Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about
Women and Reform in the late Middle Ages, Penn State Press,
Pennsylvania, 2005, pp 345.
Reviewed by Caroline Bowden, Royal Holloway, University of
London, September 2007
Convent Chronicles is a fine overview of women’ religious life in fifty-two
German and Dutch-speaking communities in the fifteenth century. This study,
based on a substantial body of previously little or unknown texts by women
religious means that Anne Winston-Allen joins a select but growing number of
historians who are demonstrating just how much there is to be known about
female monasticism for those prepared to search. The study has been based
on long hard labour (witnessed by 100 pages of notes and bibliography) not
only to locate and translate the writings but to establish the contextual
framework. At the same time Winston-Allen writes clearly and fluently
interpreting her material in ways which make her scholarship accessible to the
general reader.
Winston-Allen describes her sources, such as chronicles, life-writing, sisterbooks and sermon notes, as ‘hybrid texts’ because they cross over the
categories recognised by literary scholars more used to working with texts
written by lay women. Writings by women religious are also unusual in the
way that they are often institutional rather than individually created
documents. For instance, chronicles may be reworked by the community and
added to, not just as the result of the passage of time, but also for the
purpose of creating or fostering community memory. Her analysis of the
variety of daily life in the Canoness houses and enclosed convents is detailed.
Such depth of knowledge is important not only to comprehend the conditions
allowing the creativity of the members of the religious houses, but also to
allow historians to work comparatively: young women in Venice (for example)
may have joined convents for very different reasons from those in Bavaria. It
also demonstrates as Winston-Allen herself argues, that Christine de Pizan
was not alone in writing about “cities of ladies”: these fifteenth-century sisterbooks and chronicles celebrate the achievements and activities of earlier
members of the female communities.
The subtitle indicates a particular and important angle to the study; that is
the reaction of women to the reforms of the Observant movement which
would radically restructure life for the Canonesses and lead to wide ranging
reforms in the Dominican and Benedictine convents. Winston-Allen discusses
the impact of enclosure which she argues led to an intense burst of scribal
activity in Latin and the vernacular as communities turned inwards. Reforms
were not always imposed by men: the nuns at St Katharina in St Gall decided
to self-impose enclosure. The explosion of creativity in that convent led to the
creation of a library which at one time held 500 volumes, of which 105 still
survive. Elsewhere too, members of convents copied and created works of
meditation, verse, prayer books, histories, song books and transcriptions of
sermons some of which were beautifully illustrated. Enclosure did not entirely
cut off the nuns from the world: for instance some of the texts they edited
were specifically for lay readership and they maintained contacts with familial
and patronage networks outside.
Chapter Four discusses opponents of reform. Here Winston-Allen was not able
to find female explanations or descriptions of opposition and has to rely on
male sources. Some of the attempts at imposing reform were dramatically
resisted for instance at the wealthy abbey at Sonnenburg which was still
resisting enclosure as late as 1612. At the Benedictine abbey of Rijnsberg
populated by noble women ‘who were little acquainted with the rule’, reform
was opposed to the point where the nuns hired expensive lawyers to take five
requests to Rome. The situation in Germany was complicated by the arrival of
Lutheran preaching in the early sixteenth-century with its opposition to the
monastic life which makes it more difficult to judge the extent of the long
term impact of the Observant reform movement.
On the one hand Observant reform imposed enclosure on women which is
often seen as restrictive and negative, on the other (as Winston-Allen argues)
there are other ways of looking at it. For instance enclosure was seen by
some women religious as a way of keeping out intrusive laity and gaining
some tranquillity. It also led as we have seen to the growth of communal
libraries and the creation of innumerable texts. The reform dislodged the
nobility from their entrenched positions in some elite religious houses and
opened up the orders to an influx of devout religious.
Winston-Allen considers methodological issues and ways of interpreting
writings by women religious which are applicable outside her period. For
instance, she argues that the chronicles are works of imaginative literary selfdepictions as much as they are factual documents because they were written
with particular purposes in mind to serve the communities. These (wherever
possible) are the voices of medieval women heard (unusually) unmediated by
men and for this reason Winston-Allen gives long extracts to illustrate her
discussions. The well-chosen illustrations, although few in number, are
indicative of a variety of intellectual pursuits and artistic patronage.