Nuns and Abbesses

Although a substantial number of religious communities in the medieval West consisted partially or entirely of cloistered women, in traditional surveys of monastic history these individuals and their leadership received but scant attention. Until deep into the 20th century, the prevailing view among historians was that the role of nuns and abbesses in driving forward the development of monastic ideology and institutions had been negligible. Many believed that the purpose of female convent life had been only to provide an environment where veiled women would be shielded from the secular world and where their agency could be entirely directed toward intercessory prayer service and commemoration of the dead. With few exceptions, so they argued, those who accessed this existence spent their life in a state of discreet withdrawal, seldom leaving a lasting impression on those who shared their fate or drawing much notice from those living beyond the cloister walls. While a number of earlier specialists had already criticized this view, it was a feminist “wave” in scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that altered the perception of cloistered women as a marginal, mostly inconsequential offshoot of a monastic phenomenon shaped by male paradigms and actors. These early studies allowed a first glimpse of the scope of the phenomenon, geographically, quantitatively, and in terms of its spiritual and intellectual achievements and its impact on society. However, they did little to change the view that cloistered life for women was a “marginal” phenomenon. This was partly because traditional views took a long time to die out, but also partly because of the tendency of pioneering studies to focus on instances of oppression or emancipation. In the last three decades, these perspectives have been replaced by a wide range of thematic interests that have allowed historians to highlight different aspects of female monasticism in the Middle Ages, including the immense diversity of female monastic experiences; practitioners’ intense involvement in spirituality, intellectual life, and artistic production; their complex interactions with male monastics and clerics, ascetic women living outside of cloistered contexts, and the secular world; and the dynamics behind recruitment and patronage. Much work remains to be done to synthesize paradigm-shifting insights in these studies before we can arrive at a fundamentally revised narrative of female cloistered life, let alone insert it into a new one of medieval monasticism generally. This bibliography omits discussion of “private” monastics such as anchoresses and house ascetics, and of “semi-religious” phenomena such as that of the Beguines and Penitents.