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

The slim volume surveys the spatial, visual, and auditory environments at six female Dominican monasteries founded in the 13^th century and located in Colmar (France), Freiburg (Germany), and Diessenhofen (Switzerland). The monasteries produced a remarkable set of texts, the so-called Schwesternbücher or Sister-Books (a total of nine texts of this genre have survived), composed by nuns in the first half of the fourteenth century in either Latin or Middle High German. The Sister-Books, a literary genre not found elsewhere, are also called Gnadenleben ("biographies of Divine grace"). Combining stylistic elements of hagiography, chronicle, and foundation legend, the Sister-Books offer a unique window into the nuns' religious life. The author's analysis follows the pioneering studies by Getrude Jaron Lewis (1996), Leonard P. Hindsley (1998), and Jeffrey F. Hamburger (1998) in the United States, which examined the genre as mystical literature (Lewis), the texts of a particular monastery (Hindsley on Engelthal), and the arts in spiritual context (Hamburger). The author, a historian, has published her study under the aegis of Columbia University Press's project Gutenberg-e, funded by an Andrew W. Mellon grant (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lindgren/index.html#pgtop). Both versions are based on the author's dissertation, for which she received the Gutenberg-e Dissertation Prize (2003) from the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press. Unlike the printed version, the electronic version is fully searchable (there is no index in the paper version), and offers a great number of full color photos, many of which are taken by the author. Perhaps too late to be fully integrated into her analysis, but important for a comparison with Lindgren's work, the structure and focus of Sensual Encounters is paralleled by a superb multi-media exhibition project on women's monasteries in Bonn, Germany (2005), entitled Krone und Schleier. Kunst aus Mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (Crown and Veil. Art from Medieval Women's Monasteries). The Dominican female monasteries figure prominently both in the exhibition and the catalogue. As is true for Lindgren's study, the exhibition design explored the placement of art in interior monastic spaces. The catalogue contains several essays by prominent medievalists exploring aspects of Lindgren's chosen theme (translated into English as Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Susan Marti, Dietlinde Hamburger, and Caroline Walker Bynum, 2008).

Sensual Encounters is thus part of the growing academic interest in what Doreen B. Massey (2005) has termed the "radical contemporaneity" of space, an inquiry of the representation of space in literature, politics, and culture, and the increasing pull of on-line publishing. Recent films about monastic spirituality have also explored the meaning of space for spirituality with great sensitivity: Philip Gr.ning's Into Great Silence (2007), a documentary about life in the Grande Chartreuse, and Pavel Lungin's The Island (2007), a poignant story about a Russian Orthodox monastery, come to mind here. Lindgren's work thus contributes to a more holistic and embodied understanding of the past as we newly perceive its marks on space and place, and open both disciplinary boundaries (in this case, history, art history, and religious studies) and boundaries between popular culture and the academy (on her faculty web page, the author lists as her three favorite links the scholarly Internet Medieval Sourcebook, a BBC video game called Viking Quest, and Slayage. The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies). How does this proliferation of new communication media, the reconfiguration of academic boundaries, and the humanities' re-discovery of a spatial grammar and syntax for human behavior affect our understanding of medieval spirituality? Sensual Encounters demonstrates some of the pleasures and pitfalls of this new era.

First, a brief summary of the chapters: the introduction offers an overview of Dominican history in the thirteenth century, of the Sister-Book manuscripts, and of secondary...