Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–1500 ed. by Fiona J. Griffiths, and Julie Hotchin (review)

With Partners in Spirit, the latest volume in the ‘Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts’ series, the editors, Fiona J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin, have provided an important study for the relationship between men and women in medieval religious life. The twelve contributions that make up the volume deal with a diverse range of gender issues in Germany between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, including the cura monialium, negotiation about spiritual and institutional authority, and networks of spiritual friendship between men and women. Many of the chapters also address largely understudied or under-examined historical phenomena, such as double monasteries of men and women, the institutions peculiar to medieval Germany known as the Frauenstifte, and lay and female religious networks attached to the monastic, canonical, and mendicant orders.

As Griffiths and Hotchin explain in their Introduction, the collection places particular emphasis on instances of religious and spiritual co-operation between men and women. The purpose in doing so is to broaden the current historiography in the field of medieval men and women’s religiosity and dispel myths about male reluctance to engage in the spiritual oversight of women during the Middle Ages. The chapters which the editors have collected meet this challenge admirably. Although there is no denying that in the late medieval period male-dominated religious orders were increasingly concerned about their responsibilities towards women, each chapter relativises this concern by paying attention to what is representative, rather than exceptional, about their particular case studies.

Many of the studies collected in this volume provide a unique and detailed investigation of literature largely unknown in English language scholarship. One important example is the final essay of the volume by Sabine Klapp which examines the role played by male canons in the Frauenstift attached to St Stephan in Strasbourg. Klapp argues that these men, who generally came under the authority of female canonesses, were integral parts of the institutional structure of the Stift and shared authority with the women. Griffiths’s contribution investigates the relationship between the sisters of Rupertsberg and the spiritual friend of Hildegard of Bingen who came to live among them, the monk Guibert of Gembloux. Griffiths argues that although Guibert was alive to criticisms about the conduct of monks living with women, he seemed to prefer his pastoral work at Rupertsberg to his own monastery and found religious and spiritual inspiration in his active relationship with the sisters. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, in another important essay, examines a similar phenomenon in the pastoral relationships between the mendicants and beguines of Würzburg.

Extraordinary men and women also receive some consideration. Wybren Scheepsma examines the late thirteenth-century Dominican visionary, Hendrik van Leuven, and considers what his surviving literary corpus can tell us about his interaction with spiritual women. Anthony Ray offers an in-depth analysis of the epistolary exchange between the Cistercian monk Thomas, cantor of Villers, and his sister Alice, a nun at the convent Parc-les-Dames. A highly original and insightful chapter from Sara S. Poor examines the tradition of the Pseudo-Eckhartian treatise, Schwesterkatrei, and how its inversion of gendered spiritual authority led to its inclusion in the fifteenth-century devotional manual of Dorothy of Hof. These studies, which explore the themes of mysticism, are some of the most engaging in the entire volume.

Many of the contributions in Partners in Spirit have been translated into English from German or Dutch; while some, such as the contribution from Susan Marti on double monasteries in manuscript illumination, have previously appeared in print elsewhere in their original language. It is one of the strengths of the volume that it makes this scholarship available to a wider English-speaking audience. The translations are of a very high quality, although, in a number of...