The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

Jane Couchman, Allyson M. Poska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317041047
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: History

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women's lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.

PART I
Religion

1
The Permeable Cloister

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

In the past 20 years scholars have produced a plethora of monographs and journal articles examining the late medieval and early modern convent. Before 1990 the study of female monasticism was concentrated primarily on the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. Even for that period there were only a handful of book-length studies, and most of these focused on France and England.¹ Those works that did not examine the institutional life of convents examined the lives and legacies of exceptional nuns such as Hildegard of Bingen or Clare of Assisi. Most of these studies did not cross over into the period after 1300. It is telling, for example, that the bibliography for Jo Ann McNamara’s synthetic history of Catholic nuns, Sisters in Arms, published in 1996, did not include any monographs on early modern convents.² That situation has since dramatically changed. We now have a body of scholarship that charts the history of female monasticism across Western Europe and the Americas between 1400 and 1800. And it is not simply that a gap in our knowledge has been filled; rather, the research on convents and nuns has been transformative. It has revealed that a comprehensive appreciation of the momentous changes of this era is incomplete without an understanding of the role of convents in the social, political and religious landscape.

Arguably, three historiographical shifts moved the study of female monasticism forward, thereby giving birth to this huge outpouring of scholarship. The first was a revival of the study of the Catholic and Counter-Reformations. Emerging from a period when the religious history of the early modern era was dominated by the study of the Protestant Reformation, the terrain began to shift. Historians wondered what religious reform was already underway in Catholic Europe before 1517. They also began to analyse the impact of the Counter-Reformation.³ In each instance they looked beyond theological debates and towards an understanding of corporations (confraternities, new religious congregations) and individuals. This agenda, then, spurred an examination of Catholic institutions such as the convent. The second development was an accumulating body of research presented by historians of literature, music and art. Their examinations of nuns who wrote, sang, composed music and commissioned artwork suggested that the convent was an important site of early modern cultural production.⁴ These developments were inspired and undergirded by a third one, the already well-established enthusiasm for women’s history that offered theoretical and methodological insights to scholars taking up the study of late medieval and early modern convents. As a community that controlled extensive resources and was exclusively composed of women, some of whom held important monastic offices, the convent seemed ripe for a study of female agency and influence.

This chapter will focus on several unifying characteristics of the study of female monasticism between 1400 and 1800. The first is the role that geography has played in delimiting the studies under examination here. The second is the emphasis on the convent as an institution intimately connected to the secular world. The third is the predominant role that debates about enclosure have played in shaping the narrative and analysis of convent life. The chapter will highlight the types of primary sources that scholars have used to investigate these three areas and point to the ways in which the study of the cloister from 1400 to 1800 has resonance for our understanding of society and religion. Finally, the end of the chapter will offer some suggestions for new perspectives that will move the field beyond the features that have defined it to this point.

To begin with, a geographic paradox frames the study of early modern female monasticism. On the one hand, taken collectively, the works under examination here foster an understanding of female religious life throughout Europe and on both sides of the Atlantic. On the other hand, regarded individually, each of these works tends to be restricted by narrow geographies, examining female monasticism only in a particular city, region or country. This is largely a consequence of the ecclesiastical politics of the early modern period that have profoundly shaped the geographical scope and analytical emphases of these works. The persistence of Catholicism in Spain and Italy, for example, has marked the history of convents in these regions as distinctive because of their experience of the Catholic and Counter Reformations. Studies have examined the evolution of convent life from the spiritual stirrings of the Catholic Reformation to the spread of the currents of devotion and discipline sparked by the Council of Trent. Convents reacted to and shaped the message of the institutional church’s emphases on an active apostolate and deepening spiritual currents.⁵ Renee Baernstein’s A Convent Tale, for example, analyses the convent of San Paolo’s response to the vicissitudes of the changing religious climate in Milan. The community initially defined itself in ascetic, egalitarian and missionary terms. Later, due to sentiments within the convent and Counter-Reformation reform plans imposed by male ecclesiastics, the vision of cloister life would shift to one defined by contemplation and enclosure. Interestingly, Barbara Diefendorf finds nearly the opposite trajectory in the Parisian convents that she studies. These nuns defined their spiritual charisma first as a penitent enclosure. Yet by the mid-seventeenth century they had embraced active charitable missions as their chief feature. In Spain, nuns tried to embrace – with varying degrees of success – the active apostolate modelled by their contemporaries Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila.⁶

Regions with a more mixed confessional history offer different perspectives. Studies of those parts of Europe that overwhelmingly embraced the Protestant Reformation have a disjointed narrative trajectory. Anticipating Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, examinations of English convents range only to the end of the late Middle Ages with an occasional examination of the fate of nuns turned out from their convents.⁷ Scholars pick up the narrative roughly 50 years later with studies that explore the history of English convents in exile on the continent.⁸ The history of convents in the Holy Roman Empire or German-speaking territories resembles the patchwork adoption of Protestantism itself. Some surprising analyses emerge, however, from the study of female monasticism in these regions. Amy Leonard’s study of Dominican convents in Strasbourg charts the persistence of convent life despite the city’s adoption of Lutheranism.⁹ In other regions where Protestant movements took hold convents resisted these incursions, but in some instances, of course, nuns left the convent to embrace these new theologies.¹⁰

As female monasticism crossed the Atlantic in the age of European imperial expansion, convents became a tool for enforcing the social and political hegemony of the ruling class in the colonies.¹¹ In Spanish America, for example, entrance into convents was largely restricted in the early phases of their creation to Spanish-born women or their descendants (criollas) and native women were not often given the opportunity to embrace a monastic vocation. Another thread of the story of female monasticism in the Americas charts the work of nuns in missionary efforts.¹² Recently, this work has extended in an exciting new geographical direction that examines how women, although unable to form convents on the European model, nonetheless adopted and modified the message of Christianity to form a distinct religious apostolate in Japan.¹³

Interestingly, despite the ways in which the religious geopolitics of the early modern era have delimited convent studies, the works produced between 1990 and 2010 almost all share a guiding interpretive frame, emphasizing the various ways in which convents interacted with the worlds beyond their walls. This interpretation of the significance of the convent also helps to explain the preference of some of these studies to focus on a particular city. These urban centres provide an appropriate microcosm for seeking to understand how convents connected with local families, patrons and economies. For these scholars, the convent is not an institution set apart and cloistered, but rather an organization decidedly embedded in the daily life and concerns beyond its walls.

At the core of the examination of the convent as a social institution is the centrality of the ties of family and patronage. Without exception, the works examined here argue for the varied and influential role these family and kin played in the lives of convents and individual nuns. Families often employed deliberate strategies in placing their daughters in convents. In some instances, particularly in times of dowry inflation, families used the convent as a viable and honourable alternative living arrangement for their daughters. Such a strategy has raised questions about forced vocations and scholars have sought to ascertain the true character of monastic vocations (see below). Kathryn Burns has demonstrated that families sought and enjoyed the benefits of having their professed female relatives act as spiritual intercessors.¹⁴ It was not unusual for young women making a profession to join their female relatives – aunts and sisters typically – inside the convent.¹⁵ Over time, families developed strong associations with particular convents and scholars have charted how this allowed the women of these families to dominate convent offices and administration.¹⁶ As a result of these close ties, families defended these institutions vigorously. The Sfondrati dynasty in Milan was deeply invested in the success and piety of the convent it used as a family power base.¹⁷ It was, in part, the determination of elite families in Strasbourg to continue placing their daughters in convents that allowed these institutions to survive the demands of Protestant city administrators that they be closed down.¹⁸

The scholarship also identifies patrons outside the family as critical to understanding the nexus between the convent and the world. Patrons wanted to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: RELIGION
• PART II: EMBODIED LIVES
• PART III: CULTURAL PRODUCTION
• Index