By Emma Gabe

In the course of my work on lay sisters in late-medieval German-speaking areas, I have wrestled with the meaning of the term “lay sister” (conversa in Latin; Konversin or Laienschwester in German). “Lay sister” can refer to a converse sister––a nun who was responsible for domestic tasks inside the monastery such as cooking and gardening. But it can also refer to pious women living in the external courtyards of a monastery who had given themselves and their property to the service of the community in exchange for lifelong keep. 

The fluidity of terms and the variety of people attracted to this religious life is evident in the Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, which chronicles the spread of the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Observant reform in Dominican female monasteries in Teutonia (present-day Germany). The author of the Buch der Reformacio, Johannes Meyer, was an influential confessor and reformer who wrote many texts for the nuns under his care promoting the Observant way of life. The Buch der Reformacio survives in four manuscripts. Benedict Maria Reichert published a diplomatic edition of one of these manuscripts in 1908–09, and Claire Taylor Jones recently published an English translation of Meyer’s text under the title Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance (Toronto: PIMS, 2019). 

One of the tenets of the Observant reform was the strict enclosure of female monastic communities. In the Buch der Reformacio, it appears that Meyer uses the term “lay sister” to refer to sisters who lived inside the enclosure with the choir nuns, because he often distinguishes these women from people who lived in the external courtyards. The first Observant female community in Teutonia was the convent of Schönensteinbach in Alsace. According to the Buch der Reformacio, three of the original 13 women who joined this new community were laysisters (book II, ch. 6). One of them, Margaretha of Basel, had formerly worked as a maidservant (dienstmagt) in the convent of Klingental (book II, ch. 7). Among her many pious behaviours, Meyer records that Margaretha kept the monastic rule of silence so well that she even admonished other sisters who broke the silence, no matter their birth (book III, ch. 31–32). Adelheid Voigt, who had been the maid of a noblewoman, joined as a lay sister even though she could read Latin and German. She was not a friendly or popular person, but she was noted for her cooking skills (book III, ch. 40–41).

Meyer also wrote about lay sisters from noble backgrounds who joined Schönensteinbach and materially enriched the community (book II, ch. 11). Katharina of Bruges, from a noble background, took care of the kitchen and the garden, and gave herself to such humble tasks as washing the sisters’ undergarments (book III, ch. 33). Magdalena Bechrer, who insisted on entering Schönensteinbach as a lay sister despite her birth and wealth, commissioned books for the community’s confessors (book III, ch. 39). Lay sister Katharina Holtzhauser copied books for the community (book III, ch. 42). 

Meyer also tells us about family groups that joined monastic communities. For example, widow Anna Griss brought her ten-year-old daughter Elisabeth to Schönensteinbach, where the daughter was received as a lay sister (book III, ch. 34–37). Anna, however, lived in the external courtyards where she became the mistress of the secular maids and experienced much trouble keeping them in line. Eventually, she entered the cloistered community as a lay sister (book III, ch. 38). Despite being physically separated from her daughter by the community’s practice of strict enclosure, it could be that giving her daughter to the community and living in the external courtyards was a way for Anna to stay with her daughter.  

Meyer also provides an example of a married couple and their daughter who joined Schönensteinbach. The wife, Susanna of Masmünster, became one of the first three lay sisters (book II, ch. 7). Her husband Johannes, a knight, became a lay brother in the community’s external courtyards (book III, ch. 31; book IV, ch. 11). Their daughter, Ursula of Masmünster, was four years old when she came to Schönensteinbach. A choir nun, she eventually became prioress at Schönensteinbach and helped to reform other female monasteries (book III, ch. 24). 

Of course, Meyer’s aim in writing the Buch der Reformacio was to reinforce Observant values by presenting role models for others to follow, so we should not take Meyer’s writing at face value. It could be that the enclosure of lay sisters was less strict in reality than Meyer implied, particularly for those with family members also living in the community. The large number of lay sisters from noble backgrounds that Meyer writes about might have been proportionally lower in reality, because stories of lay sisters from noble backgrounds choosing to live humble lives served as compelling exempla. However, the range of backgrounds of lay sisters, both in social status but also age and marital status, suggests that the position of a lay sister was flexible and varied. 

By Meghan Lescault

In looking for clerical supporters of medieval non-cloistered religious women, the name of Jacques de Vitry (c. 1160–1240) may come to mind. Jacques, a regular canon, bishop, scholar, preacher, and author was a vocal promoter of the beguines, a role which may be seen in his sermons and his Vita of Marie d’Oignies. His enthusiasm for the non-cloistered, however, did not extend to all such women, and certainly not to the secular canonesses.

Secular canonesses were women from noble families who held prebends attached to collegiate churches where they had liturgical duties. They could renounce their prebends at any time and leave the community, usually in order to marry. They have received little attention in modern religious historiography, partly because they have been associated with a lack of traditional piety, a view that has its roots in the minds of some of the canonesses’ medieval contemporaries. As Jacques de Vitry holds such a view, a piece of his writing offers an early example of rigid disapproval of their form of life. Other ecclesiastical figures took issue with the canonesses,[1] seemingly because they were not nuns despite bearing some resemblance to them, but Jacques’ disdain is more surprising at first sight given his support for the beguines. It may be the case, however, that Jacques’ admiration for the modest life of the beguine was the cause of his apparent distaste for the wealthy canonesses.

Jacques devoted several chapters of his Historia occidentalis to various religious groups. A brief glance at the titles of these chapters may well reveal his view of the “ideal” religious life. Straightforward explanations such as De cysterciensibus and De canonicis Sancti Victoris stand in contrast to the title of the thirty-first chapter: De irregularitate secularium canonicarum. While “irregularity” in the ecclesiastical context means that the secular canonesses did not follow a rule, one cannot help but notice the pejorative sense it has for Jacques when reading what follows.

In describing the canonesses, Jacques paints a picture of opulence, laxity, and immodesty. He places secular nobility and religious piety in contrast to each other and elaborates on the canonesses’ material comfort:

Hee siquidem adeo personas accipiunt, quod non nisi filias militum et nobilium in suo collegio uolunt recipere, religioni et morum nobilitati et seculi nobilitatem preferentes. Purpura autem et bysso et pellibus grisiis et aliis iocunditatis sue uestibus induuntur, circumdate uarietatibus cum tortis crinibus et ornatu pretioso circumamicte ut similitude templi, gaudentes cum gaudentibus, liberales ualde et hospitales.[2]

If indeed they do accept people, they do not wish to receive anyone except daughters of knights and nobles into their society, preferring the nobility of the world to religion and nobility of mores. Moreover, they wear purple cotton and gray fur and other garments that delight them. They are enveloped in clothing of various colors with their hair curled and are covered in costly embellishment like a temple. They rejoice with the joyful and are very generous and hospitable.[3]

While this last aspect of his description has a potentially positive tone, Jacques quickly makes his overall position clear by discussing the sumptuous nature of their feasts and their freedom to leave the community for a time and to visit with their families and friends. He disapproves of their liturgical partnership with secular canons and portrays its apparent dangers in no uncertain terms:

Ipse uero, uelut sirens in delubris uoluptatis uocem iocunditatis annuntiantes, ipsos canonicos, dum superari nesciunt, fessos et fatigatos frequenter reddiderunt. Similiter et in processionibus, composite et ornate, canonici ex una parte et domine ex alia parte concinentes, procedunt.[4]

Indeed, just as Sirens proclaiming their call of delight in temples of pleasure, they have frequently wearied and tired the canons who are not aware that they are overcome. And similarly in processions, they proceed in an orderly and splendid manner while singing together, the canons from one side and the ladies from the other.

As if their status vis-à-vis the clerics was not enough, Jacques goes on to discuss the canonesses’ ability to leave their positions and marry, likely holding this in contrast to forms of life that required a permanent commitment. If his view of these women was not clear by this point, he lays all of his cards on the table with the following statement near the end of the chapter:

Aliquas autem ex ispsarum congregatione uidimus, que, saniori use consilio de Hur chaldeorum et de medio Babylonis fugientes, postquam mundi incendia euaserunt, sumpto cysterciensis ordinis habitu, ad magnum perfectionis cumulum peruenerunt.[5]

We have seen some of them who have taken sounder advice and have fled from Ur of the Chaldees and from the middle of Babylon, and after they have escaped the fire of the world, they have taken the habit of the Cistercian Order and have reached the high height of perfection.

Jacques clearly does not condone what he regards as the too worldly life of the secular canoness, and he goes so far as to promote the Cistercian Order as the salvific antidote. His identification of female monasticism with “the high height of perfection,” however, stands in contradiction to his admiration for the beguines, whose lives certainly differed from those of the Cistercians in many aspects. It seems to be the case that Jacques has a vision of ideal female piety that incorporates characteristics of cloistered women and beguines alike but does not accommodate the customs of the canonesses. This leaves the question of whether curled hair, abundant food, and coed liturgical processions can truly determine the presence or absence of piety and religious devotion. This is an important question for scholars to raise when revisiting such groups of women.

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[1] Examples include the French Cluniac canonist Guilelmus de Monte Laudano, the Italian canonist Johannes Andreae, and the Italian canonist Cardinal Franciscus Zabarella. See Elizabeth Makowski, A Pernicious Sort of Woman: Quasi-religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), especially chapter 1.

[2] Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis, chapter 31. All Latin text is from Jacques de Vitry, The Historia Occidentalis of Jacques de Vitry, trans. John Frederick Hinnebusch, O.P. (Fribourg: University Press, 1972).

[3] Translations are my own.

[4] Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis, chapter 31.

[5] Ibid.

By Isabel Harvey

            On March 8, 2021, on the occasion of the International Women’s Rights Day, Professor Angela Carbone (collaborator on the project “The Other Sister”), the Archivio di Genere of Bari and the Università degli studi di Bari – Aldo Moro (Italy) organized an online seminar to present and discuss various experiences of non-cloistered religious women’s life between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. This seminar was part of a series of meetings entitled ArchiviAzioni. Angela Carbone opened the seminar by introducing the mission of the Archivio di Genere, a multilingual and interdisciplinary documentation center that collects publications about women: from feminist to LGBTQ movements, from women’s writing to visual arts, from gender studies to postcolonial studies, from political and social testimonies to translation works. The aim of the Archivio di Genere is to preserve the words and actions of women and to make them available to researchers. This was the purpose of the March 8 seminar, which, through the presentation of three types of case studies, took an overall look at women’s religious experience outside the monasteries in Italy. In addition to a presentation of Angela Carbone’s recently published book, Sylvie Duval and Isabel Harvey also presented case studies from their ongoing research.

            Sylvie Duval opened the discussion with a presentation of her work about the Sorores humiliate of the Milanese suburb Porta Ticinese, between 1220 and 1350. Three communities existed in the Porta Ticinese suburb during this period: the Signore bianche dette Vetteri, the Signore bianche de Supra Murum and the Vergini. These three groups were generally called the Humiliate, a common term for penitents. These communities were spontaneous foundations, fruits of the association and the work of the women. The objective of Sylvie Duval’s intervention was to explore the strategies deployed by these communities during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and their social roles in relation to the changing contexts they faced. At the beginning of the period, these three groups, which were under the protection of the archbishop, did not define themselves as nuns. When enclosure was officially imposed on all professed nuns by the 1298 Periculoso decree of Boniface VIII, they found themselves de facto assimilated to the category of nuns, without immediately changing their way of life. The question of cura animarum or spiritual direction of these nuns also demonstrates the fluidity of institutional affiliations relative to these groups of religious women: initially close to the preachers, they were then subject to the cura of the local secular clergy for an extended period, before returning, in the fifteenth century, to the spiritual direction of the preaching friars of St. Eustorge. However, when the Observance brought about a new stregthening of norms, some of them (the Signore bianche de Supra Murum) asked to return to the spiritual direction of the seculars. The economic and social interests of these communities were evident in the daily life of the neighborhood surrounding them. For example, adult oblation was a fairly common practice in the thirteenth century: a person, man or woman, gave all his or her possessions to the community in exchange for its protection. The community thus acted as a place of refuge in continuity with the neighborhood. Sylvie Duval’s intervention thus makes it possible to rethink both the identities – too often plastered onto a rigid ecclesiastical structure by the historiography – and the social roles of women’s communities in light of a determining element in women’s religious experience, that is, the immediate context. 

            Isabel Harvey continued the discussion with the analysis of a curious Venetian case: the female charity institution of the Immacolata Concezione di Maria Vergine during the second half of the sevententh century. In 1669, the rich Venetian noble Francesco Vendramin removed the management of one of his charitable works, the Seminario della Immacolata Concettione di Maria Vergine, from the oversight of the pious woman Cecilia Ferrazzi after the Inquisition condemned her on the charge of a pretense of holiness. The Seminario welcomed girls and young women who were abandoned or were under the risk of falling into prostitution. When the Inquisition condemned Cecilia Ferrazzi, a female community of Capuchins received the mission of administrating of the Seminario. During the same years when Cecilia Ferrazzi constructed and improved her Seminario, the tertiary Franciscan sister Suor Lucia Ferrari founded a series of female monasteries and pious institutions for women in six northern Italian cities: Guastalla, Treviso, Mantua, Como, Parma, and Venice. According to a hagiography dedicated to her, in 1668 she had founded and written the Rule – of Capuchin obedience – for an institution devoted to the education of young girls in Venice, sponsored by the noble Francesco Vendramin. The institution was named the Colleggio dell’Immacolata concettione. The similarities between the institutions of Cecilia Ferrazzi and Suor Lucia Ferrari are striking: same charitable activities, same sponsors, similar names, concurrent dates. Based on Venetian administrative sources, normative literature, hagiographic accounts and, above all, Roman inquisitorial documents, Isabel Harvey has shown that this was a single institution, headed by not two but three women of power with social origins ranging from poverty to nobility, who created a space of freedom for themselves at the limits of the social acceptability and the orthodoxy of the Roman Church. 

            Angela Carbone presented her work on the issue of female participation in charity in southern Italy during the early modern period, presenting her book Ritirate dalle cose del monde. Donne e istituzioni nel Mezzogiorno moderno. The point of view adopted by Angela Carbone in this work is quite innovative: she is looking for the experience and the voices of women who built living environments for other women who were on the margins of two possible female life-paths: marriage or convent. Angela Carbone’s book is organized around three main categories of women’s institutions, covering all social classes, urban and rural. The starting point of Angela Carbone’s reflections is the orphan girls, those deprived from any family support. In the period between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of early modern period, new structures of assistance for orphan girls emerged, founded by lay associations: confraternities, monti di pietà, parishes, and dioceses. The second part of the book addresses the assistance given to a group of women who were even more marginalized: repentant prostitutes, those who were unhappily married or abandoned by their husbands, and all those women whose honor was already compromised. In the institutions that were founded for these women, charitable intervention took on a moral and redemptive character, through work and spiritual exercises. The third and final part of the book analyzes the noble women, who were the protagonists in the founding of many semi-religious institutions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The history of women’s charitable institutions goes hand in hand with the social representations of women and their bodies. The identity that was assigned to them, as either a reserve of purity to counterbalance the sins of the world if they were keeping chastity, or as a sinner who drew God’s wrath on Earth if they were not, was at the root of charitable institutions, as all of them place the preservation of women’s honor at the heart of their mission.

            The seminar ended with a question period where the issue of possible sources in which to see the experiences of these women emerged.