Feminine Figurae

Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers, 1100-1475

Rebecca L.R. Garber

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136715327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This work offers an examination of religious texts written by twelve women over three centuries in two languages and three genres, showing the variety and complexity of gendered images available to medieval women. Moving beyond the categories of virgin, wife and widow, these religious texts created a spectrum of exemplary feminine life-paths based not on marital status, age, social rank, or profession, but instead founded on biblical figures, monastic divisions of labor, expected saintly behaviors, and even individual personality characteristics. This study contributes to discussions of genre and its influences on gender representation, as well as to scholarship on the complexities of gender relationships within literary works and historical contexts. This work will also serve to introduce a wider audience to a cycle of texts and an interrelated group of women authors previously available only to specialists in German and manuscript studies.

CHAPTER 1

Women’s Genres, Women’s Authority

The textual sources used within this study may be best understood in terms of a “textual family,” that is as a particular group of interrelated and interconnected genres from a specific time period, the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. Represented are the twelfth-century Benedictine vision cycle, the Cistercian and Dominican personal revelations from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the fourteenth-century Dominican sister-book. These three genres, or literary types, form the majority of texts written by these religious women, yet they are not the only kinds of literary works that the women in this study composed: they also wrote letters, saints’ lives, hymns, and theological works.¹ The focus remains on these three specific literary types because together they form a group of texts in a “genre-formational continuity,” that is “bound by a structure forming a continuity and that appear[s] historically.” ² In such a genre continuity, intertextual linkages function among, between, and within genres, contributing to the intersection of the genres and the formation of textual families. These texts often differ greatly one from another, yet remain bound together by several possible factors. Examples of intertextual linkages for the texts in question include: the series of all the texts of one genre, such as the sister-book; an oppositional series, such as exists between the narrative positions in vision cycles and the personal revelations; works which included various generic aspects, such as the accretion of some of the personal revelatory texts into the sister-books; or a thematic structure, such as the position of the narrator in the vision cycles and the sister-books.³ As can be seen from this short listing, the three literary types appear as an interrelated group.

These three literary types—the vision cycle, personal revelation, and sister-book—are not commonly known to non-specialists; therefore the first half of this chapter is devoted to introducing these literary types and discussing how they function as a textual family.⁴ Because these works were written by women, they have no literary Paterfamilias; therefore, the problems inherent in establishing the authority for a textual Materfamilias are the focus of the second half of this chapter.

These three genres belong within the overarching designation of Frauenmystik (women’s mysticism), which indicates that they were composed by women, that they address women’s extrareligious experiences, and that they are also predominantly religious in nature. Unlike some examples of Frauenmystik that were written for beguines or other laypeo-ple, these specific texts were written in a monastic environment for an audience of cloistered religious. Although this intended audience was primarily monastic, it also included lay-people who shared a religious interest, such as the secular Friends of God, and also non-cloistered clerics. By nature the texts are didactic and designed to teach appropriate behaviors to their readers; however, this also reveals the limitations of their religious nature: in general, the texts do not provide specifically religious instruction into doctrine or belief, such as scriptural exegesis.⁵

Like their authors, the genres are gendered as feminine in language, content, corporate identity, intended audience, and style. These are also genres that men, in general, chose not to employ in their writing.⁶ The texts are primarily in the vernacular, the language of women religious, as opposed to Latin, the language of learned male clerics, a fact which reveals both gendered authorship as well as reception. Many of the authors record experiences of ecstatic or affective mysticism, which, by the thirteenth century, had come to be associated almost universally with women.⁷ Women alone composed the sister-books:⁸ the Domihican monks apparently felt no need for such texts. That the men (in the form of the women’s confessors) approved of the texts is witnessed by their role in the dissemination of the Nonnenbücher (sister-books) during the fourteenth and fifteenth-century reforms of women’s monasteries. Yet here again, the major audience for the texts is female. Although the women had access through the monastic libraries to models of other genres and styles, they consciously chose to employ these three.⁹ This choice informs modern scholars about the literary constraints within which the women operated, what literary endeavors were considered acceptable for women, and the extent of the authority the women were able to claim as authors. But the most striking contrast between these works and those authored by men lies in the sheer number of female protagonists and the authors’ positive evaluation of them.¹⁰ Within the sister-books, vision cycle, and personal revelations, women are positively represented: the textual focus is on women’s actions, women as recipients of grace, and women’s speech. Unlike hagiographical or secular literature by men, which record men’s attitudes and values about women, these texts portray religious women’s attitudes and values, which is why I designate these genres as ferdinine.

GENERIC HISTORY

The three genres—the vision cycle, the personal revelation, and the sister-book—form a deeply intertwined textual family in the fourteenth century, yet the histories of their existence (one can hardly call it “development,” which would imply a process of becoming or improving over time) have often been represented quite differently.

Revelatio and swesternbuoch are the manuscript rubrics that appear in reference to the three genres, or literary types, in this study. Medieval scribes employed revelatio to describe both the vision cycles and the personal revelations, and swesternbuoch to distinguish the sister-books. For a text to be regarded as revelatio, it must contain divine revelations which were considered of value to all Christians. Similarities between the vision cycles and personal revelations include: the emphasis placed upon their revelatory nature, the insistence on the divine authority of the recorded events, and the belief that other Christians will benefit spiritually from reading or hearing about these recorded experiences and their interpretations. The sister-books share this last textual function, and also contain some revelatory sections; however, they are clearly a separate type of text, as their specific rubric indicates. Unlike modern literary terminology, neither medieval term is an actual genre definition, since both refer to the content of the texts, not to their structure.

Visionary revelations, which include the vision cycles and personal revelatory texts, have existed throughout western Judeo-Christian history, and include texts from the biblical period to the present day.” Yet the extended age of the revelations should not imply that the “genre” was static: authors modified it in response to differing literary needs, styles, conditions, and changing aesthetic tastes.¹² These works, which all depend upon divine intervention for their inception (at least through the Middle Ages), are religious in nature: the revelations were granted to religious persons, or the advent of revelations converted the recipient to a religious nature. In addition, their expected audience remains their fellow co-religionists, and the content of the material is religious in nature.

The sister-books, which are also religious texts, have been presented with a rather different literary history. Scholars agree that the texts were modeled on Gerard de Frachete’s Vitae fratrum ordinis Praedicatorum (1260-70),¹³ and that the works were composed within a relatively short time frame during the first half of the fourteenth century. For the most part, they were copied and read into the sixteenth century, and then generally forgotten. This short generic history of composition stands in stark contrast to the extended history of the revelatory texts.

The problem with the sister-books lies in their difference from other, contemporary religious genres. Gertrud Jaron Lewis addresses the difficulty of generic designation in her work, By Women, For Women, About Women, in which she significantly reevaluates the texts and makes a major contribution to scholarship and our understanding of them.¹⁴ On the question of genre, she borrows a page from Jauss and declares them a genre of their own, which she then extensively defines and discusses.¹⁵

Yet this singular designation disconnects the texts from larger generic contexts, and modern scholars are left groping for a method of reading the works, a literary background against which to situate them, or a metatex-tual spectrum which would allow one to discuss intertextual differences and similarities beyond the specific group of texts detailed in the genre, sister-book.

I propose to read the sister-books as a religious subset of the literary catalogue, a secular literary type that offered the audience a thematically organized series of positive and/or negative exempla for edification, entertainment, and emulation (or avoidance). Because catalogue authors usually address the virtues or vices associated with historical or contemporary women (and by extension contemporary men), catalogues implicitly and explicitly define positive and negative stereotypes as well as masculine and feminine ideals within specific socio-historical contexts.¹⁶

Literary catalogues have a textual history equally as old as that of the revelatory works discussed ahove: the earliest catalogues were composed in the eighth century BCE by the Greeks, Hesiod and Homer.¹⁷ While these works were unknown to medieval authors, several Latin catalogues were, notably Plutarch’s Mulierem virtutes (Virtues of Women), a catalogue presenting positive, historical exempla, as well as satirical works such as Semonides of Amorgo’s On Women, Ovid’s Heroides (Heroines), and Juvenal’s Satire Six.¹⁸

The authors of the sister-books consciously collected the exploits of exemplary monastic predecessors and arranged them in such a fashion as to construct ideals of female monastic behavior. As such, they participate in the traditions of defining the virtues necessary for an ideal woman, as well as that of constructing an ideal, textual monastic, which is itself as old as the history of monasticism in the West. The texts are temporally specific: they were composed within an extremely short time span, from approximately 1305 to 1350, and while they were read and copied beyond this time span, there were few attempts made to expand the material.¹⁹ This reception history accords with that of the secular catalogues, which also tend to fall into neglect or disfavor in response to changes in social mores.

If the sister-books are indeed a subset of literary catalogues, then the three genres share similarly antique pedigrees, with the distinction that the sister-books, although religious in nature, have a decidedly secular ancestry. All three types exist within specific diachronic contexts of revelatory and catalogue literature, which the authors received, employed, and reformulated in accordance with their needs. During the fourteenth century, interplay between texts and authors led to extratextual references and the formation of an interrelated textual grouping.

GENERIC INDIVIDUALS AND TEXTUAL RELATIONS

Modern and Medieval

Genre has been defined by modern scholars as the interplay of form and content, and the genre theorists of the twentieth century have tended to foreground one or the other. Paul Zumthor, Pierre Bee, and Vladimir Propp demand largely structural definitions, while Northrop Frye is the primary proponent of content determination. Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Hans Robert Jauss, and Fredric Jameson discuss the interplay between the two criteria.²⁰ The medieval practice appears to have defined texts by their content within a specific generic form, subsequently forming numerous subsets.²¹ Jauss has been most influential in discussing the importance of understanding the differences and relationships between the “little genres” that result from this type of splitting.²²

In regards to medieval literature, modern genre theorists also inherited a pair of binary divisions from the nineteenth century: vernacular versus Latin language and religious versus secular content. Although many modern scholars agree that these binaries were imposed by moderns, and that these barriers were remarkably fluid, they retain enough influence that they have caused difficulties in interpreting the little genres of the Middle Ages, such as the three literary types under consideration here, which cross both of these binary divides.

The separation between Latin and vernacular literature has been particularly influential: Simon Gaunt proposes the language “barrier” as the principal means used by medieval people for categorizing literature (Gaunt, 4), and Jauss, Zumthor, and Bee employ only vernacular literature in their discussions on genre.²³ Yet all three of the literary types examined here cross this “barrier:” Latin examples in each genre are usually followed by vernacular texts. The sister-books for Adelhausen and Unterlinden were composed in Latin, according to the Latin model of the Vitae fratrum, while the later texts of this type were written in German. In a similar fashion, Hildegard von Bingen and Elisabeth von Schönau composed in Latin, and, although there are no vernacular vision cycles in German, Julian of Norwich’s Shewings constitute a later, English contribution to the genre. The two Latin personal revelatory texts, by the Cistercians Gertrud von Helfta and Mechthild von Hackeborn, are chronologically and textually situated between the vernacular texts of a beguine, Mechthild von Magdeburg, and later texts of the Dominican women, Margaretha Ebner, Christine Ebner, and Adelheid Langmann. Mechthild von Magdeburg’s text appears especially interesting when examining generic language change, as this is a case in which an earlier, vernacular writer influenced two later, Latin authors, the Helfta nuns.²⁴

While religious versus secular content appears easily divided, the secular-comic interludes recorded within religious drama, the Marian lyrics couched in the terminology of Minne, and the grotesque marginalia found within religious manuscripts point collectively towards a fluidity of boundaries.²⁵ Additionally, medieval textual reception blurs this line, as literary interpretation in the Middle Ages employed both biblical exegesis and secular dialectic to underpin various textual readings.²⁶ Both religious and secular texts were expected to serve the dual purposes of education and entertainment, and there is evidence of audience overlap, that literature with secular content was read by religious men and women, and that religious literature was enjoyed by secular audiences. While the three literary types in this study are all religious texts, the sister-books cross the religious-secular division, as they appear to be a religious subset of a secular literary genre, the catalogue.

Structurally, the three literary types—vision cycle, personal revelation, and sister-book—all fall into the generic category of religious prose, an extremely broad category. Thus, the genre descriptions of the vision cycle, personal revelation, and sister-book that follow will be distinguished in accordance with the medieval practice, in which the contents of the texts form the basis of distinction among them. In part this is due to the similarity of the basic structure of the texts: each is composed of a series of linked vignettes—vitae in the Nonnenbücher, visions in the vision cycles, and mystical episodes in the personal revelations. Although several structural differences exist, the greatest defining contrast among the genres remains their content.

Following Jauss, the genres will be described in relation to each other, as the texts form an historical family. Readers should he aware that literary “families” existed only in specific historical periods, and that their boundaries were fluid and constantly changing. Such families of texts “can be located historically, delimited, and described by modern scholars”;²⁷ however, these descriptions should not be equated with the manner in which a hypothetical medieval reader may have distinguished among textual types....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor Foreword
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION: Veiled Individuals
• CHAPTER 1: Women’s Genres, Women’s Authority
• CHAPTER 2: Where Is the Body?
• CHAPTER 3: Invented Communities, Idealizing the Past
• INTERLUDE: Personal Revelations
• CHAPTER 4: Margaretha Ebner
• CHAPTER 5: Adelheid Langmann
• POSTRLUDE: Personal Revelations
• CONCLUSION: Varied Ideals
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Titles and Proper Names
• Subject Index