THE OTHER SISTER RESEARCH SEMINAR: Charity, caregiving and female social roles from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period

By Laura Moncion and Emma Gabe.

On 17 December, The Other Sister group held its third research seminar, discussing charity, caregiving, and gender history in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, the session concentrated on female charity organized by and aimed at women. The goal was to investigate continuities and discontinuities in female charity between the medieval and early modern periods, which saw the development of charitable institutions exclusively for women. Research questions included the religious status of caregivers, whether or not charity was a gendered activity, the type of people that female charity targeted, and the types of assistance (spiritual, material, etc.) that women offered. This session was organized and moderated by Sylvie Duval and Isabel Harvey and featured the discussion of three articles by invited speakers. The seminar was attended by over 30 participants. 

The articles discussed in this session were:

Angela Carbone and Annamaria Gaetana de Pinto, “Spaces of power between nobility and clergy: St Anne’s Conservatory in Lecce in the modern age,” in Giovanna Da Molin (ed.), Research in Progress. Population, Environment, Health, Bari: Cacucci Editore, 2017. 

Letha Böhringer, “Beginen und Schwestern in der Sorge für Kranke, Sterbende und Verstorbene. Eine Problemskizze,” in Arthur Dirmeier (ed.), Organisierte Barmherzigkeit: Armenfürsorge und Hospitalwesen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2010 (with an English abstract).

Eva-Maria Cersovsky, “Ubi non est mulier, ingemiscit egens? Gendered Perceptions of Care from the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries,” in Sara Ritchey and Sharon Strocchia (eds.), Gender, Health and Healing, 1250-1550, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.  

Angela Carbone’s contribution presented the case of St Anne’s Conservatory (Conservatorio Sant’Anna) in Lecce, one of many charitable institutions founded in early modern Italy first and foremost by women for the ostensible aid of other women. Carbone’s work on St Anne’s, and other conservatories of this kind, can also be found in her newly published book, Ritirate dalle cose del mondo. Donne e istituzioni nel Mezzogiorno moderno (2020). In the meeting, Carbone discussed her book and the different types of conservatories, and the women for whom they were intended. Conservatories could offer help to, for example: orphan girls (in the form of education and dowry); repentant sex workers (women who, in other words, had had their honour compromised); and noble women (such as the example cited by Carbone of a woman who had been married for seven years and, failing to conceive a child, separated from her husband and went to live in St Anne’s); women fleeing from domestic abuse; women who intended to dedicate their lives to God; and women who only spent a short time in the conservatories before returning to secular society. Women entered these institutions either as a means to escape families or due to family pressures in order to maintain social status.

In Southern Italy, it is interesting to underline the foundation of repentant institutions especially when great calamities altered the common lives of the community, for instance on the occasion of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the seventeenth century. In this instance, the role of religious orders and the repentant process of women, which by definition embodied material pleasure and sin, served to alleviate divine wrath, with a subsequent benefit to the entire society. 

Using rich archival records––including foundation documents, rules and regulations, reclusion requests and administrative documents––Carbone presented these conservatories as places of conflict between the clerical and secular powers, between women and families, and between women inside these houses themselves.

Letha Böhringer’s presentation drew on both the depth and breadth of her knowledge on the beguines of Cologne, in particular the early period of beguine life in this city in the thirteenth and fourteenth  centuries. Despite the early historiographical assertions that beguines performed hospital work, Böhringer demonstrates that her Cologne sources do not show a systematic, institutional link between beguines and hospital work; if beguines worked in hospitals, this was done on an individual, ad hocbasis. While beguines did sometimes live in hospitals, as the Cologne sources show, it is unlikely that they worked there; they were more like boarders than live-in nurses. In the realm of saintly examples, the example of St Elisabeth of Thuringia (aka Elisabeth of Hungary), while a powerful image of a saintly hospital worker, was more of an ideal to admire than a practice to emulate for the everyday beguine. Böhringer’s talk also touched upon the important theme of historiography, by asking why the beguine living the active life is such a popular figure in research today, even when primary sources do not always back this up. A certain lack of appreciation for the contemplative life of nuns and other women religious can sometimes be found on both sides of the Atlantic. Beguines are sometimes cast as a prototype of the modern “working woman” or, as portrayed in Hollywood films such as Sister Act, the active life is shown as more appealing and meaningful than the contemplative one. This provokes an important question for our research, but also all historical research more broadly: How do historians’ own cultural matrices and biases influence their views of beguines, religious women, or other historical subjects?

Eva-Maria Cersovsky also commented on the historiography of care work in her paper: pushing against the notion that women became viewed as ideal caregivers in the nineteenth century, she demonstrated that learned men in the Middle Ages used and manipulated discourses of care and caregiving to implicate women. Her presentation shared some of her PhD work on care workers in Strasbourg between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Similar to Böhringer’s research, Cersovsky noted that while beguines in Strasbourg could perform nursing care, this was still an informal, case-by-case situation. One example concerned how the city council of Strasbourg tasked a community of lay brothers, sometimes also called “begards,” with visiting and nursing the sick at home during the fifteenth century. Charters also show that male and female confraternity members paid single beguines to visit and nurse the sick within the city’s biggest hospital on a regular basis, and they may have provided care to private homes as well. The work of female nurses tending to patients in their homes often involved cooking, taking care of linens, and cleaning—all important according to the Galenic medical system, but also gendered as female work. Only after the Protestant Reformation did the city council order the four surviving beguine communities to become nursing communities first and foremost––as well as Protestant. At this time, the council also specified the number and marital status of male and female nurses. In particular, they wanted to employ married men and female widows—thus ensuring that the male nurses had an outlet for their physical passions (and would not take them out on a female patient), and that the female nurses would not be distracted by the demands of their own households.

Contributions by these participants, particularly Dr. Böhringer’s talk, raised important issues of historiography in the study of non-cloistered religious women. While the historiographical focus, following the Protestant Reformations, has often been on beguines’ and non-cloistered women’s active lives, they could also have lived and valued leading contemplative lives. This conversation, among others, is helping to readjust and test the lenses through which we view premodern religious women, keeping our own biases and agendas in mind as we aim to study their lives.

THE OTHER SISTER RESEARCH SEMINAR: Working in Premodern Hospitals

By Gustave Ineza and Meghan Lescault

On October 27, 2020, the Other Sisters research group hosted a research seminar on the topic of women working in premodern hospitals. Three chapters written by the invited speakers were circulated beforehand: 

Adam Davis’ “‘In Service of the Poor:’ Hospital Personnel in Pursuit of Security” from his book The Medieval Economy of Salvation: Charity, Commerce, and the Rise of the Hospital (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Lucy Barnhouse’s “Mainz’s Hospital Sisters and the Rights of Religious Women” from her forthcoming book Houses of God, Places for the Sick: Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland.

Sharon T. Strocchia’s “Care and Cure in Renaissance Pox Hospitals” from her book Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Alison More began by introducing the three speakers, who proceeded to elaborate on their research as presented in these chapters. 

Adam Davis, Professor of History and Director of the Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement at Denison University, spoke about the emerging commercial economy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, stressing the symbiotic aspect of charity and commerce with the hospitals of Champagne as a case study. He pointed out that work in medieval hospitals went beyond healthcare and noted that the role of the sisters working in the hospitals extended to cleaning work, gardening, and agriculture. Davis introduced the multiple relationships that existed between hospital staff members who lived in community, and he discussed the permeable boundaries between the hospital workers and those for whom they cared as well as the spiritual and social web of need and assistance in which they were all entwined.

Lucy Barnhouse, Assistant Professor of History at Arkansas State University, discussed the religious identities of hospital sisters in Mainz. She presented hospitals as total entities in evolving urban areas and underscored the manipulation of the identity of those healthcare institutions. Barnhouse noted that the sisters originally belonged to a mixed-gender community but later were pushed to join the Cistercian Order. They resisted this pressure and formed an independent community dedicated to Saint Agnes in which they continued to serve as hospital sisters. These women combined charitable and practical services, for example, acquiring properties nearby that would allow them to create bakehouses for food production.

Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University, focused on women working at the Florentine pox hospital called the “Incurabili” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a topic that she approaches through the lens of labor, rather than religious, history. Strocchia discussed the silences in her sources that prevent us from knowing how skills were acquired and transmitted. She noted the methodological issues that have arisen due to historians’ prioritization of cure over care, and she emphasized the idea of approaching the topic of care through sensory regimes. Strocchia concluded by noting that historians have been occupied with investigating the precise juridical status of non-cloistered religious women and by asking our group to think more about the “in-betweenness” of such women. She posed two specific questions about these women working in premodern hospitals: 1. Does this in-betweenness allow hospital sisters to tend the bodies of strangers publicly? 2. Does this in-betweenness serve them well in administering to these strangers? 

It was this idea of in-betweenness that primarily animated the subsequent conversation, launching a robust discussion on the topic in terms of the women’s relationship to religion and canon law, the hospitals, and wider society and culture.

Appropriately for a meeting sponsored by a group devoted to the study of women who straddle the boundaries between the religious and the laity, these female hospital sisters often had ambiguous or fluid religious and canonical statuses. Barnhouse highlighted the religious fluidity exhibited by the hospital sisters of Mainz, explaining that while the sisters opted to form their own independent community rather than join a Cistercian house, as was suggested by the city council and religious men of Mainz, they nevertheless did not shy away from calling themselves Cistercians when making requests to archbishops. Moreover, they followed neither their own rule nor the Rule of Benedict, but—at least in theory—the Rule of Santo Spirito, a papally approved rule for a religious community serving in a hospital. While these women of Mainz straddled the boundaries between religious orders, the Florentine women studied by Strocchia straddled the boundaries between the religious and the laity. Strocchia explained this by noting that while these women took a pledge rather than vows, that pledge was based on a monastic model, as it was a promise of chastity and stability. Moreover, although the women were secular, they were called “sisters” by 1600.

Davis highlighted yet another ambiguity that revealed the idea of in-betweenness within the hospitals—the unclear line between who is caring and who is receiving care. He noted that there were some brothers and sisters who likely saw the hospital as a safety net where they could live and receive care if the need arose. Strocchia reinforced this idea, noting that these caregivers knew that they would eventually be taken care of by the institution to which they had devoted their lives.

Although the hospital sisters may have pledged and planned stability within the hospital, this did not preclude continued contact with the outside world. Rather, they needed to maintain a position between the hospital and wider society. Strocchia discussed the disruptive nature of visitors that appears as a theme in her sources. Davis, however, presented a more positive view of visitors, referring to thirteenth-century papal indulgences that encouraged people to visit hospitals and make donations. This need for donations relates to the idea of contact with various societal forces being required for survival and development, as noted by Isabelle Cochelin. She noted the need especially for women, whether cloistered or not, to navigate negotiations with bishops, powerful lay families, and local kings. Barnhouse illustrated this phenomenon in her comments on the Mainz hospital sisters’ relationship with the local laity. The sisters were able to garner lay support when they were resisting affiliation with the Cistercians, but they also were forced to relocate due to a struggle, likely a competition for land, with the laity. Strocchia attested to the presence of this societal in-betweenness in her own sources and attributed to the hospital sisters the function of “cultural brokerage.”

This theme of in-betweenness tied in very nicely to the overall project of the Other Sisters in its attention to women who cannot be placed easily into one category. 

The Other Sister Research Seminar: Women Serving Enclosed Women

By Emma Gabe and Laura Moncion

The research group “The Other Sister” hosted its first (virtual) research seminar on 29 September 2020. The subject was “Women Serving Enclosed Women”. We discussed four papers about servants and service in various medieval religious contexts for women. 

The papers discussed were: 

  • Laura Moncion, “Between Servant and Disciple: Recluses’ Attendants in Three Medieval Rules for Recluses”
  • Kate E. Bush, “Maids of the Handmaidens: Serving Sisters in Clarissan Community, c. 1250–1550”
  • Emma Gabe, “Lay Sisters and the Discourse of Service in Late-Medieval Sister-Books”
  • Isabel Harvey, “From Servants to Converse Nuns: Tridentine Enclosure and Economic Reform of Convents in the Papal States of Clement VIII”

These four papers are forthcoming in the conference volume for We Are All Servants: The Diversity of Service in Premodern Europe, edited by Isabelle Cochelin and Diane Wolfthal, soon to be published by CRRS, Essays and Studies.

This meeting was likely the first event where international scholars of the medieval and early modern world discussed women serving enclosed women. These women have rarely been studied, even though their numbers would have been significant in the premodern world. A recluse, for instance, would often have had two servants, and between one quarter to one half of female monasteries would have been composed of female servants and conversae.  

Each of these papers brought out different nuances in the relationships between religious women and the women serving them. Also, each touched on the degree to which the servants could have been considered religious themselves. Could some have been motivated by faith when choosing this occupation? Did the social status of women prior entering a community affect whether they would become lay sisters/converse nuns or choir nuns? It appears that there were several inconsistencies. In one case, involving biological sisters: one became a lay sister and the other a choir nun. Most importantly, the diversity––and ambiguity––of terms used to refer to servants of religious women, as well as to non-enclosed religious women themselves were discussed. 

Moncion’s work centred on the representations and roles of attendants to recluses in three medieval rules. It suggested that life as a recluse’s attendant could be considered another non-cloistered religious option for medieval women. Bush’s article focused on the somewhat surprising presence of servants and serving sisters in the monastery of Clare of Assisi and other female monasteries associated with the Franciscan order up to the Observant movement. This was particularly unusual considering the importance given by Clare to poverty and to her self-presentation as ancilla Dei.  Gabe’s paper explored the roles and representations of lay sisters in late-medieval German monasteries, as recorded in the sister-books. Harvey’s article on converse nuns in female monasteries in the Papal States adopts a new approach to Tridentine reform, moving the focus from enclosure to improved organizational and economic structures. The three last papers complemented one another in their focus on converse or lay sisters, that is, members of a female monastic community who lived alongside but separate from the typically upper-class choir nuns, across different periods and regions. 

After the presentations of each of the papers, a lively discussion over Zoom ensued, attended by scholars from Canada, Italy, the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. We hope to have many such discussions in the future on the subject of non-cloistered religious women, or “Other Sisters”.