Liturgy in Consorority: The Practice of Late Anglo-Saxon Women Religious

The scholarship on the liturgical lives of women religious in England during the Middle Ages has paid considerable attention to the early Anglo-Saxon period—and with good reason. Various exempla vividly attest that these women, especially abbesses, could and did exercise primary control over their communities’ liturgical practice, including those roles long considered to be the exclusive province of male clerics: reading the Gospel liturgically, hearing confessions, and administering the Eucharist. This scholarship has been instrumental to the recovery of the liturgical roles of early Anglo-Saxon women religious, yet it insists through citing extant prescriptive sources that these roles disappeared during the Benedictine reforms of the second half of the tenth century. This paper will argue that such exclusive focus on the ruptures in the history of communities of women religious has concealed continuities across the early and late Anglo-Saxon periods that can be detected through analysis of the documents of practice that survive from women’s monastic houses, particularly their liturgical manuscripts, which have not been identified and studied as a whole until this point. This analysis reveals a different history: women religious continued to assume active liturgical roles well into the early twelfth century.