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8 - Literacies, Learning, and Communal Reform: The Case of Alijt Bake
- Edited by Kimm Curran, Janet Burton, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter
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- Book:
- Medieval Women Religious, c.800-c.1500
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 24 January 2023, pp 137-151
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Summary
With a few exceptions, medieval religious women have for a long time been perceived as unlearned. In recent decades, however, scholars such as Linda Olsson have argued that ‘the complications surrounding past literacies highlight […] the inadequate nature of our established terminology and paradigms’. In other words: we need to think about women's literacies and learning in a different way, for instance by defining different levels of literacy. As the editors of the three volumes on Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe stated, it is important to use the plural ‘literacies’ instead of the singular ‘literacy’ to describe the engagement of religious women in medieval literate culture. The plural ‘literacies’ implies a range of variable literacy levels between different women religious and religious communities.
Women's literacies ranged from practical or pragmatic literacy – the ability to read and/or write simple and everyday sentences – to the understanding of and/or ability to copy or compose more complex texts. Even if they could not read or write (well), medieval women could also be literate in the broader sense of the word by hearing texts that were read out to them: oral literacy. Literacy in the vernacular often differed from Latin literacy. Monica Hedlund stated that considering that Latin was used every day in the convent, most sisters must have learned (at least some) Latin, even though they were perhaps not full participants in Latin intellectual culture. We should, therefore, be aware of the ‘intellectualis-ation of Latin’ in our established terminologies. This chapter discusses how late medieval northern European women religious engaged in literate culture, both in the vernacular and in Latin. A case study focuses on one woman in particular: the rebellious Dutch religious woman, Alijt Bake.
Medieval Women's Literacies and Variations
Women's literacies varied across geographical regions. In Vadstena Abbey in Sweden, for instance, schooling seems to have been going on in the community in the fifteenth century. The Dutch house of Diepenveen near Deventer also had a convent school that was attended by postulants, novices, and initially possibly also by professed sisters who did not yet possess the required skills.
11 - The Anchoress Transformed: On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti and þe wohunge of ure lauerd in the Fourteenth-Century A Talkyng of the Love of God
- from Part III - Textual Communities
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- By Diana Denissen, University of Lausanne
- Edited by Cate Gunn, University of Essex, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Swansea University
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- Book:
- Medieval Anchorites in their Communities
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 30 August 2017
- Print publication:
- 30 August 2017, pp 183-198
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Summary
THE fourteenth-century compilation A Talkyng of the Love of God (hereafter A Talkyng) is an excellent example of the incorporation of two texts from the ‘Wooing Group’ – On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti (hereafter Ureisun of god almihti) and þe wohunge of ure lauerd (hereafter Wohunge) – in a new textual and social context. Ureisun of god almihti, Wohunge and the related text Ancrene Wisse, associated by dialect and manuscript tradition, were originally written for anchoresses in the West Midlands in the thirteenth century. Both Wohunge and Ancrene Wisse are specifically addressed to anchoresses, but these texts nevertheless quickly passed into the hands of a wider group of readers.
A Talkyng is included in the closely related fourteenth-century Vernon and Simeon anthologies. MS Bodleian Eng. Poet. a.1 (The Vernon Manuscript) contains the complete text, but in MS British Library Add. 22283 (The Simeon Manuscript) the beginning and end of A Talkyng are missing. Both Ryan Perry and Wendy Scase have demonstrated that the texts in the Vernon manuscript were thoughtfully edited and revised, and this leaves the question open as to whether possible versions other than the Vernon and Simeon copies of A Talkyng might have been substantially different.
In addition to the anchoritic source material from the ‘Wooing Group’, A Talkyng is made up of a translation and free rendering of parts of some of Saint Anselm's (d. 1109) ‘Prayers and Meditations’. Anselm's texts in fact already underlie the thirteenth-century anchoritic texts, and Wohunge in particular. This text incorporates the Anselmian confession of the sinful soul, its tone of impassioned prayer and exclamation, and the idea of withdrawal into the chamber of the heart. Anselm's texts were still very much in vogue in the fourteenth century, both in Latin, but also in Middle English translations. Both the Vernon and the Simeon manuscripts also contained Middle English versions of Anselm's meditations. There is a Middle English translation of Anselm's second meditation in the Simeon Manuscript, but unfortunately the translation that is announced in the fifteenth-century index of the Vernon Manuscript, under the title ‘Orisons off seynt Anselmes Meditaciouns’, is absent in the Vernon manuscript due to a loss of forty leaves.