The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages by Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis (review)

Katie Bugyis's first monograph, The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages, presents an illuminating close look at the actions of care provided by nuns not only to their fellow religious but also to their broader secular communities. Bugyis begins by asking the reader to critically examine not just the translation of the Latin phrase cura monialium, the care of nuns, but also the implementation of the term within the scholarship. The subsequent question "should the nuns be understood as the object or the subject of the care given?" provides the interpretative backbone for Bugyis's examination of Benedictine women in tenth- through twelfth-century England (1). In contrast to the majority of previous scholarship that understands nuns as the recipients of care by their male spiritual advisors, Bugyis argues for nuns to be seen not merely as passive receivers of care but instead as active givers of care, both spiritual and liturgical, to their communities.

Bugyis organizes her study around the formal and informal roles held by women in religious communities that primarily but not exclusively adhered to the Benedictine Rule. Bugyis notes in her introduction that "it is difficult to determine when the term 'Benedictine' first accurately designates the practices of each house," particularly in regard to her temporal focus on the tenth through twelfth centuries (20). Defending her usage of the term "Benedictine" as a major identifier of the study, through its inclusion in the title, Bugyis notes that the religious houses comprising her case studies became increasingly Benedictine by the twelfth century and most remained Benedictine until Henry VIII's dissolution of English monasteries in 1539. She applies a methodology of considering Benedictine prescriptive sources "more heuristically than deterministically" so that they function as "an interpretive framework for understanding when and how certain books and texts could have been used liturgically, especially if they remained in communities' possessions into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, without foreclosing the possibility that other rules and customs dictated their production and use" (20–21).

Chapter 1 ("Memory-Keepers") closely examines the positions of cantor and sacristan, while chapter 2 ("Pastors") focuses on the leadership of abbesses and prioresses. The three subsequent chapters address the nuns as evangelists, confessors, and intercessors. In each chapter, Bugyis provides a close reading and overview of the written rules and regulations guiding Benedictine practice, referring to the original Rule of St. Benedict as well as the relevant subsequent expansions and clarifications of the Rule. She primarily uses Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel's commentary Expositio in regulam Sancti Benedicti (ca. 816) and the Regularis Concordia (ca. 973), both of which circulated within English Benedictine communities in the central Middle Ages, as well as Æthelwold's feminized Old English translation of the Benedictine Rule, likely produced in the mid-tenth century before he became Bishop of Winchester. Bugyis's key contribution to the scholarship of English women religious in the central Middle Ages comes through her insistence on looking beyond the prescriptive sources of what actions and responsibilities nuns should and should not perform. She instead magnifies objects, including liturgical books with their annotations and illuminations, mortuary rolls, miracle accounts and descriptions of saints' lives, letters and seal matrices, and cartularies to reconstruct the actions of English Benedictine women over the course of the tenth through twelfth centuries. This evidence is inherently fragmentary, relying on snippets scattered throughout objects and frequently filtered through male voices, notably that of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (ca. 1040–after 1099), a Flemish hagiographer commissioned by Ælfgifu, the abbess of Barking Abbey in Essex, to record the lives and translation accounts of the community's founding holy women. However, Bugyis persuasively argues for the necessity of looking for and including these easily overlooked but significant descriptions of Benedictine women's religious practices. She likens her methodology...