Katie Bugyis

In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice-liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.

In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice--liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.

There is an enduring debate among historians of monasticism in England during the central Middle Ages that concerns the extent to which the efforts undertaken in the second half of the tenth century by King Edgar, Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury, Archbishop Oswald of York, and Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester to reform houses of monks and nuns according to the dictates of the Benedictine Rule succeeded in regularizing their practices. Resolving this debate in the case of women’s communities is challenged by the scarce survival of their documents of practice, especially the books they produced and used to perform their liturgies. Only one psalter and one prayerbook traceable to women’s communities and datable to the time of or generation after the reforms are still extant: Salisbury Cathedral Manuscript, MS 150 and London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba A.xiv. The latter book is an ad hoc compilation of over a hundred texts, both in Latin and in Old English, including prayers, hymns, litanies, biblical florilegia, computus texts, and medical recipes, which were copied piecemeal in the early eleventh century at Leominster in Herefordshire by at least twelve scribes into what was initially a blank book, likely for pedagogical purposes. This prayerbook presents a unique witness to the liturgical practices and scribal habits of the women religious of Leominster, revealing the degree to which they adhered to, deviated from, or adapted the norms the reformers decreed.

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In the late eleventh century, the itinerant Flemish Benedictine monk, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, assembled a dossier of Latin saints’ Lives, liturgical texts, and chronicled events for the community of Benedictine nuns at Barking Abbey in Essex, England, at the behest of the reigning abbess, Ælfgifu. This dossier is the most significant and extensive collection of original texts written for a community of religious women in England during the Middle Ages. It definitely included a Life of Æthelburh, Barking’s late seventh-century founder and first abbess; a set of Matins Lessons for her successor, Hildelith; a Life of Wulfhild, the late tenth-century abbess; a set of Matins Lessons and a longer account of Ælfgifu’s first Translation of the three saints’ relics; and a report of a vision that Ælfgifu received seven years after the first Translation, authorizing a second Translation of the saints’ relics into the new abbey church. Only three manuscripts—Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 176 (E.5.28); Cardiff, Public Library, MS 1.381; and Gotha, Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek, MS Memb. I.81—still preserve Goscelin’s dossier of texts for Barking. Through paleographical, codicological, and textual analysis of these manuscripts, this article addresses questions concerning the (re)productions and uses of Goscelin’s dossier, giving special consideration to the following features: the four concluding chapters of the Life of St. Æthelburh missing from all three manuscripts, the identification of the scribal hands in TCD 176 and Cardiff 1.381, the booklet structure of these two manuscripts, and their textual variants. Studying these features of the manuscripts in detail has significant implications for tracing the provenances of TCD 176 and Cardiff 1.381 back to Barking, establishing their textual relationship, recovering their communal and liturgical uses in and outside of the abbey, and possibly even identifying Goscelin’s own scribal hand at work in TCD 176.

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After the death of their founder and first prioress, Lucy (d. ca. 1225-30), the members of her community at Castle Hedingham, Essex, circulated a mortuary roll to memorialize and request prayers for their beloved leader from religious houses in their confraternity. Opening the mortuary roll is a frontispiece with three scenes featuring the priory's patron saints, the ascent of Lucy's soul to heaven, and her funeral, with her body lying in a bier, surrounded by the presiding priest, clerics, and her fellow sisters. This tribute to Lucy is the earliest extant illustrated mortuary roll and contains one of the few artistic representations of vowed religious women from medieval England engaged liturgically, but it has yet to receive scholarly attention as a liturgical artifact. This article examines Lucy's mortuary roll alongside contemporary rituals for the dead in order to recover the liturgical activities performed by the members of Lucy's community and others to care for her soul at her funeral, after her burial, and on the anniversary of her death. Viewed through these rituals, Lucy's mortuary roll is rightly seen as both a reminder and a repository of the spiritual benefits her sisters at Castle Hedingham believed she needed to gain heaven.

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Sometime in the last two decades of the eleventh century, the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c. 1035–d. after 1114) assembled a dossier of Latin saints’ Lives, Translations, Matins Lessons, and chronicled events for the Benedictine nuns at Barking Abbey in Essex, England, at the behest of their abbess Ælfgifu (c. 1047–c. 1114) to memorialize the community’s three most treasured saints: Barking’s founder and first abbess, Æthelburh (d. after 686); her immediate successor, Hildelith (d. after 716); and her later successor, Wulfhild (d. after 996). Ælfgifu’s request was, in large part, occasioned by the major building project that she had undertaken to raze the abbey’s old church and to construct a new one. Her project necessitated the translation of the three abbess-saints to temporary resting places until the new church was completed. The aim of this article is to determine when this translation most likely occurred on the basis of the available evidence internal and external to Goscelin’s dossier. Establishing these dates is essential to efforts being made by scholars to reconstruct Goscelin’s hagiographical career with greater precision and to give due recognition to the extraordinary achievements of Ælfgifu’s abbacy.

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By the end of the twelfth century, Matilda de Bailleul, abbess of the community of Benedictine nuns at Wherwell Abbey in Hampshire, England (c.1174–1212), had acquired a finely decorated psalter for her personal use. This book, now Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS C.18 (68), is one of the few enduring artifacts of the “welcome increase” in Wherwell’s possession of properties, revenues, buildings, books, and other ecclesiastical ornaments that Matilda’s abbacy was said to have effected. It bears telling signs of her ownership—entries of several of her relatives’ obits in the opening calendar and additions of prayers tailored for an abbess’s use—as well as the marks of its subsequent owners, her abbatial successors, over the course of the thirteenth century. A majority of scholars of the psalter are in agreement that an artist and two scribes sometimes affiliated with, but likely not members of, St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire were responsible for the book’s initial production, but their consensus divides over the questions of who originally commissioned and owned it, and how it then came into Matilda’s possession. This article answers both questions by examining features of the psalter that were integral to its intended use, but have yet to be explained adequately, in connection with the documentary and narrative sources attesting to the lives of Matilda and her relatives. It makes a case for identifying Matilda’s maternal uncle, Osto de Saint-Omer (d. c.1174), a Templar based first in Flanders, then in England, as the psalter’s patron and first owner.

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In 1404, Sibyl de Felton, the abbess of Barking Abbey (1394-1419), requested the production of an ordinal for the convent’s use. This ordinal, now Oxford, University College, MS 169, details the masses and hours of the Divine Office that were to be celebrated throughout the entire year. It negotiates the coincidence of multiple feasts on a given day; provides incipits to chants, prayers, and readings; assigns roles to specific monastic officers, other members of the convent, and attendant clergy; and, supplies performative cues for the intonation of chants and for the staging of processions and liturgical dramas. Among the most surprising of the ordinal’s directives is its identification of the women playing the three Marys in the Visitatio Sepulchri, the drama that was to be performed at Matins on Easter Sunday, as sacerdotes. This essay determines whether this identification was the result of scribal error or the express instruction of the ordinal’s patron and principal users – Sibyl de Felton and her consorors at Barking. Close analysis of the chants sung, postures and positions assumed, vestments worn, and objects handled and mediated by the Marys – especially when compared with those scripted in Visitationes from other communities of women religious – will demonstrate that the identification of the women as sacerdotes offers the most fitting characterization of their performance, for they, not the attendant clergy playing Christ’s disciples, were to channel priestly authority.

The authorship of the Life of the twelfth-century English holy woman, Christina of Markyate (c. 1096–after 1155), has inspired considerable scholarly speculation. Though the writer never once positively identifies himself in extant versions of the text, oblique references locate his activity at the Benedictine monastery of St Albans in Hertfordshire during the 1130s under the patronage of the reigning abbot, Geoffrey de Gorron (1119–46), and intimate the close connections he enjoyed with his narrative’s subjects. Building off of these references, and incorporating clues from related sources from St Albans and Markyate, this article reconstructs the likeliest candidate for the writer—Robert de Gorron (d. 1166), Geoffrey’s nephew, appointed sacristan and later abbatial successor—and assesses his eligibility.

Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.

This essay presents detailed portraits of two monastic officers—cantors and sacristans—who, though indispensable to the production and direction of their communities’ liturgies, have received scant scholarly attention. It identifies women religious known to have held these offices and investigates the various ways they created, preserved, and passed on their communities’ memoria through the copying of liturgical books, the writing and preservation of charters and other documents, the maintenance of necrologies and mortuary rolls, the creation of texts and music for the Divine Office and Mass, the ornamentation of sacred spaces, the production of saints’ lives and miracle collections, the custody of relics, and the proper observance of the liturgical calendar and hours of prayer. Highlighting the various roles and responsibilities assumed by these officers is essential because they, along with their abbesses and prioresses, are the stars of the history that my larger book project, In Persona Christi: Benedictine Women's Ministries in England, 900-1225, relates.

Note: Only an excerpt of the essay is attached here. Please check out the edited volume, Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800-1500, for the complete text.

This article identifies, details, and contextualizes three stages in the development of the consecration rites for abbesses and abbots in liturgical books produced for bishops in England from 900 to 1200. It shows how these rites, through the prayers recited, insignia bestowed, chants sung, and bodily gestures performed, sought to articulate and impress the normative ideals of monastic leadership on those who were elected to exercise it, and how liturgists variously altered these rites in response to changing ecclesiastical pressures. Most significantly, for much of the late Anglo-Saxon period, the consecration rites for abbesses and abbots were the same, but, over the course of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the rites were split along gender lines with the dissemination, adoption, and adaptation of the ordines found in episcopal books affiliated with the tradition commonly identified by scholars as the Pontifical Romano-Germanique. In sharp contrast to their predecessors, the new rites envisioned dramatically different spiritual and temporal authorities for abbesses and abbots, clearly subordinating the former’s office to the latter’s by thoroughly feminizing its exemplary form. Yet, as close study of the material remains from communities of women religious during this period reveals, the consecration rite for abbesses was limited in its effect on how they actually fashioned and displayed their own authorities.

Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.

A different history of the liturgical ministries that Benedictine women religious performed in central medieval England can be told, one that challenges previous 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 rendering women completely dependent on the sacramental ministrations of male clerics. Study of the surviving documents of practice from communities of women religious in England that flourished during the central Middle Ages, especially liturgical manuscripts, reveals a different history: women religious continued to perform many of the ministerial acts cited in earlier Anglo-Saxon sources well into the twelfth century, even those acts that came to be defined strictly as sacraments. To demonstrate the persistence of such acts, this article focuses on one liturgical site: the practice of penance. It examines the prayers scripted both for female confessors and for female and male penitents found in prayerbooks and psalters produced from the ninth through the twelfth centuries. These texts suggest that, far from being pushed to the margins of their houses’ ministerial activities by resident or visiting clerics, women religious continued to exercise primary control of and agency in the confessional roles directing their communities. But only by reviewing their practice of penance through their own manuscripts can these women be fully restored to the ministries that they once performed.

Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.

Building upon the efforts made by scholars over the past twenty years to enrich our understanding of the vibrancy and sophistication of literary cultures fostered within English communities of women religious during the central Middle Ages, this article offers evidence of these women keeping their communities’ histories and preserving their saints’ cults through their own writing. This evidence is uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the post-mortem miracula of the late Anglo-Saxon saint, Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the vita et translatio Edithe composed by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107) circa 1080 and the early fifteenth-century Middle English Wilton Chronicle. This analysis not only confirms that the Wilton women provided the necessary patronage and oral and written reports for the authoring of their saint’s life and miracles, but also discloses the very histories that these women first recorded.

This article examines the Life of a twelfth-century English holy woman, Christina of Markyate – particularly its account of a vision that she had in which she was crowned in the likeness of a bishop’s miter – within the context of campaigns undertaken by English monasteries in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to obtain the papal privilege of full exemption from the sacramental and juridical control of their diocesan bishop. Reading Christina’s vision in view of the bids for independence made by St. Albans – the community responsible for commissioning and writing her Life – especially helps to shed light on why the Life seems to figure her in a distinctly episcopal cast. Significantly, the Life’s account of this vision may have been shaped by a miniature cycle of the passion and miracles of St. Edmund, produced by Bury c. 1125, seemingly in an effort to provide further confirmation of the abbey’s exempt status. In a miniature depicting Edmund’s apotheosis, the saint divinely receives a miter-like crown, which is nearly identical in its ornamentation to the one that Christina would later receive. Ultimately under investigation in this article is whether St. Albans’ campaign for exemption was one of the influences dictating the composition of Christina’s Life.

Julian of Norwich (d. after 1416) was a widely respected and sought-out English thinker and spiritual counsellor. She lived as an anchorite, enclosed in a cell attached to a church in Norwich, Julian’s Showings are a book of spiritual visions that emerged from her life of prayer and that wrestle with the profound theological mysteries of fitting evil and suffering with God’s mercy and love. Professor Katie Bugyis will examine Julian’s thought in the context of her vocation of enclosed prayer as part of the Lumen Christi Institute's Spring Webinar Series on "Reason and Wisdom in Medieval Christian Thought".

By the end of the twelfth century, Matilda de Bailleul, abbess of the community of Benedictine nuns at Wherwell Abbey in Hampshire, England (c.1174–1212), had acquired a finely decorated psalter for her personal use. This book, now Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS C.18 (68), is one of the few enduring artifacts of the “welcome increase” in Wherwell’s possession of properties, revenues, buildings, books, and other ecclesiastical ornaments that Matilda’s abbacy was said to have effected. It bears telling signs of her ownership—entries of several of her relatives’ obits in the opening calendar and additions of prayers tailored for an abbess’s use—as well as the marks of its subsequent owners, her abbatial successors, over the course of the thirteenth century. A majority of scholars of the psalter are in agreement that an artist and two scribes sometimes affiliated with, but likely not members of, St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire were responsible for the book’s initial production, but their consensus divides over the questions of who originally commissioned and owned it, and how it then came into Matilda’s possession. This article answers both questions by examining features of the psalter that were integral to its intended use, but have yet to be explained adequately, in connection with the documentary and narrative sources attesting to the lives of Matilda and her relatives. It makes a case for identifying Matilda’s maternal uncle, Osto de Saint-Omer (d. c.1174), a Templar based first in Flanders, then in England, as the psalter’s patron and first owner.

This talk was delivered to the Harvard Medieval English Colloquium on Thursday, April 25, 2019. It is based on the second chapter of my book, The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages, which was published by Oxford University Press on May 1, 2019: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-care-of-nuns-9780190851286?cc=us&lang=en&. It examines the maternal images that suffuse the sources relating the histories of abbesses and prioresses of Benedictine communities in England during the central Middle Ages. Saints’ lives, translation accounts, miracle collections, letters, and mortuary rolls all favor the epithet of mater for these officers, thus associating a woman’s capacity to bring forth fruit—biologically or spiritually—and her fitness for monastic leadership. Such associations were naturalized, given a woman’s presumed fertility, and they offered the perfect complement to the paternal imagery used to characterize abbots and priors. Many of a monastic leader’s roles and responsibilities closely resembled those of a parent: receiving and raising children, providing for their needs (shelter, food, clothing, and bedding), protecting them from physical dangers and spiritual temptations, educating them in the faith, equipping them with various skills, disciplining them, tending to their illnesses, mourning their deaths, and praying for their salvation. According to the literature regulating monastic practice—the Benedictine Rule and customaries, such as the Regularis Concordia, which was applied to all religious communities in England in around 970—the roles and responsibilities incumbent on monastic leaders were essentially the same for men and women, but abbesses’ and prioresses’ performances of their offices were most often figured as maternal in both male- and female-authored sources. None of these sources played with the paternal etymology of abbatissa—female father. When an abbess’s or prioress’s gender was troubled—and it sometimes was, as this paper shows—other non-parental imagery and epithets were invoked.

An enduring claim in the historiography of medieval monasticism is that the intercessory prayers offered by communities of nuns depreciated in value over the course of the central Middle Ages because, unlike their male counterparts, they were unable to offer Masses, the spiritual benefit increasingly desired by benefactors in return for their material investments, without the assistance of resident chaplains or visiting priests—an expense many women’s communities could ill afford on a consistent basis. Yet such assessments of the social, economic, and spiritual positions of women’s communities are rarely substantiated with adequate historical evidence, but encouraged instead by modern assumptions about the past, especially the place of religious women in it, as Erin Jordan has shown in her study of the documentary records from Cistercian abbeys founded in the counties of Flanders and Hainaut in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This paper seeks to further Jordan’s conclusions by comparatively analyzing the economies of intercession developed during the same time period by religious communities in Oxfordshire, namely Godstow Abbey (Benedictine nuns), Eynsham Abbey (Benedictine monks), Oseney Abbey (Augustinian canons), St. Frideswide’s Priory (Augustinian canons), Thame Abbey (Cistercian monks), and Cowley Preceptory (Templars). This analysis assesses both the impact of a religious community’s gender on the rate and type of spiritual benefits sought by donors through their material benefaction, and the effect of a donor’s gender, marital status, and familial entanglements on her/his religious patronage, in order to determine whether the Godstow nuns’ prayers were indeed valued less than those of their neighbors.

On February 20, 2019, as the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, I gave a public lecture that offers detailed analyses of three manuscripts that continually prove to be rich sites of evidence for my research, but have received surprisingly little attention from other scholars. All of these manuscripts were owned by communities of Benedictine nuns in medieval England, and, as I demonstrate, they all feature the handiwork of female scribes in their initial production and/or subsequent adaptation, even though they variously date to the eleventh and twelfth centuries—the very upper limit of the temporal span that scholars have determined to be the most difficult for identifying nuns serving as scribes. Thus, in focusing my lecture on these manuscripts, I highlight my own contributions to the growing body of evidence advancing medieval nuns’ literacies, particularly their ability to work as copyists, correctors, and even composers of texts.

My lecture was recorded and can be viewed at the following site: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/video/liturgy-matters-katie-bugyis.

Sometime before 1410, Nicholas Love (d. 1423/4), the first prior of the Carthusian Charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, began composing a full-scale English prose translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi. The fruits of his labors, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, became one of the best known and most widely copied vernacular translations of the Meditationes. This paper seeks to comprehend Love’s conception of the soul and the process of self-examination and -transformation that he scripted for readers of and meditators on his Mirror, highlighting the virtues in Christ’s life that he deemed constitutive of “good living” and, therefore, worthy of imitation. Of particular interest are the excisions and additions Love made to his Latin source-text and what these editorial interventions potentially reveal about his intended readership and their presumed capacities for meditation.

This lecture was delivered at the National Catholic Sisters Project Curriculum Workshop held at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX, June 11-13, 2018. It acquainted the attendees of the workshop, mainly primary and secondary school teachers and catechists, to the nearly 2,000-year history of women religious in the Christian tradition. Its central aim was to dispel the most enduring misconceptions about women religious: that they all were, and still are, forcibly professed, strictly cloistered, wildly rebellious, intellectually inferior, and spiritually dependent. The PowerPoint and video of my lecture will be made available through the National Catholic Sisters Project Curriculum.

By the end of the twelfth century, Matilda de Bailleul, abbess of Wherwell Abbey in Hampshire, England (c. 1174-1212), had acquired a finely decorated psalter for her personal use, now Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS C.18 (68). The book still bears signs of her ownership—entries of her relatives’ obits in the opening calendar and additions of prayers tailored for an abbess—and the marks of its subsequent owners, her abbatial successors, over the course of the thirteenth century. Scholars of the psalter are in agreement that an artist and two scribes affiliated with, but likely not members of, St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire were responsible for the psalter’s initial production. But their consensus divides over the questions of who originally commissioned and owned the psalter, and how the book then came into Matilda’s possession. This seminar presentation will answer both questions, drawing on liturgical evidence internal to the psalter itself and on charters and narrative sources attesting to the lives of Matilda and her relatives. Ultimately this presentation will make a case for identifying Matilda’s maternal uncle, Osto of Saint-Omer (d. c. 1174), a Templar based first in Flanders, then in England, as the psalter’s original recipient.

On August 19, 2013, a little over five months after his election to the papacy, Pope Francis granted an interview to La Civiltà Cattolica. During the interview, he was posed many questions, rainging from the personal to the theological, but the one that went viral concerned his views about women in the life of the Catholic Church. Francis admitted that women were " asking deep questions that must be answered, " and stressed that we needed to " investigate further the role of women in the church. " Though he did not elaborate on what the nature of this investigation should be, in the spirit of genuine Catholic inquiry, he would undoubtedly agree that it should entail both a renewed study of the scriptural witnesses to women's ministries during and after the life of Christ and a recovery of historical, theological, and liturgical sources from the early and medieval church. It is with this latter task of recovery that my research engages: unveiling the ministries of Benedictine women religious in England during the central Middle Ages (900–1200). For this period, I have found evidence of Benedictine women religious performing a rich variety of pastoral and liturgical ministries: consecrating new members, proclaiming the gospel, preaching sermons, hearing confessions, anointing the sick, extending hospitality to visitors, administering the Eucharist, interceding in prayer for others, and burying the dead. But in my lecture in celebration of Women's History Month and National Catholic Sisters Week at the University of the Incarnate Word, I will focus my remarks on what arguably was and still is the most controversial ministry Benedictine women religious performed: hearing the confessions of fellow community members and visiting laity and pronouncing absolution over them. My investigation will be rooted in the prayers of confession composed and copied by Benedictine women religious, preserved in the manuscripts of prayerbooks and psalters that survive from their communities, but it will also draw on saints' lives and other narrative sources to illustrate the potential uses and users of these prayers. So rooted and illustrated, my investigation will show that Benedictine women religious in England maintained primary control over their practice of penance throughout the central Middle Ages, exercising the power to bind and loose sins without the mediation of resident chaplains or visiting priests. Ultimately, it is my great hope that my lecture will inspire current and future scholars to study the well-worn, neglected, and yet-to-be-discovered sources witnessing to the lives of past and present women religious, because all of these sources speak a history that must be told.

Significant efforts have been undertaken in the past twenty years to recover the literacies of medieval women religious—from hearing, reading, and comprehending texts, to copying and composing them in Latin and other European vernaculars. Efforts like the Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe Dialogues in Hull, Antwerp, and Kansas City have radically revised received narratives about the intellectual capacities and creative productions of medieval nuns, but more work still needs to be done to challenge the claim that medieval women religious were incapable of composing their own texts, keeping their communities’ histories, writing their own letters, copying their own books, maintaining their own household accounts, reading the books, letters, charters, and other documents that came into their communities’ possession, or even understanding their own liturgical services because they lacked the requisite literacies. This paper makes a case for the female authorship of two prayers that were composed for an abbess and added in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century to a Psalter owned by Matilda de Bailleul (d. 1212), the abbess of Wherwell Abbey, a Benedictine community in Hampshire, England.

This seminar presentation draws on material from the final chapter of my forthcoming book, _In Christ’s Stead: Benedictine Women’s Ministries in England, 900–1225_. It analyzes the portraits of women religious as exemplary intercessors rendered in saints’ lives, miracle collections, manuscript illuminations, and seal images produced in the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods. All of the portraits examined were ultimately fashioned by male writers, painters, and engravers, but many still bear the marks of the women who inspired, commissioned, and shaped their fashioning. This presentation highlights the collaborations between artists and patrons and interrogates the internal motivations and external contingencies directing their efforts: memorializing the past, modeling prescribed practices, promoting the cults of saintly foremothers and the intercessory powers of the present community, and soliciting donors and new members. The very survival of a monastic house depended on the spiritual prestige it could claim over neighboring religious communities. Claims to prayers answered and miracles performed could persuade donors of means to grant gifts of land, money, and other material resources, but these claims had to be proven and publicized by oral and written testimonies and physical evidence in order to attract sufficient attention and patronage. And so captivating portraits of intercessors had to be fashioned.

Over the past thirty years, the scholarship on the liturgical lives of medieval English women religious has paid considerable attention to the early Anglo-Saxon period, roughly spanning the late seventh to eighth centuries. Various exempla, from the abbesses of double monasteries featured in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica to Boniface’s female epistolary correspondents, vividly attest that early Anglo-Saxon women religious, especially those possessing high-ranking monastic offices, social status, and wealth, could and often did exercise primary control over their communities’ liturgical practice, including roles long considered to be the exclusive province of male clerics: reading the Gospel liturgically, hearing confessions, and administering the Eucharist. This scholarship has been instrumental to the recovery of the liturgical roles of early Anglo-Saxon women religious, yet it claims, citing extant prescriptive sources—monastic rules, customaries, penitentials, capitularies, and conciliar decrees—that these roles completely disappeared, or were suppressed, through the Benedictine reforms of the second half of the tenth century and the wider ecclesiastical reforms of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. This paper will argue that such exclusive focus on the ruptures in the history of communities of women religious has concealed the many continuities across the early and late Anglo-Saxon periods that can be detected through detailed analysis of the documents of practice that survive from women’s monastic houses, particularly their liturgical manuscripts, which have not been identified and studied as a whole until this point. This analysis reveals a different history: women religious continued to assume active liturgical roles, much like those filled by their earlier Anglo-Saxon foremothers and by their contemporary Benedictine brothers, well into the twelfth century. But only by reviewing these women’s lives through their own sources can they be fully restored to the roles that they performed and to their rightful place in the history of western monasticism.
My current book project, In Christ’s Stead: Benedictine Women’s Ministries in England, 900-1225, recovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries of English women religious, who lived in monastic houses that followed the Benedictine Rule, from the end of the ninth century to the beginning of the thirteenth. Four ministries are examined in detail—public teaching and preaching, the liturgical reading of the gospel, the practice of penance, and care for the poor, sick, and deceased—and they are prefaced and contextualized by close studies of the very monastic officers that most often performed them—cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. Most innovative and central to this study are the close paleographical and codicological analyses of the surviving liturgical manuscripts that were produced by or for female Benedictine houses. Though they are dialogically related to the other textual sources and material evidence I examined, these manuscripts served as the primary documents of practice for my research, because they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral roles that women religious performed, but also to their productions as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.

The scholarship on the liturgical lives of women religious in England during the Middle Ages has paid considerable attention to the early Anglo-Saxon period—and with good reason. Various exempla vividly attest that these women, especially abbesses, could and did exercise primary control over their communities’ liturgical practice, including those roles long considered to be the exclusive province of male clerics: reading the Gospel liturgically, hearing confessions, and administering the Eucharist. This scholarship has been instrumental to the recovery of the liturgical roles of early Anglo-Saxon women religious, yet it insists through citing extant prescriptive sources that these roles completely disappeared (or were suppressed) during the Benedictine reforms of the second half of the tenth century. This paper will argue that such exclusive focus on the ruptures in the history of communities of women religious has concealed the many continuities across the early and late Anglo-Saxon periods that can be detected through detailed analysis of the documents of practice that survive from women’s monastic houses, particularly their liturgical manuscripts, which have not been identified and studied as a whole until this point. This analysis reveals a different history: women religious continued to assume active liturgical roles, much like those filled by their earlier Anglo-Saxon foremothers and by their contemporary Benedictine brothers, well into the early twelfth century. But only by reviewing these women’s lives through their own sources can they be fully restored to the roles that they performed and to their place in the history of western monasticism.

The authorship of the Life of the twelfth-century English holy woman, Christina of Markyate (c. 1096–after 1155), has inspired considerable scholarly speculation. Though the writer never once positively identifies himself in extant versions of the text, oblique references locate his activity at the Benedictine monastery of St Albans in Hertfordshire during the 1130s under the patronage of the reigning abbot, Geoffrey de Gorron (1119–46), and intimate the close connections he enjoyed with his narrative’s subjects. Building off of these references, and incorporating clues from related sources from St Albans and Markyate, this article reconstructs the likeliest candidate for the writer—Robert de Gorron (d. 1166), Geoffrey’s nephew, appointed sacristan and later abbatial successor—and assesses his eligibility.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _The Journal of Ecclesiastical History_ under the same title. A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

The authorship of the Latin Life of the twelfth-century English holy woman, Christina of Markyate (c. 1096–c. 1155), has inspired considerable speculation. Though the writer never once positively identifies himself in the extant versions of the text, his evident knowledge of the names and offices of various monks at St. Albans and his frequent references to the abbey as “our monastery” locate his activity at this Benedictine community in Hertfordshire, most likely during the final years of the abbacy of Geoffrey de Gorron (1119–46). Moreover, the writer often features himself as an eyewitness to certain events, and even recounts one of his dining experiences with Christina’s community at Markyate. Many of the characters featured in the Life, including Christina’s mother Beatrix and sister Matilda, were still alive when the writer composed his account, and relayed valuable information about Christina’s sayings and deeds directly to him. The holy woman herself also recalled or confirmed some occurrences “in [his] hearing.” The apparent familiarity that the writer enjoyed with his narrative’s subjects has made the question of the writer’s identity all the more tantalizing. This paper takes a new approach to answering this question, investigating paleographical, codicological, and liturgical evidence from both the Life and related sources from Markyate and St. Albans, especially the abbey’s Gesta abbatum, which have yet to be comprehensively identified and analyzed. Clues gleaned from these sources help to identify the likeliest candidate for the writer, as well as appraise his eligibility for this role.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _The Journal of Ecclesiastical History_ with the title, "The Writer of the Life of Christina of Markyate: The Case for Robert de Gorron (d. 1166)". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

This paper offers a detailed study of the evolution of consecration rites for abbesses and abbots in liturgical books produced in England from 900 to 1200. It reveals how these rites, through the prayers recited, insignia bestowed, chants sung, and bodily gestures performed, differently articulated and impressed the normative ideals of monastic leadership on those who were elected to it according to gender, and how those ideals were recast during periods of ecclesiastical reform.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _Traditio_ under the same title. A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

In 1404, Sibyl de Felton, the abbess of Barking Abbey (1394-1419), requested the production of an ordinal for the convent’s use. This ordinal, now Oxford, University College, MS 169, details the masses and hours of the Divine Office that were to be celebrated throughout the entire year. It negotiates the coincidence of multiple feasts on a given day; provides incipits to chants, prayers, and readings; assigns roles to specific monastic officers, other members of the convent, and attendant clergy; and, supplies performative cues for the intonation of chants and for the staging of processions and liturgical dramas. Among the most surprising of the ordinal’s directives is its identification of the women playing the three Marys in the Visitatio Sepulchri, the drama that was to be performed at Matins on Easter Sunday, as sacerdotes. This paper seeks to determine whether this identification was the result of scribal error or the express instruction of the ordinal’s patron and principal users – Sibyl de Felton and her consorors at Barking. Close analysis of the chants sung, postures and positions assumed, vestments worn, and objects handled and mediated by the Marys--especially when compared with those scripted in Visitationes from other communities of women religious--will demonstrate that the identification of the women as sacerdotes offers the most fitting characterization of their performance, for they, not the attendant clergy playing Christ’s disciples, were to channel priestly authority.

The prevailing historiography on women religious from central medieval England has insisted that they have “no history.” Citing the relative scarcity or nonexistence of written records from their monastic houses, many scholars have claimed that as compared to their earlier Anglo-Saxon forebears from the seventh and eighth centuries, women religious from the late Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest periods barely appear in the historical landscape. The repeated invading presence of first the Danes, and then the Normans; wider and more local monastic and ecclesiastical reform efforts; increased dependency on clerical care for both sacramental and practical ministrations; and the steady impoverishment of Latin learning in communities of women religious have all been identified as contributing causes of their inability to record and maintain their written records through their own scribal and archival efforts. When written records do survive from female monastic houses, the interventions of chaplains or outside scribes are chiefly credited.

Survey of the narrative accounts relating the histories of women religious – whether chronicles, saints’ lives, or miracles collections – seems to confirm claims to male dominance in their authorship: when the identity of the author is known, it is always male and often clerical. For some scholars, these sources should only be read as a “record of patriarchy” that, more often than not, obscures more than it reveals about the lives of “real” women religious. Recently, however, a few scholars have become increasingly dissatisfied with the unequivocal assertion that these clerical authors do, in a sense, have the final word on these women’s histories, given that many of these authors explicitly and repeatedly insist that their accounts were informed by the testimonies of women religious, both oral and written. Such testimonies raise the possibility that these male authors “overwrote” female-authored sources, either through adaptation or appropriation.

Most promising among the male-authored accounts that evince the overwriting of female-authored sources are the hagiographical writings of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c. 1050-c. 1107). In the saints’ lives that he wrote for the women religious at Barking and Wilton Abbeys, Goscelin unreservedly acknowledges the many women who served as essential witnesses to his writings. Goscelin’s admission of these female history-makers into his texts was more than just a rhetorical ploy aimed at self-legitimization; it was an act of genuine respect for the female authors, scribes, and patrons on whose knowledge he depended. Moreover, when Goscelin’s texts are read alongside related accounts, as well as probed for internal narrative fissures and transitions in style and voice, they not only tell us that women religious provided the oral and written testimonies and patronage for their authoring, but also disclose the very histories that these women first recorded.

N.B. This lecture has now been published as an article in _The Journal of Medieval History_ under the title, "Recovering the Histories of Women Religious in England in the Central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

In 1404, Sybil de Felton, the abbess of Barking Abbey in east London, requested the production of an ordinal for the convent’s use. This ordinal, now Oxford, University College, MS 169, details the masses and hours of the Divine Office that were to be celebrated throughout the entire liturgical year. It negotiates the coincidence of multiple feasts on a given day; provides incipits of chants, prayers, and readings; assigns roles to specific monastic officers, members of the convent, and attendant clerics; and, supplies performative cues for the intonation of chants and for the staging of processions and liturgical dramas.

Despite its potential for being a rich repository of evidence for scholars of medieval liturgy and monastic history, the Barking ordinal has received little critical attention beyond studies of its three Easter dramas. Completely neglected, yet insistently featured in the ordinal are the very materiae essential to Barking’s liturgies – bread, wine, water, oil, incense, candles, vestments, books, crucifixes, bells, flowers, and relics. All these objects variously imbued ritual actions with significatory power and promised spiritual transformations for celebrants and participants alike. The metamorphoses envisioned for the Barking nuns are especially dramatic, sometimes even transgressing the very limits of gender and ecclesiastical status. This paper will focus on three such metamorphoses. On Good Friday, the cross was to serve not only as the site for venerating the crucified’s body, but also as the medium through which the nuns could pray for Christ’s forgiveness without the intervention of a priest. During the performances of the Decensus and Visitatio sepulchri on Easter, copes and surplices were to refigure certain nuns as Old Testament patriarchs and the three women who visited Christ’s tomb, respectively. More remarkably, clothed in surplices, the nuns would assume a clerical cast, identified by the ordinal as female “sacerdotes.” Finally, on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was to descend twice upon the choir in the forms of a candelabra with seven candles and scattered flowers to manifest the nuns’ spiritual gifts. Through the convent’s interactions with and appropriations of a variety of materiae, signa were to become res, empowering the nuns as veritable confessores, sacerdotes, and apostolae.

This paper seeks to challenge earlier scholarly accounts of English Benedictine women religious who flourished in the central middle ages that suggest that they had “no history;” that is, that no, or very few, witnesses to their histories survive that preserve their own words, oral or written. Such accounts argue that these women’s histories are nearly always mediated through male-authored sources that, more often than not, obscure more than they reveal about their subjects’ pasts. While undoubtedly a hermeneutic of suspicion should be applied when handling these sources, this paper will show that when they are read alongside related chronicle and hagiographical evidence, as well as interrogated for internal, narrative fissures and transitions in style or voice, their textual layers can be peeled back to reveal the female history-makers that often stand behind them. Many male authors who served as the primary conduits for the histories of medieval English women religious explicitly state that they depended on the oral and written testimonies of their female subjects, and with a hermeneutic of recovery, they can be compelled to divulge their sources, sometimes even the identities of the women who kept their communities’ histories. To shed light on the identities of these female history-makers, this paper will uncover both the monastic offices that they held within their communities – cantors (cantrices) or sacristans (aeditvae) – and the liturgical, literary, and scribal duties incumbent upon such offices – keeping the collective memoria through the copying of liturgical books, the preservation of charters and other documents, the maintenance of necrologies, the creation of Office texts and music for important feast days, and the production of vitae and miracle collections for patron saints. These female cantors and sacristans can and should be restored to their rightful place within the historical record of central medieval England, for without them, we would indeed have no history for their monastic communities.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History_ (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), under the title, "Female Monastic Cantors and Sacristans in Central Medieval England: Four Sketches". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

A different history of the liturgical ministries that Benedictine women religious performed in central medieval England can be told, one that challenges previous scholarly accounts of these ministries that either locate them exclusively in the “Golden Age” of double monasteries headed by abbesses in the seventh and eighth centuries, or read the Benedictine and Gregorian reforms of the late tenth to twelfth centuries as rendering women completely dependent on the sacramental ministrations of male clerics. Study of the surviving liturgical manuscripts from female English monastic houses that flourished in the central middle ages reveals a different history: women religious continued to perform many of the ministerial acts cited in earlier Anglo-Saxon sources well into the twelfth century, even those acts that came to be defined strictly as sacraments. To demonstrate the persistence of such acts, this paper focuses on one sacramental site: the practice of penance. It examines the prayers scripted both for women confessors and for female and male penitents that are found in tenth- through twelfth-century prayerbooks. These texts suggest that the women religious who served as confessors understood their roles to be “sacerdotal” in character, and that when the Gregorian reform attempted to restrict these roles to male clerics, these women were unwilling to cede their sacerdotal agency without marked dissent. Far from being pushed to the margins of their houses’ ministerial activities, women religious continued to exercise active liturgical roles. But only by re-viewing their lives through their own books can we fully restore these women to the ministries that they once performed.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _Speculum_ under the title, "The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _Speculum_ under the title, "The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History_ (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), under the title, "Female Monastic Cantors and Sacristans in Central Medieval England: Four Sketches". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

In the course of the twelfth century, the regulative literature for communities of women religious increasingly placed the role of gospel-lector under clerical control. At the close of Heloise’s request to Peter Abelard for a history and rule for women religious, she pointedly asked him what was to be done about the reading of the gospels in the night office, given the potential risks that the admission of male clerics posed to a female community. More prescriptively, in the sole surviving, English copy of the so-called “feminized” Benedictine Rule, which was produced at Wintney Priory in the early thirteenth century, the eleventh chapter pertaining to the performance of the night office stipulated that a “sacerdos,” not the “abbatissa,” was to proclaim the gospel reading. As revealing as these examples might be of the liturgical praxes of high medieval female monastic communities, they have been problematically imposed by scholars on women religious who lived before the ecclesiastical and monastic reforms of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. This paper will argue that the ministrations of male clerics in the proclamation of the gospel were not always (pre-)scripted for women religious, especially in the liturgical books that they produced. Through a close study of the corrections, annotations, and lection marks added to Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 155, an eleventh-century gospelbook from Barking Abbey, the roles of women religious as evangelists – as both writers and proclaimers of the gospels – will be unveiled. The alterations made to Bodley 155 have yet to receive scholarly attention, but when systematically studied, they reveal the hand of a careful female scribe, who transformed the gospels into readings (and sometimes scripts) suitable for public performance. More importantly, the study of these manuscript-alterations challenges the dominant historiography on pre-twelfth-century, female monastic communities that figure them as necessarily, and nearly entirely dependent on the liturgical ministrations of male clerics by reforming the scholarly vision of the ministries that these communities actually did perform. At Barking, and likely elsewhere, women religious not only authorized themselves to proclaim the gospel in their liturgical settings, but they also made the Word their own.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _Speculum_ under the title, "The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

This paper seeks to complicate the gender identities that have been traditionally envisioned for high medieval women religious in England through the close examination of the various gendered speaking positions that women religious assumed while they prayed, both individually and collectively, for these positions cannot be rendered straightforwardly "female." Many of the texts that women religious repeatedly recited publicly, such as the Psalms and readings from the scriptures, invited them not only to voice an “I” that was clearly not female but also to appropriate it as their own. What is more, the so-called “feminized” Benedictine Rule and some prayers adapted for use in women’s communities scripted both masculine and feminine adjectives and nouns for their speakers. The repeated occurrence of such gender-polyphony in prayer-texts especially suggests that the retention of these masculine forms was likely not an oversight on the scribe’s part. Such is the case for the prayer-texts that survive in London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba A.xiv, an early eleventh-century prayerbook from St. Mary’s Abbey, Winchester (Nunnaminster), which will serve as the focus of this paper. Its prayer-texts and the later eleventh-century corrections made to them formulated pray-ers as both the male and female ego, often in the very same prayer. More significantly, the careful study of this prayerbook will raise the possibility that the gendered identity of women religious was much more complicated than has heretofore been posited, maybe even more complicated than the baptismal identity promised by Paul in his letter to the Galatians. For, it was both neither male nor female and both male and female; it was a radically supra-gendered identity that strove to re-present Christ’s own.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner_ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), under the title, "Apian Transformations and the Paradoxes of Women’s Authorial Personae in Late Medieval England". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

In The Book of Margery Kempe, as the voices of her fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scribes and Margery herself repeatedly tell the reader, Margery did not live within the chronological, causal progression of time-bound history, but within the mysterious, cyclical unfolding of sacred history: Christ’s past, his redemptive irruption into temporal history, became so inextricably woven into Margery’s present that their histories became inscrutably undifferentiated. In this paper, by focusing on the “voice” of Margery itself, as it is constructed in both the dialogue of the Book and in the third-person narration of the scribes, I seek to recover the theology of history voiced and performed by Margery and to answer the question of why this theology scandalized and was circumscribed by the Book’s earliest critical readers, for not everyone who witnessed the manner of Margery’s living, either in its historical or textual expression, saw its divine legitimacy as she did.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices_ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), under the title, "Handling the Book of Margery Kempe: The Corrective Touches of the Red Ink Annotator". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices_ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), under the title, "Handling the Book of Margery Kempe: The Corrective Touches of the Red Ink Annotator". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

Through a re-examination of both the internal and external codicological evidence of the earliest recension of Nicholas Love’s The Mirroure of the Blessede Life of Jesu Criste, I will argue that Love’s original intent to translate the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi was motivated by more immediate, pastoral concerns than only, or most significantly, by fears of heresy. I will detail the particular compositions of two manuscripts from this earliest recension, Takamiya MS 8 and the Foyle MS, both in comparison to the later “approved” recension of the text and with reference to their first female owners – Joan Holland, countess of Kent, widow of Thomas de Holland, foundress of Mount Grace Priory, and Sibille de Felton, abbess of Barking Abbey – in order to demonstrate how the first copies of Love’s text addressed the spiritual needs of its female readers. In reading these two manuscripts as pastorally sensitive to both their imagined and intended female audiences, I hope to offer a new account for why Love altered the original pseudo-Bonaventuran text in his translation of the Annunciation scene than has yet been advanced by scholars. Far from simply disallowing the kind of anchoritic spirituality that the Meditationes seems to inspire, especially when read with the Ancrene Wisse, as the external codicological evidence indeed suggests that it was, Love tailored his translation, in strikingly different ways, to speak to and promote the spiritual practices of his lay and religious female readers. Indeed, Love sustained his concern for the pastoral care of his female readers, whether a widow or a nun, throughout his translation by means of his preservation and accentuation of the imaginative, and often empowering, spaces created for the female exempla of the Gospels, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene most notably, and for his female readers, where they could live into their chosen roles within the Church. Ultimately, I hope that this paper will offer a way forward for scholarly discussions of Nicholas Love’s authorial persona, to help read him as having been more than simply Archbishop Arundel’s scribal henchman.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life_ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), under the title, "Through the Looking Glass: Reflections of Christ’s ‘trewe louers’ in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

In this paper, I seek to offer an account for why the patron of the St. Albans Psalter chose to imagine Mary Magdalene beyond the Noli me tangere through and examination of the vita of Christina of Markyate, an early twelfth-century visionary, hermit, prioress, and, probably, the intended recipient of the St. Albans Psalter.  I will argue that Christina’s life inspired the patron of the Psalter, Geoffrey de Gorron (r. 1119-1146), the abbot of St. Albans and Christina’s spiritual friend, guide, and disciple, to represent the women depicted in it, like Mary Magdalene and even Christina herself, not simply as models of affective piety,  but dramatically, and quite radically as preachers of the good news of Christ’s resurrection and as ones worthy to touch Christ himself, and that these images, in turn, legitimated both Christina’s authority in her own community and her spiritual direction of the monks at St. Albans. This paper is divided into three parts. First, I will contextualize the images of Mary Magdalene in the St. Albans Psalter through a quick survey of four other mid-twelfth century English psalters that contain Magdalene images. Second, I will turn to the St. Albans Psalter both to draw our attention to and to explain the illuminations that imagine the transgressive “touchings” of Mary Magdalene and Christina. Last, I will closely examine select passages from the longer, surviving version of Christina’s vita, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius E.1, that prophetically construct Christina’s “ordination” by Christ’s touch.

At the end of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer appends a retraction to his oeuvre. Praying to “oure Lord Jhesu Crist,” the poet asks that if any of his previous works displease the Lord, they be attributed to “the defaute of [his] unkonnynge and nat to [his] wyl.” For, now, knowing better, he realizes that all that he writes should be “written for doctrine,” and not for personal pleasure or gain, and thus, he asks pardon for those “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees” that are the source of his guilt. Among the works that he recants are The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and, rather puzzlingly, The Canterbury Tales. The poet, however, does not denounce all of his works as “sowen into synne.” He offers his “bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun” as words of thanksgiving to Jesus Christ, Mary, and the saints. Not surprisingly, since its penning, this retraction has elicited great bemusement and lively scholarly debate, focused largely on the question: how serious are we to take Chaucer’s recantation of most of his major “secular” poetry? This question is particularly relevant to the purposes of this paper as the Chaucerian work that it seeks to address falls within both the works that are retracted and commended. Chaucer’s Lyf of Seinte Cecile is both a tale within The Canterbury Tales, told by the Second Nun, and a legend of a saint, originally authored as a free-standing translation of Jacabus de Voragine’s life of Saint Cecilia found in his Legenda Aurea. If we are to heed Chaucer’s prayer and dissociate The Canterbury Tales from the “acceptable” canon of Chaucerian poetry, then must we also cast the life of Saint Cecilia to the pile of “heretical” poems? If we do not, and choose rather to read Chaucer’s retraction as yet another instance of biting, Chaucerian wit, then may we read this saint’s vita as serving a greater literary, ecclesiastical, and social function than simply acting as Chaucer’s “pious” offering for forgiveness?

This paper seeks to argue that precisely because Chaucer ambiguously situates the Lyf of Seinte Cecile within the spheres of the sacred and profane that he is able to transform both radically. As the poet himself admits in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women, he originally wrote the Middle English translation of the vita of Saint Cecilia as an independent text; however, once he placed it within The Canterbury Tales and put it in the mouth of the Second Nun, the legend of the saint could no longer be read simply as a work of translation or hagiography. Told within the context of the tale-telling contest on the road to Canterbury Cathedral, the saint’s life takes on a life of its own and acquires the power to empower its teller – the lowly, heretofore silent Second Nun. Read as the construction or translation of a male author, the figure of Cecilia and her bold acts of preaching and martyrdom are sanitized and constrained within the bounds of patriarchal, ecclesiastical authority; however, heard in public as the tale of a cloistered, female religious, the saint appears at the very limits of orthodoxy as a radical prophet who calls all faithful women to work for reform. Furthermore, Chaucer does not simply give the Second Nun a voice by crafting a tale for her to tell. Rather, he authorizes her as a public preacher by making her into a new Cecilia, and the poet metaphorically effects this authorization through the most unsuspecting creature, the honeybee. In her “feithful bisynesse” of translating the saint’s legend, the Second Nun becomes like Cecilia, a “bisy” bee, the Lord’s “sower of chaast conseil.”

The appearance of the figure of the honeybee in the life of Saint Cecilia is not unique to Chaucer. The poet faithfully translates the image from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, but that the honeybee appears in the Legenda and reappears in the Lyf of Seinte Cecile is not insignificant. Prior to the production of de Voragine’s Legenda in the mid-thirteenth century, the honeybee enjoyed a rich literary life in the philosophical and theological traditions. To speak to the significance of the honeybee in the vita of Saint Cecilia, I will provide a brief account of how the honeybee was understood in Western Christianity during the Middle Ages. I will focus my remarks on Aristotle’s History of the Animals, Gregory the Great’s Moralia, and Thomas de Cantimpre’s De apibus and how all three works address the virginal, communal, and prophetic character of the honeybee. With this medieval understanding of the honeybee established, I will then turn to Chaucer’s Lyf of Seinte Cecile to demonstrate how the activity of the honeybee metaphorizes the saint’s life. I will pay particular attention to the saint’s vow to live a chaste marriage, her evangelizing activities out of her home, her apologetic witness at the court of Alamachius, and her request before her death to Pope Urban to make her home into a church. After this examination of the tale, I will then analyze the tale’s teller, the Second Nun, in order to show how her “apian” self-understanding, as it is articulated in her prologue, both legitimates and is legitimated by the saint’s life she tells. The Second Nun begins her prologue with a fiery, mini-sermon against the sin of idleness and asserts that the tale that she will tell, unlike the tales told by the other pilgrims, will try “to putte [the travelers] fro swich ydelnesse.” Moreover, not only will her tale keep them from such sin, but in her activity of tale-telling (or translating), she will also keep herself faithfully occupied. For, as she notes, “faith is deed withouten werkis.” Thus, both in what she preaches and that she preaches effect a radical transformation of her community and herself. Her community becomes one that permits such authoritative, female discourse, and she becomes the (re)new(ed) model for female sanctity, the prophet of the sacred to the profane.

Adjudicating between whether or not to accept Chaucer’s retraction as a sincere profession is beyond the scope of this paper, and admittedly beyond the scope of any present-day Chaucerian scholarship. But, what this paper seeks to do is to complicate Chaucer’s constructed binary between the “worldly” and the “pious,” as he does so himself through The Second Nun’s Tale and the Lyf of Seinte Cecile. By placing his earlier translation of the vita of Saint Cecilia in the mouth of one of his female, religious travelers, the Second Nun, Chaucer not only amplifies the tale’s empowering female discourse, but he also empowers the teller of the tale with that very prophetic speech. Thus, the authority that both tale and teller gain depends on the authorizing action of the other, and Chaucer metaphorizes this authorizing action through the figure of the honeybee. The honeybee “bisily” works within/as both Saint Cecilia and the Second Nun to authorize the public, female preacher. Somewhere on the way from the tavern to the shrine of Thomas a Becket, between the profane and the sacred, a woman can become a “bisy” bee, a sower of the honeyed wisdom of the Divine.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner_ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), under the title, "Apian Transformations and the Paradoxes of Women’s Authorial Personae in Late Medieval England". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life_ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), under the title, "Through the Looking Glass: Reflections of Christ’s ‘trewe louers’ in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

N.B. This presentation has now been published as an essay in _Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life_ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), under the title, "Through the Looking Glass: Reflections of Christ’s ‘trewe louers’ in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.

This panel will explore how women’s authority has been created and exercised both textually and historically in both women’s and men’s writings from the patristic to the late medieval periods. As will be evidenced in the first two papers, potentially most destabilizing or undermining to the construction and promotion of women’s authority is the fact that most women were authored and/or authorized by men. But, as both Han-luen Kantzer Komline’s re-reading of Augustine’s treatment of the unnamed sister of the Horatii and Lucretia in City of God, and Katie Bugyis’s analysis of the visionary program set forth in the life of the twelfth-century English prioress Christina of Markyate will demonstrate, male authors did have a vested interest in upholding women’s authority. Whether this authority was in fact reflective of the desires and performances of the women who were contemporary with these male authors will ultimately be critically examined. Furthermore, as Sean Field’s reevaluation of the historical evidence surrounding the authorship of the Mirror of Simple Souls will show, Marguerite Porete’s authorial agency was not less contested or obscured in her own day as it is now. The historians on this panel hope to continue the scribal tasks first begun by the subjects of their papers by reclaiming the authority established for and exercised by the women in their writings.

This course is dedicated to the academic study of the Christian theological traditions. According to its Greek etymological roots, theology—theos + logos—is principally concerned with “God-talk,” that is, applying the very human and, thus, limited capacities of thought, speech, writing, and artistic composition to wrestle with some of the most enduring questions of ultimate concern: Is there a God? Who is He (or She or It or __)? Can God be intellectually and affectively grasped? If so, how? Why is there something and not nothing? What does it mean to be created by God? What moral obligations does such createdness entail, if any? How does an infinite, eternal God relate to or even enter into the finitude of created history? How are finite creatures to relate to God in turn? How is there evil in creation if God is good? And so many more questions! Answers to these questions are not easily given, nor, many would rightly argue, are they given once and for all. For if indeed God is incomprehensible mystery, then the task of theology is always ongoing, ever meant to be taken up by new thinkers in new times and in new places. To adapt the brilliant conclusion to the early fifteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich’s Showings, “[theology] is begun, but it is not yet performed as to my sight.”

In this course, we will think with some of the greatest minds who have contributed to the various Christian theological traditions, specifically on the question of what it means to be human, the question proper to the systematic locus of “theological anthropology,” and the question that grounds and animates the Program of Liberal Studies. Answering this question necessarily implicates the questions stated above, but it also considers many of the following features of being human: the unique manner in which humans are said to be created (i.e., in the image and likeness of God), the status of humans with respect to the rest of creation, the relationship between the body and the soul, the powers of the soul, free choice, the acquisition of virtues, the moral life (as individuals and as communities), sin and grace, suffering, salvation, death, and beatitude. In the first half of the course, we will explore ancient and medieval formulations of and answers to these questions, and in the second half of the course, we will examine more contemporary responses to these questions that critique past works of Christian theology for forgetting, marginalizing, distorting, subjugating, or dehumanizing humans of certain races, ethnicities, classes, genders, sexual orientations, and abilities. At the very end of the class, we will even trouble the anthropocentrism inherent to many theological anthropologies and consider whether a dramatic conversion in the way that humans understand and live out their relationship with other created beings is called for now.

The Bible is both like and unlike any of the other works we encounter in the curriculum of the Program of Liberal Studies. Like Plato’s Republic, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Bible has had a significant and enduring influence on the western intellectual tradition. The questions it raises and the answers it ventures about the nature of God and the origin, end, and meaning of human existence have interested, consoled, troubled, and frustrated most, if not all, of the great thinkers we wrestle with in PLS from the late antique period on. The Bible’s account of Adam and Eve’s Fall inspired John Milton’s Paradise Lost; its telling of the patriarch Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac captivated Søren Kierkegaard’s reflection in Fear and Trembling; its depictions of Christ’s crucifixion guided Julian of Norwich’s Showings; Paul’s admonition in his first letter to Timothy that the love of money is the root of all evil prompted the tale that the Pardoner tells in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and much, much more. Like these great works, the Bible must be read with a spirit of intellectual curiosity and critical inquiry, that is, with an awareness of the historical contexts in which its constituent parts were composed, recorded, and disseminated; with an appreciation for its narrative and poetic forms and rhetorical devices; and with an openness to engage deeply with the questions of ultimate meaning it asks and to take seriously the answers it offers. But unlike nearly all of the other texts we encounter in PLS, the Bible claims to communicate God’s self-revelation to humanity, and its parts have been variously adopted by Jewish and Christian communities as their sacred scriptures for the purposes of directing belief and practice. Consequently, even if we all do not accept the truth of the Bible’s claim to divine revelation—and in the class I will ensure that there is freedom of inquiry for people of all faiths and no faith alike—we must learn how the acceptance of this claim has determined the ways people have interpreted the Bible, so that we can better understand how and why it has served as a foundational source for theological reflection in Christian traditions.

In this course, we will discover that the Bible is not one book. It does not speak with one voice. It does not offer up one unambiguous truth. This is both a historical fact and a theological proposition. As a historical artifact, the Bible was compiled over the course of several centuries on either side of the year 0 C.E., and in the case of the Hebrew Scriptures—what some Christians call the Old Testament—the various writings collected relate events that were said to have happened several centuries or even millennia before. Nearly all of the material contained in the Bible began as an oral tradition, passed down through generations before someone decided that it should be written down, and in most cases, we have no idea who that someone was. In the original Greek, ta biblia means the scrolls or books. And, so, the Bible is really more of a collection or a library.

Acknowledging the long and complex history of the Bible’s composition may seem unsettling at first, especially given its status as a cultural icon. In popular parlance when we refer to something as “the Bible”—as in, for example, The Golf Bible—we mean that it is authoritative, univocal, practical, accessible, comprehensive, and exclusive. This is to say that it is the only book you will need about the topic it purports to examine, because it contains everything you will ever need to know about that topic. But—and here’s the theological proposition—God is not golf. The major monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam hold that God so transcends human experience that God is unknowable, at least on this side of death. But this does not mean that we cannot say anything about God or, worse yet, that we cannot relate to God. It just means that whatever means of access to God we have, whether through the natural world, personal experience, communal tradition, or, indeed, the Bible, will not give us the whole of what we seek. It is perhaps fitting then that the Bible contains multiple ways of coming to know God, presented by various writers and communities in different times, and that these paths to God often do not obviously converge on a single version of who God is. Thus, the library becomes a labyrinth at the center of which is a God who eludes our grasp.

Since it would be impossible to read our way through the entirety of this library and explore every corner of this labyrinth in a single semester, I have chosen texts that address one of its central through lines: God’s justice and humanity’s quest for liberation. The search begins almost immediately after creation, when the first humans confront the fact that their freedom seems to be the very source of their enslavement. It continues with the story of a people liberated by God only to find themselves slaves to their own inability to trust this God. In the Psalms, we hear both praises of the saving power of God’s justice and laments over humanity’s enduring bondage to sin. The Wisdom literature offers guidance on how to live according to God’s justice, particularly for the sake of the most marginalized and downtrodden of society. In Job and Ruth, the quest for liberation is brought into focus in the stories of two righteous people and their fidelity to God and their kin. With the prophet Isaiah we hear the promise of one who will come to liberate humanity once and for all, and in the Gospels, this promise seems to be fulfilled, but not in the way that anyone expected. Finally, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the Letter of James, and the Book of Revelation all address communities that are still trying to figure out how to live liberated lives in the midst of oppressive conditions.

The gospel according to Matthew contends that in answer to Jesus of Nazareth’s searching question to his disciples about who the Son of Man was, Simon Peter affirmed that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” Jesus responded in turn: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Mt 16.16-19). For many Christians, this exchange between Jesus and Peter not only marked the formation of the church, but also secured a foundation for this institution that could weather any vicissitude of human history, for it was a house built upon the most stable of rocks, not one built upon the ever-shifting sand (Cf. Mt 7.24-27). And yet to read the history of Christianity as an institution, or collective of believers and practitioners, that remained impervious to change would be to ignore or deny the profound developments, both positive and negative, that occurred throughout the history of this major world religion. This course will guide students through the many twists and turns, zeniths and nadirs, unities and diversities, reforms and regressions of the history of Christianity, beginning with its ostensible foundation in the first century CE up until the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. This history will be traced from both “above,” through more “official” sources produced by various leaders and theologians within Christianity, and from “below,” through the writings and material remains of Christian laity. This dual approach seeks to ensure that the history of Christianity is recovered in all of its rich variety and complexity.

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Christianity will probably have noticed an apparent contradiction (or, at the very least, a certain tension) at its heart. On the one hand, it would seem to have a suspicion of the lesser goods to be had in the pleasures of this finite and ephemeral world, preferring instead to set its sights on those greater goods that are the promise of the eternal and heavenly world “to come.” Hence, Christians are often told to forsake everyday cares to store up their treasures in heaven, which has led certain critics to suggest that Christianity has an enervating effect on social engagement, encouraging those who suffer injustice to defer satisfaction to the afterlife instead of seeking it in the here and now. On the other hand, the defining “event” of Christianity has the transcendent and infinite God of the Hebrew Bible, whose name cannot even be spoken, taking on the flesh of a first-century man named “Jesus,” who spends most of his life healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and living in solidarity with laborers, tax collectors, and prostitutes. And, even as he reminds his followers that his kingdom is “not of this world,” he suggests that entry into that kingdom is very much tied to what one does in this world for the least, which is to say the most “worldly,” among us.

This course will provide a systematic introduction to Christian thought organized around the central tension involved in attending to the sufferings of this world while setting one’s sights on the next. This exploration will be framed by the Sermon on the Mount, which is one of the key passages of the New Testament, in which Jesus provides what is perhaps the clearest articulation of how the “old law” of this present world is related to the “new law” that he is thought to have inaugurated. This will require us to first consider those Jewish sources, which Jesus took to be his own and upon which he claimed to expand. In this way, we will consider the central tension between contemporary Christianity and “secular” society as a continuation of the earliest negotiations between the emerging “Jesus” movement and the Jewish tradition to which it belonged. After an investigation of this problematic in the foundational documents of the Jewish and Christian canons, we will turn to various contemporary readings in Christian social thought that consider the implications of the “Jesus-event” for pursuing the ends of social justice. These readings will provide an introduction to defining Christian doctrines, like the Incarnation and the Trinity, while also providing a platform for thinking about larger questions concerning the meaning of suffering, the demands of justice, our obligations to the poor, and the ultimate ends of our lives together, which should be of broader interest for persons of any or no religious affiliation.

This course is dedicated to introducing students to the academic discipline of Theology. According to its Greek etymological roots, Theology—theos + logos—is preoccupied with “God-talk”, that is, applying the very human (and, thus, limited!) capacities of thought, speech, writing, and artistic composition to wrestle with some of the most enduring questions of ultimate concern: Is there a God? Who is He (or She or It)? Can this God be intellectually grasped or affectively experienced? If so, how? Why is there something and not nothing? What does it mean to be created by God? What moral obligations does such createdness entail, if any? How does an infinite, eternal God relate to or even enter into the finitude of created history? How are finite creatures to relate to this God in turn? How is there evil in creation if God is good? And so many more questions! Answers to these questions are not easily given, nor, some would rightly argue, are they given once and for all. For if indeed God is utter, endless mystery, then the task of Theology is always ongoing, ever meant to be taken up by new thinkers in new times and in new places.

In this course, we are going to join the long, venerable tradition of Christian Theology in order to ponder these questions with some of the tradition’s greatest minds. Through our readings and collective work, we will roam widely in this tradition with respect to chronology, geography, denomination, genre, and gender and state of life of the theologian. Too often in the past the academic study of Theology has limited its canon of texts to systematic treatises by ordained male clerics. Not so for this class. We will read and interrogate works by women and men; vowed religious, ordained, and lay; ancient, medieval, and modern; personal essayists, preachers, mystics, musicians, poets, painters, fiction writers, and much, much more.

Religions, like the individuals who practice them, seem to be utterly singular. Indeed, the attraction of identifying with and practicing any particular religion seems to be its promise of uniqueness, its being completely unlike any other. Yet, from its beginnings, the academic study of religion has proceeded as if there were some universal essence that all religions share: “the holy,” “the sacred,” “ideology,” “society,” “the unconscious,” “common sense,” “power,” or “culture.” But in recent decades, many scholars have challenged the view that there is any single, generalizable essence that might serve as a basis for comparison across the ways of life that have been called “religious.” Instead, these thinkers have tried to turn our attention to the specific technologies that persons and communities use to mediate their relationships to some transcendent reality, the present world, individuals and groups in and outside of their religion, and their very selves, and it is these relationships that sometimes can form the building blocks for what might be identified as “religion.” In this course, we will analyze a variety of these technologies: objects, images, texts, places (both “real” and “virtual”), practices of everyday life, and popular culture. We will discuss how these technologies have been used by particular people and communities to make sense of and interact with the complex world in which they live. Ultimately, this course will not only force us to listen to those religious “others,” whose beliefs and practices might seem strange, fantastical, or even sacrilegious, but it will also ask us to risk becoming objects of inquiry too, being seen as “other” by our fellow classmates and, potentially, ourselves. Hopefully, by the course’s end, greater self- and mutual understanding will be the rich, hard-won gain of such open, honest, and respectful disclosure.

This course is dedicated to providing a historical and theological account of the roots, growth, and flowering of the ascetic practice of virginity from its scriptural progenitors through its late medieval inheritors. It will focus on the primary sources related to this topic: treatises on virginity, consecration rituals, homilies, letters of spiritual guidance, martyr acts, saints’ lives, visionary accounts, and autobiographies. Through a variety of sources, this course seeks to understand not only the multiple and changing ways in which the discipline of virginity was theologized and practiced in the early and medieval church, but also how it empowered and spiritually authorized its practitioners to perform pastoral and liturgical acts customarily read as sacerdotal in nature, such as founding ecclesial communities, preaching, anointing the sick, forgiving sins, and interceding on behalf of souls in purgatory. Often irrespective of geographical location, class, gender, or prior sexual experience, men and women alike could serve as Christ for others through the spiritual transformation wrought by sexual renunciation, for they became Christ in their very flesh.

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.