Guidance for Women in Twelfth-Century Convents (review)

This aptly titled volume introduces and translates writings of four men—Goscelin of St. Bertin, Peter Abelard, Peter the Venerable, and Osbert of Clare—addressed to nuns and their communities. There are six chapters: four letters, a sermon, and excerpts from Goscelin's sketches of the abbesses of Barking. Little of the material has been translated into English before and all of it is packed with fascinating glimpses into the lives of medieval religious women and the men who acted as their mentors and advisers. Morton offers good guidance herself in introducing the material with care and even humor, as when she remarks, "Life for the young women of [the convent of] Marcigny must have been rather like life in a strict and well-run, but rather snobbish, lifelong boarding school" (p. 97). The sheer variety of materials and subject matter makes this book (which I hope will emerge in a more affordable paperback version) an excellent choice for advanced undergraduate and even graduate students and their teachers.

The writers talk about virginity, history, heroism, miracles, the body, education, martyrdom, marriage; they teach, they preach, they warn, they sympathize, and they remember—and they do not speak with one monolithic voice. The book opens with Osbert of Clare's letter to Abbess Adelidis of Barking, where an expression of gratitude for recent hospitality turns into a long, complex tract on exemplary women of the past, including Judith and the Vestal Virgin Silvia. (This must be the longest thank-you note in history.) Peter the Venerable scolds his nieces for a letter containing medicine, which smacks not of Christ's pupils but the schools of Hippocrates, while Abelard, in the traces of St. Jerome, offers guidance on the education of women and stresses its great importance. Osbert writes about mystical marriage of nuns with Christ in strikingly vivid and physical terms, and Abelard makes the case that the model of monasticism is the early church in Jerusalem in which women were such active participants—after women were, of course, the first to see the resurrected Jesus. Goscelin and Osbert assume their readers know their Bede; Osbert presents complex, even crabbed interpretive arguments, and Abelard does not simplify his prose style; all the authors assume their readers' mastery of the Bible and early Christian literature and casually quote Horace, Ovid, and Virgil without explaining the references. As Morton cannily remarks, that men would write nuns dense letters on elevated subjects shows that although Heloise, with her knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, was extraordinarily accomplished, she represents one end of a spectrum rather than a special case. This is a salutary reminder that despite persistent assumptions to the contrary, many women participated fully in the spiritual, political, and literary life of the twelfth-century church.

An excellent subject index facilitates comparative examination of the themes named above and encourages an approach to that most complicated of questions: what did these men think about women and gender anyway? Osbert urges women to be manly in spirit, despite their sex, and then in the next breath says that in the "downfall of the human race the woman more easily sinks to ruin (p. 40)." Abelard also praises female heroism and simply assumes that Heloise can guide her nuns to the same kind of mastery of ancient languages she has achieved, while also flatly stating that women are weaker than men. There is much to ponder here, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne provides a model for reading the texts as a group in an essay called "Dead to the World? Death and the Maiden Revisited in Medieval Women's Convent Culture," which touches on practical and spiritual aspects of death and remembrance in the Middle Ages with careful attention to gender.

With regret, I must sound a note of caution. Morton has done a great service to make these materials available to those with little or...