Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Antwerp Dialogue by Virginia Blanton, Veronica O'Mara, and Patricia Stoop (review)

This collection of nineteen essays emerged from the Antwerp conference on Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe held in 2013. Preceded by collections of papers given at Hull in 2011 and Kansas in 2012, this final volume is the longest in a series of the same name constituting an ambitious attempt to showcase recent scholarly research on medieval nuns from right across Europe, including the British Isles, and extending from Catalonia up to Scandinavia and down to Hungary. The term 'nun' here includes religious under vows, tertiaries, and even secular canonesses, and the term 'medieval' is equally generous, extending from the eighth to the sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries.

The introduction follows the convention of providing summaries of the papers and also addresses retrospectively ten far-reaching questions about pan-European nuns and their literacies—their relationship to books, to Latin, and to the vernaculars. It eschews, however, any 'grand récit' (p. lxiii), preferring the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, some of whose pieces are missing or currently hidden. This initial orientation is particularly useful, as not all readers will approach the individual papers (somewhat arbitrarily distributed among four sections entitled 'Rules and Learning', 'Literacy and Vizualisation', 'Translating and Rewriting', and 'Exchange and Networks') with equal curiosity or enthusiasm. But where else would the average Anglophone medievalist be able to read about Hungarian nuns and their role in developing vernacular literature (Viktória Hedvig Deák), or the reading of Catalan nuns (Blanca Garí), or the enviable life of the secular canonesses of Sainte-Waudru, who enjoyed all the advantages of convent life with none of the disadvantages (a private income, no vows, a residence requirement of only a few months of the year, and plenty of books) (Anne Jenny-Clark)?

Given the preponderance of medievalists who specialize in England, such potential readers should be aware that post-Conquest English nuns do not compare favourably with their continental sisters. They would make a poor showing indeed here were it not for the Syon Birgittines studied by Ann Hutchison, Mary Erler, and Veronica O'Mara. O'Mara writes on the Birgittine scribe she has now identified as Mary Nevel (though can one really claim as 'medieval' a nun whose entire life took place in the sixteenth century?) but unfortunately ignores earlier work on London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 3600, and some of the other English Birgittine material is getting a little dog-eared through repetition. Mary Erler's paper, however, on the transmission of images between Flemish and English Birgittine houses, stands out for its elegant coherence. Cate Gunn's contribution on the Anglo-Norman translation of Edmund of Abingdon's Speculum addressed to 'sisters', extracts from which are found in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 123, which belonged to an English nunnery, somewhat salvages the reputations of English nuns. But they pale into insignificance beside the nuns of Florence, some of whom ran a printing press and worked as compositors (Melissa Moreton), and the religious women of Germany and the Low Countries, who feature in at least half the papers.

In a book concerned in part with nuns' Latin literacy, however, it is disturbing to find some rather strange Latin. A religious order called 'pauperibus monialibus reclusis' (p. 28) seems improbable, while there seems to be words missing from Latin quotations on p. 27 and 28, and throughout that chapter we find unsettling variations in the use of forma/formae/formam vivendi. Sometimes it is not clear whether the problem is the medieval nuns' or the modern scholar's: the Latin quotations on p. 137, footnotes 33 and 34, could be interesting evidence of a Catalan nun's idiosyncratic use of that language, though no comment is made, while in Plate 1, repeated on pp. 152 and 159, we can see that 'sancta...