Empowering Collaborations

Writing Partnerships between Religious Women and Scribes in the Middle Ages

Kimberley Benedict

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135877606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This study examines partnerships between medieval women and scribes. Kimberly Benedict argues that medieval female visionaries often play prominent roles in collaboration while their male amanuenses serves as supports and foils.

Chapter One Precedents

This study focuses on women and scribes who wrote together during the high and late Middle Ages. Before analyzing their writing, it is important to contextualize it: that is, to consider what traditions the writers were working in or against, and how those traditions may have shaped the writers’ perceptions of their own projects. By identifying precedents for collaboration between religious women and scribes, I will show how later partnerships—such as those between Hildegard and Volmar, or Birgitta and Prior Peter—were in some respects quite conventional, and were in other respects extraordinary. Although the later partnerships were grounded in Biblical and patristic traditions, they permitted innovations that resulted in increased agency and authority for women writers.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS

Surveying the early medieval period (400–1000 AD) in search of women who participated in the production of religious texts, one is struck by how often they appear to have worked collaboratively. While we know of few women who wrote by themselves, we know of many women who wrote with others. This is not to say that women could not or did not write alone. They may have done so and simply been overlooked by writers of history, although educational inequities would have made them less likely than men to write autonomously. For this study, however, statistics about women’s literacy are less important than stories that shape cultural perceptions of female authorship. Rather than determining how early Christian women “really wrote,” I want to examine how and why narrators in the early Middle Ages tend to represent women as collaborative writers.²

According to extant accounts, religious women’s literary partnerships generally followed a consistent pattern. The woman would initiate the writing process by selecting a topic, and would ask her partner— usually a priest or monk—to produce a text on that subject. Her authority to make such requests was based on several factors. Affection was one of the most prevalent factors; most partners shared close ties of friendship or kinship, and as such found satisfaction in working with and for one another. Personal obligation was another factor; in many cases, the woman had previously provided for the man’s physical and emotional needs, sometimes making major sacrifices for his sake. Certain women, for instance, extended extraordinary hospitality to Jerome when he moved to Rome. A more extreme example is Heloise, who entered a convent at Abelard’s request despite her own misgivings. In such cases, the man might pay his implicit debt by agreeing to the woman’s relatively minor request for writing.

Perhaps the most powerful factor that gave women the right to request religious texts, however, had to do with gender roles within the church. While the church encouraged women to meditate on scripture, it prohibited them from teaching and preaching about scripture, even if they had extensive religious training. The prohibition effectively barred women from many forms of religious writing, such as the composition of doctrinal and exegetical works. On the other hand, ordained men were free to produce such texts, and in fact had an implicit pastoral responsibility to do so if their fellow believers—especially the textually disenfranchised—sought to understand God’s word more fully through written works. In asking men to write about religious topics, then, women called on them to act as ministers of God’s word, a call that most felt compelled to answer.

In addition to initiating the composition process and selecting the subject matter for the proposed text, the woman in a writing partnership would often help determine the genre of the text. She might ask for a sermon, for example, or a scriptural commentary, or a hymn. Through the choices outlined above, the woman played an important role in the phase of the writing process known as inventio, or invention. In a subsequent and closely related part of the process known as dispositio, or arrangement of material, the woman played a less visible role while her male partner’s authorial activities became more appreciable. He would compose a text based on the woman’s request; within the guidelines she had suggested, he decided which materials to include and how to present them. Once he finished writing the text, he would submit it to the woman for her perusal and presumably her approval as well, soliciting her involvement in the final phase of writing.

Throughout the entire process, partners generally worked in separate locations. In some cases, they did so for convenience. Partners whose daily routines and responsibilities were dissimilar, as in the case of women at court and men in the cloister, found it easiest to work independently and to meet only at crucial times in the writing process. In other cases, writing partners worked separately out of necessity. Many lived far apart, for instance, and had to conduct their collaborative work through letters. And in nearly all cases, partners tended to limit their time together out of pru dence. Working closely with a person of the opposite sex was liable to give rise to gossip and scandal, as proved to be the case for some of the couples described below. Even when partners worked separately on writing tasks, however, they almost always had spent time together in other capacities—in social circles, for example, or in academic settings—and thus had engaged in the kind of direct interaction needed to sustain a dynamic partnership.

Some of the earliest examples of textual teamwork among Christians, as described above, are the partnerships that developed in the late fourth century between certain women and Augustine of Hippo. Two women, Italica and Paulina, each asked Augustine to write about human beings’ perceptions of God. Their requests led to the production of complex epistles that later served as working drafts for sections of The City of God (Ferrante 53). Not only did the women set the writing process in motion, but they also helped with publication and revision, as evidenced by Augustine’s request that Italica present one of the texts to an unsympathetic audience and report their responses. Other women, such as Juliana, Maxima, and Seleuciana, prompted Augustine to compose shorter epistles about questions of orthodoxy and heresy (53). Again, the women appear to have played an ongoing role in the composition process. When Augustine sent them what he had written, he asked them to investigate the topics further and inform him of their discoveries, laying the groundwork for collaborative revision of ideas and texts.

Around the same time (380–400 AD) that theological commentaries were being produced by Augustine and his female colleagues, equally important doctrinal works were being generated by certain Roman women and Jerome. Their partnerships are unusually well documented, and as such, they provide a wealth of information about collaboration among early Christian writers. The first such partnership was initiated by Marcella, a wealthy and powerful widow who was devoted to serious study of the Bible. Her collaboration with Jerome began as a series of conversations: having learned that the scholar had recently come to Rome, she invited him into her home to discuss difficult scriptural questions with her and other Christian women. Not content merely to converse, however, Marcella urged Jerome to write about the issues they had addressed (Kelly 94). She would set the composing process in motion by writing to her colleague about a particular topic, and asking him to write back. Often the topics she chose had to do with issues of translation, as when she asked Jerome to write an exposition of the ten names of God found in the Hebrew scriptures, or to explain the meaning of the Hebrew words alleluia, amen, and maran atha (Schaff and Wace 43). Other times, she introduced topics having to do with issues of interpretation, as when she asked Jerome to define the cryptic “sin against the Holy Ghost” mentioned in Matthew 12:32, or to interpret the parable of the sheep and goats cited in Matthew 25:31 (56, 123). Occasionally she focused on issues of textual integrity, as when she asked Jerome to reconcile seemingly contradictory statements in the gospels about the resurrected Christ’s interactions with his followers (123).

Not only did Marcella choose subject matter for Jerome to write about, but she sometimes provided him with rough draft material, as when she asked him to explain the meaning of the Biblical terms ephod and teraphim, and at the same time supplied him with information she had already compiled about those words (Kelly 95). That Marcella consistently initiated the composing process is clear from Jerome’s characterizations of her as a forceful writing partner. On one occasion, he complained good-naturedly, “You write nothing except what tortures me and compels me to read scriptures” (Ferrante 49), and on another occasion he referred to her ruefully as his “slave-driver” (Kelly 95), crediting her in each case with pushing the writing process along. Through her persistent and detailed inquiries, she made important intellectual contributions to the writing process, as Jerome acknowledged when he told her, “You provoke us with great questions and make our wit numb with inactivity; while you ask, you teach” (Ferrante 49, emphasis added).

Following Marcella’s example, other women formed literary partnerships with Jerome during the time he lived in Rome. Prominent among these collaborators were an aristocratic young widow named Paula and her daughters Eustochium and Blesilla. These women were involved in, and often responsible for, the production of some of Jerome’s most significant works. For instance, Paula and Eustochium noted errors in his first edition of the Psalter—errors that he attributed to copyists—and asked him to undertake a second edition. The revised text gained wide recognition, and eventually became the standard Psalter used in most churches as late as the sixteenth century (Schaff and Wace 494). In their collaboration with Jerome, Paula and her daughters played many of the same roles in the writing process as Marcella did. Like Marcella, the women challenged Jerome to tackle challenging subjects. For example, Paula asked him to compile a complete bibliography of Origen’s works, which were controversial at the time. In making such a bold request, Paula not only determined the content of the book, but also influenced the means of textual production, for given the inflammatory nature of the material, Jerome felt compelled to do all the transcription work himself rather than assigning it to a secretary as he usually did (Ferrante 50). Like Marcella too, Paula and her daughters pressed Jerome to write prolifically. For instance, Blesilla asked him to translate Origen’s commentaries on the gospels, which totaled 65 volumes (Kelly 99, n. 34). Although Jerome did not carry out that Herculean task, he accepted other rigorous assignments, such as writing four commentaries within the space of a few months, at times composing nearly a thousand lines per day (145). Not only did the women set high standards for productivity, but they also established high standards of quality, as Jerome recounted in one of his letters to them:

A few days ago you told me that you had read some commentaries on Matthew and Luke, of which one was equally dull in perception and expression, the other frivolous in expression, sleepy in sense. Accordingly you requested me to translate, without regarding such rubbish, our Adamantius’ thirtynine ‘homilies’ on Luke, just as they are found in the original Greek; I replied that it was an irksome task and a mental torment to write, as Cicero phrases it, with another man’s heart not one’s own; but yet I will undertake it, as your requests reach no higher than this. (Schaff and Wace 496)

The passage recalls Jerome’s partnership with Marcella, insofar as the women pressure their friend to carry out a writing project so difficult as to be “irksome.” But the passage also gives a unique glimpse into the strengths that the women brought to the composition process. If they were demanding taskmasters, they were also intelligent and well-educated ones who knew literary “rubbish” when they saw it. As such, they were capable of ensuring that the texts they helped create would be neither “dull” nor “frivolous.” In addition to initiating literary production, Paula and Eustochium played significant roles in the composition process right up to the final phases of editing, as evidenced by Jerome’s request that they evaluate his translation of the book of Esther: “Since you have zealously entered the Hebrew libraries and confirm the struggles of interpreters, holding the Hebrew book of Esther, look at the individual words of our translation so that you may know that I added nothing, but simply transmitted the history from Hebrew to Latin as a faithful witness” (Ferrante 51–52). As the preceding descriptions suggest, Paula and Jerome worked together particularly often. Their close textual relationship prompted Jerome’s critics to suggest that they were sexually intimate as well, a charge that the partners refuted.

Although Marcella, Paula, and Eustochium’s partnerships with Jerome are the best documented and most often cited, many other women collaborated with Jerome on literary projects. A woman named Fabiola invited him to write about the significance of sacred vestments and rituals described in the Pentateuch (Kelly 211); Principia prompted him to write a commentary on Psalm 44 (Ferrante 48); Hedybia asked him to explicate complex passages and to reconcile apparent contradictions in the gospels; and Algasia led him to compose eleven chapters’ worth of close readings of the New Testament (Schaff and Wace 224). Such partnerships established an important precedent for later writing teams, particularly those made up of women and men. Partners ranging from Gisla and Rotrud and Alcuin, to Heloise and Abelard, all justified their literary exchanges by citing the example of the Roman women and Jerome (Ferrante 28).

As the Christian church gained prominence in Western Europe over the next several centuries, writing partnerships took on new characteristics. More religious communities were established for women, a change that was reflected in writing teams: whereas earlier pairs had usually consisted of a lay woman and an ordained man, now the female partner was likely to have taken religious vows herself. An example of such collaboration can be found in the early eighth century, when a nun whose name is now unknown asked the Venerable Bede to write a commentary on the third chapter of Habakkuk, often called the “Song of Habakkuk” (G.Brown 55). Bede complied with the request, and later acknowledged the commentary’s collaborative origins when he cited it in his bibliography, describing it as a text written for a “beloved sister in Christ.” Available evidence suggests that this commentary was the only work Bede wrote for a woman (Ward 77); while he apparently was willing to accept women’s invitations to collaborate, he seems to have been less inclined to initiate such partnerships.

At the same time that writing teams were becoming more closely tied to religious institutions, they also were establishing more connections to political power. This development had to do with the fact that the Christian religion was finding increasing favor among Western European rulers. As political leaders took steps to incorporate Christianity into their kingdoms, they opened up possibilities for partnerships between members of the cloister and the court. Toward the end of the eighth century, for example, extensive collaboration took place between Alcuin and several female relatives of Charlemagne (Ferrante 54). Gundrada, Charlemagne’s granddaughter, urged the theologian to compose a treatise about the reason of the soul. After drafting the treatise, Alcuin sent it to Gundrada with the suggestion that she read more extensively on the topic and then share her reading materials with him, a plan that would have allowed for continued collaboration with respect to ideas and, possibly, additional literary production.

An equally significant document was created jointly by Gisla (Charlemagne’s sister), Rotrud (Charlemagne’s daughter), and Alcuin. Gisla and Rotrud determined the genre and topic of the text, insofar as they petitioned Alcuin to write a commentary on the gospel of John. In their petition, they specified what the commentary ought to contain: teachings from “the holy fathers” and “the holy doctors,” both “the old and the new” (55). Alcuin appended their written request to the commentary that he subsequently drafted, calling attention to the collaborative origins of the latter. Upon completion of the draft, he submitted the autograph manuscript to Gisla and Rotrud for their approval, asking “if they deem it worthy to have it transcribed, that is, to publish it for him, with instructions for the copying and editing” (55). Alcuin’s request gives the impression that the women were involved in the composition process literally from start to finish, and that their contributions to each phase were substantial. Throughout the process, the partners appear to have been aware that they were working in a longstanding tradition of collaborative writing. Gisla and Rotrud likened Alcuin to Jerome in order to goad their friend gently into finishing his part of the writing project. They implied that if Jerome had been able to maintain productive partnerships with the Roman women even after he moved thousands of miles to Be thlehem, surely Alcuin should be able to keep up collaborative efforts while he was living in Tours and they were living nearby in Paris (Browne 254).

Similar writing partnerships flourished in the eleventh century between several noble women and Peter Damian (Ferrante 56). Empress Agnes, Countess Hermesinde, Countess Blanche, and Countess Adelaide all prompted Peter to write letters concerning questions of scriptural interpretation. The letters proved to be significant insofar as they formed the basis for later editions of Peter’s biblical commentaries. A literary partnership also arose between Peter and one of his sisters, who wrote him a sophisticated letter containing “weighty questions about what existed before creation and what would exist after the end of the world” (56). In doing so, she determined not only the genre and topic of their written discourse, but also set the tone for the level of rhetoric they would employ. According to Peter, his sister’s questions led him to think along new and challenging lines, motivating him to draft complex answers and compile a bibliography of recommended reading on the subject. While the women mentioned above were instrumental in initiating writing projects, little is known about whether or how they may have participated in later phases of the writing process.

The twelfth century saw the development of one of the best-known writing partnerships in western European history: that of Heloise and Abelard. After committing themselves to religious orders, the couple exchanged letters that were initially personal in nature, but which gradually expanded to include a variety of topics and subgenres. For instance, the correspondence led to the composition of a history of female monasticism, a rule for nuns, a biblical commentary, theological analyses, sermons, and hymns. Most of these documents were written at Heloise’s request. When commissioning the works, she generally laid down specific guidelines concerning their content and purpose. For example, when asking Abelard to write a rule for nuns, she urged him to “prescribe some Rule for us and write it down, a Rule which shall be suitable for women, and also describe fully the manner and habit of our way of life, which we find was never done by the holy Fathers” (Abelard and Heloise 160). By making straightforward demands about what the work should contain, and also offering subtle suggestions as to how Abelard might improve on existing documents, Heloise helped determine what shape the text would take. As one scholar has put it, Heloise’s letter of request in this case effectively “sketches the outline of Abelard’s response” (Ferrante 44).

Upon receiving Heloise’s petitions for particular documents, Abelard carried out the task of writing by himse...