Introduction: Medieval Women’s Religious Texts in the Germanic Regions

This special issue of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures is devoted to a range of essays about women’s involvement with spirituality—as readers, illustrators, copyists, and authors—in the Germanic regions from the thirteenth to the first decades of the sixteenth century. The focus is on texts and authors from England, Germany, and the Low Countries. The impetus for these studies was a colloquium titled “Medieval Female Writers in the Germanic Regions” held on April 4, 2014, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, which I organized during my time there as a Brueghel Visiting Professor. The conference was sponsored by the Department of Germanic Literatures and Languages, with the assistance of Simon Richter, then head of the department, Martina Bale, and Taylor McConnell. Contributors to the original conference explored a series of case studies that served to highlight the variable nature of women’s spirituality in complementary and contrasting ways. The essays here, which include some by colleagues who presented at the colloquium plus other specially commissioned articles, focus on a broad spectrum of devotional texts, from mystical treatises over a book of saints’ lives and devotional compilations to sermon literature. They are organized in broadly chronological order.

In concentrating on the rationale for Uan seven manieren van heiliger minnen, Kris Van Put (University of Antwerp) provides a clear and focused analysis of the production of a vernacular mystical text by one of the most well-known female writers out of many operating in the Low Countries. Beatrice (1200–1268), who was the abbess of the Cistercian abbey of Nazareth, produced her text around 1250; it is transmitted in three manuscripts, but the evidence for Beatrice’s authorship derives from her vita. Setting aside some problematic critical dependence on the vita, Van Put shows that Beatrice was a self-conscious author and a teacher who produced this “mirror of the contemplative life in love” in Dutch for her fellow nuns or other mulieres religiosae less proficient in Latin.

In the next two essays we move from a Dutch vernacular text where a clear case can be made for the authorship—albeit not one accepted by all scholars—to completely anonymous devotional texts produced in fifteenth-century England. Whereas in Beatrice’s case we can point with certainty to an identified author but can only speculate about the audience for whom she wrote her text, in their essays on The Chastising of God’s Children and the Mirror for Devout People, Marleen Cré (University of Lausanne) and Paul J. Patterson (Saint Joseph’s University) are nevertheless able to argue from textual and contextual evidence for female readers. The Chastising of God’s Children, a devotional compilation that survives in twelve manuscripts and an early printed edition, was written most likely after 1391 and before 1409 for female religious. In an essay that focuses on the trials of the contemplative life, Cré explores the ways in which female agency can be acquired through the transmission of knowledge, arguing that such instruction enables the female reader to exercise true spiritual discernment.

With regard to the Mirror for Devout People, a text that had a much smaller circulation, being extant only in two manuscripts, Patterson argues that it is possible to obtain a firm sense of the Mirror’s historical reader by focusing on the role of aristocratic laywomen in the commissioning of religious texts. Through his careful itemization of the book-owning activities of the Scropes and Chaworths, specifically John Scrope and his wife, Elizabeth Chaworth, Patterson is able to demonstrate that such aristocratic lay families, with their ties to royalty and to important religious houses, such as the Birgittines of Syon, were well placed to acquire religious reading for themselves.

While the valuable contextual information about the owners of the Mirror for Devout People may only be used as a way into its potential readership, the evidence in the next essay is altogether more definite. Sara S. Poor (Princeton University) concentrates on Anna Eybin, provost of the Augustinian convent of Pillenreuth near Nuremberg from 1461 to 1476 and an active compiler and scribe of...