Synopses & Reviews
The late Middle Ages was a time of intense religious ferment in Europe marked by countless calls for reform of the Church. Within monastic orders, the Observant movement was one such effort to reform religious houses, sparked by the widespread fear that these houses had strayed too far from their original calling. In
Convent Chronicles, Anne Winston-Allen offers a rare inside look at the Observant reform movement from the women’s point of view.
Although we know a great deal about the men who inhabited Observant religious houses, we know very little about their female counterparts—even though women outnumbered men in many places. Often what we do know about women comes to us through the filter of men’s accounts. Recovering long-overlooked writings by women in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Winston-Allen surveys the extraordinary literary and scribal activities in German- and Dutch-speaking religious communities in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries. While previous studies have relied on records left by male activists, these women’s narratives offer an alternative perspective that challenges traditional views of women’s role and agency. Women were, in fact, active participants in the religious conversations that dominated the day.
With its rich depiction of women as transmitters of culture, Convent Chronicles will be invaluable to scholars as well as to graduate and undergraduate students interested in the history of women’s monasticism and religious writing.
About the Author
Anne Winston-Allen is Associate Professor of German and Medieval Literature at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She is the author of Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (Penn State, 1997).
Table of Contents
Contents Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Women Writing in the Late Middle Ages
1. Late Medieval Nunneries: Accounts by Women
2. The "Women's Religious Movement" and the Observant Movement: Female Piety and the Establishment
3. Women of the Reform
4. Opponents of the Reform and Enclosure
5. Did Nuns Have a Renaissance? Libraries and Literary Activities
6. "Femininity-in-Writing": New Heroines, Strategies, and Roles in Late Medieval Piety
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index