Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority in Poitiers' Abbey of Sainte-Croix by Jennifer Edwards (review)

Jennifer Edwards's Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority in Poitiers' Abbey of Sainte-Croix is an outstanding and comprehensive case study that explores the various strategies the abbesses of Sainte-Croix relied on to maintain authority and wield power over a span of nearly one thousand years. Edwards has explored this topic for many years, and this book is the culmination of her 2008 dissertation and several subsequent articles.

The Abbey of Sainte-Croix was established around the year 550 in the old Roman town of Poitiers (Pictavium) by the sainted Merovingian queen Radegund. Beginning shortly after Radegund's death in 587, the abbesses of Sainte-Croix faced threats to their authority from all sides. While some of these threats came from local nobles, bishops, kings, and occasionally the nuns themselves, they also came from the canons attached to the church of Sainte-Radegonde. Originally founded by Radegund as a funerary church dedicated to Notre-Dame-hors-les-Murs, the male community frequently contested their dependent position to the abbesses of Sainte-Croix. Edwards masterfully illuminates the centuries of associations between Sainte-Croix and their vast and shifting network of friends and foes as the abbesses navigated complex power relations.

Her central argument is that the abbesses consistently turned to two strategies that were initially established by Radegund: "First, she relied on networks of allies, primarily bishops and kings, to support her; and she created a set of cultural ideas, symbols, and materials that later nuns might use to invoke her memory or attach new allies to the Abbey of Sainte-Croix" (21); and second, "Radegund shaped the tools the nuns used to defend their abbey, privileges, and powers" (25). While Radegund herself declined the position of abbess out of humility, she nonetheless served as a spiritual mother, teacher, and protector. In this capacity, Radegund provided her community with important cultural artifacts (such as two vitae with extensive miracle accounts, poems, letters, and relics) that attracted patrons and became the foundation for how Sainte-Croix shaped its identity. Edwards demonstrates the value of these artifacts, arguing that "the abbesses looked to ancient texts describing Radegund's life for justifications for their authority, precedents for their legal claims, and for allies who might support them" (20). The abbesses also cultivated a rich archive of documents detailing the support of their network of allies, which ranged from the Frankish kings (until the eleventh century), to the papacy (until the thirteenth), and finally to the king of France, who became personally involved in directing reforms at Sainte-Croix in the early sixteenth century. This served to establish the abbesses' authority and official support as traditional and legitimate. However, the abbesses always "walked a narrow line between receiving royal or papal support and welcoming external interference in abbey affaires" (2).

The book is divided into seven mostly chronologically ordered chapters that trace Sainte-Croix's history from its origins, including a full account of Radegund's pre-Sainte-Croix life. The study concludes in the year 1520, which, Edwards argues, is an appropriate stopping place (because we are entering the early modern period) and because the story enters a "different chapter" that was also "still consistent with the larger pattern at Sainte-Croix" (16). Edwards's command of her sources surpasses that of all earlier studies of these two institutions. This is the only work to date that has drawn together such a breadth of Radegund sources, placing vitae in conversation with letters, charters, liturgical materials, and art.

Edwards has done for Sainte-Radegonde and Sainte-Croix what Sharon Farmer did in 1991 for Saint-Martin and Marmoutier in her seminal Communities of Saint Martin. In this innovative and influential study, Farmer examined the specific ways in which the canons of Saint-Martin and the monks of Marmoutier used their founder's cult to promote their interests in different ways from the eleventh through the early thirteenth century by...