Katerina's Windows: Donation and Devotion, Art and Music, as Heard and Seen through the Writings of a Birgittine Nun (review)

Research on women's patronage of religious art has emphasized its more "creative"angles. Katerina's Windows also illuminates essential, but less glamorous, aspects. In 1516 a Nuremberg widow, Katerina Imhoff Lemmel (1466–1533), entered the Birgittine abbey of Maria Mai. Lemmel brought not only substantial wealth but also experience in the commercial ways of the world. Religious superiors let neither go to waste.

Lemmel had scarcely settled in before the abbess made her the equivalent of today's church development officer. Sixty surviving letters reveal how this resourceful woman forged chains of influence linking her convent to the world. Hans Imhoff, her cousin and recipient of the letters, emerges as Mai's indispensable (and long-suffering) "gofer" beyond the wall.

Lemmel's first letter asks for money; later ones ring unremitting changes on this numbing refrain. By her second letter she is apologizing:"I am happy to see that you too have become a beggar, so you will not look so disapprovingly at my begging. See how it is with holy poverty!" (p. 127). By letter 6 she is also apologizing for constantly importuning poor Imhoff, but reassures him, "I believe you soon will have less to do" (p. 141). Exactly the opposite proves true. "Dear Cousin, don't be frustrated with all the trouble that we put you through" (p. 261) becomes a counterpoint to Lemmel's pervasive, mendicant theme.

After nearly three years Lemmel remarks, "Dear Cousin, you write that I should relieve you of some responsibilities, which is only right" (p. 321). But the indomitable Birgittine does not change her tune. When another cousin dies, she hustles for a handout."If you are an executor, then I wanted also to come begging to you and ask if you could not have something come our way…" (p. 346). And she plays that well-worn convent trump card:"… because we are also to be counted among the poor and homeless, being locked up in one of these poor monasteries…" (p. 346).

Lemmel's persistent tactics were essential—and worked. Within three years new stained glass (hence, the book's title) adorned the abbey, thanks to Lemmel's generosity and dunning letters to relatives. The delicate processes of gift solicitation, commissioning, and creation of the windows constitute the book's most illuminating aspects, with details on glass painting and patrons' roles in choosing subject matter. Lemmel urges relatives "not [to] decide on the images without having a look at the Passion of Our Dear Lord and the Sorrows of the Virgin Mary" (p. 278). What must the cousins have thought when Lemmel promptly looked their gift horses in the mouth? Their new windows did not encourage [spiritual] "desire," and "where our beloved Lord is crowned—he sits there like a fat priest!" (p. 321).

But by 1526, the fruits of Lemmel's labors lay in ruins. With unmatched narrative intensity, a Chronicle of the Peasants' War from Mai's House Book vividly describes the 1525 uprising (a useful excerpt for undergraduate reading lists). Children chant on the hillside, "You must leave this place and get out of here" (p. 402), as nuns watch from attic windows. Beating drums in the distance and pikes menacing above the abbey wall presage imminent attacks. As the nuns sing Mass, peasants loot convent treasures secreted in the garden, and shout, "Stop your howling. We have had enough of it!" (p. 406). They leave behind decapitated crucifixes; statues thrown in manure heaps; and, of course, broken windows.

Like many antiquarians' rambling chronicles, the book's encyclopedic commentary on Lemmel's letters leads readers off the primary path onto many a byroad, some more pertinent than others. The authors, however, opted for "full-sized windows of our own, … rather than...