Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts

Project Information

WMM

Grant agreement ID: 842443

DOI

10.3030/842443

Project closed

EC signature date 10 April 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 212 933,76

EU contribution

€ 212 933,76

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WMM (Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts)

Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2021-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

WOMEN MAKING MEMORIES: LITURGY AND THE REMEMBERING FEMALE BODY IN MEDIEVAL HOLY WOMEN’S TEXTS
Devout women from medieval Europe knew the words, sounds, sights and movements of the Divine Office and Mass by heart. References to sensations and the gendered discourses produced by the liturgy abound in female-authored (auto)biographies and visionary texts written between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. Despite British and Continental women’s important literary contributions to Europe’s cultural heritage, the Middle Ages are still popularly presented as “dark ages” rife with misogyny.

This project intervenes in this representation of the Middle Ages by amplifying medieval women’s dissenting voices. It argues that medieval women appropriate liturgical memoria (memory arts), that is, what and how the liturgy taught women to remember. Pairing literary analysis and historical contextualization, it has scrutinized six religious texts by medieval women from the British Isles and north-western Europe: the Diepenveen sister-book, a late-fifteenth, Middle Dutch compilation of nuns’ biographies from the Low Countries; a late-fifteenth-century Middle Dutch visionary text by Jacomijne Costers’ (d. 1503) and Mechtild van Rieviren (d. 1497) from Antwerp, present-day Belgium; a Middle Low German prayer-book from the Cistercian Medingen convent, Germany; the Middle High German sister-book from the Dominican convent St Katharinental in Diessenhofen, present-day Switzerland; and recluse Julian of Norwich’s (c. 1342–c. 1416) visionary text A Revelation of Love, and laywoman Margery Kempe’s (1373–c. 1439) autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe, both Middle English texts from Britain. The action sought to map how memory arts in medieval women’s texts appropriate the art of memory taught by the liturgy. It also strove to chart the understandings of gender, the body, and the relation between self and other imprinted on readers’ memories. The first comparative study of female-authored vernacular European texts, the project also tracked differences and similarities between texts, regions, and communities, and mapped change.

The action concludes the following. Firstly, medieval women writers remake liturgical embodied memories into a collective memory located in all bodies in their communities. They also harness the body and memories to redefine what bodies get to be remembered. Secondly, they instil an understanding of community and individual as containing one another, by which they appropriate medieval medical theories that present women as biologically more impressionable. Thirdly, these women share themes and authorial concerns, but differ in their anxieties about embodied devotion and their view of the role of religious enclosure and community.

The project also responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, with which it coincided, by examining how medieval women can inspire resilience in modern individuals; medieval women can exemplify resilience by their reaction to self-isolation and by how they process their memories of the Bubonic plague through their daily interaction with one another.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

First, the project charted how these women writers draw upon the words and sensations of the liturgy, and how they harness the liturgy’s form for the form of their text. This was accomplished by tracing allusions to many liturgies, for instance, the echoes of the profession rite (the liturgical ritual that made a woman a nun). Then, the project analysed how medieval women transformed the “building blocks” of liturgical memoria into memory arts of their own, scrutinizing the role of gender, embodiment, and community. In particular, it examined what understandings of the relation between the individual and the group the texts promote. Subsequently, the project compared and contrasted these women’s different transformations of the liturgy, mapping differences and similarities between texts and regions, as well as change over three centuries. All of these steps read women’s texts and the texts that they bodily encountered alongside one another, and through one another.

The tangible results are a dataset, four articles, conference presentations, a conference, and popular outputs. The dataset collected, analysed, and compared medieval women’s transformations of the liturgy. The articles, conference presentations, and popular outputs explored these transformations further, and unravelled the import of gender, senses, and the relation between individual, group, and the divinity.

The intangible results were three findings. Firstly, medieval women capitalize upon the form of the liturgy to (re)form their communities through the form of their text. Secondly, medieval women harness their embodied experiences to negotiate the control that the liturgy exerted over their bodies. Thirdly, all medieval women writers participated in a profoundly European network of literary influences, liturgical texts, and vernacular concepts, and navigated gendered tensions and subjection. The conference papers, popular outputs, and disseminate these results. The Open Access articles and dataset make further exploitation possible.

Concerning resilience, the project has illustrated how memories of worshipping with the community allow religious women not to be overcome by trauma.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project has significantly enriched medieval literary studies, gender studies, and the history of religion; it has shed light upon medieval women’s originality of thought and amplified their unique voices. It has unravelled the understudied interaction between medieval women’s literature, their bodies, and their gendered experience of the liturgy woven around them. It also has brought to light hitherto unknown, conflicting significances with which female-coded bodies were charged. The project was the first to compare female-authored texts in four medieval European vernaculars. The project, therefore, has illuminated medieval women’s central importance to Europe’s literary history.

In terms of socio-economic impact, the project has crafted new memories of the Middle Ages. It has drawn public attention to medieval women’s voices and to their literary influence on European culture. It also forged more diverse understandings of gender in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the project has augmented the knowledge base offered by museums and religious heritage sites in north-western Europe. Furthermore, it has increased awareness of how medieval women richly contributed to the thoroughly international literary culture in which they participated. It has generated a more diverse religious engagement with Europe’s spiritual heritage as well. In this way, the project has spun European conversations across space and time and enriched modern individuals’ engagement with the past.

The wider societal implications have been that the action has spotlighted medieval women’s resilience in the face of pandemics, their commitment to (re)building community and contributing to the flourishing of all members of their communities, and their defiance of gendered oppression. Thus, it has demonstrated that medieval women can speak defiant hope into the lives of modern individuals, and inspire similar courage in modern societies.

The Holy Kinship, c. 1520, produced in Zermatt (Switzerland), currently in Museum Appenzell