Literacy and Learning in the Lives of Women Religious in Medieval Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2021

Summary

Although Hildegard of Bingen described herself multiple times in her writings as indocta (unlearned), medieval accounts and modern scholarship reveal discrepancies and conflicting information regarding this claim. What, then, was the extent of her education? Instead of answering this question directly by interrogating the intent, meaning, or reliability of her statements and those of her contemporaries, a broader picture of educational standards, resources, and contexts for the intellectual formation of women religious in medieval Germany is investigated. Invoking the full breadth of meaning of ‘women religious’ to include nuns, canonesses, consecrated widows, beguines, and anchorites unveils a wide-ranging scope of educational activity. Contemporary sources, including monastic and canonical rules, hagiographic literature of female vitae, and concrete evidence of libraries and scribal activity in female communities elucidate details of materials, learning conditions, pedagogy, and intellectual engagement and creativity. This chapter thus contextualizes the medieval German environment of female literacy and learning with which Hildegard would have been familiar.

InformationThe Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen , pp. 52 - 82DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108573832.004[Opens in a new window]Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021

Introduction: Hildegard and Formal Learning

When Hildegard of Bingen spoke of her formal education, she frequently underscored the limits of her “earthly” training, stating that the knowledge that flowed through her was divine rather than human in origin. In the opening declaration of Scivias, for instance, Hildegard says that, despite not knowing how “to analyze the syntax of words, or to divide their syllables,” nor having “any knowledge of their cases or tenses,” she had been granted, through heavenly visions and auditions, a sudden understanding of “the meaning of the exposition of the Scriptures, namely the Psalter, the Gospel, and the other catholic volumes of both the Old and New Testament.”Footnote1 In a variety of writings, Hildegard refers to herself as indocta – “unlearned” or “uneducated” – an adjective that she and others bestow on her teacher Jutta of Sponheim as well.Footnote2 Hildegard also links the limits of her learnedness to her gender, as can be found in the introduction and conclusion to her Explanation of the Rule of Benedict, where she refers to herself as a “poor female person and untrained in learning.”Footnote3

Others in Hildegard’s sphere – acquaintances, intimates, and vita writers – echo similar assessments. Adelbert, prior of Disibodenberg, recalled to her in a letter the narrowness of her literary knowledge, stating:

We remember how you were educated among us, how you were taught, how you were established in the religious life. For your instruction was that appropriate only to a woman, and a simple psalter was your only schoolbook.Footnote4

In a discussion of her formative years, the authors of the Vita sanctae Hildegardis (Life of Saint Hildegard), Gottfried of Disibodenberg and Theodoric of Echternach, state that, save for having been taught the psalter and simple notation, Hildegard had “received no other teaching in the arts of literature or of music from a human source.”Footnote5 The vita writers go on to marvel that she was nonetheless able to produce such a prodigious number of writings and books.

Hildegard’s meager schooling caused her to enlist the help of more conventionally educated individuals, who could take down dictation. Initially, she turned to nuns under her charge, ones apparently better trained as scribes and more expert in Latin than she. Later the monk Volmar – who served as her secretary and confessor for many years – helped to mediate her mystical experiences, putting her words into more polished and proper Latin. Following Volmar’s death in 1173, Hildegard turned to Ludwig of St. Matthias, Gottfried of Disibodenberg, and Guibert of Gembloux for their scribal, literary, and editorial assistantship.

Despite these and other assertions of the deficiencies of both her principal instructor and her own schooling, one finds among contemporary reports small contradictions in the educational background of Hildegard and her teacher. The Vita domnae Juttae inclusae (Life of Lady Jutta the Anchoress, ca. 1140), a work likely commissioned by Hildegard, characterizes Jutta quite differently than Hildegard does:

Once [Jutta] had passed the tender years of her infancy, her mother handed her over to be instructed in the learning of the sacred Scriptures. In these she made good progress; whatever her capacious intelligence could absorb from them she committed to her retentive memory, and thereafter strove to implement with good deeds.Footnote6

This vita also shows Jutta to be a skilled and dedicated teacher who passed on all acquired knowledge, especially with regard to teachings from the Old and New Testament, and who “held back none of her daughters.”Footnote7 These depictions of Jutta’s learnedness and pedagogical generosity contrast starkly to the epithet indocta mulier (uneducated woman) and other statements found in the Scivias and the Vita sanctae Hildegardis.

Other discrepancies emerge among medieval reports. While in numerous accounts Hildegard is portrayed as barely literate and in need of scribal assistance, certain passages present her as capable of writing down her visions in her own hand, privately and unaided.Footnote8 She also expressed frustrations with her secretaries when they had introduced changes into her writings.Footnote9 Her dissatisfaction suggests not only that she detected emendations but also that she was competent enough to offer an opinion on both the style and the substance of their scribal interventions. Another inconsistency occurs between books 1 and 2 of the Vita sanctae Hildegardis: in the former, she is described as having received rudimentary training in psalm singing and musical notation, while in the latter, she is said to have “never studied neumes or any chant at all.”Footnote10 Odo of Soissons also writes to her in a letter: “It is reported … that you bring forth the melody of a new song, although you have studied nothing of such things.”Footnote11

Medieval authors are not the only writers to present diverging views on Hildegard’s learning. Concerning her literary and musical output, some modern scholars have located traces of influence from specific authors (Plato via Calcidius, Cicero, Augustine, Boethius, William of Hirsau, Honorius Augustodunensis, Rupert of Deutz) and works (i.e. the anonymous Speculum virginum [Mirror for Virgins]) as well as familiarity with specific literary and musico-liturgical genres.Footnote12 Others have challenged such conclusions, suggesting instead that her familiarity with specific authors, texts, genres, and schools of thought might be accounted for as knowledge transmitted to her orally rather than her direct engagement with such texts or through any kind of formal instruction.Footnote13

Scholars today have offered multiple explanations for the meaning and intention behind the assertions on her literary and linguistic competencies. Some suggest taking her and her vita writers’ words at face value. Others view these remarks as examples of humilitas or other rhetorical topoi. Some propose that such protestations belong to larger strategies, ones meant to appease or silence her detractors, legitimize the divine nature of her visions, authorize her leadership decisions, add to the force of her legal complaints, or prepare and construct a dossier for canonization. As Joseph Baird and Radd Ehrman put it, “the extent of Hildegard’s education is a problem not likely ever to be solved.”Footnote14

It is not the purpose of this chapter, however, to either determine the intent or decide on the meaning of the words of Hildegard or her contemporaries on her education. Neither does this chapter set out to relitigate the trustworthiness of statements made by her and others. Instead, it aims to present more broadly standards and expectations of, as well as contexts for, literacy and learning common to women religious in medieval Germany. The remainder of the chapter proceeds from three vantage points. First, monastic and canonical rules together with a pair of conciliar decrees will be reviewed for information they contain pertaining to learning and literacy in women’s communities. This section focuses on early rules, most written or compiled between the fifth and ninth centuries, and which were foundational texts for women’s houses in the early medieval period.

Following this survey, relevant hagiographic works will be considered. Hagiographic literature cannot, of course, be read as a set of unassailable facts; even so, vitae register through the depiction of their holy protagonists idealized forms of religious life. Just as the vitae of Hildegard and Jutta provide information about the educational conditions of their subjects and offer insights into contemporary values on female learning, so too can other vitae be inspected for views on and values held for female learning. As spiritual exempla, the women of these vitae promote, on the one hand, and reflect, on the other, social, cultural, and institutional norms for the education of women religious. In such accounts, we encounter the exemplary pupil, teacher, reader, and singer as she pursues her sacred duties in her convent, cell, or religious house.

The chapter closes with a short review of important scholarship presenting concrete examples of learnedness and literacies found in and among women’s communities in medieval Germany. These various studies examine artifacts from the macro perspective, such as book collections as a whole or scriptoria, and from the micro perspective, such as individual manuscripts, parts of manuscripts, or writings by women. Types of evidence include the remnants of libraries, medieval book inventories, and documents related to book acquisition such as commissions, purchases, donations, in-house copying, and book loans. How women used and engaged their books can be surmised in part through the evidence of glosses, annotations, addenda, and manuscript wear. Illustrations, individual ownership marks, ex libris marks, colophons, and names of dedicatees offer clues about the intended readers and owners. The identification of women scribes, information about their scriptoria, and the interaction between female and male agents can shed light on educational matters in ways that rules and vitae cannot. Finally, there are numerous examples of female authors from women’s communities in medieval Germany, and these will be addressed in relevant cases.

Before continuing, a short explanation on the types of “nuns” considered here as well as the rationale for the chronological scope of the study are warranted. Throughout this chapter, “women religious” (mulieres religiosae) and “female religious” will be used to refer collectively to nuns, ruled canonesses, secular canonesses (including Stiftsdamen), anchorites, consecrated or holy widows, beguines, and other holy women who dwelled in, formed, established, or took part in religious communities, households, or cells.Footnote15 Some followed a known or authorized rule (e.g. the Regula Benedicti, Regula ad virgines, Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis, Regula Augustini), while others apparently lived according to a discipline set out in a local or hybrid rule that has not survived or according to guidelines and precepts never formalized in writing.Footnote16 Some women religious such as beguines did not observe a rule per se.

By including different types of female religious in this chapter, I hope to present a more representative and balanced picture of the religious landscape of medieval Germany, and one familiar in some measure to Hildegard as well as her forebears and her successors, rather than restricting evidence to professed nuns only. Hildegard was herself, of course, a Benedictine nun who dwelled in the double community at Disibodenberg and later at the convent at Rupertsberg. Yet, while living at the latter, she did not always adhere to the strict regulations of enclosure demanded by the Regula Benedicti, and this exemption is one frequently encountered among medieval religiosae, especially German noblewomen. Before joining her Benedictine community, however, Hildegard lived as a girl with the anchorite Jutta, and together with another girl Hildegard’s age they were “entombed” in a cell. Prior to her life as anchorite, Jutta was educated for three years under the guardianship of Uda, a holy widow. In addition to Hildegard’s diverse “monastic” lineage, her exchanges and interactions with the outside world included religious orders different than her own – Augustinians, Premonstratensians, Cistercians, as well as unruled canonesses. Finally, because Hildegard is grouped among the German female mystics especially connected to the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, I include some later medieval examples – especially from Gertrude of Helfta and from select communities of Dominicans (an order postdating Hildegard’s lifetime) – for they provide another witness to education among women religious. Thus, this chapter examines evidence of learning and literacy as reported for and by different types of women religious from the ninth up to the middle of the fifteenth century, with the intent of presenting a wide-angle view of female religious in medieval Germany and the broader cultural, social, and institutional contexts for thinking about their education as well as that of Hildegard.

Education of Religiosae According to Rules and Rulings: Omnes litteras discant

The numerous extant rules for medieval women religious routinely confirm that Latin literacy was a standard expectation. The Regula ad virgines, a set of sixth-century prescriptions for nuns by Caesarius of Arles, puts it most succinctly and explicitly: “Omnes litteras discant” (All shall learn to read).Footnote17 Literacy made possible the primary mission of these communities: performing the daily rounds of lessons, chants, prayers, and other spiritual obligations, at specific times of the day, week, and year. According to several rules, the minimum age for admission was set to six to seven years old so as to ensure that the member was old enough to learn the alphabet and recognize letter forms.Footnote18

Rules say little about educational curricula, but the Book of Psalms was clearly a core text. The Regula Benedicti (Rule of St. Benedict), a sixth-century rule written for monks but used by and adapted for nuns, is the most explicit text in this regard. It dictates that the community should sing through the entire psalter weekly, and it lays out in painstaking detail the order of the 150 psalms, the division of their chapters and verses, as well as their distribution throughout the day and week. While in-house solutions for the ordering of the psalms are allowed, the obligation of a weekly reading of the psalter must nevertheless be met (chapter 18).Footnote19

Scriptures – that is, the rest of the Old Testament together with the New Testament – comprise the other standard text for female religious. The Regula Augustini (Rule of St. Augustine), especially widespread from the late eleventh century on, commands all to listen at mealtimes as scriptures are read aloud.Footnote20 The Regula Benedicti makes frequent mention of reading and singing from the scriptures during the liturgy, and while it does not prescribe a lectionary schedule akin to that for the psalter, it does give some general guidelines for scriptural choices at Vigils and Matins, respectively, and assigns specific biblical canticles at Vespers, Compline, and Matins. The Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis, a rule for canonesses from 816, provides by far the most comprehensive instructional “program” for women religious. It maps out a course for the study of Holy Writ thusly:

Let her first study the Psalter. Then let her gather wisdom for life in the Proverbs of Solomon. Let her learn in Ecclesiastes to despise the vanities of the world. Let her follow in Job examples of virtue and patience. Then let her pass onto the Gospels, never to be put aside once taken in hand. Let her also drink in the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles with a totally willing heart, and then the rest of the New and Old Testament in their proper order.Footnote21

The various rules say little about other appropriate lectiones, but the Regulae themselves are generally required reading in their respective communities, as with the anonymous Regula cuiusdam ad virgines (Someone’s Rule for Virgins), which states that, before mealtime, the abbess can assign multiple chapters of this rule for spiritual nourishment.Footnote22 The Regula Benedicti emphasizes the importance of hearing and comprehending the rule read (chapter 58) and advises further it be read aloud routinely so that no one can claim ignorance as an excuse for her disobedience (chapter 66). Other appropriate texts for religious inculcation include biblical commentaries (chapter 9) and the writings of the church fathers and hagiography at Compline (chapter 42). One later exception for supplemental readings occurs in the twelfth-century statutes for Premonstratensians (Statuta ordinis Praemonstratensis), which prohibits canonesses from learning anything beyond the psalter, prayers, and the Marian vigils.Footnote23 However, in the event that a particular sister had been educated prior to joining the community, she might, with permission from the abbot, be allowed to read other books on feast days.Footnote24 In the Regula Benedicti, supplemental texts are chosen for their ability to edify listeners (chapter 42) and instill monastic virtue (chapter 73), and thus the Regula Benedicti warns against reading from nine of the first ten books of the Old Testament before bed (the Book of Ruth is the exception), since such texts are deemed unsuitable for the weak-minded (chapter 42).

Rules generally denote that reading was both a communal and an individual activity. Communal readings took place in the liturgy, at mealtimes, and while sisters performed manual tasks.Footnote25 Connected to these different settings were different modes of reading. Speaking, reciting on discrete pitches, and chanting all constituted ways to read communally, and a premium was placed on listeners remaining attentive and silent. By contrast, individual reading was done quietly, inaudibly, or sotto voce (Regula Benedicti, chapter 48). Several rules mandate that books be made available to individuals and that time should be set aside every day for private reading.Footnote26 Overall, the various rules warn against the corrosive potential of idleness and gossip and indicate that the lectio divina not only fulfilled the obligation of a religiosa but also served to combat moral corruption and torpor in the community.Footnote27

Expectations for literacy pervade the various rules, and not surprisingly attempts to regulate competency and maintain standards can be found. Carelessness in reading and in singing are met with penalties for adults and corporal punishment for children.Footnote28 According to the Regula Benedicti, the selection of a lectrix hebdomadaria (weekly reader) was determined not according to her seniority or rank but rather according to her ability to read in a way that edified the listener (chapter 38), a duty reiterated in chapter 47 for singers and readers. Of course, the importance of lectrices and cantrices to edify as they read and recite presumes aural comprehension. The importance of aural acquisition is reflected in warnings to remain alert during communal readings and safeguard against drowsiness.Footnote29 The rigors of daytime and nighttime rounds must have overwhelmed younger members of the community, however, and Aurelian of Arles’s rule, also called Regula ad virgines, made some accommodation for the very youngest girls in the convent, exempting them from the most strenuous liturgical duties.Footnote30

Writing, another dimension of literacy, receives few words in rules, but the Regula Benedicti does list a wax tablet and stylus among the items that the abbess must make available to each nun (chapter 55). Moreover, this rule instructs a novice formally entering the community to write her statement of profession; if, however, she is still “unlettered,” a surrogate could write the vow for her, and the entrant could enter a mark next to the vow (chapter 58).

Rules also warn against certain educational practices and abuses, and whereas private reading played a role in the formation of women religious, references to supervision of private reading and limiting types of personal communications surface. For instance, oversight of personal letter exchange comes under the purview of the abbess or some other senior member in the community.Footnote31 Caesarius of Arles adjures that neither the daughters of nobility nor those of common folk should be received into a convent for the sole purpose of rearing and teaching them, although there is ample evidence to suggest that this practice continued well into the central Middle Ages.Footnote32

In general, the various rules give few if any details about material support, learning conditions, instructors, and pedagogy. The presence of libraries can be assumed, but virtually nothing is said about the management and acquisition of books, though from the twelfth century on, ordinals, customaries, statutes, and so on sometimes offer details on the offices and duties of librarians and scribes in the various monastic and canonical orders.Footnote33 In terms of teaching personnel, Caesarius refers to a “mistress of the novices” in the Regula ad virgines, but he does not specify her duties.Footnote34 In ordinals, constitutions, customaries, and other prescriptive texts written after 1100, indications for and definitions of the offices of female cantor (cantrix), librarian (armaria), and teaching mistress emerge, but such information in the various rules compiled before the twelfth century is scarce. One relatively early statement on educational oversight was issued at the Synod of Chalon-sur-Saône of 813, which directs the abbess to take care that her charges “strenuously apply themselves to reading, to the Office, and to singing the psalms.”Footnote35 These Acts also order each female religious to learn to read and sing in order to fulfill her sacred duties. This latter decree, adopted verbatim at the council of Mainz in 847, declares:

Female religious should apply themselves in their monastery to read and chant, to celebrate or pray the psalms, and celebrate the canonical hours – namely Matins, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline – all in equal measure.Footnote36

Thus, while the various rules and legislation governing female religious are often vague on implementation and methods of teaching, collectively these late patristic and early medieval texts make clear that literacy was a basic necessity and one that made possible these communities’ fundamental spiritual obligations.

Female Learning and Literacy According to the Hagiographic Tradition

Hagiographic literature presents another perspective of education found in religious communities. As sacred biographies, the lives of saintly women present idealized nuns, canonesses, anchorites, widows, lay sisters, and other consecrated women. They commonly impart, furthermore, details about educational standards, literacy requirements, and attitudes toward learning and teaching in their communities.Footnote37 Some two dozen medieval hagiographies of German women religious have been surveyed for this chapter. From these lives, one can gain some understanding about what, when, where, and how exemplary women read and what were the standards and conditions for their education.

Without a doubt the text most commonly cited in the twenty-some hagiographies surveyed is the Book of Psalms. The references to the psalter and to psalmody are so numerous that it is helpful to organize them along thematic and structural lines:

1. (1)the psalter as primer;

2. (2)the psalter in the daily rounds of the Divine Office;

3. (3)the psalter as ubiquitous, enduring lectio, including as the last words spoken, recited, or heard in life;

4. (4)the psalter or psalmody as catalyst for a miracle;

5. (5)reading and reciting the psalter as demonstration of discipline and asceticism;

6. (6)reading the psalter as private, interior devotion and a marker of individual piety and chastity.

In what follows, I provide representative examples from each group, though some references to the psalter or psalmody can easily fit more than one category.

That the Book of Psalms frequently functioned as a textbook is already well-known to historians, and this view is abundantly clear in the hagiographic tradition, as with the Vita Mathildis posterior (from 1002/1003), which depicts the young girl Mathilda of Saxony being sent to the convent of Herford for the express purposes of learning to read the psalter.Footnote38 The two lives of Wiborada recount how the future anchorite Wiborada acquired basic literacy through learning the psalms.Footnote39 Unlike modern-day primers, which are texts put aside once a child has mastered the content, the psalter remains a central text for life, both within the liturgy and without. In a very brief description of the life of the twelfth-century conversa Guda of Arnstein, the author encapsulates her anchoritic existence as listening “to the Divine Offices, intent on the Psalms and prayers.”Footnote40 For the fourteenth-century Dominican nun Margret Finkin of Töss, the psalter was her constant reader and companion, so that, from the time she had learned the psalter until the moment of her death, not a day passed when she did not recite the psalms.Footnote41

The importance of the psalter at the end of one’s life is found in the ninth-century vita of Abbess Hathumoda of Gandersheim. As she approaches death, she and her community found great comfort in singing the songs of David – sometimes in unison, sometimes in a kind of “polyphonic” intermixture of different psalms, and sometimes in a kind of psalmodic troping through the combination of disparate verses:

And now the body began to fail little by little, and yet Hathumoda’s mind remained firmly fixed on heaven. She often sang along with us the same psalms, and often different ones, as well as certain verses from here and there in the Psalter, so linked to one another in conjoined order they could not be doubted to have been inspired to her holy mind by the same spirit through which they had been written. Between the psalmody and the prayers, the Lord was always in her mouth, Christ always in her heart, and unless she closed her eyes for a bit as if sleeping, she always either sang psalms or spoke about the salvation of her soul.Footnote42

The hagiographic utility of the psalter is frequently conveyed in miracle stories as well. In the Vita Leobae, when a certain sister Agatha was falsely accused of fornication and infanticide, her abbess, Leoba of Bischofsheim (d. ca. 782), directed the large community to recite the entire psalter with arms extended in the form of the cross. Through the nuns’ aggregate chanting of the psalter, the falsely accused Agatha was proven innocent and the actual wrongdoers discovered.Footnote43 According to the fourteenth-century Sisterbook of Töss, Gertrud of Winterthur witnessed how, on Good Friday, while her convent recited the psalter, the figure of a wounded Christ appeared before each sister who read, and he uttered gently to each “With these prayers, my wounds are healed.” Yet for those sisters who chose not to read or feigned reading, Gertrud saw how Christ neither stood before nor spoke to them. The episode concludes: “Then [Gertrud] understood, how beloved and worthy to him is [psalmodic] prayer in the community.”Footnote44

Striking, too, is how holy women are described as adopting more ascetically demanding regimens of reading and chanting the psalter. Mathilda of Saxony increased her weekly obligation sevenfold when possible, while the Dominican Beli of Winterthur commonly read the entire psalter every day after the early mass.Footnote45 Hildegard’s first teacher, Jutta, intensified her own psalmodic practices not only in frequency but also through heightened physical exertion, thus:

In the course of her rule of life, [Jutta] used to complete the entire Psalter every day, as well as daily reciting other additions for the living and dead, which could not be expected of anyone else. She sometimes added a second and the third Psalter, but never less than one, except when she was prevented by serious weaknesses. On occasion, she went through the entire Psalter standing in one place, adding a prostration between each verse, but she did this rarely because she had not enough strength for it. More often she went right through the Psalter while standing erect crouching on her knees. Sometimes she used to give herself to this work in bare feet even through the hardest and most pressing winters, so that for this labor she became afflicted by a serious debility.Footnote46

Finally, hagiographers often depict reading the psalter as a solitary act and one that signifies virtue and piety. Returning to the Vita Mathildis posterior, when word of Mathilda’s goodness had reached the widowed Henry, duke of Saxony, he dispatched his son and noble vassals to observe her in the cloister that they might report back to him:

After setting up camp in a field near the convent, a few men entered the chapel as if to pray. There they saw the maiden sitting with a psalter in her hand, demonstrating by her bearing and most honorable visage the full extent of her virtue.Footnote47

It is not then just her noble carriage and beauty that recommend Mathilda as a suitable bride but also her pious learning, denoted by her psalter. Mathilda marries Henry, and following his death in 936, she resides as a widow in Quedlinburg and Nordhausen, two Stifte, or female religious communities, that she had founded. In these years, she is presented deeply engaged in her psalter, “at times … so engrossed in reading or chanting the psalms, she was unable to notice those who passed by.”Footnote48

Vitae also commonly represent the Bible as standard reading. For instance, the unnamed magistra of Admont was reported to have been “thoroughly educated in sacred scripture,”Footnote49 and Leoba of Bischofsheim read carefully “all the Books of the Old and New Testament and learned by heart all the commandments of God.”Footnote50 While the ubiquity of biblical reading is nearly on par with the Book of Psalms, hagiographers often make a subtle distinction in showing how their protagonists experienced these texts.

While reading the psalter in private is often connoted as an interior, intimate, quiet spiritual experience, an individual’s reading of the Bible in contrast often shows an intensive study requiring robust exposition and interpretation to be ultimately shared with others. Hathumoda of Gandersheim is described thusly:

She devoted herself zealously to the reading of Scripture … In hearing, reading, and understanding scripture, almost no one at that time exhibited greater caution, a more lively sense, or a more healthy intellect. If she had to question something as is the custom, she covered minutely and fully all that touched on it, so that her questioning itself seemed to teach rather than to question.Footnote51

Hathumoda moved her examination of scriptures from the private sphere to her community. The vita explains that she goes one step further yet, as she sits with guests at mealtimes to discuss, probe, and teach Holy Writ.Footnote52 Leoba’s knowledge of scriptures was so thorough that she was dispatched to other convents as well as at court to discuss religious matters.Footnote53 Already in the widely disseminated sixth-century Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a “vita” of Scholastica, the sister of Benedict of Nursia, shows the nun earnestly discussing theology with her brother in their annual meeting and through divine intervention she is able to prove to Benedict the virtue of such discourse.Footnote54

Thus, the individual reading of scripture does not end there but moves to a more “public,” that is, communal, space, where speaking, exegesis, and a kind of preaching take place. By contrast, private reading of the Psalms remains private. Mathilda utterly absorbed in her psalter has echoes in depictions of the Virgin Mary in Annunciation scenes. As recent scholarship has shown, in the Latin West beginning in the ninth century, Mary is presented as reading the psalter at the moment the archangel Gabriel announces that she is with child. The newer literary-iconographic representation – the so-called Reading Mary – takes hold first in the German lands and displaces an older tradition of Mary with spindle or weaving thread.Footnote55 The new tradition of Mary reading specifically the psalter is traced to the mid-ninth century, as found in an ivory carving from Metz (ca. 860–870) and in an Old High German versified version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew by Otfried of Weissenburg who describes Gabriel finding Mary “with her psalter in her hands, singing it through until the end.”Footnote56 Laura Saetveit Miles has argued that the depiction of Mary as reader, which first emerged in the late Carolingian period, corresponded with the contemporary religious reforms that “reemphasized exactly her model of solitary, studious prayer.”Footnote57 Miles connects these “explicit pictorial and textual references” to male monastic and clerical contexts specifically,Footnote58 but contemporary hagiography of female saints shows that Mary engaging her psalter in quiet seclusion was a model for women religious as well.

In contradistinction to this iconographic tradition, representations of female religious with scripture or biblical books take on decidedly different forms. (Here, scriptures, Holy Writ, and the Bible refer to the New Testament together with the Old Testament except for the Book of Psalms, since hagiographers and other writers often treat this biblical book as separate from the rest of the Bible.) A chief attribute for abbesses in the medieval German iconographic tradition is the Gospel, with the abbess depicted holding the book in a frontal stance rather than in profile and meeting the viewer’s gaze directly rather than reading or interrupted reading.Footnote59 In a partially extant series of eleventh-century sculptural reliefs from St. Liudger in Werden, the religiosae are represented as dynamic discussants.Footnote60 The women are paired: each holds a book, the one inclined toward the other, hands held as deeply engaged in learned disquisition. While the books are generic visually and could intend biblical commentaries, sermons, and so on, the hagiographic tradition and rules for women’s communities suggest that the most apt texts for communal interrogation would be the Bible. The iconographic traditions of women with psalter and scriptures, then, might be viewed as visual exempla instructing women religious on how to approach these two fundamental readings.

Besides the Book of Psalms and the Bible more generally, few other religious or theological texts are cited in the surveyed vitae. Knowledge of the Regula Benedicti or other rules is often implied but not necessarily stated explicitly. Occasionally other texts are mentioned as with the Dominican nun Anna of Klingnau, who spent her day enthusiastically reading the lives of saints and martyrs when not attending to her other duties.Footnote61 Leoba of Bischofsheim was fully conversant in patristic writings, conciliar decrees, and ecclesiastical law,Footnote62 while Mathilda of Saxony undertook the Dialogues of Gregory I with her close friend Ricburg, the abbess of Nordhausen.Footnote63

Several vitae identify the liberal arts as a component of the education of female religious. Leoba’s training in the liberal arts served as a path “to attain a perfect knowledge of divine things so that through the combination of her reading with her quick intelligence, by natural gifts and hard work, she became extremely learned.”Footnote64 Mathilda of Saxony’s schooling in literary studies prepared her for both a secular life at court and a contemplative one as conventual.Footnote65 The late twelfth-century Vita sanctae Cunegundis describes how Empress Kunigunde saw to it that her niece Uta, the first abbess of Kaufungen, was educated in theological, liturgical, literary, and other secular disciplines, as was befitting the role of the head of a women’s community.Footnote66 Adelheid of Vilich’s philosophical studies nurtured her “rational soul” and readied her for spiritual learning and pursuit of knowledge of God.Footnote67 The unnamed prioress-teacher of Admont is described as “second to none in religious habits and the liberal arts too,” and the characterization of her manner of speech (pleasing, well-ordered, temperate, instructive, informative) is indicative of one steeped in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic.Footnote68 Furthermore, she put her liberal arts training to good use as she is noted for devoting time to dictating letters and writing prose and verse.Footnote69 However, the importance of striking a balance between the love of (secular) learning and leading a spiritual life is noted in the early biography of Gertrude of Helfta, which characterizes her as devoted to the study of the liberal arts. Still, because of

her excessive attachment to the secular studies … she had neglected to adapt the high point of her mind to the light of spiritual understanding. By attaching herself with such avid enjoyment of the pursuit of human wisdom, she was depriving herself of the sweet taste of true wisdom.Footnote70

Through divine revelation, Gertrude came to understand that her love of learning must be transformed to a desire to know God.

The vitae are sparing in details on how communities learned chant, including on aspects of aural learning, acquisition of basic modal theory, or reading notational scripts. Generalities are common as, for example, in the description of Liutbirga, who was reported to have taught girls “psalmody,” a word that implies singing the psalms to specific modal recitation formulae but that might be understood more broadly as singing chant or monophonic liturgical song.Footnote71 One particularly poignant description is found in the Dominican St. Katharinental Sisterbook. In one of the vitae, Katrin Brümsin, a novitiate, struggles with learning and literacy in general. One night, Katrin dreams that an unknown bishop was singing mass on the feast of John the Evangelist, and as the other sisters joined to sing the sequence Verbum dei deo natum (The word of God, born of God), Katrin did not. The bishop – who was in fact John the Evangelist – asked her why she refused to sing. Katrin explained that she was unable though she tried with all her heart. Taking her by the hand, the Evangelist placed her before a large chant book open to the golden lettering of the sequence Verbum dei deo natum and said gently, “this you should pray to me.”Footnote72 Miraculously she sang the entire chant – all twenty-four verses, as the vita stresses. When Katrin awoke from her dream, she exclaimed to a fellow novitiate that she had learned the sequence by heart. Doubting her, the sister told her to sing it, and Katrin demonstrated that indeed the saint had taught her well. According to the vita, from then on Katrin not only possessed the ability to learn chant but flourished in her other studies. Showing a far less gentle approach, Adelheid of Vilich did not refrain from scolding sisters who sang poorly, even boxing the ears of one sister who chanted out of tune. The vita reports, however, that this physical inducement brought forth improvement, for, miraculously, the girl sang with a beautiful voice ever after.Footnote73

Writing – either as copying text or as text composition and compilation – gets occasional mention in the vitae. Margret Finkin was eager to learn to read and write Latin,Footnote74 and the anchorite Wilbirg is described as not only reading and receiving letters from her friends but also writing and sending her own.Footnote75 The Vita Mathildis virginis recounts how Mechthild of Diessen worked diligently as a scribe, yet at the moment the bells signaled the start of the Office, she did not hesitate to lay down her quill – even stopping mid letter.Footnote76 On the other hand, when Gertrude of Helfta halted scribal work to attend Mass, John the Evangelist appeared to her, telling her to resume her work. In return, she gained special understanding of the meaning of chant as she combined scribal activities while listening to the liturgy at a distance.Footnote77

In addition to copying texts, book production and parchment preparation are thematized in the Life of Mechthild of Diessen. The author, in a rather grim episode, describes how an unnamed sister in the community suffered a horrible scribal calamity. Though the sister was an experienced scribe, once, while pricking the parchment for ruling, she gouged her eye with an awl. Had it not been for the miraculous intervention of Mechthild, this unnamed scriptrix would have lost her eye.Footnote78 Not all book makers met with disasters in the scriptorium: in the tradition of the sister-books, Dominican sisters are remembered, blessed, and lauded for their skills as copyists, notators, painters, and decorators of beautiful codices.Footnote79

Record-keeping is mentioned in the vitae of Mathilda of Saxony who bequeathed to her granddaughter Mathilda, future abbess of Quedlinburg, a necrology. The elder Mathilda had maintained this list of obituary notices of kin and community for memorial purposes, and, on her death bed, she turned over the duty of entering the obits to her namesake.Footnote80 Other types of writing are noted as well. The unnamed magistra of Admont dictated letters,Footnote81 while Gertrude of Helfta compiled several volumes of sayings of the saints.Footnote82 The various contributors to the Legatus note their admiration for Gertrude’s works, particularly the eloquence of her written prayers, spiritual exercises, and biblical exegesis.Footnote83 According to the Sisterbook of Töss, the Dominican Willi of Constance authored a beautiful book of religious materials, while Mechthilt of Wangen, who neither knew Latin nor how to write, was wondrously able to write four passion accounts in German – with her own hand.Footnote84

Manifestations of literacy and learning in the hagiography are also reported through the descriptions of ideal teachers and learners. Teachers are exemplified as alert, tireless, selfless, generous, and are shown often balancing tenderness, moderation, rewards, and practical discipline. Mathilda listened to her students read aloud, corrected them, and quizzed them on their memorization of texts.Footnote85 Leoba had girls read scripture at her bedside, and though she appeared as if asleep, she was able to recognize mistakes and prompt them if they skipped a word or dropped a syllable.Footnote86 She also urged her pupils “to vie with one that they might achieve perfection.”Footnote87 The unnamed magistra of Admont, “full of charity and love” toward her nuns, responded to the educational interests, and when they requested to be taught prose and verse, she prepared lessons on wax tablets the night before.Footnote88

For the model female pupil, two themes emerge: displaying a maturity beyond her years and an eager, industrious disposition. In Guibert’s letter to Bovo, Jutta is described as possessing already at a young age a “maturity of mind.”Footnote89 Rejecting material wealth and youthful fancies in favor of learning are common manifestations of such maturity, as in the case of Wiborada who renounced worldly possessions and comforts and shunned children’s games and ditties so that she might attend daily masses and learn to read.Footnote90 One does find the occasional exception to the keen learner: Anne of Ramschwag, for instance, disliked learning and avoided books. However, once during a reading lesson, when her teacher opened up a book, Anne saw inside the book the Christ child lying vulnerable, tiny, and unclothed. He spoke to her encouragingly, and from then on, Anne approached her studies wholeheartedly and eagerly learned what was demanded of her.Footnote91 Yet it is far more common for accounts of saintly women to describe their subjects as naturally diligent pupils. As a girl, Mathilda distinguished herself as someone who “excelled mightily in every endeavor, upright beyond her tender years, assiduous both in her study of letters and in her handiwork.”Footnote92 Hathumoda perfectly combined the ideal traits:

The jokes and games, however harmless, that are familiar to children her age, she derided as vain, and scorned as good for nothing. The gold and precious baubles, which children however innocently desire as being pretty, she desired not at all, and did not wish to have … And letters, which others have to be compelled to learn, even by whippings, she begged for with willing zeal and mastered through tireless study.Footnote93

These examples stand in stark contrast to Hildegard, who minimizes formal learning and its usefulness. Yet not all mystics found earthly training at odds with divine encounters. Gertrude of Helfta enjoyed a formal education, and indeed, her love of learning as a child dominates the first chapter of book 1 of The Herald of Divine Love:

Even at this tender age, she already possessed the wisdom of the mature person. She was so amiable, clever, and eloquent, and so docile that she was admired by all who heard her. As soon as she was admitted to school, she showed such quickness and intelligence that she soon far surpassed in learning and knowledge all the children of her own age and all her other companions as well. Gladly and eagerly she gave herself to the study of the liberal arts.Footnote94

For Gertrude, as long as her pursuit of knowledge was regarded as a path to greater spiritual understanding, the broad curriculum of her education was not viewed as an impediment to the divine visions that accompanied her through life.

The Evidence of Libraries, Books, and Texts from Women’s Communities

Arguably the best, most direct evidence demonstrating literacy and learning of female religious is located in their books. Thus, historians find it instructive to consider the library holdings once conserved in their communities; to inspect closely individual texts that they read and with which they interacted; and to look at the volumes they favored, collected, commissioned, donated, copied, and authored. Since the late 1990s, numerous scholars have produced full-length studies investigating the education and erudition evinced in women’s houses in medieval Germany. Katrinette Bodarwé’s comprehensive examination of literary witnesses from Gandersheim, Essen, and Quedlinburg provides a window into traditions of learning in these three communities from roughly 850 to 1100.Footnote95 New perspectives on intellectual culture of female religious during the long twelfth century are found in Alison I. Beach’s Women As Scribes, Fiona Griffith’s Garden of Delights, and Listen, Daughter, a collection of essays on the Speculum virginum, edited by Constant J. Mews.Footnote96 Broader in scope is D. H. Green’s immensely helpful overview of female literacy for the entire medieval period, with special attention given to the German lands as well as England and France.Footnote97 Monographs by Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner and Eva Schlotheuber, respectively, present different approaches to learning among German women connected to the new religious orders of the central and late Middle Ages.Footnote98 The multiauthored study of Paradies bei Soest undertakes through a series of carefully coordinated essays a thorough investigation of intellectual culture in evidence at this Westphalian Dominican convent, particularly as manifested in several of its liturgical books.Footnote99 Finally, the three-volume series entitled Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe presents collectively more than fifty individual essays examining how women read, wrote, scribed, and illustrated texts in both Latin and vernacular languages.Footnote100 This massive project – representing the work of some four dozen authors – signals a historiographical shift in scholarship on learning among women religious; more than a quarter of the essays consider examples from the German-speaking areas and collectively cover the entire Middle Ages.

During the late Carolingian, Ottonian, and Salian periods, numerous female houses throughout the German lands fostered education among their members. Indeed, many of these places boasted a thriving intellectual culture. That erudition flourished in the more elite communities was no doubt facilitated by their status as imperial Stifte, which served as homes for daughters, granddaughters, sisters, nieces, and widows of high-ranking nobility. As Helene Scheck puts it, “[by] virtue of their class, royal women of Carolingian Francia and Ottonian Saxony enjoyed the same privilege, even duty, of becoming educated as their male counterparts.”Footnote101

The reconstructed book holdings of the Stifte at Gandersheim, Essen, and Quedlinburg reveal a range of texts available to the sisters.Footnote102 Unsurprisingly, psalters, bibles, and pericopes are ubiquitous as are complementary books of commentaries, sermons, and glosses. Also ever-present in these collections are books supporting the opus dei, including a variety of chant books and other liturgical and devotional sources (e.g. sacramentaries, prayer books, calendars, and saints’ lives). Beyond writings connected to scripture, liturgy, and formation, texts attached to the study of the liberal arts, philosophy, and theology are found. Thus, the reconstructed libraries reveal the presence of an array of texts by patristic and early medieval Christian authors (e.g. Prudentius, Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Gregory, and Bede), more contemporary authors (e.g. Paul the Deacon, Alcuin, Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, Haimo of Auxerre, Hrabanus Maurus, and Liutprand of Cremona), as well as by classical and secular writers (e.g. Terrence, Virgil, Flavius Josephus, Boethius, and Priscian).

Library holdings offer a bird’s-eye view of learning, but the existence alone of a text is not proof of its reception either communally or individually, and examination of sources for indications of their use is important. Helene Scheck catalogues types of reader marks, annotations, marginalia, glosses, and corrections found in a Carolingian copy of Jerome’s Epistulae once held at St. Servatius in Quedlinburg.Footnote103 Her analysis reveals that the canonesses not only leafed through this codex over several generations but also responded to, revised, and interacted with the particular letters for more than five centuries. The source’s physical traces and additions are witness to “the reading practices, level of competence, and intellectual interests of its royal female monastic audiences from the eighth century onwards.”Footnote104

Gandersheim, Essen, and Quedlinburg testify to the high level of education among its inhabitants, but other early medieval communities also served as important sites of learning for German women religious. The Regensburg Stifte of Obermünster and Niedermünster are special in their possession of early examples of feminized versions of the Regula Benedicti.Footnote105 In a late tenth-century copy from Niedermünster, the feminized version of the rule of Benedict was bound with a copy of Caesarius of Arles’s Regula ad virgines, and the two rules were provided with four full-page miniatures. One image depicts the then abbess holding a book as her sign of authority, while another illustration presents Caesarius pointing to the opening words of his rule as two sisters look on.Footnote106 Both illustrations reinforce the underlying mission of reading and understanding Latin as central to the community. Another book once belonging to Niedermünster is the extraordinary “Uta Codex” (ca. 1025). Adam Cohen characterizes this luxury evangeliary as “representative of female intellectual and spiritual life,” calling attention to ways in which the book engages a range of competencies and levels of its readers, even drawing the trivium and quadrivium of the liberal arts into its program of education and inculcation.Footnote107

After 1100, a pronounced interest in more contemporary authors mark the literary pursuits cultivated in numerous female houses. Preferences for late eleventh- and twelfth-century discourses on monastic renewal, church reform, and the cura monialium are especially manifest in newly founded convents and reformed monasteries.Footnote108 Beach has explored the makeup of the twelfth-century libraries at Wessobrunn, Admont, and Schäftlarn,Footnote109 while Julie Hotchin has done the same for Lippoldsberg and Lamspringe.Footnote110 A common feature in their reconstructions shows that the women were acquiring not only patristic and early medieval texts but also more recent ones, including works by Anselm of Canterbury, Bruno of Segni, Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, Hugh of St. Victor, and Bernard of Clairvaux. In some cases, Beach and Hotchin argue, these updated collections put the Benedictine nuns in conversation with the intellectual debates connected to reform movements and the enacting of pastoral care in dual-sex communities.Footnote111

Case studies on individual manuscripts demonstrate ways in which German women religious found purchase in the wider intellectual culture of ecclesiastical and monastic reforms. For instance, the Admont nuns’ copy of Anselm’s Orationes sive meditationes (Book of Prayers and Meditations) – a manuscript likely made by nuns (or canonesses) in Salzburg – shows originality in the ways in which the scribes, artists, and notators reworked the text by incorporating images with chant fragments into the mise-en-page.Footnote112 Michael Curschmann describes the resulting program in Anselm’s book of prayers as “remarkable for its intellectual ambition, its artistic execution, and its demand on the viewer.”Footnote113 Curschmann continues, “these prayers had been designated by their author as private and non-liturgical. And yet, their ultimate recipients found a way of assimilating the collection into their own way of life and habits of ritual.”Footnote114

The Admont Orationes is an example of a text reworked by nuns, for nuns, but twelfth-century texts were also composed specifically for female religious. The Speculum virginum (Mirror for Virgins), an imagined dialogue between Theodora, a nun, and her male spiritual mentor, Peregrinus, is one such case.Footnote115 A didactic text written in the first half of the twelfth century, it focuses on a nun’s formation, emphasizing the spiritual value of virginity and enclosure to her vocation. While the Speculum may have functioned as a guidebook for monks and confessors serving female communities, the accompanying illustrations and music in the earliest manuscript tradition suggest that nuns also engaged the text more directly.Footnote116 Furthermore, through the exemplum of Theodora, it presents a learned nun fully conversant in scripture and models spiritual and intellectual inquiry for religiosae.Footnote117 The lavishly illuminated florilegia Hortus deliciarum (Garden of Delights) is another text written for a female audience. This late twelfth-century work – comprised of preexisting theological writings, biblical history, canon law, poetry, and music – was assembled, amplified, and glossed by Herrad of Hohenbourg, with nearly 350 individual images. The fundamental purpose of the Hortus was to educate women of the Augustinian community of Hohenbourg. The wide range of materials Herrad culled from included contemporary writings of Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, Peter Lombard, and Peter Comestor. As a text for women, the Hortus deliciarum is a fascinating counterpoint to the slightly older Speculum virginum. The latter, transmitted in several dozen sources, apparently served as an aid for male clerics caring for nuns pastorally, and the stylized dialogue reinforced the male–female hierarchy of teacher–pupil. By contrast, the encyclopedic nature of Hortus deliciarum with its emphasis on pedagogy and synthesis reduced the Augustinian canonesses’ dependency on a magister, as it reassigned the responsibilities of teaching to Hohenbourg’s magistrae.Footnote118

Scribal contributions of nuns, canonesses, and recluses are another manifestation of intellectual culture in their communities. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are marked by a greater pool of evidence attesting to the scribal activities of women religious in the German lands. Certainly, female scribes existed before 1100, but securing the identity, provenance, and context has posed problems for historians. Beach has succeeded in locating numerous female scribes in twelfth-century sources, typically relying on a combination of paleographic analysis, identification of names in colophons and necrologies, and other testimonies.Footnote119 Various scholars have shown that women scribes supplied books for their own communities as well as for other male and female communities. Indeed, scribal work emerges as a significant and even an honorable vocation for women religious during the central and late Middle Ages, and activities included not only copying texts but also illuminating, rubricating, notating, binding, and at times coordinating with male scribes or with scribes from other women’s communities.Footnote120

Scribes did not always act as passive copyists; rather at times they exercised agency as editors and coauthors, engaging with and shaping the content of the final products. Evidence from twelfth-century Admont suggests a collaborative process by which nun-scribes not only took down biblical commentaries, expositions, and sermons dictated and preached by Abbot Irimbert but also practiced a certain degree of autonomy for editing final written versions.Footnote121 Other examples of nuns and sisters determining texts and content as compilers and copyists have been detected in later sermon collections.Footnote122

In late medieval Germany, conditions for the culture of learning and reading changed with regard to contemporary views on Latin literacy in women’s communities. Scholars offer different perspectives on the nature and extent of Latin education in women’s communities. Ehrenschwendtner points out the limited use of Latin in Dominican convents of southern Germany, providing evidence that only basic linguistic competence was required for reading the Bible and performing the liturgy.Footnote123 Gone is institutional support (at least officially) for traditional Latin-based study of grammar, the other liberal arts, history, and philosophy, and indeed, novitiates were expected to have received a rudimentary education in reading and music (specifically solmization) before entering the convent.Footnote124 Nevertheless, a wider range of vernacular religious literature flourished in these convents,Footnote125 with some convents boasting large collections of German-language books.Footnote126 Moreover, sisters served as scribes to supply their own collections and as librarians to organize and oversee holdings.Footnote127

In her study of the northern German convents, Schlotheuber, on the other hand, shows that knowledge of Latin in several convents was considerable.Footnote128 In Liturgical Life and Latin Learning, Schlotheuber discusses the modern historiography in greater detail.Footnote129 She and her coauthors demonstrate that the Dominican sisters of Paradies bei Soest must have had extensive literary resources available to them and that their command of Latin must have been quite advanced for them to have produced such elaborate and complex liturgical books.Footnote130

Prayer books and other devotional texts from northern German convents in the Lüneburg-Heath suggest that some communities operated in a literary-linguistic continuum.Footnote131 Books written contemporaneously in the same scriptorium show a range of employment of language: Latin only, Low German only, or a combination of the two. Collectively these manuscripts point to a range of linguistic levels geared toward the abilities of individual readers, on the one hand, and aimed at facilitating greater Latin comprehension, on the other. It also reveals the learnedness of their creators who skillfully compiled, copied, and translated preexisting materials, while amplifying and connecting with newly composed texts.

Female authorship is found among German religiosae of the entire Middle Ages. Hildegard is, of course, the most celebrated writer today, but other marquee names exist as well: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Elisabeth of Schönau, Mechthild of Hackeborn, and Gertrude of Helfta. Texts of lesser known and anonymous female authors have come down to us as well. Especially well represented from the German lands are female hagiographers such as Hugeburc of Heidenheim (Hodoeporicon/Vita Willibaldi and Vita Wynnebaldi, ca. 778/779), Hrotsvit (Book of Sacred Stories, ca. 962), Bertha of Vilich (Vita Adelheidis, ca. 1056/1057), and Gerdruot of Admont (Vita cuiusdam magistrae monialium Admuntensium, ca. 1170).Footnote132 Female authorship has been argued for the anonymous Vita Mathildis anterior (ca. 973/974) and the Vita Mathildis posterior (ca. 1002/1003).Footnote133 The tradition of sacred biographies finds a new form in the fourteenth-century sister-books tradition. These compilations of short biographies of Dominican nuns were authored by women from the same communities – some in Latin, most in the vernacular, and sometimes as the work of an individual, sometimes as collaborative or corporate enterprise.Footnote134 Evidence for correspondence has survived too, the style, content, and tone of which range from official, formal, and pragmatic to letters of a more personal and intimate nature.Footnote135 Finally, the musical literacy required for the opus dei emerges in extant manuscripts pointing to women religious composing music and managing and choreographing the details of the liturgy for their particular community.Footnote136

To conclude, literacy and learning of female religious in the medieval German lands are well documented. The rules of their communities supported Latin literacy on a fundamental level, allowing them to fulfill their sacred duties. Saints’ lives presenting German women religious reinforced the importance of education to meet their spiritual obligations; indeed, many of these hagiographic examples model learning exceeding the basics, and permitting deeper erudition in the pursuit of divine knowledge. Finally, the books acquired, commissioned, copied, and read by religiosae together with the texts they compiled and authored show a rich and dynamic tradition of learning and literacy.

For Hildegard, while we have no inventories of books that she had access to nor record of the library at Rupertsberg, this investigation of rules, of hagiographies of other women religious, and of literary practices at other female institutions in medieval Germany suggests that her demonstrated knowledge of a wide range of literature was not unusual for a professed nun of noble birth, living in a time and place marked by reform and spiritual renewal. What makes Hildegard remarkable is how she mobilized that knowledge to produce a prodigious collection of writings, even as she distanced herself from claims to the normal paths to learning and literacy common to her milieu.

Footnotes

1 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 59.

2 See Vita sanctae Hildegardis, ed. Monika Klaes, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM) 126 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), 24; and Anna Silvas, ed. and trans., Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 168.

3 Hildegard of Bingen, Explanation of the Rule of Benedict, trans. Hugh Feiss (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 48.

4 Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994–2004), 1:172.

5 Gottfried and Theodoric, Life of Hildegard (book 1.1.) in Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, 139–140.

6 Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, 67.

7 Ibid., 73.

8 Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, 159–160, 225.

9 Joan Ferrante, “‘Scribe quae vidis et audis’: Hildegard, Her Language, and Her Secretaries,” in David Townsend and Andrew Taylor, eds., The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 102–135.

10 Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, 139 and 160.

11 Hildegard, Letters, 1:110.

12 See chapters in this volume by James Ginther (Chapter 4), Peter V. Loewen (Chapter 6), Faith Wallis (Chapter 7), and Jennifer Bain (Chapter 10), for example, and reference to other scholarship.

13 For an overview, see Justin A. Stover, “Hildegard, the Schools, and Their Critics,” in Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and George Ferzoco, eds., A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 109–137.

14 Hildegard, Letters, 1:6.

15 Women religious is a translation of mulieres religiosae (or religiosae), a term frequently found from the thirteenth century on. Modern scholars also apply this term as a more neutral translation for sanctimoniales, moniales, monachae, canonissae, canonicae, puellae, and ancillae Dei for the entire Middle Ages. For a discussion of variety of terms in use in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, see Thomas Schilp, Norm und Wirklichkeit religiöser Frauengemeinschaften im Frühmittelalter: Die “Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis” des Jahres 816 und die Problematik der Verfassung von Frauenkommunitäten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 54; and Steven Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries: The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800–1050 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).

16 Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries, 1–36.

17 Caesarius of Arles, Oeuvres monastiques I: Oeuvres pour les moniales, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, Sources Chrétiennes, vol. 345 (Paris: Cerf 1988), 170–272; Maria Caritas McCarthy, trans., The Rule for Nuns of St. Caesarius of Arles: A Translation with a Critical Introduction in Studies in Mediaeval History (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1960), 175.

18 Ibid., 173. Albrecht Diem, “New Ideas Expressed in Old Words: The Regula Donati on Female Monastic Life and Monastic Spirituality,” Viator 43, no. 1 (2012): 1–38; Albrecht Diem, “Das Ende des monastischen Experiments. Liebe, Beichte und Schwiegen in der Regula cuiusdam ad virgines (mit einer Übersetzung im Anhang),” in Anne Müller and Gert Melville, eds., Female “vita religiosa” between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts (Münster and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), 81–136.

19 Because there are many English translations of the Regula Benedicti available, I refer the reader to chapters rather than pages. For an excellent Latin–English edition: The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

20 Raymond Canning, trans., The Rule of Saint Augustine: Masculine and Feminine Versions, intro. Tarsicius J. van Bavel (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), 28.

21 Translation from Alison I. Beach, Women As Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20. This passage from the Institutio was inspired by a letter from Jerome to Laeta (Letter 107) concerning the education of her little daughter, Pacatula.

22 Diem, “Das Ende,” 123. Caesarius’ Regula ad virgines is also required reading: see McCarthy, Rule for Nuns of Caesarius, 189.

23 Raphaël van Waefelghem, Les premiers statuts de l’Ordre de Prémontré: Le Clm. 17.174 (XIIe siècle) (Louvain: P. Smeesters, 1913), 66. For a translation of the books appropriate for sisters and other statutes for Premonstratensian women, see Beach, Women As Scribes, 112–116.

24 Ibid.

25 See Beach, Chapter 2, this volume, as well as, for instance, the Regula cuiusdam ad virgines in Diem, “Das Ende,” 123, 125.

26 Canning, Rule of Augustine, 35. McCarthy, Rule for Nuns of Caesarius, 175–176. The Regula Benedicti, chapters 48 and 49.

27 Ibid.

28 Canning, Rule of Augustine, chapter 2.4, 27. Regula Benedicti, chapter 45.

29 McCarthy, Rule for Nuns of Caesarius, 175.

30 Mayke De Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 33.

31 McCarthy, Rule for Nuns of Caesarius, 188. Regula Benedicti, chapter 54.

32 McCarthy, Rule for Nuns of Caesarius, 179.

33 The office and duties found in Dominican communities in the German-speaking lands are especially well studied: see Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), 200–283; Rebecca L. R. Garber, Feminine Figurae: Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers, 1100–1375 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 61–104; and Johannes Meyer, Das Amptbuch, ed. Sarah Glenn DeMaris. Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum Historica 31 (Rome: Angelicum University Press, 2015).

34 McCarthy, Rule for Nuns of Caesarius, 182.

35 Adapted from Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries, 168.

36 Ibid., 169 and 171, respectively.

37 For an excellent study on representation of female learning and literacy in a hagiography, see Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck, “Leoba and the Iconography of Learning in the Lives of Anglo-Saxon Women Religious,” in Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, eds., Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 3–26.

38 Sean Gilsdorf, trans., Queenship and Sanctity: The “Lives” of Mathilda and the “Epitaph” of Adelheid (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 90.

39 Walter Berschin, ed., Vitae Sanctae Wiboradae. Die ältesten Lebensbeschreibungen der heiligen Wiborada: Einleitung, kritische Edition und Übersetzung. Mitteilungen zur vaterländischen Geschichte 51 (St. Gall: Historischer Verein des Kantons St. Gallen, 1983), 38–41, and 132–135.

40 Jonathan R. Lyon, ed. and trans. Noble Society: Five Lives from Twelfth-Century Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 238.

41 Margarete Weinhandl, trans. [into modern German], Deutsches Nonnenleben: Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töss und der Nonne von Engeltal Büchlein von der Gnaden Überlast (Munich: O.C. Recht Verlag, 1921), 164.

42 Frederick S. Paxton, trans., Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony: The “Lives” of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 137, and 136–140.

43 C. H. Talbot, trans., The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, Being the Lives of SS. Willibrord, Boniface, Leoba and Lebuin, Together with the Hodoepericon of St. Willibald and a Selection from the Correspondence of St. Boniface (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 217–218.

44 Weinhandl, trans., Deutsches Nonnenleben, 186–187 (translation mine).

45 Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 102 and Weinhandl, Deutsches Nonnenleben, 174–175.

46 Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, 72.

47 Vita Mathildis posterior in Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 92.

48 Ibid., 112.

49 Lyon, Noble Society, 158.

50 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, 215.

51 Paxton, Anchoress and Abbess, 126.

52 Ibid, 127.

53 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, 223.

54 Book 2, chapter 23. Philip Woodward, Edmund G. Gardner, and George Francis Hill, trans., The Dialogues of Saint Gregory, Surnamed the Great; Pope of Rome & the First of That Name. Divided into Four Books, Wherein He Entreateth of the Lives and Miracles of the Saints in Italy and of the Eternity of Men’s Souls (London: P.L. Warner, 1911).

55 Laura Saetveit Miles, “The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation,” Speculum 89 (2014): 632–669.

56 Ibid., 643–646.

57 Ibid., 668.

58 Ibid., 634.

59 Karen Blough, “The Abbatial Effigies at Quedlinburg: A Convent’s Identity Reconfigured,” Gesta 47, no. 2 (2008): 147–169.

60 Karen Blough, “Implications for Female Monastic Literacy in the Reliefs from St. Liudger’s at Werden,” in Blanton, O’Mara, and Stoop, Nuns’ Literacies: The Kansas City Dialogue, 151–169.

61 Weinhandl, Deutsches Nonnenleben, 170.

62 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, 215.

63 Vita Mathildis posterior in Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 110.

64 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, 215.

65 Vita Mathildis posterior in Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 110.

66 Vita s. Cunegundis, ed. Georg Waitz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS 4 (Hanover, 1841), here 823.

67 Madelyn Bergen Dick, trans., Mater Spiritualis: The Life of Adelheid of Vilich (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1995), 21.

68 Lyon, Noble Society, 156.

69 Ibid., 159.

70 Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, trans. Margaret Winkworth (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 53.

71 Paxton, Anchoress and Abbess, 116.

72 Ruth Meyer, Das “St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch”: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 124.

73 Dick, Mater Spiritualis, 29/31.

74 Weinhandl, Deutsches Nonnenleben, 165.

75 Lukas Sainitzer, ed. and trans., Die Vita Wilbirgis des Einwik Weizlan (Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, 1999), 238 and 345.

76 Lyon, Noble Society, 174.

77 Gertrude of Helfta, Le Héraut, (Livre IV) in Œuvres spirituelles, ed. J.-M. Clément, 5 vols. (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1968–1986), 4:286–288. For an English translation of the relevant passage and discussion of this episode, see Felix Heinzer, “Explaining the Bread of True Intelligence: John the Evangelist as Mystagogue in the Sequence Verbum dei deo natum,” in Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ed., Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John at the Dominican Convent Paradies bei Soest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 93–95.

78 Lyon, Noble Society, 210–211.

79 Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, ed., “Les vitae sororum d’Unterlinden. Edition critique du manuscrit 508 de la Biblioteque de Colmar,” in Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age 5:431; Weinhandl, Deutsches Nonnenleben, 181; Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women, 272–277; and Garber, Feminine Figurae, 71.

80 Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 85–86 and 125.

81 Lyon, Noble Society, 158.

82 Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love, 53.

83 Ibid., 53.

84 Weinhandl, Deutsches Nonnenleben, 185; Meyer, St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 122, 252.

85 Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 113.

86 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, 215.

87 Ibid., 223.

88 Lyon, Noble Society, 158–159.

89 Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, 104.

90 Berschin, Vitae Sanctae Wiboradae, 32–41, and 128–133.

91 Meyer, St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 128–129.

92 Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 92.

93 Paxton, Anchoress and Abbess, 121.

94 Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love, 52.

95 See Katrinette Bodarwé, Sanctimoniales litteratae. Schriftlichkeit und Bildung in den ottonischen Frauenkommunitäten Gandersheim, Essen und Quedlinburg, Quellen und Forschungen 10 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2004).

96 Beach, Women As Scribes; Fiona Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Constant J. Mews, ed. Listen, Daughter: The “Speculum Virginum” and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

97 D. H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

98 Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Die Bildung der Dominikanerinnen in Süddeutschland vom 13. bis 15. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004); and Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der Nonnen im späten Mittelalter. Mit einer Edition des “Konventstagebuchs” einer Zisterzienserin von Heilig-Kreuz bei Braunschweig (1484–1507) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).

99 Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, Susan Marti, and Margot E. Fassler, Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent, 2 vols. (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag and National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2016).

100 Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, eds., Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Nuns’ Literacies: The Kansas City Dialogue (2015); and Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Antwerp Dialogue (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017).

101 Helene Scheck, “Reading Women at the Margins of Quedlinburg Codex 74,” in Blanton, O’Mara, and Stoop, Nuns’ Literacies: The Hull Dialogue, 3.

102 Bodarwé, Sanctimoniales litteratae.

103 Scheck, “Reading Women at the Margins,” 3–18.

104 Ibid., 8.

105 See Katrinette Bodarwé, “Eine Männerregel für Frauen. Die Adaption der Benediktsregel im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert,” in Anne Müller and Gert Melville, eds., Female “vita religiosa” between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 235–274, esp. 264–268, and Adam S. Cohen, “The Art of Reform in a Bavarian Nunnery around 1000,” Speculum 74 (1999): 990–1020.

106 Folios 58 v (Abbess Uta) and 65r (Caesarius and two women). Digitized images of the complete manuscript are available online: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:22-dtl-0000024890.

107 Adam Cohen, The Uta Codex: Art, Philosophy and Reform in Eleventh-Century Germany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), here 3, more generally, 1–23.

108 See Susann El Kholi, Lektüre in Frauenkonventen des ostfränkisch-deutschen Reiches vom 8. Jahrhundert bis zur Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997).

109 Beach, Women As Scribes.

110 Julie Hotchin, “Women’s Reading and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Germany: The Library of the Nuns of Lippoldsberg,” in Alison I. Beach, ed., Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 139–189.

111 Beach, Women As Scribes, esp. 79–83, 105–106, 131–133; Hotchin, “Women’s Reading and Monastic Reform,” 152, 160–163.

112 Rachel Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Speculum 81 (2006): 700–733; Michael Curschmann, “Anselm von Canterbury im Frauenkloster: Text, Bild, Paratext und Musik in einer Handschrift Orationes sive meditationes (Admont 289),” Wolfram-Studien 23 (2012): 79–130; and Michael Curschmann, “Integrating Anselm: Pictures and the Liturgy in a Twelfth-Century Manuscript of the ‘Orationes sive Meditationes,’” in Susan Boynton and Diane Reilly, eds., Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music and Sound (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 295–312.

113 Curschmann, “Integrating Anselm,” 309.

114 Ibid.

115 See the various essays in Mews, Listen, Daughter.

116 Morgan Powell, “The Speculum virginum and the Audio-Visual Poetics of Women’s Religious Instruction,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, 111–135; and Catherine Jeffreys, “Listen, Daughters of the Light: The Epithalalium and Musical Innovation in Twelfth-Century Germany,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, 137–57.

117 Sabina Flanagan, “The Speculum virginum and Traditions of Medieval Dialogue,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, 181–200, here esp. 189–194.

118 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, 3.

119 Beach, Women As Scribes; and Alison I. Beach, “‘Mathild de Niphin’ and the Female Scribes of Twelfth-Century Zwiefalten,” in Blanton, O’Mara, and Stoop, Nuns’ Literacies: The Hull Dialogue, 33–50.

120 For a general overview, see Cynthia J. Cyrus, The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

121 Beach, Women As Scribes, 72–88.

122 See Regina Dorothea Schiewer, “Books in Texts – Texts in Books: The St. Georgener Predigten as an Example of Nuns’ Literacy in Late Medieval Germany,” in Blanton, O’Mara, and Stoop, Nuns’ Literacies: The Hull Dialogue, 223–237.

123 Ehrenschwendtner, Die Bildung der Dominikanerinnen, 78–82.

124 Ibid., 77–119.

125 The scholarship on German literature for late medieval women religious is vast; see, for example: Johanna Thali, Beten – Schreiben – Lesen: literarisches Leben und Marienspiritualität im Kloster Engelthal (Tübingen: A. Francke, 2003); and Antje Willing, Literatur und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert. Deutsche Abendmahlsschriften im Nürnberger Katharinenkloster (Münster: Waxmann, 2004).

126 Antje Willing, Die Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina zu Nürnberg: Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), esp. xi–xviii.

127 Ehrenschwendtner, Die Bildung der Dominikanerinnen, 287–289, 302–307.

128 Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung.

129 Schlotheuber, “Chapter 3: Intellectual Horizons,” in Hamburger et al., Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies, 43–90.

130 Hamburger, Schlotheuber, Marti, and Fassler, Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest.

131 Henrike Lähnemann, “Bilingual Devotion: The Relationship of Latin and Low German in Prayer Books from the Lüneburg Convents,” in Elizabeth Andersen, Henrike Lähnemann, and Anne Simon, eds., A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 317–341.

132 For a recent review of Hugeburc, see Pauline Head, “Who Is the Nun from Heidenheim? A Study of Hugeburc’s ‘Vita Willibaldi,’” Medium Ævum 71, no. 1 (2002): 29–46. For a discussion of legends and passions, see Stephen L. Wailes, “The Sacred Stories in Verse,” in Phyllis R. Brown and Stephen L. Wailes, ed., A Companion to Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960): Contextual and Interpretive Approaches (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 85–120. For information on Bertha of Vilich and Gerdruot of Admont, see Dick, Mater Spiritualis, 15–19, 94–100, and Lyon, Noble Society, 152–153, respectively.

133 Gilsdorf, Queenshipand Sanctity, 15–21.

134 Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women, Garber, Feminine Figurae, and Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

135 Alison I. Beach, “Voices from a Distant Land: Fragments of a Twelfth-Century Nuns’ Letter Collection,” Speculum 77 (2002): 34–54; Eva Schlotheuber, “Daily Life, Amor Dei, and Politics in the Letters of the Benedictine Nuns of Lüne in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Blanton, O’Mara, and Stoop, Nuns’ Literacies: The Kansas City Dialogue, 249–267; Antje Willing, “Das sogennante Schwesternbuch aus St. Katharina in St. Gallen: Konzeption und Intention,” in Antje Willing, ed., Das “Konventsbuch” und das “Schwesternbuch” aus St. Katharina in St Gallen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2016), 113–132.

136 For example, Lori Kruckenberg, “Music for John the Evangelist: Virtue and Virtuosity at Paradies,” in Hamburger, Leaves from Paradise, 152–155; and Alison Noel Altstatt, “The Music and Liturgy of Kloster Preetz: Anna von Buchwald’s Buch im Chor in Its Fifteenth-century Context” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2011), 14–180.

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