Historical Studies Journal

A Problem Like Maria: A History of the History of Medieval Nuns

By: Robert Welch

Though representations of Catholic monasteries often favor male actors, women began forming separate monastic communities at approximately the same time as men, roughly 300–500 C.E. Despite this fact, historians have traditionally paid less attention to women’s communities than their male counterparts. This survey demonstrates that historians have shifted their attention from focusing on institutional rules and regulations, and the dissemination of power from above, to instead focusing on the lived experiences of women in medieval monastic communities. These changes have come about as more women entered the professional study of history, and also as the discipline itself has evolved from simply profiling the actions of leaders and nations, to instead focusing on the lives of those marginalized populations who did not participate in what the previous eras considered to be great deeds.

In the first five decades of the twentieth century, most historians studying monasticism treated the study of nuns as a subset of the broader study of religious institutions. Historians who focused on issues surrounding women in religious orders examined how communities of nuns differed from, or deviated from, male institutional norms. Social and cultural historians later shifted attention to rediscover the voices lost to history, leading to a greater focus on women’s stories. Intellectual historians like Caroline Walker Bynum highlighted the importance of female religious mystics in the Middle Ages during the second half of the twentieth century.^[1] Pioneers in the study of sexuality, like John Boswell, challenged a discipline hesitant to discuss the topic by emphasizing the importance of the entire realm of human lived experience.^[2] Scholars of religion like Moshe Sluhovsky analyzed narratives of possession and exorcism in later medieval and early modern convents, amplifying the voices of those accused of diabolical attack. Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, a new generation of scholars explores how nuns interacted with the greater world outside the convent walls and examines just how porous the concept of enclosure truly was.^[3] This study does not aim to be all-inclusive or complete, instead it serves as an introduction to the literature and organizes its findings chronologically within thematic groupings discussing some of the major questions about those communities that scholars have addressed over the last hundred years.

Women as Contemplatives vs. Men as Active Creatures

Prior to the mid-1960s, historians typically envisioned women in religion as supportive helpers of men. Scholars often characterized women’s communities as less important than their male counterparts, depicting them as servants of Christ akin to Mary and Martha of the Gospels.^[4] Academic works generally mentioned women only when comparing their houses to men’s cloistered communities. One of the earliest scholars to suggest a unique role for women in medieval religion was Herbert Grundmann, a German historian who taught at the University of Munster, and was director of the Monumenta Germaniae Historia from 1959 until his death in 1970.^[5] Grundmann’s Habilitation Dokument, accepted in 1933 and first published in 1935, was one of the first serious works to accord specific importance to the role of women in medieval religious history.^[6] Grundmann recognized the important role women played in the rise of the mendicant movements in Italy, France and Germany in the thirteenth centuries and their contributions to the production of vernacular religious literature throughout the high middle ages.^[7] Grundmann’s most important contribution to the study of medieval religious women was his exposition of the role played by medieval nuns like Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena as critics of both secular and ecclesiastical rulers. He also pointed out the contributions of women like Mechthilde of Magdeburg, whose Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowering of God’s Light) was the first widely read collection of religious visionary literature in Old High German.^[8] In addition, he emphasized the significant contributions of women’s branches of the Franciscan and Dominican orders in manuscript production and the translation of Latin sermons into local vernaculars.^[9] He also wrote the first serious studies of women’s tertiary orders, like the heretical Beguines. His analysis of those orders revealed they had played a more substantial role in heretical movements than earlier historians had acknowledged.^[10] Still, Grundmann, like most other historians working in the first half of the twentieth century, contended that women’s roles in medieval life were contemplative rather than active, and they required guidance from male clergy members to ensure adherence to Catholic orthopraxy. Scholars of medieval religion who wrote after Grundmann, like Peter Brown, typically underestimated the importance of women’s contributions to the formation of Catholic orthodoxy and worked from official proclamations and council records, rather than from the writings of nuns.^[11]

In contrast to Grundman, Caroline Walker Bynum’s work in the 1980s concentrated on the writings of female mystics, rather than those of male clergy members. Her studies widened the view of women’s contemplative praxis. Bynum’s three major monographs, Jesus as Mother, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, and Fragmentation and Redemption, published in the later 1980s, represented the general shift in academia toward the histories of previously marginalized groups.^[12] Though Holy Feast and Holy Fast is her best-known work, Jesus as Mother was the first work to specifically address the active nature of women’s contemplative activities.^[13] Bynum’s contribution to the field lies primarily in her emphasis on the corporeality of medieval women’s religious experiences. Rather than concentrating on Conventual Rules and their evolution over time, Bynum focused on the writings of the nuns themselves, and their accounts of their lived experiences. Furthermore, Bynum pointed out the language of those experiences were essentially physical in nature. They experienced their ecstasies somatically, not merely as visual or auditory hallucination, like someone watching a film. She concentrated on the accounts of mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Christina of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, all of whom either wrote accounts of their mystical experiences themselves, or had those accounts transcribed by compilers of their vitae. Most unusually for the period, these women all served as advisors, whether officially or unofficially, to secular and religious authority figures.^[14] In their visions, Cloistered (and non-cloistered) women felt the pain of giving birth to the infant Messiah, tasted the ferrous saltiness of Christ’s blood, and chewed on the tough flesh of the anthropomorphized eucharist.^[15] Bynum’s focus on the writings of women themselves contrasted with the work done earlier by male scholars, who showed more concern for convent charters and priestly sermons. Those documents, while important, said little to nothing about the women who spent their lives in those communities while engaged in intense spiritual activity. Bynum’s contribution was recognizing the interiority of women’s mystical experiences.

Bynum’s work on the interiority of mystical experience, and the reliance on the writings of nuns, rather than men’s writings about them, was truly innovative. This work was continued by a new generation of scholars who sought to bring to light what Anne Jacobson Schutte referred to in the introduction to her translation of seventeenth-century lay mystic Cecelia Ferrazzi, as “other voices, rather than older voices.”^[16] Schutte’s 2001 study, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618-1750, expanded on Bynum’s methodology, and applied it to the lives and writings of religious women in the early modern era.^[17] This approach became standard in the study of pre-modern female mysticism and popular piety. Younger social and cultural historians like Gillian Ahlgren, Meghan Callahan, Elizabeth Makowski, and art historian Jeryldene M. Wood have emulated Bynum’s approach of bringing the stories told by these women to life, rather than relying on narratives about those women written by men.^[18] Schutte drew from transcriptions of hours of interviews from the Inquisition with women accused of the crime of “Pretense of Holiness.” The eloquent responses they provided their interlocutors provide not just insight into those women’s religious belief systems, but also vital information about women’s daily lives in later Renaissance Venice.

Ecclesiastical Communities as Feminized Spaces

The study of cloistered women’s communities as gendered spaces has undergone a similar shift to that of their lives as mystics. Subordination and class structure in medieval convents were the focus of study for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Early scholars placed greater emphasis on the hierarchical nature of cloistered life than on interpersonal relations. When those interactions were even mentioned they were generally in the form of superior-inferior communications.^[19] Historian Peter Brown’s seminal account of the first 800 years of Christianity, published in 1996, representing work he began in the later 1950s, presented a social and cultural historiographical approach to the overall history of the Catholic Church. When discussing monasticism in general and nuns in particular, Brown returned to the institutional approach of previous generations of scholars. For example, his discussion of St. Radegund (ca. 520-587), and her foundation and administration of the Convent of the Holy Cross, is a narrative of royal prerogative and official piety, rather than of the saint’s personal actions or inner thoughts.^[20] Brown, like his contemporaries, viewed monasticism through an institutional lens, and wrote in terms of royal prerogative and orthodox pietistic practices. Brown’s contemporary, Marcia Colish, who wrote an intellectual history of early medieval Europe, devoted even less space to the lives of cloistered women in her 1997 work.^[21] Professor Colish’s work focused more on the writings of the Church Fathers, and how ecclesiastical authorities like bishops shaped and implemented religious doctrine. When she wrote about monastic communities, Colish mostly discussed the Rules of the earlier religious orders, rather than those who lived according to them.

Both Brown and Colish represent a generation of scholars trained in the years immediately following the Second World War. These historians prioritized documentation and interpretation of institutional charters over exploring monastics’ inner lives. Though historians working in this period could not be said to have been hostile to the inner lives of cloistered women, the discipline of history simply did not consider the voices of those who did not hold political power to have been important in forming the historical narrative. Historians of the first half of the twentieth century followed the lead of scholars like Will Durant, whose eleven-volume opus emphasized the accomplishments of powerful men and institutions in Western society and was colored by a distinct anti-communist sentiment. Scholars like Durant were more invested in telling the history of the West’s rise to supremacy than they were in describing the intricacies of the daily lives of common folk.^[22] Bynum’s work represented a major shift from the history of large religious orders to a newer history of professed religious people. It is important to remember that unlike the work of Durant, which was overtly propagandist, the work of scholars like Brown and Colish was not meant to portray the superiority or inferiority of one group compared to others. Regardless of that fact, the generation of historians trained in the era immediately following the Second World War paid greater attention to larger institutions, and to diplomatic and legal documents than they did to the writings of those affected by them.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s feminist scholars, following the footsteps of Bynum, began analyzing daily life in medieval and Renaissance convents more deeply. Kate Lowe showed that women’s orders, while often structurally similar to male orders, developed unique positions only present in female institutions. Though they often shared similar titles and duty assignments, women’s orders frequently developed these roles differently from men’s communities. Set monastic roles, though they might carry the same titles in male and female foundations, were adapted in ways consistent with women’s position in pre-modern society. For example, while an Abbess was the senior authority figure in communities of nuns, Abbesses were subordinate to priests in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and male religious authorities frequently countermanded their decisions. More recent works by historians like Kate Lowe have emphasized the role of convents in educating young women, who boarded there to attain a basic education. Professed nuns frequently encouraged these girls to consider taking vows after they had completed their three or four years of schooling.^[23] Amy Leonard and Sharon Strocchia have written works of cultural and social history that concentrate on the particular situations of nuns in Catholic communities in Reformation Germany and Renaissance Florence.^[24] These authors, who trained in the later 1980s, situate the lives of women in convents in specific geographic and chronological settings, and attribute as much importance to the nuns’ relationships with their convent’s external communities as they do to the sisters’ relationships with each other inside the convent.

German historians Hennrike Lahnemann and Eva Schlotheuber’s 2024 study of the convent of Ebsdorf, near Braunschweig, paints a detailed picture of nuns as human beings rather than personifications of sanctity, as they had been depicted in the previous century.^[25] Their analysis of roughly a century of diaries presents three-dimensional portraits of women who experienced joy, jealousy, ambition, friendship and enmity while living in a cloistered existence. These scholars emphasize the importance of regionality in understanding the complexities of convent life, and how even minor differences in the experiences of cloistered women represent how individual convents were forced to adapt to local political and environmental challenges. Lahnemann and Schlotheuber’s study, in particular, depicts the challenges convents faced when sieges befell their cities, as those communities relocated to safety while striving to maintain their enclosed way of life.

Elizabeth Makowski further explored the porous nature of the cloister in her research on fourteenth-century English nuns in Yorkshire, many of whom made a habit of leaving their convents for periods of months or years. She revealed how some nuns left their convents for extended periods, only to return penitent and seeking forgiveness.^[26] Makowski demonstrates that, while nuns did not receive the same benefit of doubt that many monks received when they left then later rejoined their communities, recusant nuns were not automatically condemned by their orders, and cast out to live lives of shame and infamy. This 2019 book sheds new light on the treatment of women who transcended social norms in the Middle Ages, and challenges previously held suppositions regarding life in the pre-modern era. Makowski points out how difficulties specific to medieval English female existence were accommodated by women’s religious orders, and counters narratives characterizing them as unforgiving spaces, bound by unbendable ironclad rules. Instead, her work shows how women’s religious orders sought to adapt to local conditions of hardship, and tried to practice Christian charity toward their members. These studies emphasize important information regarding how, despite their essential separateness from the secular world, religious communities could not separate their existences from the political and social upheavals surrounding them.

Art historians have also been active as guides to the life of cloistered women. Art historians shifted their focus away from object-oriented studies in the late 1970s, and followed their literary studies colleagues toward a more holistic understanding of how art was produced, who produced it, and why it mattered to both the artists and their communities. Jeffery Hamburger has utilized cultural studies and gender studies methodologies to discuss manuscript illustrations produced by women in later medieval German convents. His first two monographs contextualized these works and their importance within other roles convents played, such as teaching and healing.^[27] His work on manuscripts produced by the convent at Fulda reveals the whimsy and humor with which nuns in the foundation’s scriptorium addressed their work. In addition, Hamburger discussed how frescoes and sculptures in the convent itself, though often produced by male builders, represented the ideas and directions of the community’s female leaders. Art historians like Hamburger, like the scholars mentioned in the preceding paragraph, have revealed ways cloistered women engaged with their communities, and reconstructed the social networks connecting religious and laypeople in the pre-modern era. Such research helps to resurrect lost social webs and reminds us that even cloistered communities were never completely isolated from their secular surroundings.

Lovers, Lesbians, and Prostitutes

Before the late 1970s, scholars largely ignored the topic of clerical sexuality. Although British historian Derrick Sherwin Bailey wrote on homosexuality in the priesthood in the 1950s, most historians avoided the subject due to prevailing social mores. The prevailing homophobic attitude of that time made discussion of this subject uncomfortable, if not taboo, for most scholars.^[28] It took the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and the gay liberation movement of the 1970s for social and cultural historians like Yale’s John Boswell to provide academic legitimacy to the subject of clerical sexuality.^[29] As living beings, nuns possessed the same desires and emotions as individuals in any other context. A cursory examination of the diaries maintained by medieval and early modern clergy members indicates that these women experienced, and frequently acted upon, those feelings and desires. Both Judith Brown and Guido Ruggiero have written on sexuality in cloistered communities. Brown’s 1986 account of the heresy trial of seventeenth century Tuscan nun Benedetta Carlini revealed that sexual desire not only existed in communities whose members were sworn to celibacy but that, despite prohibitions to the contrary, women often acted upon those desires with other members of their community.^[30] Brown’s work is particularly germane to students of early modern religious mysticism, and hearkens back to Bynum’s discussions of the erotic language female mystics employed to describe their visions. Ruggiero has written on heterosexual interactions between nuns and men from both the lay and religious communities. His 1985 work The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice contains a chapter on such relationships that had been brought to the Inquisition’s attention in fifteenth and sixteenth century Venice.^[31] His work emphasized just how porous the boundary between convent and community was, and how easily men, whether religious or non-religious, gained access to cloistered women for both sexual and nonsexual interactions.

More recently, cultural historians like Christina Bhasin, Silvia Evangelisti, Mary Lavin, and Lynn Lara Westwater have written on the relatively loose interpretation of cloister and the ability of women in religious orders to engage in social interchange both inside and outside convent walls.^[32] Bhasin’s work on communities of former prostitutes in post-plague Venice is particularly enlightening and draws attention to the dilemmas facing involuntary entrants to seventeenth-century religious orders. Her work emphasizes that religious institutions in the pre-modern era were often viewed as solutions to problems like the spread of disease or public disobedience by both civil and religious authorities. According to Bhasin, prostitutes and actresses were herded into convents by the civic and ecclesiastical authorities following a particularly virulent outbreak of plague in 1668. Her work calls attention to the fact that those in power often viewed women as problems, rather than contributing members of society, an attitude that some might argue has not significantly changed four centuries later. In the twenty-first century, scholars of human sexuality and gender theory should take a fresh look at the existing source material and allow previously ignored aspects of nuns’ lives to enter the historiographical discussion and challenge assumptions that earlier generations of scholars often held.

Possession, Heresy, and the Inquisition

Herbert Grundmann’s work on heresy in the Middle Ages was one of the first studies to take seriously the roles of women in both orthodox and heretical religious movements, but his writing carries a flaw that runs through much of the pre-1990s scholarship on the relationship between women and the Inquisition. Grundmann, like most scholars of heretical movements in this era, produced narratives that depicted women as passive victims of male Inquisitors and recipients of priestly action, rather than protagonists in their own stories. As Judith Brown demonstrated in her account of Benedetta Carlini’s trial, discussed above, women denounced to the Inquisition were not fainting wallflowers, wispy delicate petals tossed about in a tempest of external forces. Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance held firm beliefs regarding religion and dogma, which often placed them at odds with ecclesiastical authorities.^[33]

Cultural and intellectual historians have paid particularly close attention to the relationship between nuns and their priestly confessors in regions where outbreaks of diabolical possession occurred.^[34] In the earlier part of the twentieth-century scholars of possession focused on institutional interactions between the Catholic Church hierarchy and those less powerful who were often referred to the authorities for exorcism. By the early 1990s, the focus on such cases shifted to issues of social interactions between the possessed and their local communities and how being identified as someone who had been possessed in the past might lead to notoriety. This notoriety might lend a sort of unofficial social authority otherwise denied to those living outside existing positions of power.^[35] Moshe Sluhovsky’s study of a case of possession in sixteenth-century France revealed that individuals who had been exorcised often acquired informal authority on matters of religion over others in village and convent settings, regardless of their previous social or institutional backgrounds. Many of those affected were women, who then acquired agency that would otherwise have been denied to members of their sex in other circumstances. Nicole Obry, the subject of Slushovsky’s article, even acquired a reputation as a local saint after her exorcism and professed to be able to identify others who had been touched by demonic presences.

There is a clear path from Bynum’s reliance on the words of female mystics to the work of researchers like Moshe Sluhovsky and Jeffrey R. Watt, whose close readings of local records in the context of microhistories bring the past alive in ways that previous studies did not.In 2009 Jeffrey R. Watt wrote of an outbreak of possession in a convent in Bologna during the opening decade of the seventeenth century. Watt compared records from the local diocesan Inquisitor with the diaries of some of the sisters living in that convent, and discovered that, while the ecclesiastical authorities blamed the initial diabolical encounters on a few of the younger sisters’ dabblings in love magic and fortune telling spells, the nuns’ diaries revealed that one of their assigned confessors, Father Francesco Cavano, had pressed his attentions on many of the novices, who then responded by acting out in ways that resembled the stereotypical attributes of those in the throes of diabolical possession.^[36] The conflict between the nuns, who were at the mercy of a powerful man, and the diocesan authorities, who were disinclined at first to believe reports of wrongdoing by Cavano, represents a microcosm of similar interactions between those in power and those in subordinate positions in society at large. Watt’s study contains several stories describing how women, frequently a marginalized class in pre-modern Europe, sought to claim agency when subjected to unwanted male attention. In this case, although the Bishop of Bologna failed to bring charges against Fr. Cavano, the Bishop did relieve him of his office as a conventual confessor, thus relieving the women of his unwanted attention. This is an example of how, in the early part of the twenty-first century, historians are reading older sources in new ways and comparing accounts to form more complex understandings of past events, rather than accepting the pronouncements made by previous generations of scholars. The shift from the study of institutions to individuals is an important development in recent scholarship and is a continuation of the shift toward cultural studies that began in the 1980s. Voices of marginalized individuals (in this case, the voices of cloistered women), though frequently suppressed, have emerged to tell their side of the past to an audience that is eager to hear their stories.

The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Research

History as a discipline has evolved in the past century from the study of institutions and leaders to one that amplifies the voices of previously silenced communities. It has changed from a top-down emphasis on rulers and ‘great men,’ to bottom up studies of the daily lives of the marginalized and dispossessed. Historiography reflects the time when it was written, therefore, it is not surprising that as society changed over the past hundred years, so did the way scholars interpreted the available source materials. The content of those records did not change, rather historians approached them with new questions and found new answers to questions that previous generations had not thought to ask. They failed to ask the questions because they did not consider the voices of non-noble actors significant. Those answers produced new questions, whose answers produced new meanings, and those meanings, of course, have generated even newer questions. Critics who deride historians as revisionists overlook the reality that revision lies at the heart of historical scholarship. This paper has shown that attention to women in monastic orders has shifted away from the structure of those orders to the women themselves and their interactions with their communities.

Recent scholarship has embraced interdisciplinarity. The incorporation of archeology and art history into the study of Medieval and Renaissance convents has also allowed more insight into the day-to-day experiences of nuns in this era, and scholars are finding it more difficult to separate the lives of those who lived before us from the role played by the profound interplay between individuals and their material surroundings. Scholars of material culture have published recently on the role of small personal objects, like breviaries and portable reliquaries, in the devotional lives of women in religious communities. Archeologists are examining the built environment and analyzing how convent structures influenced the sisters’ interactions. Simple differences like whether the community slept in common open-plan dormitories, or resided in individual cells, likely affected whether interpersonal conflict was likely to have occurred between members of religious orders. Geography also influenced convent life, with urban communities facing challenges that differed from those of rural foundations. It is impossible ever truly to understand the existence of another human being, but recent scholarship allows us to empathize with the joys and disappointments, the friendships and petty jealousies, the great passions and deep heartbreaks of women who died long before our generation of scholars were born.

Notes

1. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. (New York: Zone Books, 1990). ↑

2. John Boswell. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe From the Beginning of the Christian era to the Fourteenth Century. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980). ↑

3. Moshe Sluhovsky. “A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 1039-1055, and “The Devil in the Convent.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 5 (December 2002), 1379-1411. ↑

4. Peter Brown. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000. (Chicheser, UK: Wiley, 1996.) and Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), though published after the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1980s, exemplify the male centric scholarship of the first half of the 20^th century. Both Brown and Colish trained in the 1940s and 1950s, and therefore reflected this mindset. ↑

5. Grundmann himself is problematic. He signed an allegiance document to the Nazi Party in 1933, and served as a Wermacht officer in Eastern Prussia. See the introduction by Steven Rowan to the 1965 English translation of Herbert Grundmann. Religiose Bewegungen in MIttelalter. (Darmstadt, DE. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961). ↑

6. Grundmann’s work was republished in 1955, after the war, and revised again in 1961, before being translated to English in 1965. ↑

7. Grundmann, 192. ↑

8. Grundmann, 196. ↑

9. Grundmann, 200. ↑

10. Grundmann, 243. ↑

11. For the state of the study and analysis of the role of women in medieval religious movements after Grundmann, see Peter Brown. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000. (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1996). While Brown does pay some attention to the role of women in the foundation of the monastic traditions, he mostly emphasizes their work in support of the male orders. ↑

12. Bynum’s work changed the direction of the study of women’s role medieval religious thought, and remains relevant today. ↑

13. Bynum, Jesus as Mother. ↑

14. Though in the case of Margery Kempe, her efforts at offering advice landed her in jeopardy with those same authorities more often than not. See Bynum’s description of Kempe’s interactions with various ecclesiastical authorities throughout her writing. ↑

15. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 190. ↑

16. Cecelia Ferrazzi. Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint. 1609-1684. Transcribed and Translated by Anne Jacobson Schutte. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3. ↑

17. Anne Jacobson Schutte. Aspiring Saints: Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618-1750. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). ↑

18. See Gillian T.W. Ahlgren. Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Meghan Callahan. “Suor Domenica da Paradisos as Alter Christus: Portrait of a Renaissance Mystic” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 323-350; Elizabeth Makowski. Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2019); Jeryldene M. Wood, Women, Art, and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ↑

19. Brown, 48. ↑

20. Brown, 44. ↑

21. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400. 47. ↑

22. Will Durant’s Western Centric series of books were published after World War II in a distinct effort to counter a perceived threat from Eastern centric communist ideologies. They remain on the shelves of many public libraries to this day. ↑

23. K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter Reformation Italy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 184. Lowe devotes an entire chapter to how female religious orders interpreted monastic rules differently from male orders. Of particular importance was the role of nuns as teachers to girls from upper class families, many of whom were expected to take vows later on. ↑

24. Amy Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Sharon Stroccchia. Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). ↑

25. Hennrike Lahnemann, and Eva Schlotheuber. The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents. (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024). ↑

26. Makowski, 139-150. ↑

27. Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. (New York: Zone Books, 1998). Also see his earlier book, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). ↑

28. Derrick Sherwin Bailey. Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. (London: Longman, Greens, & Co. 1955). ↑

29. Boswell. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Boswell worked on letters and diary entries from male monastics in the 12^th century, and asserted that the language in these letters indicated romantic and erotic love between monks, rather than fraternal agape. ↑

30. Judith Brown. Immodest Acts : The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 59. Benedetta’s visions and religious ecstasies were written down in language that was overtly erotic. Similar accounts of the ecstasies of Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila lead a reader to reasonably question whether the very physicality of the language used to describe them may indicate that some of the experiences were, in fact, recollections of actual interpersonal encounters in the community of religious women. See also Caroline Walker Bynum’s discussions of the very physical language used by earlier mystics, like Hildegard of Bingen, when describing their spiritual raptures in Fragmentation and Redemption, 190. ↑

31. Guido Ruggiero. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). ↑

32. Christian Scippa Bhasin. “Prostitutes, Nuns, Actresses: Breaking the Convent Wall in Seventeenth-Century Venice.” Theatre Journal, Vol. 66, No. 1, “Modernism” (March 2014), 19-35. Bhasin writes specifically about communities composed of former prostitutes. On interactions between nuns and lay suitors, see Silvia Evangelisti. “Wives, Widows, and Brides of Christ: Marriage and the Convent in the Historiography of Early Modern Italy.” The Historical Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), 233-247, Mary Lavin “Sex and Celibacy in Early Modern Venice.” The Historical Journal, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), 865-888; and Lynn Lara Westwater. “A Rediscovered Friendship in the Republic of Letters: The Unpublished Correspondence of Arcangela Tarabotti and Ismaël Boulliau.” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 67-134. ↑

33. Here the work of Caroline Walker Bynum is once again very germane. See especially her discussion of Margery Kempe’s run ins with the ecclesiastical authorities in Lincoln and Norfolk in Jesus as Mother. ↑

34. For example, see Jeffrey R. Watt’s excellent study on possession and exorcism in the convent of Santa Chiara, The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009.). ↑

35. Moshe Sluhovsky. “A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 1039-1055. Sluhovsky argues that 16 year old Nicole Obry’s experience in 16^th century Laon began as an effort to have her visions recognized by the church as legitimate holy experiences. Instead she was judged to be possessed, and underwent exorcism, and that Nicole was an active participant in the process. ↑

36. Watt, 101-103. ↑