continental female mysticism. This edition includes an introduction that discusses the role of the manuscript in England and three essays that analyze the roles of these beguines in their Low Countries home of Liège along with the English reception of their lives. The edition itself is also extensively annotated and glossed making it accessible to any scholar of English medieval literature.