SORORAL IMAGERY – INTERWEAVING AGENCY WITHIN 15TH AND 16TH CENTURY GERMAN DEVOTIONAL TEXTILE WORKS

The critical consensus about women in the Middle Ages primarily illustrates their disadvantages within society. One demographic, conventual nuns, however, held greater agency and power. This paper argues that nun’s nonnenarbeiten (nun’s work) or textile work reveals a more inclusive space for sacred women’s agency rather than simple devotional busywork to keep nuns from being idle.

Historically, nonnenarbeiten has been dismissed in favour of monks’ work as decorative, naïve, and insignificant arts. In the late twentieth century, however, scholars began considering female-created art as sites of claimed agency. There remains a scholarly gap focused on self-referential imagery with textile works, particularly works designed to remain enclosed within convent walls. This paper begins to fill that gap by considering tapestries depicting nuns as significant narrative elements, illustrating a community of women with agency.

This paper examines nonnenarbeiten from what is now Germany, between the Catholic Reform and the Protestant Reformation. Both culturally significant and directly affecting nuns, these cultural events increasingly stripped them of agency and authority. Analysing works from St. Walburga in Eichstätt and Lüne Abbey in Lüneberg, as well as work from the Boon and Mainz regions in Germany, I argue that these textiles illustrate a visual culture within enclosure, in which these women wove their images into liturgical history, ultimately, claiming authority and voice.