‘Mulieres Religiosae’: Shaping Female Spiritual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods ed. by Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier (review)

‘Mulieres religiosae’ usually describes the semi-religious lay women who emerged in the early thirteenth century as exponents of a new form of spirituality. This collection extends the term to religious women in general, and aims to examine ‘the nuances of what constitutes female spiritual authority, how it was acquired and manifested by religious women, and how it changed and evolved’ (p. 1). The contributors adopt a critical approach that shifts focus away from the limitations that could restrict women to instead investigate how women negotiated their circumstances to assert their own voices. Originating in a conference in Antwerp in 2007, the twelve case studies analyse the exercise of female spiritual authority within the Catholic tradition. Geographically, the chapters cover England to Hungary, Sweden to Italy, and chronologically span the late tenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Several contributors examine how individual women negotiated the tensions inherent in speaking publicly or writing on spiritual matters. María Eugenia Góngora discusses how the twelfth-century German visionary Elisabeth of Schönau used her visions on the authenticity of the relics of St Ursula to navigate the expectations of ecclesiastical authority and those of her own community, and to, ultimately, maintain the legitimacy of her spiritual authority. Imke de Gier examines the assertion of authority in Marguerite Porete’s vernacular treatise Le mirouer des simple ames, contending that by claiming to articulate the authority of God’s words, the book provided readers with the means for potential transformation into the radical state of freeness the author described as ‘annihilation’. In a subtle reading of the shifts in discursive registers in the Long Text of Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Kathleen M. Smith explores the poetic, spiritual, and political functions of Julian’s ‘vernacular incantatory rhythms’ (p. 188), which the visionary employed to underline the authority of her theological interpretation.

Women also sought to establish themselves as exempla of new modes of female religiosity. Vicktória Hedvig Deák explores how Margaret of Hungary drew on the models of her aunt, St Elisabeth, and stories about the piety of the mulieres religiosae mediated by her Dominican confessor, to fashion herself as the first (recorded) exponent of a new spirituality in Hungary. Piroska Nagy examines the role of physical afflictions and emotional states as bases for interpreting spiritual authority in her study of the little-known Cistercian nun, Lukardis of Oberweimar. In a sensitive reading of Lukardis’s vita, Nagy draws attention to the importance of communal relations and expectations in interpreting somatic experience as a valid sign of holiness, and highlights the delicate tension between individual aspiration and communal self-perception.

Spiritual authority could also be exercised by women by virtue of their office as religious superior. In one of the strongest chapters in the collection, Ping-Yuan Wang takes up this important and often overlooked aspect of women’s journeys to religious leadership in her study of the ‘ordinary religious women’ (p. 267) of the Visitandines in seventeenth-century Brussels. Her analysis of nuns’ compositional strategies in the circular letters required by their congregation demonstrates how these women negotiated a ‘rhetoric of conformity’ (p. 278) to assert a sense of collective autonomy and authority. In a probing chapter, Anneke Mulder-Bakker examines how some religious women exercised spiritual authority as mediators in the secular sphere. Extending her research into older women in medieval society, she argues that age and wisdom, in addition to charisma, could offer a socially recognised avenue for women to acquire authority.

Representations of female spiritual leadership lend insights into how ideas of authority and its practice were negotiated between a religious superior and her community. Andrea Worm’s analysis of depictions of female monastic leaders and their convents in German manuscript illumination from the...