Teaching & Learning Guide for: Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality and the Arts in the Middle Ages
Authors: Mecham June L. 
Published: June 2007

Focus Questions

What challenges do researchers interested in female spirituality and the arts face and why?

How might broadening the definition of such categories as religious women, spirituality, and the arts transform our understanding of women’s participation in medieval European history? How might such developments shape future research in this field?

Author Recommends

* Schulenburg, Jane, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca.500–1100 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

A magisterial work on female spirituality and monasticism in the early Middle Ages, the foundation for this study is the analysis of 2200 female and male saint’s vitae (lives). Schulenburg studies the public and private activities of holy women, their opportunities, their lives, and their relationships with siblings and spiritual friends. She explores accounts of heroic virginity and self‐mutilation as well as the life expectancy of early medieval saints. Drawing comparisons between the lives of male and female saints, Schulenburg’s study revealed the distinctive characteristics of female sanctity in the early Middle Ages.

* Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).

In part a response to analyses of medieval religious women like Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia, Bynum’s sophisticated study explores how the social, cultural, and theological associations surrounding the categories of female and flesh encouraged women to express their devotion in somatic, affective, emotional, and often intensely physical ways. Bynum’s positive reevaluation of female mystics and visionaries was revolutionary within the field and her work has shaped the subsequent discourse on female spirituality.

* Hamburger, Jeffrey, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

What devotional objects did nuns see and use in the convent? Did nuns produce artwork? Hamburger was one of the first scholars to undertake a serious study of the artistic endeavors of religious women – a topic almost entirely neglected within the fields of history and art history. Following Bynum’s characterization of female piety, Hamburger explores how the affective and emotional aspects of female spirituality found expression through the often ephemeral artistic creations of monastic women.

* Elliot, Dyan, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Elliot’s most recent monograph explores what she describes as the criminalization of female spirituality resulting from an inquisitorial culture that increasingly sought proof of mystical and spiritual experiences. Studying sacramental confession, the inquisition of heretics, and the discernment of spirits, Elliot examines primary sources from diverse genres and reveals the importance of gender‐related issues within these realms.

Online Materials

1. Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index

http://www.haverford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/mfi.html

This website indexes journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. The focus of the index is on current articles and essays, which are often more difficult to identify, rather than monographs written by a single author that can be easily located through library catalogues. A subject search for the term ‘arts,’ for example, will yield several pertinent works.

2. Monastic Matrix: A Scholarly Resource for the Study of Women’s Religious Communities from 400–1600 CE

http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/

This website provides several resources for pursuing the relationship between women, spirituality, and the arts in the context of Western European monasticism. Monastic Matrix consists of six components. The Monasticon provides a repertory of women’s monastic communities, while entries on individual men and women important to women’s religious history and associated with the communities may be found under Vitae. A collection of primary source documents are found in the Cartularium; secondary source articles are located under Commentaria. Figurae provides a visual library of digital images related to women’s monastic communities; the Vocabularium supplies a glossary of terms explaining vocabulary relevant to women’s religious communities. Finally, the Bibliographia offers a substantial bibliography of published and unpublished works related to women’s spirituality and monasticism. The Bibliographia and Figurae sections are particularly useful for exploring the interconnections between women, spirituality, and the arts.

Sample Syllabus: Female Spirituality in the Middle Ages

Note: The following syllabus provides topics and readings suitable for lecture or discussion in an upper‐level undergraduate or graduate level course. It also provides two sample projects. Instead of the fictional individual project which asks the students to create a new female saint with a shrine and devotional image, instructors could substitute an actual, historical saint or a research paper, particularly if the course were intended for graduate students.

Required Texts:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986).

Bynum, C., Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).

Hobbins, D., The Trial of Joan of Arc, Translated and Introduced by Daniel Hobbins (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2005).

Required Work:

Figurae

Twice over the course of the semester each student will be required to find 3 images from the Figurae section of Monastic Matrix http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/ and explain how women participated in their production or use. This may require additional research.

Individual Project: Saint, Shrine & Devotional Image

Based on the knowledge they have acquired over the course of the semester, each student will fashion a new (previously unknown) female saint and work to promote her cult. As part of the project, they should write an official Vitae or life of their saint, emphasizing features of her distinctive spirituality, pious practices, and miracles associated with her cult. Each student will also fashion a shrine to their saint as well as a devotional image associated with either their saint or her shrine. Each student will need to address how they intend to promote their saint to female and male pilgrims as well as how they wish to control spatial access to their saint’s shrine. They should consider the type of iconography they wish to employ in the devotional images associated with their saint. Students are encouraged to be historically creative. Shrines and images may be produced electronically (through computer graphics and programs) or physically (through any media the student chooses).

Topics for Lecture & Discussion

Week I: Introduction & Overview

Definitions, Problems & Issues: What is female spirituality?

Reading:

Mecham, J., ‘Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality, and the Arts’, History Compass, 4/3 (2006), 448–480.

Mooney, C. M., ‘Voice, Gender, and the Portrayal of Sanctity’, in Catherine M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 1–15.

Weeks II–IV: Early Middle Ages

Foundations for Understanding: Martyrs & Monasticism

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ch. 1.

Wemple, S., ‘Female Monasticism in Italy and its Comparison with France and Germany from the Ninth through the Eleventh Century’, in Werner Affeldt (ed.), Frauen in Spätantike und Mittelalter: Lebensbedingunge‐Lebensnormen‐Lebensformen. Beiträge zu einer internationalen Tagung am Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin 18. bis 21. Februar 1987 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1990), 291–310.

Schulenburg, J. T., ‘The Heroics of Virginity; Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation,’ in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and Reaniassance. Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 29–72.

Lay Piety & Patronage

Reading:

Pitarakis, B., ‘Female Piety in Context: Understanding Developments in Private Devotional Practices’, in Maria Vassilaki (ed.), Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 153–166.

Smith, M. F., R. Fleming, and P. Halpin, ‘Court and Piety in Late Anglo‐Saxon England’, Catholic Historical Review, 87/4 (2001): 569–602.

Lay Piety & Pilgrimage

Readings:

Smith, J. A., ‘Sacred Journeying: Women’s Correspondence and Pilgrimage in the Fourth and Eighth Centuries,’ in J. Stopford (ed.), Pilgrimage Explored (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 41–56.

Schulenburg, J. T., ‘Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice’, in Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (eds.), Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 185–206.

Monastic Women & the Literary Arts: Hroswitha & Herrad of Hohenburg

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ch. 2.

The Plays of Hroswitha, Introduction at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/roswitha‐toc.html#gasquet‐introduction

Dulcitius at

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/roswitha‐dulcitius.html

Monastic Women & the Visual Arts

Project: Find three images related to female monastic communities, dating from ca. 500–1100 in the Figurae section of Monastic Matrix at http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/. Be prepared to bring them to class and explain how women were involved in their creation or use.

Weeks V–X: High Middle Ages

Hildegard of Bingen

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ch. 3.

Women, Liturgy & Drama

Reading:

Matthews, K., ‘Textual Spaces/Playing Places: An Exploration of Convent Drama in the Abbey of Origny‐Sainte‐Benoîte’, European Medieval Drama: Papers from the Seventh International Conference on European Medieval Drama 7 (2003): 69–85.

Muessig, C., ‘Prophesy and Song: Teaching and Preaching by Medieval Women’, in Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (eds.), Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 146–158.

Yardley, A. B., ‘Was Anonymous a Woman?’ in Martha Furman Schleifer and Sylvia Glickman (eds.), Women Composers Through the Ages, vol. 1 (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 69–71.

New Developments: Cistercian, Premonstratensian & Gilbertine Orders

Reading:

Berman, C., ‘Were There Twelfth‐Century Cistercian Nuns?’, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 68/4 (1999): 824–864.

Wolbrink, S., ‘Women in the Premonstratensian Order of Northwestern Germany, 1120–1250’, Catholic Historical Review, 89/3 (2003): 387–408.

Constable, G., ‘Aelred of Rievaulx and the Nun of Watton: An Episode in the Early History of the Gilbertine Order,’ in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women. Dedicated and presented to Professor Rosalind M.T. Hill on the Occasion of her Seventieth Birthday (Studies in Church History, Subsidia I) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 205–226.

New Developments: Beguines & Bridal Mysticism

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, chs. 4 & 5.

Latré, G., ‘Beguinages and Female Forms of Spiritual Life in the Low Countries: An Introductory Lecture to a Visit of the Leuven Beguinage’, in Juliette Dor (ed.), A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens‐Fonck (Liège: Université de Liège, 1992), 219–234.

Norris, J., ‘Nuns and Other Religious: Women and Christianity in the Middle Ages’, in Linda Mitchell (ed.), Women in Medieval Western European Culture (New York, NY: Garland, 1999), 277–293.

New Developments: Women & the Mendicant Movement

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ch. 6.

Fumagalli Beonio‐Brocchieri, M., ‘The Feminine Mind in Medieval Mysticism,’ in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (eds.), Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 19–33.

Wood, J. M., ‘Breaking the Silence: The Poor Clares and the Visual Arts in Fifteenth‐Century Italy,’Renaissance Quarterly, 48/2 (1995): 262–286.

Female Asceticism

Reading:

Bynum, C., Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

Selections from Bell, R., Holy Anorexia (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Female Spirituality & Heresy

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ch. 7.

Wessley, S., ‘The Thirteenth‐Century Guglielmites: Salvation through Women’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women. Dedicated and Presented to Professor Rosalind M.T. Hill on the Occasion of her Seventieth Birthday (Studies in Church History, Subsidia I) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 289–303.

Weeks XI–XVI: Late Middle Ages

Features of Female Piety?: Somatic & Maternal Spirituality

Reading:

Hale, R. D., ‘Taste and See, for God is Sweet’ Sensory Perception and Memory in Medieval Christian Mystical Experience’, in Anne Clarke Bartlett et al., Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lazario (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 3–14.

Rublack, U., ‘Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus in Late Medieval Dominican Convents’, Gender and History, 6/1 (1994): 37–57.

Klapisch‐Zuber, C., ‘Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento,’ in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, tran. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 310–329.

Monastic Women & the Arts

Project: Find three images related to female monastic communities, dating from ca. 1200–1500 in the Figurae section of Monastic Matrix at http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/. Be prepared to bring them to class and explain how women were involved in their creation or use.

Reading:

Hamburger, J., ‘Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript’, Gesta, 31 (1992): 108–134.

Hamburger, J., ‘To Make Women Weep: Ugly Art as “Feminine” and the Origins of Modern Aesthetics’, Res, 31 (1997): 9–33.

Roberts, A., ‘North Meets South in the Convent: The Altarpiece of Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Pisa’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 50/2 (1987): 187–206.

Lay Piety & Patronage: Women & Books of Hours

Examine the following facsimile:

Inglis, E., The Hours of Mary of Burgundy: Codex Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: H. Miller, 1995).

Reading:

Penketh, S., ‘Women and Books of Hours’, in Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (eds.), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1996), 266–280.

Stanton, A. R., ‘From Eve to Bathsheba and Beyond: Motherhood in the Queen Mary Psalter’, in Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (eds.), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1996), 172–189.

Lay Piety & Patronage: Women & the Parish

Reading:

French, K. L., ‘I Leave My Best Gown as a Vestment’: Women’s Spiritual Interests in the Late Medieval English Parish’, Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History, 4/1 (1998): 57–77.

French, K. L., ‘Maidens’ Lights and Wives’ Stories: Women’s Parish Guilds in Late Medieval England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29/2 (1998): 399–425.

Lay Piety & Pilgrimage

Reading:

Schein, S., ‘Bridget of Sweden, Margery Kempe and Women’s Jerusalem Pilgrimages in the Middle Ages’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 14/1 (1999): 44–58.

Webb, D., ‘Freedom of Movement? Women Travelers in the Middle Ages’, in Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (eds.), Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 75–89.

Domestic Spirituality

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ch. 8.

Webb, D. M., ‘Woman and Home: The Domestic Setting of Late Medieval Spirituality’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 159–174.

New Developments: Women & the Devotio Moderna

Reading:

‘Salome Sticken: A Way of Life for Sisters’ and ‘On the Life and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and Other Devotional Exercises’, in Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, trans. and ed. John van Engen (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1988), 176–204.

Dijk, M. van, ‘Henry Mande: The Making of a Male Visionary in Devotio moderna,’ in Mathilde van Dijk and Renee Nip (eds.), Saints, Scholars and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Stuides. Festschrift in Honour of Anneke Mulder‐Bakker on the occasion of her Sixty‐Fifth Birthday (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 133–151.

Female Spirituality in Decline?: Accusations of Abuses & Witchcraft in the Later Middle Ages

Reading:

Petroff, E., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ch. 9.

Hobbins, D., The Trial of Joan of Arc, Translated and Introduced by Daniel Hobbins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Presentations of Individual Projects

Seminar/Project Ideas

Find three images related to female monastic communities, dating from ca.500–1100 in the Figurae section of Monastic Matrix at http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/. Be prepared to bring them to class and explain how women were involved in their creation or use.