Received Medievalisms

A Cognitive Geography of Viennese Women's Convents

C. Cyrus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230393585
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

This study examines the post-medieval reception of Vienna's women's monastic institutions. Through analysis of the physical and historical place such women's institutions held in an important urban and political center, this book provides a new picture of the ways in which the medieval shapes later understandings of women's role and agency.

CHAPTER 1

SETTING THE STAGE

When the Ottoman forces arrived at the gates of Vienna in 1529, they came against a city defined in part by its Catholic heritage, a landscape in which church, cloister, and cathedral shaped not only the skyline but also mental maps with their enumerations of important civic structures. In this time of army embattlement, the sisters, nuns, and canonesses of the city appeared as part of the citizenry, but only as members of the background realm of daily life and prayer, for the women themselves were securely tucked away. As churches and convents were repurposed for the war effort, the displaced women religious joined up with other groups of nuns from suburban institutions who had fled inside the city gates for protection.¹

During the long hours of bombardment, the women of these various monastic communities presumably kept to their traditional practices of prayer and worship. Yet, their homes, the monasteries that they inhabited and to which the rules of clausura normally bound them, became potent symbols of a civic community identified as Christian through steeple and embellishing cross. The city that the Turkish army encountered hosted eight women’s monastic communities arrayed over several monastic orders—Augustinian, Premonstratensian, Clarissan, Penitent, Cisterican—along with several chronologically ephemeral houses that soon dropped out of the historical record.² Together, these houses carried a rich history of community engagement in matters spiritual, attested to by the financial and spiritual intersections between cloistered sisters and their civic supporters. Narrative images of maps and of engravings, and contemporaneous verbal imagery in poetry and chronicles, capitalized on these women’s institutions to remind a broad audience—of Nuremberg and elsewhere—of the binary opposites of Turk and European, Muslim and Christian, barbaric and civilized, prayerful and besieged. For this European audience, the skyline profile defined the city; it made that city recognizably unique, but it also made it recognizably Christian. Nor were the monastic references of the early sixteenth-century visual and verbal accounts unusual; throughout her history, the city of Vienna has boasted of her religious institutions through seemingly casual references that contribute to a broader myth of “Catholic Vienna.”

The study undertaken here seeks to understand the ways in which these women’s monasteries fit into the broader complex of such urban-historical portrayals in multiple popular genres dating from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, with a particular eye to the evolving attitudes toward Vienna’s medieval past. The women’s convents lack the quaintness of the Viennese fiaker; they substitute their own enacted ritual of liturgy for the whirl of the waltz with its emphasis on imperial and urban pleasures. Thus, they do not partake directly in the theme of “gay Vienna.” These institutions do, however, capture a sense of the Viennese past that generated its own sense of longing and belonging. The convents, as portrayed in a range of different postmedieval genres, function as easily recognizable symbols of the medieval and the spiritual ancestry of a proud city, though how they do so can vary according to narrative preference and authorial perspective. With enduring walls of stone and an ongoing presence in everyday religious life, the monasteries could stand directly for the “old” and for the “Catholic” nature of the city, skyline markers of a historical Christian past.

The monastery suits a variety of literary agendas. Convents in general, and the women who inhabit them, help to convey an often internally generated notion of what the city as a place could be thought to be about. This book examines the representational substitutions in which the mere presence of convent women can reflect implicit claims of a Catholic identity for the city as a whole. Perhaps unsurprisingly, postmedieval authors tend to emphasize Vienna’s ties to Christian—and specifically Catholic—identity at times when they are most under threat: in the face of the pressures of the Turkish/Ottoman empire to the east in 1529 and again in 1683, and during the periods of challenges to received Catholicism as with the Protestant/Confessional tensions of the sixteenth century and the monastic closures of the 1780s. In other instances, the convents become an important part of city identity by making symbolic claims about Vienna’s (inevitable) status as a “Residenz-Stadt,” seat of imperial power, for their Christianizing, historically predicated presence functions as the rhetorical reminder of actions of city heroes in the past. The convents take their place in historical accounts of the city’s leadership alongside heroic battles and expansive building programs as a projection of ducal/imperial good deeds on behalf of the urban metropolis. In these accounts, monasteries as a group affiliate upward, being seen as somehow under the protection of the duke or the emperor, becoming sacred attributes of first Babenberg and then Habsburg political power. In other tellings, a convent in the singular may appear as a place of unusual happenings, confirmations of God’s involvement with city affairs or—to a more anticlerical author—location for the tendentious holdover of an arcane and archaic past. The mystery behind monastic walls can play to whatever authorial agenda is brought to bear, for when little is known, much can be supposed. Although physically embodied and localized by street and by neighborhood, the convents are also spiritually predicated and socially constructed as institutions of both religious and urban import.

Thus, the goal of this book is to think about how these monastic houses figure into Viennese narratives of several different genres across five centuries. By tracing the stories of monasticism in Vienna and its women’s monastic culture through the historical record, I am undertaking a sort of cognitive geography, seeking to reconnect with attitudes toward the institutions of the day. We have in the various kinds of casual references to these women’s cloisters numerous pointers toward a relationship of urban space and monastic identity. The book that follows examines four sets of historical data that make reference to Viennese women’s convents. The visual record of the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries—cartographical plans and pictorial representations of Vienna—provides a chronological grounding for the presence of and reception of these women’s institutions. Verbal references to these monasteries from the travel literature and topographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries enrich this chronological understanding, and more clearly reveal the medievalist bias of the age, in which “monastic” begins to merge conceptually with ideas and ideals of the Alt-Wien, the old city. Foundation stories, whether told in formal histories or referenced in topography or travelogue, purport to tell of the origins of a given community and so facilitate an analysis of the balance of knowledge and assumption in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stories of a mythic medieval past. Last, the nineteenth-century legacy of Sagen und Legenden, tales and legends compiled and created in a romantic environment, provides anecdotes and allusions to the women’s cloisters, ironically bringing convent life to a reading public at the moment when the institutions themselves had ceased to exist, closed by the emperor as part of the religious reforms of the Enlightenment.

Methodology

As should be apparent, the kind of “cognitive geography” I seek to write here is of the cultural and qualitative rather than the statistically quantitative variety. I analyze various sets of references to the women’s houses to compile a complex picture of the attitudes of artists, topographers, and authors toward these women’s institutions. My approach is nested amid literature in urban history, monastic studies, and gender history by virtue of its content, and historiography, topographical studies, and cognitive geography in methodological outlook. Whereas historiographical analysis has generally been applied to history texts properly speaking—chronologies, proto-historical narratives, and the like—I have looked here more often to popularizing accounts that allude to women’s convents only in passing. For instance, I examine the maps and city depictions of the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries for what they reveal about the status of monastic establishments vis-à-vis their urban context. Such maps have been well studied as maps and as sources for a history of urban building programs, but I look to them from the perspective of monastic narrative, looking for clues to how those women’s monasteries were culturally construed by the image-makers of the day. A map is never merely a map, as Denis Wood and John Fels tell us; it is necessarily a mediated product that reflects an underlying set of expectations about what matters and what does not, and reveals the perceived priorities of both its urban and its artistic context.³ Indeed, the pivotal observation that drove my thinking about the place of the women’s convents within Vienna was the way in which their steeples intrude into the city skyline in images of the day, disproportionately tall in relation to the width of the city walls. What this visual emblem meant, and how to take references to these specific institutions within the larger sphere of a largely male-dominated city history penned by officers of court, important citizens of the council, mayors, nobles, and the like, became the focus of my investigation.⁴ Read from the vantage point of gender and from the view of institutional history, the stories inherent in map design reveal assumptions about the value of these Catholic women’s institutions.

I also engage with written narratives. Since Vienna functioned as either an interim or final destination for most of the travelers who moved into the Danube valley, the city looms large in the resultant evocative literature provided by these authors to armchair-traveling readership back home. Likewise, since Vienna served as a “Haupt- und Residenzstadt,” functioning as political capital and imperial city, it often received extra attention in the topographical discussions of what has become modern-day Austria. The many published depictions of Vienna from this period served to introduce the city to a broad reading public, for, as Klaus Laermann has reminded us, the bourgeois had need of travel literature because they were eager to acquire information.⁵ The dual pressures on authors of these genres to edify and to entertain mean that both the travelogue and its topographical corollary are as susceptible to critical interpretation as any fictive genre. Both are complicated by the relationship of author to subject matter, a relationship shaped and defined by differing cultural practices from around Europe. Moreover, the particular challenges of the travel text—the skeptical reader and the pull between credibility on the one hand and the useful lie on the other—shape genre choices and conventions. For all that it provides seemingly objective data about which building is where, travel writing of either the travelogue or topographical sort is fundamentally a cultural practice. Drawing on more than one hundred published topographical texts and travelogues by local and foreign authors from the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, I examine the contexts in which women’s convents appear and, to some extent, the circumstances surrounding their invisibility. I have chosen to combine readings from the seemingly straightforward travelogue literature and the nominally objective topographies together (as does Kai Kauffmann, for instance), for I find that topographies overlap with travelogues not just in content, through the shared descriptions of Vienna’s primary buildings, but also in verbiage and in approach. Indeed, the two genres exhibit numerous verbal and factual borrowings that reinforced a shared perspective on the city. In 1784, for instance, Heinrich Reichard’s travelogue recommended the books by Matthias Fuhrmann, whose Alt- und neues Wien of 1734 provided a “chronological and historical” description of the city, and that of Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern, especially the third volume of his Topographie from 1770, with its description of the city by quarters. Likewise, Joseph Kurzböck’s Neueste Beschreibung (1779), a self-described “handbook for foreigners and nationals,” shared these citations and added Leopold Fischer’s multivolume Brevis Notitia (1767ff) to his list of authorities.⁶ Deeply intertextual, these genres worked in synchronicity to establish a common ground of place and meaning within Vienna’s walls. Such reports furnished valuable clues to the situation and importance of the various city institutions that serve as undergirding to the stories being told.

I provide close readings of selected passages of these texts to demonstrate some of the intellectual and cultural priorities of the authors involved. Although this literature has been reviewed for its contribution to the city’s urban history, the place of religious institutions and of women’s roles within that unfolding history have received relatively little attention. The focus of thought has largely been on the role of the author and, particularly, on the conventions of these socially mediated genres. William Stewart provides an inventory and an overview of travelogues at large, engaging with the ways in which that literature changes over time. His careful groupings lead us to read such writings as being socially constructed texts. Françoise Knopper, Grete Klingenstein, and Kai Kauffmann each contribute analyses that adopt a tighter geographical focus—from South Germany and Austria, to the problem of Austria and its meanings, to Vienna specifically—and engage in important ways with the impact of confessional concerns on the resulting texts.⁷ Leslie Bodi’s widely regarded book Tauwetter in Wien also engages with the place of Vienna in the travelogue, though his central concern is the Broschurenflöt, that flood of published pamphlets in Vienna of the 1780s as Enlightenment reforms of censorship laws released the brakes on publication. These multifaceted analyses of travel literature have provided an important scaffolding for my own assessment of this diffuse literature, but I read the travel and topographical genres for a much different purpose.

To establish some sense of Vienna’s gendered past, I examined this literature both for individual references to women’s convents and for a more broadly construed sense of place and institutional identity. I work in full awareness that the descriptions provided by these authors are shaped both by generic prescription and by authorial perception. Thus, the passing reference to a specific institution in this travel literature brings with it a host of meanings that inform and are informed by other aspects of the Viennese urban landscape. In these accounts, an intrusive authorial “I” of the travel-writer him- or herself generates a dialogue between institution and urban identity. Authors of both genres must consciously winnow their observations about the urban environments they describe. Noticing a monastery—or ignoring it—shapes the kind of city the author (re-)creates for his or her reader. The authorial choice to witness or to ignore the women’s monasteries in particular provides a glimpse into their underlying assumptions about which edifices and experiences mattered in late Baroque or Enlightenment Vienna. The associations that authors bring to such descriptions also reveal an interpretive bias, one grounded in the perception of a historical past, for more often than not, it is the convent’s medieval origins and incarnation that gets fullest treatment in the relatively brief discussions that typically ensue. There is, in other words, a surprising bias toward medieval identity in the accounts of these (nominally contemporaneous) women’s monastic institutions.

These accounts, with their surprisingly medievalist emphasis, led me to take up as a separate question the matter of how the foundation stories for women’s convents evolved during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.⁸ Taking three convents as case studies, the analysis provides close readings of the events, of material objects, and of author-identified social groups involved in these vividly reconstructed actions. Like salvage anthropology, which seeks for an “authentic” object but presents it to the world in a restored and reconstructed guise, the narratives examined here take institutional beginnings and add to them elements of a hero-story, laden with an assumption of singular human agency in which one individual protagonist, suitably inspired, creates the circumstance in which a community of religious can spring into being. I assess Caspar Maurer’s homegrown Viennese history of the seventeenth century, for example, to determine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Setting the Stage
• 2.  Mine’s Taller: On Steeple Distortions in City Depictions
• 3.  Mental Topography and the Viennese Medieval Past
• 4.  Foundation Stories: The Heroes of Viennese Monasticism
• 5.  Virgin Intercessor and Other Monastic Miracles
• 6.  Conclusion: The Persistence of the Medieval
• Appendix 1   Views of Vienna: Selected Panoramas, Plans, and Pictorial Reports
• Appendix 2   Vienna in Prose: Selected Histories, Topographies, and Travelogues
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index