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

It is a simple but invaluable desideratum that titles should be explicit. Another is that they should not promise more than they can deliver or hide what they are delivering. Unfortunately, many titles do not abide by these considerations and the current book—which in many ways is an excellent study—is a case in point. Leaving aside the ambiguous main title, The Care of Nuns, with its play on cura monialium, this book is not about "The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages." Instead it is a perceptive analysis of some known manuscripts, narratives, and records from a small collection of Benedictine nunneries in the south of England that demonstrate the varying ways in which some medieval nuns played a part—or may have played a part—in their own spiritual welfare, traditionally seen as a male preserve. Herein lies this book's main scholarly contribution.

Regarding the chronological parameters of the book, it starts with the early tenth century and finishes in the early thirteenth. The justification for the former is the date of the earliest manuscript evidence; the latter coincides with the terminus a quo of a liturgical study by Anne Bagnall Yardley. But rather than the confusing term "central Middle Ages," it would have been preferable to have used dates. The introduction, with its peculiar sub-title, "Curates of Nuns," sets out the rationale for the book. It stresses that "examining the meaning of cura monialium gets to the very heart of what it was to be a Benedictine nun in England during the central Middle Ages" (2) and the book "traces the persistence of many of the pastoral and liturgical ministries performed by nuns in the early Anglo-Saxon period into the central Middle Ages, focusing on their incidence in communities that came to follow the Benedictine Rule" (13). There are five chapters and a conclusion, entitled Memory-Keepers, Pastors, Evangelists, Confessors, Intercessors, and Conclusion: Ministers of Christ, followed by two careful appendices, a bibliography, and an index.

In the introduction, Bugyis presents vignettes of Ælgifu of Barking, Ediva of Godstow, and Matilda de Bailleul of Wherwell. The emphasis is on the authority of each nun. For instance, Ælgifu, abbess of Barking, engaged Goscelin de St. Bertin to produce saints' lives honoring three of her saintly predecessors at Barking, including its founder Æthelburh. This is an innocuous act, but the larger context is worthy of scrutiny. Earlier Ælgifu had torn down the abbey church that had been erected in Æthelburh's time; for this she was repeatedly reproved by Maurice, Bishop of London. Yet Goscelin's lives of Æthelburh (and Wulfhild) were dedicated to the same Maurice, a point variously interpreted. Bugyis favours the explanation that it was to defend her building program and secure the abbey's independence from episcopal control. Whether this interpretation is right or wrong, it is in the interrogation of the minutiae of such narratives that the strength of this study lies.

In the book as a whole, there is a concentration on those Benedictine convents for which there are surviving documents of practice (liturgical and devotional material): Barking, Castle Hedingham, Godstow, Leominster, Markyate, Nunnaminster, Romsey, Shaftesbury, Wherwell, and Wilton, with particular emphasis on Barking, Godstow, Markyate, Nunnaminster, and Wherwell. There are some twenty such manuscripts comprising cartularies, prayer books, psalters, and saints' lives, plus a calendar, gospel book, homiliary, mortuary roll, ordinal, and pontifical (15–16). These are discussed to varying extents with those most closely analyzed being Cambridge, St John's College, MS C.18, a psalter owned by Matilda de Bailleul, Abbess of Wherwell; London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba A.xiv, a prayer book from Leominster; London, The National Archives, E164/20, a Latin cartulary from Godstow Abbey; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 155, the only complete surviving gospel...