Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia

A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture

Felice Lifshitz

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823256891
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, a groundbreaking study of the intellectual and monastic culture of the Main Valley during the eighth century, looks closely at a group of manuscripts associated with some of the best-known personalities of the European Middle Ages, including Boniface of Mainz and his "beloved, "abbess Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim. This is the first study of these "Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany" to delve into the details of their lives by studying the manuscripts that were produced in their scriptoria and used in their communities. The author explores how one group of religious women helped to shape the culture of medieval Europe through the texts they wrote and copied, as well as through their editorial interventions.
Using compelling manuscript evidence, she argues that the content of the women's books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist (i.e., resistant to patriarchal ideas). This intriguing book provides unprecedented glimpses into the "feminist consciousness" of the women's and mixed-sex communities that flourished in the early Middle Ages.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTIONS: PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

CHAPTER ONE

SYNEISACTISM AND REFORM: GENDER RELATIONS IN THE ANGLO-SAXON CULTURAL PROVINCE IN FRANCIA

PROLOGUE: REGIONAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

This book is a study of manuscripts produced during the eighth century in the Anglo-Saxon cultural province in Francia, and it argues that the Christian culture of that region was thoroughly gender-egalitarian and in many ways feminist. Before moving on to description (chapter 3)1 and analysis (chapters 4 through 7) of the manuscripts, I introduce the individuals and issues at stake in the area (chapter 1) and the region itself (chapter 2).

My approach is unusual. A 1999 study of “regional history and religious history” using “a new methodology which locates the development of the Church in the context of what will be termed the north Italian human environment” never addressed ideas, as opposed to institutions and events, and utilized no manuscript evidence.2 In the definitive regional history of the area covered by this study, neither ideas nor manuscripts made an appearance.3 Even in the midst of pleading for a regional approach to religious and ecclesiastical history (“Landeskirchengeschichte”), another specialist on the area covered by this study made no reference to manuscripts, although he held a position at the University of Würzburg, where the manuscripts I discuss are located.4 To my knowledge, the only regional study of a premodern place to have treated manuscript evidence as an integral part of the source base is Patrick Sims-Williams’s “coherent picture” of the kingdoms of the Hwicce and the Magonsætan during the seventh and eighth centuries.5 Like Sims-Williams, I examine ideas within a regional context, on the basis of a corpus of relevant local manuscripts.

A treasure trove of eighth-century manuscript material survives to illuminate the “distinct area of Anglo-Saxon influence and Anglo-Saxon script [that] was established in Germany by the activities of Boniface and his pupils, as well as by the monks and nuns who followed them.”6 Yet, these manuscripts have barely been noticed by early medieval historians. Indeed, the vast majority of historical, literary, theological, and art historical scholarship has failed even to register the connection between women and the Würzburg manuscripts, let alone actively explore the intellectual worlds of the women who produced and used the codices. Instead of using the manuscripts examined here, scholars have repeatedly mined a single source: a famous collection of letters. This particular source has led scholars to highlight the prominence of women, as intellectual intimates, in the personal lives of Boniface and Lul; their collaboration, as spiritual equals, in all aspects of the professional lives (pastoral care, mission, education, liturgy) of those successive Mainz prelates; and the high quality of their own minds, based on the literary prowess displayed in the letters.7 I, too, begin with that letter collection, before moving on to the manuscripts.

SYNEISACTISM AND MARRIAGE: FRAMEWORKS FOR GENDER RELATIONS IN THE ANGLO-SAXON CULTURAL PROVINCE IN FRANCIA

Soon before 786, an unidentified individual collected dozens of letters written over the course of the previous century by Archbishop Lul of Mainz (d. 786), his predecessor Boniface (d. 754/755), and many of their colleagues, relatives, and friends on both sides of the English Channel.8 Of the sixty-nine letters in this collection, twenty-five (eight of the first twenty, and eighteen of the first thirty-eight) were to, from, or between female members of the group.9 Some of the women were named, such as Abbess Eadburga (of Minster-in-Thanet or Wimbourne), heartily thanked by Boniface for sending him books, and elsewhere asked by Lul to support his weakness with her strength.10 Others were anonymous, such as the ancilla Dei to whom Boniface turned for solace after run-ins with “pagans, false Christians, fornicating clerics and pseudo-priests.”11 Because letters constituted “proof that disembodied friendships between members of the opposite sex subsist on ideas,”12 the compiler of the letter collection made an important ideological point about gender and intellectuality. She or he also produced a monument to syneisactism, a (always slightly controversial) form of religious life that encouraged sexually chaste contact between men and women.13

Syneisactic practices existed everywhere from Egypt to Ireland, and from paleo-Christian times through the Reformation.14 Syneisactic forms ranged from sustained friendships or even spiritual marriages between professed women and men, through the convention of attaching small, informal women’s communities to a major men’s community, to the formal institution of the full-fledged double monastery. The apostle Paul referred approvingly to the practice (1 Corinthians 7:36–38) and may have engaged in it himself, for he once asked, “have we not power to lead about a sister as a wife?” (1 Corinthians 9:5). From a very early date, there was a thriving settlement of monks and virgins at Seleucia, all governed by a deaconess, around the tomb of Paul’s most famous female companion, St. Thecla.15 Furthermore, cenobitic (community-based) monasticism was frequently a “domestic ascetic movement” instigated by a female member of the family, involving “the commitment of the entire family to pursuing a life of Christian piety.”16 Such mixed-sex communities were created by orthodox-minded women throughout the Mediterranean world.17 Most important, however, the seventh and eighth centuries in England and parts of Western Europe, including the Anglo-Saxon cultural province in Francia, represented a high point of syneisactism.18

For instance, Leoba may have ruled both the women’s house at Tauberbischofsheim and the men’s house at Fulda as a double community.19 As Boniface’s “beloved,” her corpse was brought to Fulda (in 782) from her property at Schornsheim near Mainz (where she had died) so that she might be buried next to Boniface.20 The burial of male and female corpses in a single grave was not uncommon among Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics,21 and Boniface had requested that the two be buried in a single grave, but the monks of Fulda (founded in 744 by Boniface’s student, Sturm) instead buried Leoba in an adjacent spot.22

Syneisactic monastic practices bled easily into that other key framework for gender relations, namely, marriage. Several members of the monastic circles around Boniface, such as Bugga’s mother, Eangyth; Abbess Adela of Pfalzel; and Bilhildis of Altmünster in Mainz, came to monastic life after extensive heterosexual experience.23 Lul’s aunt Cynehild crossed the Channel to take up the monastic life alongside her unnamed husband and their children Baldhard and Berhtgyt; the latter worked for decades in Thuringia as a magistra (teacher) and regularly exchanged books with her cousin Lul.24 Theoretically, married women and men could make vows of chastity only with the permission of their spouses, but churchmen in the region offered discontented wives (not husbands) the opportunity to purge the sin of illicitly abandoning a husband through penance.25 This made it possible even for less prominent women to turn to religion after a life of marriage and procreation, such as the unidentified Gottgeweihte (consecrated to God) Bertrada (or Berta), mother of Heribert, who donated property to Echternach in 721.26 Furthermore, some women in the monastic circles of the Anglo-Saxon cultural province in Francia later married.27 Whether she had been a formally professed and consecrated nun, or a widow or virgin who had converted by changing her vestments while living in her own home, a woman could subsequently (re)marry and remain a full member of the local Christian community, as long as she and her new husband did penance.28

Detailed information on the institution of matrimony during the early Middle Ages is hard to come by; nevertheless, evidence relevant to the Anglo-Saxon cultural province in Francia implies that married women were understood to be full autonomous human beings who could make choices and even mistakes. For instance, ecclesiastics provided penitential remedies for Christian husbands who wished to remain married to adulterous wives29 or to separate from a pagan or infidel wife who refused to abandon her own religious convictions;30 likewise, abandoned husbands were required to take back penitent wives who decided to return home.31 Meanwhile, eighth-century ecclesiastics gave women permission to leave a husband who had (through theft or fornication) made himself a servum (“slave”).32

The level of independence for married women indicated in these examples was tied to their control of property. Women in Francia inherited and possessed property as fully entitled individuals. Both married women and married men sometimes disposed of their property independently, but more commonly both spouses held and disposed of property together, so that women participated in the disposition of their husbands’ personal inherited properties, and vice versa. In the eighth century east of the Middle Rhine, women (consecrated and lay, married or single) not only enjoyed legal autonomy alongside financial and property rights but also chose to exercise their freedom in large numbers by generously and visibly supporting monastic institutions, through public acts in public fora.33

No constitutive nuptial rites existed during the early Middle Ages.34 However, many manuscripts (albeit none from our region) contained an accio nuptialis giving prayers and offerings to help a woman and her husband produce posterity. The accio urged brides to be loving, wise, and fruitful, but never obedient, and the couple took communion only to affirm their togetherness and facilitate their fecundity.35 The spirit (if not the text) of this accio clearly penetrated the Anglo-Saxon cultural province, where a local scribe replaced Isidore of Seville’s visions of the sacrament of marriage as a divinely ordained institution intended to assure the subordination of women to men with a discussion of fertility entirely in keeping with the accio nuptialis.36 This is consistent with the way the family was conceptualized in the region, as witnessed by local extracts from the “Family Relations” section of Isidore’s Etymologies (Book 9, chapters 5–7):37 a multipolar network in which male and femal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps and Color Plates
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface: Medieval Feminism
• Acknowledgments
• Part One. Introductions: People, Places, Things
• Part Two. Textual Analysis
• Part Three. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography: Manuscripts and Printed Materials
• Index
• Series Page
• Color Plates