Katie Bugyis

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.

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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.