Women in Middle Ages

History Compass 4/3 (2006): 448480, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00325.
Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality, and the Arts in the Middle Ages
1
June L. Mecham
University of Nebraska, Omaha
Abstract
The study of women, spirituality, and the arts has progressed considerably over the past twenty-five years, becoming both more nuanced and sophisticated as well as more conflicted. Recent scholarship on this subject reflects the adoption of broader definitions of the arts and of female religiosity in addition to a weakening of both conceptual and disciplinary boundaries. Current research further demonstrates a greater democratization in the types of women and pious activities studied. Researchers are increasingly re-conceptualizing piety in terms of grouped or interrelated actions tied to the visual and material culture of medieval Christianity, thereby highlighting the importance of performance within female devotion. While issues of essentialism and agency continue to stimulate debate, researchers have uncovered considerable evidence of the influence medieval women exerted upon religious drama, music, art, literature, and theology. Nevertheless, substantial areas for further research remain. A book of hours, too, must be mine, Where subtle workmanship will shine, Of gold and azure, rich and smart, Arranged and painted with great art, Covered with fine brocade of gold; And there must be, so as to hold The pages closed, two golden clasps.2
When he penned the lines above, the French court poet Eustache Deschamps (13461406) sought to parody the acquisitive piety of the noble lady. Deschamps critiqued the materiality of the womans devotions as well as the desire to possess and to impress. Did his reference to the golden clasps that held the pages closed further imply that the books owner never looked within the text, never delved beyond the material or visual? In many ways, Deschampss poem serves as a metaphor for research on the subject of women, spirituality, and the arts. The significance of visual imagery and material objects within female devotion, as well as the tendency to denigrate these features, comprise two very important elements of the scholarly debate on this subject.
Blackwell Publishing 2006
Recent Research on Women, Spirituality, and the Arts in the Middle Ages . 449
Fig. 1. Robert Campin and Assistant (South Netherlandish [Tournai], active by 1406, died 1444),
The Annunciation Triptych, altarpiece, c. 1425, South Netherlandish; made in Tournai, oil on wood; overall (open): 25 3/8 46 3/8 in. (64.5 117.8 cm) central panel: 25 1/4 24 7/8 in. (64.1 63.2 cm) each wing: 25 3/8 10 3/4 in. (64.5 27.3 cm): The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70) Photographs, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The past twenty-five years have witnessed an intense interest in the topic of female spirituality in the Middle Ages, resulting in a substantial number of excellent scholarly studies as well as the translation of such research into more popular forms. Specialized websites like Monastic Matrix, Feminae, or Mittelalterliche Frauenklster, all dedicated specifically to the study of religious women in the Middle Ages and intended for scholars as well as students, have brought research on medieval womens spirituality into the electronic age.3 One might even say that the subject finally arrived with the recent exhibition of Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklster (Crown and Veil: Art from Medieval Convents), sponsored jointly by the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn and the Ruhrlandmuseum in Essen from March 19 to July 5, 2005. The exhibition was the first to bring together the extraordinary amount of visual and material artifacts preserved from female religious establishments in the German-speaking regions of Europe. Together with the conference accompanying it, the exhibit represented both the culmination of over twenty years of scholarly research on the subject of monastic women, spirituality, and the arts in the Middle Ages as well as new developments in the field.4 It would thus seem timely to consider the state of the field and recent trends in modern scholarship. These developments include the adoption of broader definitions of the arts and of female religiosity, greater democratization in the types of women studied, a reappraisal of womens artistic creations, and an increased recognition of womens active contribution to the visual, literary, material, and devotional culture of medieval European Christianity. Issues of essentialism and female agency also continue to animate
Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/3 (2006): 448480, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00325.x
450 . Recent Research on Women, Spirituality, and the Arts in the Middle Ages
the scholarly debate about female spirituality and the arts, resulting in more sophisticated and nuanced studies. Establishing a Field: Fundamental Works on Female Spirituality In the early 1980s, research on female spirituality remained in its infancy. The publication of Caroline Walker Bynums Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages in 1982 and Peter Dronkes Women Writers of the Middle Ages in 1984 were the first drops in what has since become a veritable flood of scholarly literature.5 As part of the broader movement within feminism to recover womens history, researchers sought to identify and explore the role that sex and gender played in shaping the spirituality of medieval women. Was the religious experience of women somehow distinct from that of men? Were the choices that women made about their devotional practices different from those of men? What particular options or obstacles did women face in adopting a religious lifestyle? To answer such questions, scholars initially turned to visionary literature and mystical tracts, two literary forms in which religious women played a fundamental role.6 The experiences and concerns of extraordinary figures like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Margaretha Ebner, and Clare of Assisi, to name just a few, dominated the literature and shaped historians perceptions of female religiosity.7 Relying on an extensive and sophisticated analysis of the vitae of female saints as well as the visionary and mystical literature produced by or about them, in 1987 Caroline Walker Bynum published her classic study, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.8 Bynums work explored how the social, cultural, and theological associations surrounding the categories of female and flesh resulted in a spirituality that was somatic, affective, emotional, and often intensely physical. The cultural and theological associations of the female with flesh enabled medieval women to identify directly with the figure of Jesus, and religious women more frequently externalized their spirituality through bodily signs, miracles, and performative imitation.9 In the thirteenth century, the incarnation and birth of Jesus featured prominently in womens spirituality. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the physical suffering of an adult Christ in the crucifixion became the dominant theme, and women numbered among the earliest Christians to experience stigmata.10 While Bynums interpretation of female spirituality as somatic and ecstatic was not entirely new, (nineteenth-century historians had expressed similar views of female religiosity), her positive reevaluation of female mystics and visionaries was revolutionary.11 Bynum illustrated the sophisticated ways in which female religious could turn the culturally negative associations of women with physicality into a positive position that enabled women to identify with the humanity of Christ. Subsequent research has continued to build upon Bynums characterization, even as it questions the dichotomy
of a somatic and ecstatic female spirituality versus an educated and intellectualized male religiosity.12 Many female mystics reflected the medieval associations between women, physicality, and humanity through their use of maternal and erotic imagery. Studies of Dominican nuns in general, and the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century mystics at the convents of Helfta, Engelthal, and Maria Medingen (Mdingen) in particular, reveal that religious women identified with Mary as both a symbol of fruitfulness and as a competitor for the intimate relationship they sought with the Christ child.13 Such visionary and mystical experiences suggest the importance of gender, gender roles, and medieval gender ideologies in shaping the devotional experiences of religious women and their expression. Indeed, Joanna Ziegler has argued that in the first half of the fourteenth century the emphasis within female spirituality shifted from ecstasy, rapture, and revelation to more mother-oriented expressions, a shift reflected by Rosemary Drage Hales use of the term mother mysticism.14 Monastic women were not the only religious women whose lives were influenced by prevailing ideas about gender and gender roles. The lives of urban recluses, or anchoresses, also reflected the social importance of such female roles as mother, grandmother, and wise woman.15 Like the Dominican nuns and mystics, female recluses also found in Mary inspiration for their religious role. For urban recluses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, Mary exemplified the roles of religious instructor and prophetess.16 Scholars further emphasize the domestic nature of female spirituality, in terms of the iconography women favored, their spiritual concerns, and even the physical spaces women used for their devotions.17 Devotional Spaces/Devotional Places: The Art and Architecture of Female Piety Womens visionary experiences emphasized not only their own physicality, but also the physicality of their material environment. Religious women who recorded visions in which they nursed, cradled, or otherwise cared for the infant Jesus frequently had a specific and tangible focus for their devotions: a small statue of the Christ child or Christkindl. These figures often were used in conjunction with small altars and altar ornaments, garments, and cradles.18 Sister Angelica, who entered the order of Saint Clare of Monticelli in Florence in 1446, received such a figure from her father in 1452, complete with
two robes: one of crimson satin with a pearl clasp and the other of Alexandria velvet with gold trimming, a crimson velvet bonnet [and] a garland with a wide red fringe . . . accompanied by a tabernacle of painted wood, with a small altar and ornaments, cloths, and other small objects for this altar.19
The German Dominican mystic, Margaretha Ebner, likewise received a Christkindl from her spiritual advisor, Heinrich of Nrdlingen, which is still
Fig. 2. Figure of the Christ child with arm raised in blessing from the Cistercian convent of
Heilig-Kreuz in Rostock, with textile clothing and crown. Pl 600 Mechelen, c. 1500, Segendes Christkind, Heilig-Kreuz Kloster in Rostock; with textile clothing and crown: height 32 cm, height of crown 7 cm: Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Kunstsammlungen, Inv.-Nr. Pl. 600.
preserved as a cultic object in the convent of Maria-Medingen.20 Such devotional images figured prominently as actors as well as objects in visionary accounts, and descriptions of visions often employed the language used to describe works of art.21 Despite the prominent place of artwork in the visionary literature produced by and about religious women, scholars initially neglected its significance. Jeffrey Hamburger thus noted that in the 1980s seemingly basic questions about how nuns lived and worshiped, what they saw and read, were not easily answered, and it is thanks to his own remarkable scholarship in the field that such questions are more easily addressed today.22 The first works to explore the connections between visual and material culture and female spirituality emerged from the fields of art history and archeology. The art journal Gesta led the way in 1992 with an issue dedicated specifically to the archeology of female monasticism. These articles
Fig. 3. Devotional crib for a Christ child, wood: Kln/Cologne, Museum Schntgen, Inv.-Nr.
A 779.
emphasized the fundamental structural differences that defined female monastic life, especially the increasing emphasis on claustration that resulted in the presence of gates, grilles, screens, parallel aisles, and separate choirs. Such structural divisions elevated the role of sensory perception in female monastic devotion. In some houses, these architectural features prohibited nuns from having a direct line of vision to the altar, thus increasing the importance of hearing. In other cases, they granted nuns an exclusive view of the Eucharistic rituals of the Mass, thereby privileging the role of seeing.23 Declaring that medieval gender roles . . . were intrinsic to religious belief and were played out with reference to the material world, Roberta Gilchrist explored the importance of spatial segregation in the construction of English convents in her pioneering work, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women.24 Gilchrist argued that the enclosure and spatial segregation of nuns, which divided them from the male clergy who ministered to them, articulated the gendered power structures of a
male-dominated ecclesiastical hierarchy as well as replicated the secular domestic arrangements of noble women. While subsequent research has noted that the walls of female monasteries were far more permeable than the rhetoric of enclosure would suggest, spatial politics nevertheless shaped the spirituality of religious women in ways quite different from that of their male counterparts.25 Two clear examples of this emerge in the context of urban religious movements. The experiences of the beguines, who faced increasing suspicion of heresy and forced enclosure in the fourteenth century, and of urban recluses, who modeled a highly visible form of public enclosure that rarely raised suspicion, illustrate the fundamental importance of space in shaping the options and opposition religious women faced.26 In fact, the life of the urban recluse seems to have been a strictly female phenomenon, particularly since the eremetical life no longer provided a viable option for women of the High Middle Ages. For the urban recluse, however, physical enclosure provided a spiritual authority and public role nearly equal to that of a parish priest, since she too assumed the functions of religious instructor and advisor, admonisher, and prophetess.27 Indeed, the role of spatial restriction and architecture in an urban religious context and in relation to womens spirituality requires substantially more research.28 Although physical enclosure shaped the lives of many professional religious women, it did not restrict their visual world. Within the confined spaces of the convent, artwork abounded. Paintings, sculptures, stained glass, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and images for meditation (Andachtsbilder) shaped the communal and personal devotional practices of medieval nuns, just as they did for lay women in their parishes or homes.29 Religious women regularly employed visual imagery as devotional aides to stir the memory and enhance their contemplative practices, hence their prominence in womens visionary literature as stimuli to visions.30 In fact, the omnipresence of religious artwork may have imprinted the consciousness of professional religious women with a standardized iconography.31 More than any other scholar, Jeffrey Hamburger has illustrated the fundamental importance of visual culture in shaping the spirituality and devotional practices of medieval nuns. Asserting that corporeal images proved uniquely suited to the somatic character of female spirituality, Hamburgers sophisticated analyses of the role of images and imagery have revolutionized the way scholars think about female devotion.32 Indeed, the importance of visual and material culture to female spirituality has become axiomatic. A considerable amount of the religious artwork, liturgical objects, and devotional books used in monastic, parochial, and even domestic settings resulted from the spiritual needs and patronage of women, and the quantity of surviving materials that can be associated with female creators and benefactors testifies to the fundamental role of the visual and the material in female spirituality.33 Indeed, researchers attribute many developments within medieval art to the needs and preferences of women, including the
production of illustrated Psalters and prayer books, the crucifixus dolorosus, and images of Jesus and Mary that exalt the humanity of Christ or a tender intimacy between mother and son. Likewise, the number of effigies of Christ (Grabchristus), figures of the Christ child (Christkindl ), and moveable statues of Christ astride an ass (Palmesel ) associated with womens religious communities reflects an emphasis on visual and material performances in female devotion.34 Scholars have exalted the role of images within female spirituality in particular, because images potentially enabled women to experience mystical union or establish their spiritual authority directly and independently of the male clerical establishment.35 Used in a daily devotional context, religious artwork granted an immediacy and intimacy with the divine that women, excluded from the priesthood and the universities, could rarely gain in other ways. Indeed, Hamburger has argued that nuns created images that met their own devotional needs and often mirrored their quotidian lives, employing artwork to fashion a distinctive visual culture and spirituality.36 Womens production of liturgical textiles and decorations further made their contributions an integral part of the celebration and experience of Mass, allowing them to participate in the liturgy by proxy.37 The use of artwork to express womens religious concerns emerges particularly prominently in the later fifteenth century among reformed houses in Germany. While male reformers railed against the personal possessions of nuns, they nevertheless considered the gendered activities of writing, sewing, embroidery, tapestry weaving, spinning, crocheting, combing and carding wool, hooking and weaving cloth as suitable activities for monastic women.38 Communities that underwent reform embraced such activities and expressed their spiritual fervor by producing large-scale embroideries and tapestries as well as new liturgical texts.39 According to Jane Carroll, the embroideries and tapestries produced in the wake of conventual reforms functioned not only as expressions of woven devotion, but also as sermons in thread. The small portraits of Dominican nuns engaged in weaving, found in the large tapestries produced in a Franconian convent, symbolized the reformers advocacy of the vita activa and monastic labora. Acting as an oriflamme to rally the women of the community, the portraits served a didactic function by inspiring current and future nuns to imitate the devotion and labor depicted.40 Similarly, Jeryldene Wood theorized that aesthetics and artistic patronage provided a medium through which the Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy could convey their religious ideals to a broader public.41 A Book for Mary: Women and the Literary Arts Study of the creation and use of devotional artwork by religious women has offered researchers a particularly fruitful avenue for exploring issues of agency with regard to female spirituality, yet women also played an active role in commissioning and creating religious literature. Whether as patrons,
copyists, authors, or recipients of texts, the religious needs of medieval women stimulated the creation as well as the composition of a wide body of devotional works.42 Books possessed by or created for female readers often emphasized themes and iconography specifically related to womens social roles.43 For example, the importance of mothers in the Queen Mary Psalter, the active way in which they were portrayed artistically, and the importance of their actions all suggest that this work was consciously molded and even commissioned for a lay woman.44 The prominence of imagery based on the allegory of Christ as the heavenly bridegroom (sponsus) and the soul as his bride (sponsa), and its relationship to the bridal mysticism of thirteenthcentury nuns, similarly led Hamburger to attribute the composition of the Rothschild Canticles to a Dominican advisor and a female religious patron.45 In addition to visionary literature, pious women encouraged the development of the genres of vernacular theology and meditational tracts, conventual and reform chronicles, private prayer books and devotional anthologies.46 The demand for devotional texts in the vernacular by monastic women may have even resulted in their being more in touch with current spiritual trends than their male counterparts.47 In the fifteenth century, when Observant reforms promoted communal and individual reading as well as female monastic education, nuns proliferated as authors, translators, transcribers, and copyists.48 But did the literary culture of convents and the texts authored by religious women reflect concerns or themes that differed from those of male authors? Many scholars have noted the differences in tone, style, and content found in the chronicles and Sister-books written by monastic women. Female authored texts focused more on internal events than on external power conflicts and granted the inhabitants of their communities greater agency and more active roles in shaping their religious and monastic lives than male authors did.49 Female authors also favored imagery related to womens social roles, such as bridal or maternal metaphors, especially when they wrote about themselves or for other women.50 Finally, womens writing tended to emphasize concerns related to family relationships, childrens upbringing, and the care of the sick and elderly.51 Indeed, Ulrike Wiethaus argues that the vernacular spirituality of Dominican nuns reflected their immediate social world and its cyclical temporality a world of feminized enclosures, rich in detail versus a spirituality of masculinized open spaces.52 Batrice Acklin Zimmermann, however, discovers in the Dominican Sister-books a narrative theology, arguing that because women were not allowed to write on such matters, they wrapped up their theology in seemingly innocuous stories. These narratives provided abstract theological concepts, with which the nuns were both familiar and concerned, with a reality drawn from the concrete examples of monastic life and personal experience.53 The Dominican authors of the Sister-books thus transformed the patterns of thought they encountered in sermons, theological tracts, and discussions with their spiritual advisors into their own theology. According
Fig. 4. Elsbeth Stagel composing the Lives of the Sisters of Tss, late 14th century: Stadtbibliothek
Nrnberg/Nuremberg, MS Cent. V 10a, fol. 3r.
to Zimmermann, it is only because such female-authored texts were viewed as not worthy of being described as theology that they were relegated to the realm of mysticism.54 This is not to say, however, that female-authored, vernacular texts represented some kind of proto-feminist subjectivity or solidarity.55 In cases where women were not the original authors of religious books, their spiritual preferences can still be detected through the choices they made in compiling, editing, and occasionally commenting on their texts.56 For example, the fifteenth-century librarian of Kloster Lichtenthal near Baden-Baden, fondly known to her sisters as Sister Regula, felt little hesitation in shaping the texts she copied for her community. In her Book of the Holy Maidens and Women, Regula excised certain violent scenes of martyrdom,which are not useful to write or hear, or what she regarded as extraneous miracles not needed for a godly life. Regula also attempted to make additions of her own: Here I wanted to write a vision of St.
Catherines birth, [which she says God gave her to understand], but it was not allowed.57 Even in cases where the scribe did not comment directly on her choices, it is still possible to read between the lines and recover the devotional preferences or concerns of the copyist by analyzing the choices of texts and their arrangement.58 Additions to the decoration and illumination of a text can provide further insight into the ways women shaped their devotion.59 A fourteenth-century lectionary from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore provides a striking example. This work, originally illuminated either in a conventual or professional workshop, was improved upon later by a nun or several nuns. Brightly colored and patterned borders were added and sections of the text repainted in gold leaf on colored bars. The particular passages chosen for embellishment, namely portions of the Easter liturgy, indicate the importance of the paschal season in female monastic devotion as well as the nuns unique aesthetic sense.60 Indeed, the nuns bold use of colors and patterns corresponded to the use of color and pattern in tapestry and embroidery, both considered womens work.61 The production of books thus allowed women to express their own religious sensibilities in terms of the style of illumination and the thematic emphasis or design of the book. Book production further enabled religious women to engage obliquely in theological matters through the choice of subject, the interpretation of the text, or their own accounts of visions, stories, and experiences.62 In fact, the reading preferences and literary productions of religious women and their choices in the selection, interpretation, and illumination of certain scenes, stories, or texts remain fruitful areas for future investigation. The Drama of Devotion: Performance and Female Spirituality Another area in which religious women expressed their spirituality was within liturgical drama. The Visitatio sepulchri, which depicted the visit of the holy women to Christs tomb with the aide of devotional props like a sepulcher, a sudary, or relics, appears closely associated with female communities.63 Out of approximately twenty-two extant Visitatio manuscripts from Germany, nine come from female houses, to which may be added fragments of Visitatio plays from two other houses.64 Nor was Germany unique; texts for dramatic performances during the paschal season appear in female houses across Europe. The chapter of canonesses located at St. Georges in Prague kept ten texts of the Visitatio in their library, and one of the two English texts recording such performances comes from the womens monastery of Barking.65 The Visitatio dramas popularity among female houses is not entirely surprising. In the Visitatio, womens experience literally took center stage. The revelation granted to the holy women at the tomb promoted an empowering image of feminine revelation and activity within the Christian community as well as provided strong female role models for the Brides of Christ who enacted these scenes.66
Fig. 5. Lectionary, early 14th century, German: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Ms 148,
fol. 23r.
Once thought to be the preserve of male clerics, recent research has proven that religious women incorporated dramas into their paschal liturgy and participated actively in their performance. In at least half of the female houses from Germany that performed this drama, religious women assumed the roles of the holy women.67 Other clerics or nuns participated by carrying censers, candelabras, or candles as part of the drama or in the processions that framed its performance. Likewise, Peter Dronke argued that nuns likely performed Hildegard of Bingens Ordo Virtutum, noting that the twenty female roles in the play corresponded to the number of women Hildegard took with her to the convent of Rupertsberg.68 Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that female performers were more common in medieval drama than previously thought, and the participation of nuns in convent drama in the early modern period has been well documented.69 Nuns from the French Benedictine abbey of Origny-Sainte-Benote participated in producing, writing, directing, and performing liturgical dramas
Fig. 6. Effigy of Christ and Sepulcher, c. 1450, from the Cistercian convent of Wienhausen;
wood: Wienhausen, Kloster Wienhausen.
for the paschal season, as indicated by the use of the vernacular French and the addition of stage directions in the manuscripts from this house.70 The texts from the abbey of Barking specifically credited Abbess Katherine of Sutton (136376) as the motivating force behind the composition of the dramatic rituals performed by Barkings nuns, and the presence of unica, unique musical and textual compositions, indicates that the nuns of Barking helped compose their Visitatio drama.71 Moreover, the similarity between manuscripts from Origny and other female houses, such as Sainte-Croix at Poitiers, Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains at Troyes, and even Barking in England, suggest that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries specific dramatic conventions spread between female communities.72 The liturgical dramas of the paschal season highlight both the importance of performance within female spirituality and womens active role in shaping the lived reality of religious devotion or religion vece.73 Such performances enabled monastic women to shape the devotions of the parish communities with whom they frequently shared a church. The Barking manuscript clearly stated that the abbess commissioned the performance of the communitys paschal dramas to counteract the spiritual torpor of her parish, while the drama enacted by the community of Origny was designed to display the wealth and status of the abbey as well as the privileged position of its nuns.74 Nuns involvement in composing the texts or making additions to such works further provided them with a venue for public speaking, even for preaching.75 In this sense, the roles enclosed women assumed in these dramas paralleled the roles of urban recluses, who also functioned simultaneously
as models, mediators, religious instructors, and common theologians to correct and shape the devotional practices of their fellow Christians.76 Finally, liturgical performances could provide another medium through which religious women might resist the authority of the male ecclesiastical hierarchy. For example, Dominican nuns in Tuscany subverted the authority of church officials by preserving the Laude compositions of Savonarola and continuing to sing them as part of their promotion of his cult throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.77 And a Cross for the Altar: Female Patronage and Liturgical Decorations The ability to participate in the liturgy and shape devotional experience was not restricted solely to professional religious women. Recent scholarship has extended the study of female spirituality outside the cloister and down the social scale to recognize the various ways in which lay women expressed their personal piety and shaped the religious experiences of others. Patronage provided one such way. Donations and contributions by pious women ranged in scope from the foundation of private churches and the weaving of albs for religious communities to the donation of a chicken or bucket of lard to a priest.78 Even modest donations of textiles to decorate the altar or altar vessels, money to purchase a breviary, an engagement ring sold to buy lamps, or the donation of a few pennies for oil or candles to burn in front of relics, reflected womens active involvement in shaping the medieval devotional experience.79 Indeed, womens donations indicate an intimate involvement in the ceremonial life of the church [that] insured an ongoing association with the liturgical functions and physical fabric of the church.80 Clergymen often encouraged women to donate their skills in order to fashion textiles to adorn churches, and vitae of holy women as well as convent necrologies noted womens skills in embroidery, weaving, and dyeing. Indeed, the late eleventh-century vita of Margaret of Scotland described the queens royal chamber as a veritable workshop for the production of altar cloths, priestly vestments, and liturgical decorations.81 While donations of costly devotional items like books, relics, or crosses played an important part in the activities that defined high status piety for both men and women in the early Middle Ages, literary and testamentary evidence does show certain gender differences, particularly for the later Middle Ages. Lay women tended to donate material items, especially items of a personal and domestic nature, more than men, who favored monetary donations.82 Women contributed textiles worked specifically for liturgical use, such as altar cloths, dorsals, and aurifrisia, as well as personal items, such as kerchiefs, table cloths, tassels, belts, or dresses. They also gave jewelry, namely gold or silver crosses, wedding rings, necklaces, and bracelets, as decorations for statues of the saints, Christ, or the Virgin Mary.83 Lay women, beguines, and nuns alike contributed money for lamps and lights to burn before important cultic images, made donations of crowns for statues of the
Virgin, and contributed either money or labor to the decoration of statues with robes (see Fig. 2).84 Women also took a more active role in determining the use of the items they donated. Wealthy Anglo-Saxon noblewomen like Queen Emma and Countess Goda commanded that their donations of gold and silver be melted down and reworked into reliquaries, book covers, images of saints, crosses, or other ecclesiastical ornaments.85 In 1373 Margarete Todinghusen of Lbeck likewise decreed that the small gilded image (Tafel) that she bequeathed to the female Cistercian house of Neukloster be placed upon the high altar.86 Lower down the social scale, women directed that their donated sheets become altar cloths, their gowns and dresses be remade as copes and vestments, their kerchiefs serve as corporals for the host, and their jewelry be used to decorate statues of the saints.87 Such items not only reflected the personal devotion and aesthetic taste of the women who made or donated them, they also provided for the decoration of the communal space of the church, thereby shaping the religious experience of the broader community of faithful.88 Items used on the altar, like altar cloths or covers for the pyx, further created a visible intimacy between the donor and the Eucharist.89 The donations of monastic and lay women thus contributed considerably to the decoration of medieval chapels, churches, and choirs, or the devotional clutter that presented an awesome spectacle to worshipers.90 Monastic and lay women shared both the production and use of such items. Monastic women sometimes even supplemented their finances through the production and sale of handiwork, such as embroideries, tapestries, images, and illuminated texts. The nuns at Le Murate in Florence, for example, copied manuscripts, produced gold thread, wove shirts, woolens, tablecloths, and other linens, netted seeds of perfume, and cast gesso reliefs.91 Such items linked professional religious women to the outside world commercially, spiritually, artistically, and socially through their gendered labor.92 Indeed, material culture frequently provided a link between the convent and the secular world. Trousseau inventories from Florence indicate that secular brides received Christkindl as aides to their devotions just as women entering convents did, and nuns often recreated the life of secular women within the convent, a phenomenon that led to reform movements reaffirming the vita communis and apostolic poverty.93 Lay women, nuns, beguines, and tertiaries commonly possessed devotional images as well as books of hours, Psalters, illustrated Bibles, prayer books, or meditative tracts.94 Lively exchanges of books and devotional artwork existed among residents of individual communities, as well as between cloistered women of different communities, and nuns and their lay relatives or friends.95 Patronage, exchanges of books or gifts of images, and commercial productions thus functioned to create a shared set of devotional practices that united rather than divided female monastic devotion and lay piety. An image in an antiphonal from the convent of Heilig Kreuz in Regensburg,
Fig. 7. Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine with the Christ child, 1491, in the Antiphonale de
sanctis from the Dominican convent of Heilig Kreuz in Regensburg. Agnes Volkamer, a lay contributor to the production of the manuscript, appears in the lower left-hand corner in a blue mantel. Her neice, Magdalena Holzschuher, kneels in the center in a white veil. St. Catherine with the Christ child, Antiphonale de sanctis, Heilig Kreuz, 1491; watercolor painting: Regensburg, Bischfliche Zentralbibliothek, Bestand Ch, Bischfliche Zentralbibliothek Regensburg.
created c. 1491, illustrates this connection. The image depicts the mystical marriage of Saint Catherine and the Christ child, adored by members of the convent. Included in the conventual group was Agnes Volckamer, who had sent forty gilders to her niece, Magdalena Holzschuher, a nun within the convent, as a contribution to the production of this book.96 The antiphonal thus reflected a joint endeavor by the nuns of this community and their secular relatives, aptly illustrated in the unified group praying below the holy figures in the image. Taking their cue from images such as this, scholars increasingly emphasize the fluidity characteristic of female devotional practices, so much so that one might question the utility of making sharp distinctions between monastic and lay piety for women.97 When one
considers the impact of medieval gender ideologies on the lived reality of female devotion, this commonality appears even more prominently. Like the image of Saint Catherine and the Christ child, studies that focus on the contributions of women and their connection to the material and visual culture of medieval piety have begun to re-conceptualize devotion in terms of grouped actions and activities.98 Envisioned in such terms, female devotion becomes active rather than passive; it is something created and enacted. Scholars of Margery Kempe have long acknowledged the role of performance in shaping and reflecting her piety,99 but by noting other exclusively female performances, such as medieval churching rituals, Carol Meale has extended the importance of performance and drama to a greater number of devout women. Indeed, Meale argues that religious dramas or medieval womens street theatre may have played a hitherto unacknowledged role in promoting the affective piety of women.100 Similar performances of piety may be found in the lives of Beguines and urban recluses. Far from being removed from the local community, the urban recluse in particular represented a living saint: dead to the world, yet alive to the people around her, she performed salvation, making it visible and tangible graspable, even if only through the window of her enclosure.101 The articles contained in Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, edited by Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler, likewise emphasize the role of performance in female spirituality, especially in establishing the authority of female visionaries and mystics. In some cases, this entailed physical performances, such as Elisabeth of Spalbeeks re-enactment of the Passion, but female devotional performances could also include verbal performances, like preaching and prophesying. More frequently, however, female piety embraced private or intimate performances, as when religious women read devotional texts aloud or recounted miraculous events and experiences to each other in their individual chambers.102 Lingering Doubts: Problems of Patriarchy and Essentialism Despite the abundant evidence that women actively contributed to the devotional practices, images, and literature that shaped their piety that they were even pioneers of new artistic and religious trends like devotion to the Eucharist or the feast of Corpus Christi the study of female spirituality and the arts must nevertheless grapple with two important and intertwined issues: essentialism and patriarchy. By characterizing female spirituality as fundamentally experiential and tied to the physical, visual, and material, by describing it as emotional and ecstatic, maternal, domestic, or erotic, have scholars fallen victim to an interpretation of women and womens experiences that assumes immutable, physical, and biological differences? By emphasizing the somatic and affective characteristics within female spirituality do researchers in fact replicate the hierarchical binary
constructs of man/woman, mind/body, reason/emotion, and spiritual/ material that shaped medieval thought? Even Bynum cautions against overestimating or misinterpreting the somatic and visual aspects of female piety, noting that theological subtlety and interiority were equally characteristic of female spirituality.103 The subordinate position of women in medieval society, and particularly the role of the cura monialium, or care of religious women by male ecclesiastical figures, further complicates this issue. Scholars visibly struggle with the question of whether the gender distinctions present in medieval devotional experiences reflected an actual divergence between male and female spirituality or whether they resulted more from social expectations or literary topoi.104 The authors of the collected articles in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters examine this issue with regard to female visionaries, mystics, and saints, questioning whether mystical, visionary, or hagiographical literature can reveal the unmediated piety and spirituality of women.105 Catherine Mooney in particular has argued that the recovery of authentic womens voices is extremely difficult; the distortion of male influence, whether as scribe, translator, or spiritual advisor will always be present.106 Thus, as Hamburger once remarked,we have a false or, at best, misleading impression of female spirituality itself, an impression conditioned by the perspectives of male ecclesiastical authorities.107 In a sophisticated analysis of Heinrich Seuses Life of the Servant, Ulrike Wiethaus demonstrates how the characterization of female or feminine spirituality as ecstatic, somatic, and connected to the material world and human relationships was critiqued and ultimately subordinated to a more masculine spirituality of intense intellectualization. The metaphors employed by Seuse functioned to symbolically discredit womens devotional practices, and even the structure of the text reflected Seuses efforts to discipline, to rename, and re-appropriate religious experiences typically associated with women. In a particularly telling vignette, Wiethaus notes that a not so subtle shaming takes place in that ecstatic nuns are identified with drunken that is, loose women attending a raucous carnival.108 Wiethaus concluded that the nature of female spirituality and its unique features were thus circumstantial and historically determined, conditioned by the unequal gender dynamic inherent in medieval society.109 Studies of the visual culture of medieval convents and the artwork produced by nuns are likewise not exempt from dealing with these issues. Medieval ecclesiastics frequently based their advocacy of images and artwork in female devotion on a misogynistic view of women as spiritual weaklings, who required the aid that pictures provided.110 With their weaker and more porous brains, women could receive impressions more readily than men; therefore, visual imagery seemed particularly suited to them.111 By emphasizing the importance of visual imagery and artwork to female religiosity, are researchers in fact adopting rhetoric similar to that of medieval clerics and reformers?
The gender dynamics inherent in the creation and use of religious imagery are perhaps most colorfully illustrated in the satirical story told by Vasari about the Pisan painter Buonamico Buffalmacco, who tricked the fourteenth-century Florentine nuns of Faenza into providing him with their best vernaccia wine and mocked their curiosity about the progress of the frescoes they had commissioned for their house.112 Vasaris tale illustrated the tensions inherent in the relationship between female patrons and the artists whose work they commissioned, while also suggesting the differences in aesthetic taste between religious women and male artists. Although Vasari presumably wished to mock the curiosity and naivet of the nuns, the women nevertheless remained the matresses of the work, determining the subject matter, the colors used (the nuns found the original too pale), and overseeing the progress of the work.113 The story therefore addresses the question of control. Who controlled or shaped the religious imagery used by women: the women themselves or the men on whom they relied, their artists or spiritual advisors? The Christkindl statues particularly illustrate this dilemma, since women often received such figures as gifts from male relatives or spiritual advisors. As noted previously, Sister Agelica of Monticelli in Florence received her figure from her father, while Margaretha Ebner received her Christkindl from her spiritual advisor, Heinrich of Nrdlingen. Referring to these figures as bambinos or holy dolls, a term which itself denigrated female devotional practices as derivative and childish, Chistiane Klapisch-Zuber argued that such statues functioned to channel the socially conditioned maternal desires and frustrations of female religious in ways that male confessors could recognize and accept.114 While other scholars seek to avoid the simple equation between mystical experiences and sublimated sexual or maternal desire by using the term mother mysticism to describe the devotional practices and visions associated with these figures, this descriptor nevertheless emphasizes the dominance of culturally and socially determined roles in shaping female spirituality.115 In his ground-breaking work, Nuns as Artists, Hamburger similarly noted that one cannot overlook the ways in which the conventions of female spirituality encouraged cloistered women to transfer their affections by ways of sublimation to Christ as child or bridegroom. Just a page later, however, he cautioned that we should be wary of reducing female piety to little more than the sublimation of sexual desire, if only because in so doing, we ape one of the marginalizing strategies employed by its least sympathetic medieval (and modern) critics.116 Yet Hamburger noted that visual imagery could serve as a means of channeling womens ecstatic spirituality or their flights of devotional fancy along institutionally acceptable trajectories, and asserted elsewhere that the infantilization of Christ was a strategy especially appropriate for an audience of cloistered women, since it exalted maternal instincts rather than sublimated sexual desire.117 Joanna Ziegler likewise concluded that visual imagery provided a safe means of controlling womens
religious responses, because it replaced private ecstasy with routine devotion.118 Seeking to avoid such marginalization, some scholars have emphasized the interpretive freedom that art offered, providing women a direct contact with the holy that appeared unmediated by men and unmarred by the common misogyny of sermons.119 Yet one must question how truly free from the dominant clerical discourse any medieval Christian was. For professional religious women, the realities of the cura monialium certainly mitigate against any unqualified interpretations of nuns artistic, literary, or musical compositions as proto-feminist responses that consciously sought to reject dominant paradigms.120 Speaking of the images produced by the nuns of St. Walburg in Eichsttt, Hamburger noted:
Much as we would like to interpret the drawings as affirmations of spiritual autonomy or even as evidence of resistance to prevailing norms of gender and authority, we cannot construe them as self-representations of female spirituality.121
Scholars must therefore consider how religious women interpreted the images that surrounded them and how their reception and interpretation were conditioned or mediated by the expectations of the patriarchal society in which they lived. Studies of female spirituality and its relationship to the arts must not only grapple with the question of the reception of artwork by medieval women, but also with its reception by modern scholars. Researchers have often unwittingly adopted the rhetoric of medieval theologians and reformers by equating the use of religious images with popular piety and folk art.122 Describing the art produced by nuns as nave, unskilled, unsophisticated, childish, doll-like, tapestry-like, or provincial, art historians negatively evaluated the art produced by religious women and placed it in hierarchical opposition to high art.123 Indeed, the words nuns work (Nonnenarbeit) or even nuns books (Nonnenbcher), replete with their negative associations, have assumed the status of technical terms in scholarly literature on female spirituality and the arts. Nonnenarbeit stands by definition for deficiency: not only a lack of skill and sophistication, but also a lack of identity.124 The equation of Nonnenarbeit and the visual imagery of female devotion with popular piety, folk art, or even sublimated desire underestimates the sophisticated intellectual and theological principles that guided the use of artwork by religious women.125 In fact, Hamburger argues that nuns may have consciously embraced ugliness in their artwork as a means of expressing humility.126 Negative value judgments aside, the artwork produced by religious women in conventual scriptoria and workshops do reflect unique aesthetic and stylistic differences from those produced in male communities or in professional workshops. Art historians nevertheless remain divided on the issue of whether nuns artwork was fundamentally conservative or innovative. In her study of the artwork produced at the double house of Engelberg,
Susan Marti concluded that the nuns manuscript illumination remained conservative and reflected an aesthetic shaped by their familiarity with textile production, as evidenced in the use of bright colors, bold patterning, and flat compositions with figures heavily outlined in black.127 Yet Marti also noted the nuns interest in the use of innovative imagery, such as scenes of the crucifixion by the virtues, the Saint Anne Trinity (Anna Selbdritt), and the bathing of the Christ child.128 Some Final Thoughts As researchers continue to explore the relationship between women, spirituality, and the arts, their scholarship increasingly provides a more nuanced and sophisticated, albeit sometimes conflicted, understanding of female devotion. While the spirituality of monastic women, mystics, and visionaries remains an important area of investigation, scholars are also expanding the scope of their research to include the varied lives and devotional practices of a broader group of religious women, including beguines, tertiaries, urban recluses, and inhabitants of open monasteries. Likewise, researchers have extended their studies to include the devotional practices and patronage of average parishioners rather than focusing solely on wealthy aristocratic and royal women.129 Devotion itself is being re-conceptualized in terms of pious performances and grouped or interrelated actions tied to the visual and material culture of medieval Christianity.130 Instead of studying visionary or mystical literature exclusively, scholars analyze the literature of devotion in conjunction with womens creation and use of artwork and material culture, the role of pious donations and reading practices, and the importance of communal as well as individual acts of devotion. The study of female spirituality and the arts is increasingly breaking boundaries, both conceptual as well as disciplinary. The divisions between literature, history, and art history are being crossed in an effort to provide more comprehensive analyses of female spirituality. Likewise, the divisions between text and image as well as between the literary, visual, and oral culture of medieval religion, are challenged by researchers who seek to read images as texts and texts as images or performances.131 Moreover, the definition of art has expanded so that it includes not only formal works of art, such as painting or statuary, but also those works of art previously relegated to the realm of folk art, namely the textile arts and the production of ephemera. Attention to the lesser arts has enabled researchers to recover more of womens contributions to the religious imagery and material culture of medieval Christianity, just as researchers are recovering womens contributions in the fields of drama, music, literature, and theology through increasingly sophisticated analyses of the literary and liturgical texts used, copied, or created by religious women. The boundaries between female monastic and lay piety have likewise become increasingly fluid.
However, as significant as much of the recent research on this topic has been, the predominance of material from the Germanic regions of Europe poses a potential problem. An enormous amount of visual, material, and literary culture has survived from religious communities located in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. As a result, many of our ideas about female spirituality and devotional practices have been shaped by the experiences of women in these regions. Future research must determine how typical such practices were for women in other parts of Europe. The geographical nuances subsumed under the broader rubric of female spirituality and the arts need further exploration and elucidation. Likewise, different orders and observances (Benedictines, Dominicans, Cistercians, Clarissans, Franciscan Tertiaries, and beguines, among others) should be explored in a comparative way in order to detect specific or common features of their members spiritual and artistic style. Researchers also have yet to adequately explore the extent to which womens religious concerns, as expressed by the production and use of literature and art, differed from that of men. Finally, the effects of spatial politics, namely enclosure, on the devotional practices, artwork, and architecture of non-monastic female religious require further study. Indeed, urban religious culture and womens actions and activities in this realm provide fruitful avenues for future research. Notes
The author gratefully acknowledges that funding for the reproduction of the images has been provided by the Charles and Mary Caldwell Martin Fund from the History Department of the University of Nebraska at Omaha. 1 My thanks to Marie Kelleher for allowing me to use the title for the session on female monasticism sponsored by Monastic Matrix at the 40th International Medieval Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 2005: Breaking Old Habits: New Approaches to Female Monasticism in the Middle Ages. 2 Heures me fault de Nostre Dame . . . Qui soient de soutil ouvraige, Dor et dazur, riches et cointes, Bien ordonnes et bien pointes, De fin drap dor bien couvertes, Et quant elles seront ouvertes, Deux fermaulx dor qui fermeront. Eustache Deschamps, Oeuvres completes, ed. De Quex de Saint Hilaire and G. Raynaud (Paris, 18781903), vol. 9, 45. 3 Monastic Matrix at http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/ Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index at http://www.haverford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/mfi.html; Mittelalterliche Frauenklster at http://www.frauenkloester.de/. 4 A publication of articles presented at this conference is planned. 5 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study from Perpetua (d. 203) to Margaret Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 6 Barbara Newman, Die visionren Texte und visuellen Welten religiser Frauen, in Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklstern (Bonn and Essen: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und das Ruhrlandmuseum Essen, 2005), 10418. 7 See also Elizabeth Petroff, Medieval Womens Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 8 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
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Caroline Walker Bynum, Formen weiblicher Frmmigkeit im spteren Mittelalter, in Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklstern (Bonn and Essen: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und das Ruhrlandmuseum Essen, 2005), 11829. 10 Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 119, 123; Bynum,Formen weiblicher Frmmigkeit, 125. 11 Bynum,Formen weiblicher Frmmigkeit, 119. 12 For works that continue to stress the somatic aspects of female piety: Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Rosemary Drage Hale, Taste and See, for God is Sweet: Sensory Perception and Memory in Medieval Christian Mystical Experience, in Anne Clarke Bartlett et al. (eds.), Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lazario (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 3 14. Ulrike Wiethaus addresses the academic battles waged over the relative valuation of male versus female spirituality. Ulrike Wiethaus, Thieves and Carnivals: Gender in German Dominican Literature of the Fourteenth Century, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren (eds.), The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 20938. The opposition between female spirituality and official church doctrine is illustrated in the work of Herbert Grundmann, while a reevaluation of this dichotomy is presented in the works of Martina Wehrli-Johns and Batrice Acklin Zimmermann. Herbert Grundmann, Religise Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin: Verlag Dr. Emil Ebering, 1935), trans. Steven Rowan, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 201; Martina Wehrli-Johns, Voraussetzungen und Perspektiven mittelalterlicher Laienfrmmigkeit seit Innozenz III. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Herbert Grundmanns Religisen Bewegungen, Mitteilungen des Instituts fr sterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 104/34 (1996): 286309, esp. pp. 3078; Batrice Acklin Zimmermann, Gott im Denken berhren. Die theologischen Implikationen der Nonnenviten (Freiburg: Universittsverlag Freiburg, 1993). 13 Hale, Taste and See, 3 14; Hale, Imitatio Mariae: Motherhood Motifs in Devotional Memoirs, Mystics Quarterly, 16/4 (1990): 193 203; Ulinka Rublack, Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus in Late Medieval Dominican Convents, Gender and History, 6/1 (1994): 3757. 14 Joanna E. Ziegler,Reality as Imitation: The Role of Religious Imagery among the Beguines of the Low Countries, in Ulrike Wiethaus (ed.), Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experiences of Medieval Female Mystics (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 11226. Ziegler unfortunately espouses a rather simplistic view of the role of artwork in shaping and controlling female spirituality in this article. Rosemary Drage Hale developed the term mother mysticism to describe the devotional practices of the Dominican mystic, Margaretha Ebner. Hale,Imitatio Mariae, 193. 15 Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 187. 16 Ibid., 1914. 17 Felicity Riddy, Nunneries, Communities and the Revaluation of Domesticity, Gender and History, 12/3 (2000): 75562; Diana M. Webb, Woman and Home: The Domestic Setting of Late Medieval Spirituality, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds.), Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 15974; Katherine L. French,I Leave My Best Gown as a Vestment: Womens Spiritual Interests in the Late Medieval English Parish, Magistra: A Journal of Womens Spirituality in History, 4/1 (1998): 5777. 18 Hale, Taste and See ; Hale, Imitatio Mariae; Hale, Rocking the Cradle: Margareta Ebner (Be)Holds the Divine, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds.), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), 21140; Rublack, Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus, 3757; Ziegler,Reality as Imitation; Jeffrey Hamburger, Am Anfang war das Bild: Kunst und Frauenspiritualitt im Sptmittelalter, in Falk Eisermann, Eva Schlotheuber, and Volker Honemann (eds.), Studien und Texte zur Literarischen und Materiellen Kultur der Frauenklster im spten Mittelalter: Ergebnisse eines Arbeitsgesprchs in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbttel, 24.26. Februar 1999 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 144. 19 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 31113. Susan Marti has noted the discrepancy between the number of visions in which such Christkindl figure prominently and the relatively
few statues which survive. Susan Marti, Malen, Schreiben, und Beten: Die sptmittelalterliche Handschriftenproducktion im Doppelkloster Engelberg (Zurich: Zurich InterPublishers, 2002), 2534. 20 Rublack,Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus, 3753. 21 Elizabeth Vavra, Bildmotiv und Frauenmystik Funktion und Rezeption, in Peter Dinzelbacher et al. (eds.), Frauenmystik im Mittelalter (Ostfildern bei Stuttgart: Schwabenverlag, 1985), 20130; Jeffrey Hamburger and Robert Suckale, Zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits Die Kunst der geistlichen Frauen im Mittelalter, in Krone und Schleier, 35; Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1996). 22 Jeffrey Hamburger, A Liber Precum in Slestat and the Development of the Illustrated Prayer Book in Germany, Art Bulletin, 73 (1991): 209 36; Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary, 13; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists; Hamburger, Am Anfang war das Bild; Hamburger, Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript, Gesta, 31 (1992): 108 34; Hamburger, To Make Women Weep: Ugly Art as Feminine and the Origins of Modern Aesthetics, Res, 31 (1997): 933; Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 23 Bernadette Barrire, The Cistercian Convent of Coyroux in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Gesta, 31 (1992): 76 82; Caroline A. Bruzelius, Hearing is Believing: Clarissan Architecture, ca. 1213 1340, Gesta, 31 (1992): 83 91; Lorraine N. Simmons, The Abbey Church at Fontrevaud in the Later Twelfth Century: Anxiety, Authority and Architecture in the Female Spiritual Life, Gesta, 31 (1992): 99 107; Hamburger, Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium, 10834. 24 Roberta Gilchrist, Blessed Art Thou Among Women: The Archaeology of Female Piety, in P. J. P. Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worth Wight: Women in English Society c. 12001500 (Stroud, Alan Sutton, 1992), 212; Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1993). 25 Katherine Gill,Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples, in Craig A. Monson (ed.), The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 1548; Gabriela Signori, Wanderer Zwischen den Welten Besucher, Briefe, Vermchtnisse und Geschenke als Kommunikationsmedien im Austausch zwischen Kloster und Welt, in Krone und Schleier, 131 41; Carola Jggi and Uwe Lobbedey, Kirche und Klausur Zur Architektur mittelalterlicher Frauenklster, in Krone und Schleier, 88 103; Annette Kern-Sthler, Zur Klausur von Nonnen in englischen Frauenklstern des spten Mittelalters: Die Lincolner Visitation Returns 14291449, in Eisermann, Schlotheuber and Honemann (eds.), Studien und Texte zur Literarischen und Materiellen Kultur der Frauenklster im spten Mittelalter, 10318; Jane Tibbets Schulenburg,Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice, in Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (eds.), Womens Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 185206. 26 Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 13, 15; Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200 1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 11837. 27 Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 183, 13, 1619. 28 One of the few studies of urban religious architecture is Roberta Gilchrists Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism (London: Leicester University Press, 1995). 29 Hamburger has suggested that this visual culture perhaps provided nuns with compensation for the loss of personal possessions and the spatial restriction enjoined by enclosure. Hamburger and Suckale, Zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits, 34; Newman, Die visionren Texte und visuellen Welten religiser Frauen, 114. 30 Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary; K. Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 13501500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 148. 31 Newman,Die visionren Texte und visuellen Welten religiser Frauen, 114. 32 Hamburger, Liber Precum, 234; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 137, 175; Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary; Hamburger, St. John the Divine. 33 Hamburger and Suckale, Zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits, 29; Mary Frances Smith, Robin Fleming, and Patricia Halpin,Court and Piety in Late Anglo-Saxon England, Catholic Historical Review, 87/4 (2001): 591; June Hall McCash (ed.), The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (eds.), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 34 Hamburger and Suckale,Zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits, 2139; Hamburger,Liber Precum, 20934; Hamburger, Am Anfang war das Bild, 144; Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles. Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 35 Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary, 93, 104, 148, 320; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 21417; Newman, Die visionren Texte und visuellen Welten religiser Frauen, 106 7; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 90. 36 Hamburger, Art, Enclosure, and the Cura Monialium, 126; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 10, 46, 137, 158, 220; D. Rigaux,The Franciscan Tertiaries at the Convent of SantAnna at Foligno, Gesta, 31 (1992): 927. 37 Hamburger,Liber Precum, 234; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 137, 175; Sandra Penketh,Women and Books of Hours, in Taylor and Smith (eds.), Women and the Book, 274. 38 Johannes Meyer, mterbuch, quoted in Jane L. Carroll, Woven Devotions: Reform and Piety in Tapestries by Dominican Nuns, in Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart (eds.), Saints, Sinners and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Hants: Ashgate, 2003), 186. 39 Among the convents of the Lneburg heath in Lower Saxony, the convent of Lne fashioned large-scale embroideries depicting the lives of saints and Jesus, while the nuns of Ebstorf produced new liturgical manuscripts to replace those judged unacceptable by the reformers. Angela Lorenz-Leber, Kloster Lne (Knigstein im Taunus: Verlag Langewiesche, 1991); Horst Appuhn, Bildstickereien des Mittelalters in Kloster Lne (Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation, 1983); Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Penn State Press, 2004). 40 Jane L. Carroll,Woven Devotions, 182201; see also Hamburger, Nuns as Artists. 41 Jeryldene Wood, Women,Art, and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 42 Verena Kessel, Frauen als Auftraggeberinnen von illuminierten liturgischen Handschriften, in Teresa Berger and Albert Gerhards (eds.), Liturgie und Frauenfrage: Ein Beitrag zur Frauenforschung aus liturgiewissenschaftlicher Sicht (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag Erzabtei St. Ottilien, 1990), 195 209; Alison Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 43 Illustrations elevating the ideals of purity, humility, and obedience, virtues particularly associated with the female sex, appear prominently in illuminated Psalters and books of hours owned by women. Penketh,Women and Books of Hours, 26681. 44 Queen Isabella, wife of Edward II and mother of Edward III, is the most likely candidate for ownership of the work. She was also active in commissioning books. Anne Rudolff Stanton, From Eve to Bathsheba and Beyond: Motherhood in the Queen Mary Psalter, in Taylor and Smith (eds.), Women and the Book, 17289. 45 Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles. 46 Newman, Die visionren Texte und visuellen Welten religiser Frauen, 106;Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles; Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, A Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns: St. Catherines Convent, Nuremberg, in Taylor and Smith (eds.), Women and the Book, 124; Wiethaus, Thieves and Carnivals, 209 11; Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women; K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 47 David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995); Hans-Jochen Schiewer,Literarisches Leben in dominikanischen Frauenklstern des 14. Jahrhunderts: Das Modell St. Katharinental bei Diessenhofen, in Studien und Texte zur Literarischen und Materiellen Kultur der Frauenklster im spten Mittelalter, 285310. 48 Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 169238; Eva Schlotheuber,Ebstorf und seine Schlerinnen in der zweiten Hlfte des 15. Jahrhunderts, in Eisermann, Schlotheuber, and Honemann (eds.), Studien und Texte zur Literarischen und Materiellen Kultur der Frauenklster im spten Mittelalter, 169222. 49 Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 21623;Wiethaus,Thieves and Carvinals, 211. 50 Bynum,Formen weiblicher Frmmigkeit, 128. 51 Wiethaus,Thieves and Carvinals, 214.
52 53
Ibid., 216. Zimmermann, Gott im Denken berhren, 227, 427, 612, 116, 149. 54 Ibid., 1113, 167 8; Wehrli-Johns, Voraussetzungen und perspektiven mittelalterlicher Laienfrommigkeit, 3078. I am endebted to Anneke Mulder-Bakker for noting these references. On the Sister-books see also Lewis, By Women, For Women,About Women; Susanne Brkle, Literatur im Kloster. Historische Funktion und rhetorische Legitimation frauenmystischer Texte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Tbingen: Francke Verlag, 1999). 55 Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 213. 56 June L. Mecham, Reading Between the Lines: Compilation,Variation, and the Recovery of an Authentic Female Voice in the Dornenkron Prayer Books from Wienhausen, Journal of Medieval History, 29 (2003): 109 28; Astrid Breith, Daz ist nit von worheit beweret und hat grundes nit in der geschrifft Corrections, Adjustments and Marginalia in Late Medieval Lichtenthal Manuscripts, paper presented at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds ( July 13, 2005); Ulla Bucarey, . . . das nyman kuscheit mag verlieren wider willen: The Power of Virginity in 15th century Hagiographic Texts in the Nunnery of Lichtenthal, paper presented at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds ( July 13, 2005); Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 1768, 230. 57 Bucarey,The Power of Virginity;Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 1768. 58 Mecham,Reading Between the Lines, 10928. 59 Judith Oliver,Worship of the Word: Some Gothic Nonnenbcher in their Devotional Context, in Taylor and Smith (eds.), Women and the Book, 109. 60 Ibid., 11116. 61 Ibid.; Hamburger, Nuns As Artists, 317. 62 Ehrenschwendtner, Library Collected by and for the Use of Nuns, 128; Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 184. 63 Kate Matthews, Textual Spaces/Playing Places: An Exploration of Convent Drama in the Abbey of Origny-Sainte-Benote, European Medieval Drama: Papers from the Seventh International Conference on European Medieval Drama, 7 (2003): 74 5, 78 9; Ulla Haastrup, Medieval Props in the Liturgical Drama, Hafia: Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art, 11 (1987): 13370. 64 Ursula Hennig, Die Beteiligung von Frauen an lateinischen Osterfeiern, in Carola L. Gottzmann, Herbert Kolb, and Roswitha Wisniewski (eds.), Geist und Zeit: Wirkungen des Mittelalters in Literatur und Sprache. Festschrift fr Roswitha Wisniewski zu ihrem 65. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 1991), 212; Gisela Muschiol, Zeit und Raum Liturgie und Ritus in mittelalterlichen Frauenkonventen, in Krone und Schleier, 50. 65 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); Matthews,Textual Spaces/Playing Places, 69. 66 Matthews, Textual Spaces/Playing Places, 76; June L. Mecham, Sacred Vision, Sacred Voice: Performative Piety and Female Monastic Devotion in Late Medieval Germany (in preparation). 67 Hennig,Die Beteiligung von Frauen an lateinischen Osterfeiern, 21127. 68 Peter Dronke (trans. and ed.), Nine Medieval Latin Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1525. 69 Elissa Weaver, The Convent Wall in Tuscan Convent Drama, in Monson (ed.), Crannied Wall, 73 86; Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); E. Arenal and S. Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Works, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). 70 Matthews,Textual Spaces/Playing Places, 73. 71 Oxford, University College Ms 169, Ordinarium Berkingense saec. xv, 119 121, transcribed in Karl Young, Dramatic Associations of the Easter Sepulcher, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 10 (1920): 130; Anne Bagnall Yardley, Was Anonymous a Woman? in Martha Furman Schleifer and Sylvia Glickman (eds.), Women Composers Through the Ages (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), vol. 1, 69 71; Carolyn Muessig, Prophesy and Song: Teaching and Preaching by Medieval Women, in Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (eds.), Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14658. 72 Matthews,Textual Spaces/Playing Places, 712. 73 Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 16.
74
Young, Dramatic Associations of the Easter Sepulcher, 130; Matthews, Textual Spaces/Playing Places, 79, 84. 75 Muessig,Prophesy and Song, 14658. 76 Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 1617. 77 Patrick Macey,Infiamma il mio cor: Savonarolan Laude by and for Dominican Nuns in Tuscany, in Monson (ed.), Crannied Wall, 16189. 78 Smith,Court and Piety in Late Anglo-Saxon England, 588. 79 Ibid.; French, Womens Spiritual Interests; Gill, Open Monasteries for Women, 21, 31; Carolyn Valone, Roman Matrons as Patrons: Various Views of the Cloister Wall, in Monson (ed.), Crannied Wall, 4972. 80 Gill,Open Monasteries for Women, 31. 81 Smith, Court and Piety in late Anglo-Saxon England, 592 3; Renate Kroos, Niederschsische Bildstickereien des Mittelalters (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag fr Kunstwissenschaft, 1970), 1601. 82 Mary Frances Smith, Robin Fleming, and Patricia Halpin note the commonalities between the religious activities of noble men and women as well as high-ranking prelates in late Anglo-Saxon England in terms of providing rich, high-status donations to religious establishments. Smith,Court and Piety, 600. Gender differences in donations are noted by French and Kamerick for the later Middle Ages. French, Womens Spiritual Interests, 57 77; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 87. 83 French, Womens Spiritual Interests, 69; Smith, Court and Piety in late Anglo-Saxon England, 5946; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 102, 118. 84 Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 86; French,Womens Spiritual Interests; Ziegler,Reality as Imitation, 122, 125; June L. Mecham,The Vice of Proprietas: Gender, Status and Personal Wealth at the Convent of Wienhausen (in preparation). 85 Smith,Court and Piety in late Anglo-Saxon England, 590. 86 Max Hasse, Kleinbildwerke in deutschen und skandinavischen Testamenten des 14., 15., und frhen 16. Jahrhunderts, Niederdeutsche Beitrge zur Kunstgeschichte, 20 (1981): 614. 87 French, Womens Spiritual Interests, 70 2; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 101. 88 French,Womens Spiritual Interests, 5877. 89 Smith,Court and Piety in late Anglo-Saxon England, 588, 594. 90 Ibid., 596. 91 Kate Lowe, Womens Work at the Benedictine Convent of Le Murate in Florence: Suora Battista Carduccis Roman Missal of 1509, in Taylor and Smith (eds.), Women and the Book, 142. 92 Hamburger,Art, Enclosure, and the Cura Monialium, 120. 93 Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual, 311. 94 For book ownership among lay women, see among others: Taylor and Smith, Women and the Book; for book ownership among nuns, see among others: Marti, Malen, Schreiben, und Beten, 259; Hamburger, Art, Enclosure, and the Cura Monialium, 119; Bell, What Nuns Read; Schiewer, Literarisches Leben, 285 310; Marius Winzeler, Die Bibliothek der Zisterzienserinnenabtei St. Marienstern. Zu Geschichte und Bestand einer frauenklsterlichen Bchersammlung des Mittelalters, in Eisermann, Schlotheuber, and Honemann (eds.), Studien und Texte zur literarischen und materiellen Kultur der Frauenklster, 33156. 95 Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles, 184; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 183 6; Hasse, Kleinbildwerke in deutschen und skandinavischen Testamenten, 60 72; Signori, Wanderer Zwischen den Welten, 1359. 96 Corine Schleif,Men on the Right Women on the Left: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places, in Raguin and Stanbury (eds.), Womens Space, 2367. 97 Hamburger,Am Anfang war das Bild, 19; Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary, 18; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 1836. 98 For example: Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ralph Hanna III, Some Norfolk Women and Their Books, ca. 13901440, in McCash (ed.), Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, 288 305; Carolyne Larrington, The Candlemass Vision and Marie dOignies Role in its Dissemination, in Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Brown (eds.), New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Lige and Their Impact (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 195214; Mecham, Sacred Vision, Sacred Voice.
99
Denis Renevey, Margerys Performing Body: The Translation of Late Medieval Discursive Religious Practices, in Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (eds.), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 197216. 100 Carol M. Meale, This is a Deed Bok, the Tother a Quick: Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in the Book of Margery Kempe, in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (ed.), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, Essays for Felicity Riddy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 64; Catherine Sanok, Performing Feminine Sanctity in Late Medieval England: Parish Guilds Plays and the Second Nuns Tale, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32/2 (2002): 269303. 101 Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 1949. 102 Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Zeigler (eds.), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999); Wiethaus, Thieves and Carnivals, 225. 103 Bynum, Formen weiblicher Frmmigkeit, 119 20. See also Zimmerman, Gott im Denken berhren; Brkle, Literatur im Kloster. 104 Bynum,Formen weiblicher Frmmigkeit, 121. 105 Catherine M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Ralph Hanna III raised similar issues in his article on Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Hanna, Some Norfolk Women and Their Books, 288 305. 106 Mooney, Voice, Gender, and the Portrayal of Sanctity, in Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices, 115. 107 Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary, 383. 108 Wiethaus,Thieves and Carnivals, 21819. 109 Ibid., 216. 110 Hamburger,Liber Precum, 232. 111 Newman,Die visionren Texte und visuellen Welten religiser Frauen, 107. 112 Rigaux,Franciscan Tertiaries at the convent of SantAnna at Foligno, 923. 113 Ibid. 114 Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual, 327; Rublack, Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus, 37. 115 Hale,Imitatio Mariae, 193203. Hale notes that some male mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse, and Johannes Tauler, also drew upon these culturally fixed values and metaphors. All three men were intimately acquainted with female mystics and perhaps inspired by them. Hale,Taste and See, 314. 116 Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 21718. 117 Ibid., 216, 219; Hamburger,To Make Women Weep, 32. 118 Ziegler,Reality as Imitation, 11314, 121. 119 Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 90. 120 Margaret Miles went so far as to assert that medieval women had no autonomy or agency in either the making or reading of images. M. R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). However, the research of Jeffrey Hamburger clearly has demonstrated womens role in the creation, use, and interpretation of images, while still acknowledging the constraints of the cura monialium. Hamburger, To Make Women Weep, 301; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 218, 221. 121 Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 218 19, 221; Newman, Die visionren Texte und visuellen Welten religiser Frauen, 107, 114. 122 Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 217; Hamburger,To Make Women Weep, 933; Robert Scribner, Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation Germany, Journal of Religious History, 15 (1989): 44869. 123 Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 213; Marti, Malen, Schreiben, und Beten, 247; Jan Gerchow and Susan Marti, Nonnenmalereien, Versorgungsanstalten, und Frauenbewegungen Bausteine einer Rezeptionsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Religiosen in der Moderne, in Krone und Schleier, 14354. 124 Hamburger, To Make Women Weep, 18; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 3; Marti, Malen, Schreiben, und Beten, 247.
125
The works of Jeffrey Hamburger admirably explore the sophisticated intellectual and theological principles that guided womens creation and use of devotional artwork. Hamburger and Suckale, Diesseits und Jenseits, 37; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 217; Hamburger, Visual and Visionary. 126 Hamburger,To Make Women Weep, 1822. 127 Marti, Malen, Schreiben, und Beten, 2512; Oliver, Worship of the Word, 116; Carroll, Woven Devotions, 190. 128 Marti, Malen, Schreiben, und Beten, 256. 129 The work of Katherine French and Kathleen Kamerick are representative for the late medieval period. Both trends are reflected in Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women. 130 Penny Galloway, Neither Miraculous nor Astonishing: The Devotional Practice of Beguine Communities in French Flanders, in Dor, Johnson, and Wogan-Brown (eds.), New Trends in Feminine Spirituality, 10727; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 190; Mecham, Sacred Vision, Sacred Voice. 131 Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 190. Michael Camille cautions against this desire to read images as texts, arguing that it oversimplifies images. Michael Camille, Art History in the Past and Future of Medieval Studies, in John Van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1994), 36282.
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History Compass 4/3 (2006): 448480, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00325.

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