Women in the Medieval Monastic World eds. by Janet Burton, and Karen Stöber (review)

This edited collection of essays is a welcome addition to recent research on female monasticism. It is the first volume of Brepols’s new series, ‘Medieval Monastic Studies’, which complements the annual Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies.

Women in the Medieval Monastic World offers the reader a broad range of case studies that address various thematic, chronological, and architectural aspects of female monasticism in the medieval period. The religious landscape of medieval Europe showed great vitality, and women were able to found, join, and lead – some with distinction – religious communities. They also influenced, and in turn were influenced by, the local communities in which they lived their lives. The contributions examine these aspects of female monasticism across a wide geographical range, including Spain and Catalonia, northern Italy, northern Gaul, England, Wales, Venice, Denmark, Sweden, the Low Countries, Transylvania, Ireland, and the medieval German kingdom.

As the editors, Janet Burton and Karen Stöber, note in their Introduction, in his influential work on monastic and religious orders, written over sixty years ago, David Knowles found little to say about the lives of the female religious in nunneries, except that they were ‘intellectually inferior and materially decadent’ (p. 1). Indeed, there was nothing unique about female monasticism; male religious always occupied higher positions, and nuns only ever played minor roles in monastic scholarship. This collection systematically dismantles this perspective, along with the belief that few nunneries left adequate documentary or material sources for historical analysis.

About a third of the chapters focus their analyses on contemporary material culture, specifically examining the archaeology and architecture of nunneries, with fascinating results. Matthias Untermann’s study of the positioning of choirs within German convent churches, for example, sheds light on the use of sacred space within these churches. In his sample of convent churches, Untermann found no fewer than seven different positions. Most conventual choirs took up their positions in the galleried western ends of their churches, but a significant number were positioned in transepts, or in their churches’ eastern ends, traditionally the location of monks’ and canons’ choirs.

In her contribution, Tracy Collins initiates a new interpretation of Irish nunneries, which were richly distributed throughout Ireland and totalled 114 by 1540. Collins argues that the archaeology of female monasticism in Ireland has been greatly understudied and her examination of St Catherine’s, County Limerick is intended to go some way towards redressing this situation. Her analysis indicates that the building was enlarged in the fifteenth century and that ship graffiti incised near the western end may well signify the position of an altar. This resonates with other nunneries in England and on the Continent, where the western end was often considered to be the nuns’ space.

Anne Müller’s chapter on claustral space reiterates a theme that runs through the whole volume: female monastic space was different from male monastic space, having divergent and completely different functions. In particular, Müller argues that female claustral space, as a form of ‘active enclosure’ where nuns were prohibited from leaving, was often physically separate from the male-dominated church. In male monasteries, cloisters were attached to the church and intimately connected with how the monastery functioned. The close proximity of male authority to nunneries affected not only how female communities functioned, but also impacted upon the physical space in which the nuns lived their lives. Janet Burton further examines male authority in her chapter on Cistercian nunneries in Yorkshire.

Yorkshire is also the setting for Michael Carter’s analysis of the patronage of Swine Priory. His examination of documentary evidence, such as wills and suppression documents, along with the architectural evidence of rood and parclose screens, confirms the findings of other studies of late medieval patronage of monasteries that late medieval nunneries and monasteries were actively supported by patrons.

The final important chapter describes the Female...