Since the publication of ‘The Life of Nuns’ which is open access available via Open Book Publishers, there have been a number of reactions to it from a wide variety of people, academic colleagues as well those interested in the topics for personal reasons. Of the first category is a podcast interview for the ‘Journal of the History of Ideas’ with Luke Wilkinson (Cambridge), starting by a discussion of the concept of enclosure.
Podcast: Journal for the History of Ideas
In Theory is the podcast of the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. The hosts of the JHI Blog team interview intellectual scholars in the fields of philosophy, literature, art history, natural and social sciences, religion, and political thought about their latest books and works. The aim of the JHI podcast is to highlight the huge diversity of intellectual history at university departments across the world.
Also on the concept of enclosure but from a personal point of view is a personal reflection written by Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun (Chatto & Windus 2024) who writes from a personal perspective as somebody who lived for ten years as an enlosed nun.
Review by Catherine Coldstream
A fascinating and highly readable account of the life of cloistered Catholic women on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The Life of Nuns (and note the subtitle: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents) not only ‘takes us inside’ the enclosure of these ancient, dedicated spaces, but does so with impressive scholarly panache that is rich in detail yet never laboured or heavy in its approach. Avoiding the twin temptations of retrospective judgementalism and facile prurience, Lähnemann and Schlotheuber mine their rich sources for authentic meaning, intelligently building up a convincing picture of a highly organised and efficient world that was well-embedded in the social values of its day.
The authors take full advantage of the extensive material resources at their disposal, eloquent artefacts, documents, and objects of use that, unlike their English counterparts, survived the Reformation intact. While necessarily interpreting them, the book also at times wisely allows these relics of an almost-forgotten world to shine and speak for themselves. Bundles of letters (always full of surprises), candidly annotated parchment songbooks, murals, statues, hairshirts, and even a pair of ‘the oldest spectacles in the world’ – found under floorboards in the 1960s, having ‘fallen through the cracks of time’ – all grant glimpses of a world in which felicity and feistiness apparently flourished hand-in-hand.
While the book takes the reader through the many different physical and psychic spaces of convent life, as well as charting the temporal changes of two significant communities in particular – the Benedictine Kloster Lüne, in the Hamburg area, and the Heilig Kreuz Kloster near Braunschweig – it is the diary of a lowly Cistercian nun at the latter that provides a focal point and much of the vividness that brings the book alive with accounts of lice, Lebkuchen, and the sisterly singalongs that sometimes led to quarrels. Not all Cistercians approved of the dubious flax-breaking festivities that were apt to erupt when things got perhaps a little dull. This unnamed nun seems uninhibited in setting down her thoughts, apparently unfiltered by duty or piety, over a 20-year period (the diary is almost as thick as it is wide) and it is her voice that provides a stringent, sometimes acerbic insight into what actually went on, well out of sight – needless to say – of the provosts and prelates of their wider circle.
Reading this remarkable volume left me with the distinct impression that medieval monasticism was far earthier, and less subject to the kind of dualistic tensions we tend to associate with asceticism, perhaps because the life of nuns was at that time a social norm, something wholly reflective of its period, rather than a counter-cultural choice or radical defiance of other orthodoxies. These tough yet pious women, while silenced by time and neglected by research, undoubtedly had and were aware of their status and influence within the broader human and divine scheme of things. Playing on the German ‘unerhörte Frauen’ (or ‘unheard women’) Lähnemann suggests the nuns were also ‘unheard of’ – in the sense of being ‘outrageous’ – at times. Unlike most cloistered nuns today, these women had clout, and spiritually and humanly persuasive voices many did not hesitate to use.
I found this not only an inspiring but an entertaining read, one that presented striking cultural contrasts with the late 20th Century monasticism of my own experience, while also showing far more similarities than a casual observer might expect. In matters of temporal and spatial organisation, and ritual formalities, the life of Catholic nuns living 500 years apart seems to have persisted almost unchanged, certainly in traditionalist corners of the modern Church. It is however in the nitty gritty concerning love, politics, and the topical interpretations of religion of any given community that the truly human and idiosyncratic can take centre stage, and often does with unpredictable results. The achievement of this book is to present both the formal and the unreformed, the ideal and the reality, and – fascinatingly – the effects of the Reformation on women’s cloistered communities, in a well-ordered account that is as underpinned by rigorous research as it is vivid, commanding, and engrossing.
Coming up: ‘The Life of Nuns’ at Book at Lunchtime 13 November 2024, 1-2pm.
For a reflection on the genesis of the project see the blogpost about the backstory and how it all started with a mistake. There you will also find a discount code for paper copies.