IST 605: Women's Monastic Communities in Early Medieval Germany

Church and Cloister by Carola Jäggi and Uwe Lobbedey

The fourth chapter of Crown and Veil sets out to provide details of the conditions of living and worship for religious women in Germany. The authors show that such an idea is difficult to generalize for the early medieval period through analysis of archaeological findings of varied buildings and frequent reconstruction. Despite this, Jäggi and Lobbedey point to a few consistent patterns emerging among the evidence. They found that most living spaces consisted of large central rooms with smaller rooms adjacent, each with hearths for heat, but little evidence of cloisters found in the later medieval period. With respect to places of worship, female monastics were often restricted to a gallery, or an upper story above the main area of worship. The buildings themselves tended to be based on the single room structures found in England at the time, showing a further connection between the Isles and the continent. 

Holy Women And The Needle Arts by Janet Schulenburg

This work is chapter five of Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe. Of the practical arts of women religious, Schulenburg notes that one of the most understudied is that of embroidery. Such pieces had multiple uses and multiple meanings. Some were made to be worn, others to be worshipped. More still were used as memoria, or for the liturgical remembrance of the dead. As such, embroidery could not be separated from the ritual aspects of Christianity. Beginning with artifacts from the 6th century, roughly aligning with the earliest women’s monastic foundations in Europe, Schulenburg provides a catalog of known needlework, including many German examples. 

A Reconsideration of Female Scribal Activity by Helene Scheck

In this chapter of a forthcoming publication, Scheck proposes both the location of production of a particular script and the type of manuscripts that the women working there would have produced. She follows the women of the Carolingian dynasty from Soissons to Herford as they became abbesses of newer foundations in the east. She uses a manuscript written in a distinctive style, and filled with collections of particular devotional texts to connect the elements of her argument. It’s likely that the book in question was created with the express purpose of educating women in the newly colonized Saxon lands. This shows an intellectual network where women’s monastic communities in West Francia were influencing those in East Francia, and how those in East Francia, in turn influenced foundations to come in the later centuries. 

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia by Felice Lifshitz

While other authors have posited that early Germanic culture, and in some cases early Medieval Germanic culture, approached gender from an egalitarian position, Lifshitz builds an argument for the case that this equality persisted even after the population was forced to convert to Christianity, though the most commonly used manuscripts show little evidence for this. Lifshitz proves her point through a set of previously understudied manuscripts believed to have been copied by women religious. In the first chapter of this book, she provides an historical context and a thorough review which shows that it was the Carolingian reforms of the late 8th century that began to remove the rights of women, religious or not. As such, Lifshitz suggests that recompilations of these documents in later centuries diminished the freedoms and contributions of women for the centuries to come. 

The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany by Cynthia J. Cyrus

In this work, Cyrus tabulates features of manuscripts produced at women’s monastic communities across time in Germany. These features, such as colophons at the end of manuscripts, were statements offering information about the creation of books. In chapter four, Scribe as Individual, the author uses the content of early medieval colophons to make assessments about the state of books in this time. Perhaps the most impacting is the suggestion that threats and curses found therein indicate the relative scarcity of and difficulty to produce these objects. 

Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages by Janet Nelson

In her article, Nelson sets out to review the evidence for female agency in the early Medieval period, through how women were represented in words. For the most part, this analysis must be carried out through the extant writings of and on women religious, as there are few records connected to those outside of such a life. The author shows how gender was constructed through texts used to educate or record. In some cases, these texts were even written by women religious who internalized the patriarchy. Despite this, in more personal writings, they acknowledge themselves as subjects, rather than objects. This often resulted in ambiguous meanings ascribed to the women, and in the present day leads to many interesting research opportunities.