Medieval Female Religious Writers in the Germanic Regions
Dutch Studies Colloquium – University of Pennsylvania

Date: Friday 4 April 2014

Time: 9:45 am – 5:15 pm

Location: Max Kade Center, 3401 Walnut Street, Room 329

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Click below (under "Attachments") to download the conference program.

Speakers

Johan Oosterman (Radbouduniversiteit Nijmegen; nl)

Paul J. Patterson (Saint Joseph’s University)

Sara S. Poor (Princeton University)

Patricia Stoop (University of Pennsylvania / Universiteit Antwerpen; b)

John Van Engen (University of Notre Dame)

Anne Winston-Allen (Southern Illinois University)

 

Programme

9:45–10:20 am                   
Welcome and coffee

10:20–10:30 am                
Opening remarks
Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania) 

10:30 am – 12:00 noon     
Johan Oosterman (Radbouduniversiteit Nijmegen; nl) – The Book as Memorial: Shaping Identity by Writing, Copying and Collecting Books in Religious Communities in the Lower Rhineland

Patricia Stoop (University of Pennsylvania / Universiteit Antwerpen; b) – Female Authorship in Convent Sermons from the Low Countries

12:00 noon–1:30 pm          
Lunch

1:30–3:00 pm                     
John Van Engen (University of Notre Dame) – Teaching and Abnegation: Alijt Bake (1413-55) as Teacher, Preacher, and Author

Sara S. Poor (Princeton University) – Re-thinking Female Authorship: Anna Eybin’s Table of Contents

3:00–3:30 pm                     
Coffee/Tea 

3:30–5:00 pm                     
Paul J. Patterson (Saint Joseph’s University) – “When we spake laste togyderys”: Carthusians, Birgittines, and Religious Mentoring

Anne Winston-Allen (Southern Illinois University) – “There was a sister among the reformers... who could write textura script and also paint”: Women’s Book Illustration in the Context of the Observant Reform

5:00–5:15 pm                     
Closing remarks

5:15 pm                              
Belgian Beer Reception

Summaries

The Book as Memorial: Shaping Identity by Writing, Copying and Collecting Books in Religious Communities in the Lower Rhineland

Johan Oosterman

Radbouduniversiteit Nijmegen (nl)

The word plays a significant role in the life of religious individuals and communities: liturgy, private devotion and learning are inconceivable without words. Additionally, words in written form are our main entry to the religious life of the past. My research in the past years was aimed largely at late medieval and early modern books from female religious communities. It became more and more clear to me that religious texts and their material carriers ― the extant books ― were more than only messengers to convey content. The act of writing, the material entity of the book, and the collecting of texts and books were as such meaningful in the life of religious women, and played a crucial role in the way in which religious communities reflected upon their own existence and identity. To demonstrate that texts were not only messages, books not only carriers of content, and collections not only a depository of useful and intensely used books, I will make an excursion along some books and collections of former communities in the Lower Rhineland region.

 

‘When we spake laste togyderys’: Carthusians, Birgittines, and Religious Mentoring

Paul J. Patterson

Saint Joseph’s University

In the opening lines of the Middle English Mirror to Devout People, a fifteenth-century Carthusian text directed to a sister at the Birgittine Syon Abbey, the author reminds the reader that “whene we spake laste togyderys I be hette yow a medytacyon of the passion of oure lorde” (fol. 1r).  What is the significance of the Carthusian author’s claim that he and the reader spoke? And what do this claim and the text of the Mirroritself tell us about the relationship between the Sheen Charterhouse, where the Mirrororiginates, and Syon Abbey?  This paper will address this relationship by examining the implications of the close proximity of the two houses, the ways in which a Carthusian text was approved, and other similar texts that were created for the sisters at Syon upon the initial establishment of the Abbey.

 

Re-thinking Female Authorship: Anna Eybin’s Table of Contents

Sara S. Poor

Princeton University

Anna Eybin, provost of the Augustinian convent Pillenreuth near Nuremberg from 1461–1476, was an active compiler and scribe of books for her religious community. In a book of saints’ lives that she assembled, Eybin also includes a detailed, although not quite complete table of contents. A comparison of the descriptions of the texts in the contents with the texts as they appear in the book gives us an unusual opportunity to consider Eybin not only as a compiler but also as a composer of stories. It also provides us with a provocative case with which to re-think our conceptual models for authorship, particularly with respect to women and gender.

 

Female Authorship in Convent Sermons from the Low Countries

Patricia Stoop

University of Pennsylvania / Universiteit Antwerpen (b)

The majority of the Middle Dutch manuscripts from religious institutions in the Low Countries derive from female establishments, and vernacular sermon collections in particular show the marked involvement of women. A great many codices were written for and/or used in women’s monasteries, and the apparently clerical genre of the written convent sermon ― sermons preached by confessors and visiting priests in convents and written down by their inhabitants ― has almost exclusively been handed down by female scribes, although, of course, preaching itself was reserved for men. We know of more than forty handwritten collections from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which are of unprecedented importance and richness ― both with regard to quantity and quality, even from an international perspective. These offer unique insight into the way in which women in late medieval and early modern enclosed religious communities dealt with the spiritual inheritance of their confessors. In today’s contribution I will focus on the collaborative and even creative authorship which can be detected in many of these sermon collections, and on particularly on the prologues in which the sisters explicitly phrase their contribution to the sermon collections.

 

Teaching and Abnegation: Alijt Bake (1413-55) as Teacher, Preacher, and Author

John Van Engen

University of Notre Dame

Alijt Bake of Utrecht and Ghent, for ten years prioress of Galilee, the convent of canonesses regular, in Ghent before being deposed from office, left a body of known writings that includes four sermons, a book of spiritual formation for sisters, a tractate, an apologia, letters, and a spiritual autobiography. While parts of this oeuvre are known to a few students of Middle Dutch or of late medieval mysticism, scholars have not examined the altogether self-conscious way in which “Mother Alijt” presented herself and her writings, nor have they explored the spiritual claims she made to teach and preach and write, a claim she asserted in the face of resistance coming from within her house and from critics both lay and religious beyond her cloister in the city of Ghent.  

 

“There was a sister among the reformers... who could write textura script and also paint”: Women’s Book Illustration in the Context of the Observant Reform

Anne Winston-Allen

Southern Illinois University

This paper challenges the view that women’s book illustration in the fifteenth century was simply “naïve”, harmless work that was not part of the mainstream. In fact, convent women’s art is much more political than has generally been understood. Examined in the context of the fifteenth-century struggle for reform in which many women artists were engaged, these illustrations express not merely religious imagery but a polemical “reform mentality”. This paper will show some ways in which the women’s portrayal of themselves diverges from mainstream art.

Beyond unconventional depictions of the sisters’ own piety, their illustrations include famous reformers of the past and women who turned away from the world to embrace a life of spirituality and voluntary poverty or others who were rescued from purgatory through the prayers of an Observant prayer confraternity. While several chronicles and accounts by women have now come to light, the most militant writings of sisters in the Observance Movement (among them those of Magdalena Kremer, the unnamed nun who could “write textura script and paint”) express a knowledge of the history of the reform and of the religious order itself, a history which recalls the struggles of the community’s founding mothers for official acceptance.

A pervasive “leitmotiv” of the fifteenth century, religious reform became — in the hands of the Observants — an unexpectedly effective a tool for opening up more cloisters to the daughters of the burgher class. Thus, although the movement’s first women’s house north of the Alps had a majority of founding members from the lower nobility, the cloisters that were subsequently reformed included more and more women of the urban patriciate. These literate sisters industriously made and illustrated books, especially vernacular ones, to meet the demand for devotional literature at other newly reformed houses. And while it is now clear from the chronicles and other writings of these women that there was “a literature of reform”, this paper will show that there was also “reform art”, a genre that waits to be looked at with new eyes.