Power and Gender. Female Religious Communities in a European Perspective
The study of religious women in the premodern period is not new. However, especially in the late medieval and early modern periods religious women are often viewed through a national lens. In the past, different conceptual traditions about religious women have often hindered international cooperation. German scholars have worked with the binary of monasteries (Klöster) and houses of canonesses (Stifte), seeing the latter as a phenomenon of the Holy Roman Empire alone. Anglo-American works prefer the concepts of “(un)reformed communities”, “(un)regulated communities” or “monasteries with/out enclosure”. A look at the sources and international studies casts doubt on German exceptionalism.
The panel will bring together the different academic traditions and subject female communities to a European perspective. First, the individual contributions analyse the specific religious lifestyle in female religious communities in different European regions (Spain, France, Holy Roman Empire). In doing so, they try to overcome the binary of two different types of women’s religious life and to see religious life as fluid and on a wider spectrum. Secondly, the papers examine the interdependence between religious lifestyle, gender and the power of religious women. Regulated and unregulated monasteries were affected differently by gendered dynamics that influenced the power of religious women. Confinement to a strict enclosure or its lack determined whether abbesses of religious communities could rule directly over their properties and people. Here, the papers challenge the still prevalent assumption in German early modern studies of religious princesses of the Empire as being less powerful than their male counterparts (mindermächtig). Enclosed religious women often had a different kind of authority which derived from their religious function and offices inside the community. In turn, canonesses were confronted with specific gendered expectations due to their proximity to secular society.
The panel will consist of a brief introduction, three presentations followed by a discussion of 35 minutes.
The paper compares the authority of abbesses and their male counterparts in unreformed communities of South-Western Germany. In the 15th and 16th centuries the authority of religious superiors was attacked by city councils and their own chapter. During these conflicts the actors negotiated gendered expectations of the superior. There is no simple causality between the power of abbesses and the specific vita religiosa of her community. However, gendered dynamics differed in collegiate churches from regulated monasteries. Due to their greater closeness to the secular world, abbesses and provosts took over practices of ruling and thus certain gendered patterns of behavior from the nobility.
Klosterneuburg Abbey, north of Vienna on the Danube, existed as a double monastery until 1568. Since the 12th century, Augustinian canons and canonesses had not only lived in close proximity to each other, but they also interacted with each other. It is therefore all the more surprising that the women’s community has attracted little interest in 20th-century historical research. While the ‘great’ stories about the canonised founder of the convent and extraordinary works of art such as the Verdun Altar were repeatedly taken up, there was hardly any interest in the history of the canonesses of Klosterneuburg beyond the examination of individual aspects.
In the course of cataloguing the historical sources concerning Klosterneuburg Abbey in the tradition of the historiography of the 18th century, the two canons Benedikt Prill and Wilibald Leyrer collected and copied sources on the women’s community. These records formed the basis for further work on the subject. Only recently, scholars started to analyse the history of the canonesses of Klosterneuburg according to current academic standards. The paper will therefore take a look at the history of research and present selected sources.
The assumption that women who exercised liturgical leadership (not only abbesses, but also chantresses and other nuns) were exceptional has been challenged by recent scholarship. However, few general accounts of premodern and early modern women religious have dealt with the Iberian world, southern Europe and other “peripheral” territories.
Further comparative studies are needed that reconsider how women religious in these “marginalized” territories negotiated or challenged multiple binary divisions and boundaries. This paper will reassess some binary divisions: e. g., between reformed and nonreformed women’s monasteries, or the gendered definition of liturgical authority. It will review the gender dynamics in some regulated monasteries in the Iberian Peninsula (mainly royal or aristocratic houses belonging to various religious orders) and the degree of independence and power that these aristocratic women achieved in the creation and performance of the liturgy.