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.

In ‘From Reading to Writing: The Multiple Levels of Literacy of the Sister Scribes in the Brussels Convent of Jericho’ Patricia Stoop demonstrates that from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, the Augustinian canonesses of the Brussels convent, Onze Lieve Vrouw Ter Rosen gheplant in Jericho [‘Our Lady of the Rose Planted in Jericho’] were very active in writing and copying manuscripts. In exploring the literacy of the Jericho sisters — from reading and copying, through writing household accounts, to redacting original sermons — Stoop shows that they produced a large number of carefully written manuscripts (illuminated with pen drawings) for their own use, most of them in the vernacular. Thirty-six manuscripts survive, thirty of them produced before 1550. This collection of manuscripts is the third largest from a medieval women’s convent in the Low Countries. Additionally, some four of five scribes (in changing teams) were active in the convent’s scriptorium. They produced, for pay (and most likely on commission), a large number of books and texts for individual, prosperous lay patrons, as well as for religious persons and institutions outside the convent walls, generally during the daily time allotted for handicrafts. In the same period some of the most talented sisters wrote down the sermons they had heard their confessors and visiting priests preach, and preserved them in eight collections. Both sermons and sermon collections were the result of a communal and layered authorship, which involved a dynamic merging of several ‘author roles’: women (redactors) wrote down the spoken sermons of their father confessor (auctor intellectualis) from a first-person perspective and put themselves, so to speak, in his position. A second, anonymous sister made editorial adaptations (titles, cross-references) and sometimes even adjustments to the content (editor). Finally, this sister (or a third) copied the sermons into the manuscript (copyist). Thus the sermons as well as the collections were the result of an intense collaboration, and the women had a large share in the production of the preserved material.

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.

On December 8, 1459, Maria van Pee, canoness regular in the Brussels convent of Jericho, decided to write down the sermon that she heard her confessor, Jan Storm, deliver in the convent's church. Her initiative laid the foundation for a long and carefully maintained tradition of sermon writing, which would endure until the beginning of the eighteenth century. After providing a short historical background, this article focuses on the convent's literary production and especially on the sermon collections and their prologues in which the female scribes account for their contribution to the writing and editing of the sermons and the composition of the manuscripts. By concentrating on the collection of Maria van Pee, it demonstrates how the sisters handled the sermons they heard their confessors preach in order to keep them from oblivion and how they thereby designed a creative and collective "authorship" for themselves, a role that was unusual for hte Middle Ages.