Treharne in C. Saunders & D. Watt Women in Medieval Literary Culture (original) (raw)
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Literature Compass, 2007
Feminist study of Middle English religious writings is a relatively new field, but it is a rich and well-developed one. Although the work of such pioneers as Eileen Edna Power set the stage in the early twentieth century, feminist scholarship of the corpus of medieval religious texts in English only emerged as a truly vibrant area of inquiry in the past twenty years. Indeed, the entry of such figures as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich into the canon, marked iconically by their entries into the Norton Anthology of British Literature in 1986 and 1993 respectively, suggests at once how recent a scholarly development such work is and how strong an influence such scholarship has had on the study of Middle English literature. Using the cases of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as test cases, this essay explores the key debates that have driven and shaped feminist scholarship on Middle English religious texts over the past two decades, and it explores newly emergent trends. It examines the impact of psychoanalytic criticism on medieval feminist scholarship and interrogates the contributions made by scholars who embrace French feminist approaches. It addresses the paradigm shifts enacted by the groundbreaking work of Caroline Walker Bynum as well as the questions concerning gender and essentialism raised by her work. The importance of New Historicism in the field is also a key concern in the essay, as are new takes on historicist research, especially the work of scholars who are rethinking questions of historical periodization. Feminist approaches to medieval religious writing are not limited to scholarship focusing on texts by and for women. However, widespread assumptions about medieval women's incapacity to produce or comprehend texts worthy of serious scholarly consideration meant that for much of the twentieth century, Middle English religious texts by women, or primarily directed toward a female readership, were ignored. Accordingly, among the primary tasks of feminist scholars were overcoming the perception that such texts were not worthwhile objects of study and, concomitantly, making these texts readily available to scholars and students.
Medieval Women's Writing is a major new contribution to our understanding of women's writing in England, 1100-1500. The most comprehensive account to date, it includes writings in Latin and French as well as English, and works for as well as by women. Marie de France, Clemence of Barking, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and the Paston women are discussed alongside the Old English lives of women saints, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the St Albans Psalter, and the legends of women saints by Osbern Bokenham. Medieval Women's Writing addresses these key questions: Who were the first women authors in the English canon? What do we mean by women's writing in the Middle Ages? What do we mean by authorship? How can studying medieval writing contribute to our understanding of women's literary history? Diane Watt argues that female patrons, audiences, readers, and even subjects contributed to the production of texts and their meanings, whether written by men or women. Only an understanding of textual production as collaborative enables us to grasp fully women's engagement with literary culture. This radical rethinking of early womens literary history has major implications for all scholars working on medieval literature, on ideas of authorship, and on women's writing in later periods. The book will become standard reading for all students of these debates.
In ‘From Reading to Writing: The Multiple Levels of Literacy of the Sister Scribes in the Brussels Convent of Jericho’ Patricia Stoop demonstrates that from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, the Augustinian canonesses of the Brussels convent, Onze Lieve Vrouw Ter Rosen gheplant in Jericho [‘Our Lady of the Rose Planted in Jericho’] were very active in writing and copying manuscripts. In exploring the literacy of the Jericho sisters — from reading and copying, through writing household accounts, to redacting original sermons — Stoop shows that they produced a large number of carefully written manuscripts (illuminated with pen drawings) for their own use, most of them in the vernacular. Thirty-six manuscripts survive, thirty of them produced before 1550. This collection of manuscripts is the third largest from a medieval women’s convent in the Low Countries. Additionally, some four of five scribes (in changing teams) were active in the convent’s scriptorium. They produced, for pay (and most likely on commission), a large number of books and texts for individual, prosperous lay patrons, as well as for religious persons and institutions outside the convent walls, generally during the daily time allotted for handicrafts. In the same period some of the most talented sisters wrote down the sermons they had heard their confessors and visiting priests preach, and preserved them in eight collections. Both sermons and sermon collections were the result of a communal and layered authorship, which involved a dynamic merging of several ‘author roles’: women (redactors) wrote down the spoken sermons of their father confessor (auctor intellectualis) from a first-person perspective and put themselves, so to speak, in his position. A second, anonymous sister made editorial adaptations (titles, cross-references) and sometimes even adjustments to the content (editor). Finally, this sister (or a third) copied the sermons into the manuscript (copyist). Thus the sermons as well as the collections were the result of an intense collaboration, and the women had a large share in the production of the preserved material.
This study uncovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries performed by Benedictine women religious in England from 900 to 1200. Three ministries are examined in detail – the proclamation of the gospel, the practice of penance, and the administration of the Eucharist – but they are prefaced by portraits of the very monastic officers that most often performed them – cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. The research presented in this study challenges past scholarly accounts of these ministries that either locate them exclusively in the so-called “golden age” of double monasteries headed by abbesses in the seventh and eighth centuries, or read the monastic and ecclesiastical reforms of the tenth through twelfth centuries as effectively relegating women religious to complete dependency on the sacramental care of ordained men. This study shows that far from becoming wholly dependent on such care, many women religious in central medieval England continued to exercise prominent liturgical and pastoral roles in their communities, much like those assumed by their earlier Anglo-Saxon foremothers and by their contemporary Benedictine brothers. To uncover these liturgical and pastoral ministries, this study investigates a variety of textual sources and material evidence – monastic rules, customaries, penitentials, ecclesiastical decrees, canon law collections, theological treatises, chronicles, saints’ lives, miracle collections, letters, charters, cartularies, wills, mortuary rolls, manuscript illuminations, seals, sculptures, and grave goods. But most innovative and central to this study are the close paleographical and codicological analyses of the surviving liturgical manuscripts that were produced by and for houses of Benedictine women religious in central medieval England. When identified and then studied as a whole – which they have not been until this point – these books provide a treasure-trove of unexamined evidence for understanding the lives of women religious. The manuscripts analyzed include psalters, prayerbooks, gospel books, lectionaries, homiliaries, calendars, pontificals, and ordinals. These books serve as the foundational documents of practice for this study, for they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral ministries that women religious performed, but also to the productions of female scribes as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.