The Life of Nuns E-Book

Henrike Lähnemann

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

In the Middle Ages half of those who chose the religious life were women, yet historians have overlooked entire generations of educated, feisty, capable and enterprising nuns, condemning them to the dusty silence of the archives. What, though, were their motives for entering a convent and what was their daily routine behind its walls like? How did they think, live and worship, both as individuals and as a community? How did they maintain contact with the families and communities they had left behind?


Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber offer readers a vivid insight into the largely unknown lives and work of religious women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Using previously inaccessible personal diaries and letters, as well as tapestries, painting, architecture and music, the authors show that the nuns were, in fact, an active, even influential part of medieval society. They functioned as role models and engaged in spirited dialogue with other convents, with the citizens of their home towns and with the local nobility. Full of self-confidence, they organised their demanding daily lives; ran their complex convent economies as successful businesses; offered girls a comprehensive theological, musical and practical education; produced magnificent manuscripts; ministered to the convent sick and dying with homemade medicines and to family and friends with advice. Initially—and fiercely—they resisted the Reformation, only for some of the convents to survive as Protestant women’s foundations to this day.


Now, for the first time in centuries, this account by Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber allows the voices of these remarkable women to be heard outside the cloister and to invite us into their world.

Leseprobe

THE LIFE OF NUNS

The Life of Nuns

Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents

Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

©2024 Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber, The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0397

Copyright and permissions for the reuse of the images included in this publication may differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations.

Further details about CC BY-NC licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web

Any digital material and resources associated with this volume will be available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0397#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80511-266-2

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80511-267-9

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80511-268-6

ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 978-1-80511-269-3

ISBN HTML: 978-1-80511-271-6

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0397

Cover image: Apparition of the crucified Christ from the vision of Dorothea von Meding in 1562, painted in 1623, on the nuns’ choir in Kloster Lüne. Photo by Sabine Wehking. ©Kloster Lüne

Cover design by Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal

Contents

Prologue: Voices from the Past

I. Enclosure

1. The Nuns’ Flight

2. The Convent Living Space

3. The Ebstorf World Map

II. Education

1. The Convent as School

2. The Convent as Cultural and Educational Space

3. The Heiningen Philosophy Tapestry

III. Nuns, Family, and Community

1. Life History and Family Influence

2. The Family and the Convent Community

3. Representation and Status

IV. Love and Friendship

1. Friendship Beyond Convent Walls

2. The Idea of Friendship

3. Christ Embracing John the Evangelist as Spiritual Bridehood

V. Music and Reform

1. Secular Songs while Breaking Flax

2. Convent Reform

3. Music Instruction in Kloster Ebstorf

VI. Reformation

1. The Papal Legate Arrives in Town

2. Convents during the Reformation

3. A Vision of the Reformation

VII. Illness and Dying

1. Death in the Community

2. Medicinal Knowledge and the Rituals of Dying

3. This World and the Next in the Wienhausen Nuns’ Choir

VIII. Appendix

1. Convent Histories

2. Schematic Representations of Convent Life

3. Glossary of Terms

4. List of Illustrations

5. Sources and Secondary Literature

Index

Prologue: Voices from the Past

© 2024 H. Lähnemann & E. Schlotheuber, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0397.00

In the Middle Ages, half of all those who entered religious houses were women. Why, then, do we hear so little about them? From the German lands, only a few names are familiar: Hildegard of Bingen, of course. Perhaps also Roswitha of Gandersheim and Mechthild of Magdeburg. In recent years, they have had books or exhibitions dedicated to them. Yet the great group of learned, feisty, devout, capable, and enterprising nuns from countless generations has faded into oblivion, their voices unheard. Nevertheless, in the Middle Ages women who lived in *convents1 were by no means unremarkable or unremarked – quite the opposite. The title of the original German version of this book2 plays on the word ‘unerhört’, meaning both ‘unheard’ in the sense of not noticed by research and ‘unheard of’ in the sense of outspoken, even outrageous. The nuns’ communities were often powerful institutions, and the nuns saw themselves as occupying a highly influential position, since their way of life made them into ‘brides of Christ’, the now and future spouses of the ‘king of kings’. Such a position meant they had his ear as no one else did. The conviction that Christ heard and listened to them permeated medieval society and bestowed upon them a special status, one which manifested itself not just politically and economically, but also socially and culturally – and which allowed these women to become effective and influential in hitherto unprecedented ways.

To be unheard-of and unheard is a fate first suffered by these nuns in the modern era; thus every act of rendering them visible – and audible – constitutes a minor revolution. In her book on entering the convent, education and the world of nuns in the late Middle Ages,3 Eva Schlotheuber has edited and contextualized a small parchment manuscript which, through daily use, had grown to a considerable girth: the convent diary of a nun from the convent dedicated to the Holy Cross (Heilig Kreuz Kloster) near Braunschweig, an eloquent and important ‘witness statement’ in which, for over twenty years, a Cistercian nun described her life in the convent just outside the town gates of Braunschweig. For her part, Henrike Lähnemann brought together, from libraries across the globe, the devotional manuals of the *Cistercian nuns from Kloster Medingen and edited their liturgy from the Manual of the Provost in order to open the door into the world of images and devotion inhabited by the nuns.4 For background information, both authors drew on a unique source which had, up to then, languished amongst the medieval manuscripts in the convent archive at Kloster Lüne: the community’s unedited collection of letters. They copied nearly 1,800 of these, written between 1460 and 1560, into three voluminous books of which the first volume, together with short summaries and a comprehensive introduction in both German and English, is available open access.5 These are moving testimonies from the late Middle Ages and Reformation, when the nuns resolutely resisted the introduction of Lutheran practices into the convent. In their letters, the women debate a broad spectrum of themes stemming from their work days, high days and holidays – from lobbying for additional rights for their convent to theological debates to letters dispensing consolation and advice.

The German Reformation was a hugely complex and regionally diverse process. While Protestant historiography traditionally told the story of a clear break marked by Martin Luther’s publication of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, the reality in the multitude of small German principalities, many of which changed sides several times, was much more complex. Dissolution during the Reformation was a fate only about half of the convents experienced in the areas that converted to Protestantism.6 Those in the territory of Lüneburg, among them Kloster Lüne, continued to exist as a Protestant community in its original buildings. In 2022, the convent celebrated 850 years of uninterrupted existence. A community of women under an *abbess still lives in these premises. The construction of the buildings is reported in the letters, and its archive has preserved the medieval sources to this day. The women of Kloster Lüne can be seen in the image on the front cover, a detail from a painting which captures the vision of a Lüne conventual in the sixteenth century. It still hangs on the wall of the nuns’ choir at Kloster Lüne. Other convents, such as the home of the Cistercian diarist, were initially dissolved but deemed indispensable after all and refounded a short while later, as a Protestant foundation for women from high-ranking families.

The diarist does not mention her name in her work. At no place in her entertaining record of convent life, which stretches over two decades, does she provide any clue to her identity. She lived as a nun in the Cistercian Heilig Kreuz Kloster towards the end of the fifteenth century and, like two thirds of the community, probably died of the disease in 1507. Her chronicle breaks off abruptly with the description of the plague, which started within the town, slowly spreading to the convent and claiming its first fatalities there. The handwritten diary, preserved in the form of a compact volume, is twice as thick as it is wide. In 1848, the book, part of the estate of the collector Carl Friedrich von Vechelde, who came from Braunschweig, was sold to the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and is preserved there under the shelfmark Cod. Guelf. 1159 Novi. Since the von Vechelde family had several of its members in the convent, the diary notes by the anonymous Cistercian nun may have been handed down in the family over the centuries. Unfortunately, the beginning of the manuscript, where the writer of the diary may have said something about herself, is lost. Her journal notes begin in 1484 and, given the noticeable effort and care behind its creation, the journal was clearly an important personal item for her. She procured her own writing material in the thriftiest but most laborious way possible: she scraped off the text of an old parchment prayer book to write on it again and cut further scraps of parchment to the right size or even sewed smaller pieces together to have sufficient material for her writing. In some places, she supplemented her stock of parchment and paper by using the reverse side of old letters. Her position in the convent can only be established in as far as she does not appear to have held any of the leading monastic offices and officiated neither as *prioress nor as *cellarer nor as *teacher of the girls (magistra puellarum). This means that the writer of the diary is one of the rare voices which report on life behind the convent walls from the internal perspective of the convent: she uninhibitedly discusses matters that either appeared problematic to the nuns or simply went wrong. For her, there is nothing which needs defending or glossing over; and in places her judgement on the various office-holders who steered the fortunes of the convent is shot through with quite startling criticism.

Around the year 1500, the duties which fell to the author of the diary probably included participating in the organisation and supervision of the celebratory dinners which took place in the convent in the company of the nuns’ relatives whenever new members were admitted to the community. In 1499, she describes just such a dinner, to which families from the minor aristocracy were invited, and concludes her description with the words: ‘I have written this down so that I may conduct myself somewhat more cautiously should I be entrusted with the care for a similar dinner in the future’.7 In other words, she notes down the events of her life in the convent not least for herself. Her lowly position in the convent leaves its mark on her narrative perspective: her comments have a certain unfiltered quality. She writes in Latin, perhaps also to practise that language, on whose orthography and syntax she did not always have the firmest grasp. In some places, she lapses suddenly into the local dialect of Middle Low German, namely, whenever the subject matter becomes emotional, she wishes to reproduce the words of relatives and lay people, or the appropriate Latin expression does not occur to her. Her narrative style is captivating: lively, refreshing, and humorous.

While the writer may have kept a diary as a source of reassurance for herself in difficult situations, she also envisages future generations of nuns in the Heilig Kreuz Kloster as the intended readers of her record. She wishes to pass on what the convent has done wrong, whether from lack of awareness or lack of thought, so that these things might be avoided in future: ‘I have written this so that those who come after me do not believe every word they hear’.8 Such were her words of caution to her readers when the provost and convent were forced into a shamefaced admission that they had been fooled by swindlers who had promised them a sizeable endowment from nobles living a considerable distance away. Similarly, in her view the individual nuns who rashly ran away when fire broke out one night on the Rennelberg, the little hill on which the convent was built, would have been better advised to hold their ground, for with a little more faith in God their abandoning of enclosure – especially running around in their nightclothes like vagabonds – could have been avoided.

Building on the tales told by the writer of the journal, we deal with larger, interlinked themes: the nature of life in the convent (Chapter I); what we know about the education there (Chapter II); the nuns’ relationship to their families and how the convent economy functioned (Chapter III); the specific shape that love and friendship took within the convents (Chapter IV); the role played by music and what it meant to be reformed (Chapter V); how the women’s communities coped with the upheavals of the Reformation (Chapter VI); how illnesses were healed and how death was dealt with in the convents (Chapter VII). The Appendix includes a glossary with a systematic compilation and explanation of concepts marked by asterisks in the text, as well as overviews and suggestions for further reading.

The book is based on material from the German lands – partly because that is the area of the expertise of the authors, but even more so because the surviving documents here are rich in a way which is unparalleled, particularly in England, where the dissolution of the monasteries eradicated the greater part of the material heritage of the convents. Wall paintings in the nuns’ choirs, painted sculptures with their dresses for different occasions, illuminated prayer books, and elaborate tapestries would have existed in noble foundations for religious women across the British Isles but have been at best converted, but mostly destroyed. By contrast, in the Cistercian convent of Wienhausen alone, more than 2,000 objects – among them the oldest spectacles in the world – were found untouched under the floorboards in the 1960s, having fallen through the cracks of time.

Within this corpus of objects and texts, a large number of the sources stem from the fifteenth century. These are fascinating decades in which written testimonies increase sharply in number. Just as the nun from the Heilig Kreuz Kloster recycles a parchment prayer book to make writing space for her notes, many other written documents from convents also bear witness to creativity when dealing with precious writing material. At the end of the fourteenth century, the first paper mill in Germany commenced operations in Nuremberg and the number of those able to read and write increased, above all in the cities and, due to the efforts for reform, in the monastic houses, developments which led to a marked rise in text production. The traditional designation of ‘late medieval’ is problematic if ‘late’ represents a value judgement. The stories and records left by the nuns do not speak of decline and discontinuation followed by the dawning of a new age in the sixteenth century, whether with the Reformation or the rebirth (‘Renaissance’) of Antiquity, one understood in secular terms. Rather, from the perspective of contemporaries, the fifteenth century manifested itself as an age of radical departures and the discovery of new horizons.

We always look back on the past with our own eyes, but we can expand our perspective through that of women from earlier generations if we allow their voices to be heard – whether we are dealing with Hildegard of Bingen and her community in the twelfth century or the anonymous Cistercian nun from the Heilig Kreuz Kloster and her sister nuns in the fifteenth. They are the main protagonists in their own story. We would like to make as many as possible of the forgotten voices audible again. For that reason, we decided to start each chapter with an account from the convent diary of our Cistercian nun from Braunschweig – first-hand reports on lice, Lebkuchen, and attestations of love for Christ.

The rich heritage of the convents also includes their musical and material culture, aspects we similarly wish to incorporate into this book – from their large tapestries to their sculptures to their medieval architecture, of which more has been preserved in Germany than in most other European countries. Hence every chapter is supplemented by medieval works of art from convents: illustrative examples which shed light on a given theme from the perspective of the nuns.

This book has grown out of many years of collaboration and was jointly conceived. Eva Schlotheuber contributed the initial stories and was responsible for the classificatory chapters, while Henrike Lähnemann took this further and was responsible for elucidating the narratives represented in the images. Kristin Rotter of the publishers Propyläen proposed the original project; she accompanied it with enthusiasm, as did Martina Backes, Berndt Hamm, Thomas Noll, Friedel Helga Roolfs, Philipp Stenzig, Sabine Wehking, and Christine Wulf. We also profited from feedback after publication at readings, by reviewers, and by letters. This helped us reshape the volume when Alessandra Tosi encouraged us to bring the book across the Channel, and got her team at Open Book Publishers on board. Particular thanks are owed to Anne Simon who worked with us a number of times through the whole book to turn it into a readable account that opens up the world of Northern Germany to an Anglophone readership, Charlotte Pattenden, prioress of Kloster Lüne, who offered her professional expertise as copy-editor, and Andrew Dunning, curator of medieval manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. Wolfgang Brandis, archivist of the Lüneburg convents, provided the majority of the original illustrations and clarified image copyright with the individual convents. As with the German edition, the abbesses and their convents heartened us from the very beginning with their interest in their own history.