2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This session will investigate how medieval women religious negotiated communal and religious identities via a process of experimenting with different literary templates for female communal life and spirituality. Relying on evidence originating from female monasteries of the ninth to eleventh centuries, papers in this session will adopt two perspectives. One consists of reconstructing how these communities creatively relied on written regulations for monastic life to shape a unique narrative of self and of communal purpose. Another will look at how outsiders, specifically ecclesiastical and secular rulers, responded to the normative 'ambiguity' that resulted from this female culture of debate and experimentation. Steven Vanderputten’s paper will argue that the interventions of contemporary male reformers have obscured a vibrant culture of intellectual and spiritual debate in female monastic contexts, and investigate possibilities for recovering some of that culture. Katie Bugyis’s paper will look at how women religious in Anglo-Saxon England, despite living in a context of institutional instability, managed to sustain a tradition of liturgical study and practice. Finally, Jirki Thibaut will rely on a case study of female communities in Saxony to reconstruct how the women relied on written legacies of monasticism’s past to shape their own, unique interpretation of the monastic ideal. By adopting this comparative perspective, this session seeks to argue against scholars' tendency to rely on male-authored normative texts to evaluate the 'ambiguous' realities of female religious life around the year 1000.