Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2004 by James A. Parente, Jr.

Charlotte Woodford. Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany.

Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xvi 229 pp. index. append. bibl. $70. ISBN: 0-19-925671-3.

Charlotte Woodford's monograph is a major contribution to the emerging literature on convent writing and historical narration in the German empire. In contrast to Renaissance Italy, German convents have attracted relatively little attention. Only a few sources have been reprinted in journals of local historical interest, and many still remain in manuscript. Woodford's meticulously researched study magnificently illuminates this unknown corpus of historical convent writing and ably delineates the nuanced approaches their authors adopted towards the past.

Woodford contextualizes her subject by describing the origins and function of early modern convent historiography. Most convent histories were written by the abbess or the prioress and were intended primarily for the religious community and its benefactors. Woodford draws on convent histories written by Augustinian, Benedictine, Bridgettine, Cistercian, Dominican, and Franciscan (Poor Clares) nuns, who resided in the area of present-day Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria. As with women's writing elsewhere in the Empire, convent histories were almost exclusively written in German. In contrast to such Latinists as the tenth-century Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim or the twelfth-century Hildegard von Bingen, early modern German nuns rarely produced work in Latin (with the notable exception of Caritas Pirckheimer). Most nuns had only a passive understanding of Latin, and many fifteenth-century convents contained the largest collections of German books in the Empire.

Woodford is fascinated by the reasons for such extensive historical writing in convents. She lays bare the inadequacy of the familiar response that historical writing was didactic and teases out the different levels of edification that informed the texts' composition. Nuns engaged in convent history wrote to inform the members of the community of their house's unique past and to extol the virtues of its earlier residents. But these writers also had other purposes: some convent histories served as legal documentation of the property, privileges, and rights of the community. Other histories were written to build a sense of communal pride; others promulgated the fifteenth-century, and later post-Tridentine, call for enclosing the nuns, disciplining their behavior, and enforcing the sanctity of the "common life," the renunciation of all personal possessions. Convent histories could also provide consolatory reminders of the workings of divine providence, especially in times of turmoil, and the inevitability of historical change.

Woodford illustrates the variety of convent histories through several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century case studies. She first examines the best known of all early modern convent writers, Caritas Pirckheimer, the brother of the famous humanist, Willibald. Though an exceptionally accomplished Latinist, Caritas wrote her Denkwurdigkeiten (Memoirs) in German to chronicle the steadfast resistance of her Poor Clares against the attempts of the Nuremberg city council to impose the Lutheran Reformation. Caritas's community survived closure by the council, but its clerical ministers were removed and new members were prohibited. Through her analysis of the manuscripts, Woodford demonstrates that the convent was not as unified as Caritas would have readers believe despite her praise of the community for its obedience. Woodford next explores the individual authorial voice in the diaries of two Bavarian nuns, Clara Staiger (1588-1656), an Augustinian prioress, and Maria Anna Junius (b. before 1606), an ordinary Dominican. Both women voiced their dismay at the Swedish war in Bavaria in the early 1630s but with varying attention to historical details. Woodford argues for the authors' restrained individuality: Staiger gives a personalized view of her duties as prioress, and Junius intermixes her personal reaction to the war with other contemporary accounts of the events. Woodford's final chapter, in which she compares two other Bavarian accounts of the Swedish invasion by Juliana Ernst (1589-1665), prioress of a Poor Clare convent, and Elisabeth Herold (1599-1657), abbess of a Cistercian convent, is more successful. Juliana Ernst stoked the courage of her community by evoking the exemplary qualities of its fifteenth-century mystic founder, Ursula Haider. Elisabeth Herold, who wrote during the restoration of her convent after its devastation by the Swedes, conjures up the community's glorious past to reassert the convent's legal claims to property and build communal identity. Ernst and Herold emerge as the most methodical historians of the group: Woodford shows them comparing different manuscripts, weighing oral accounts against written sources, sifting through convent archives, and amplifying their histories with materials drawn from elsewhere (such as newspapers). In her eagerness to establish historical continuities between the present and the past, Ernst refrains from critically analyzing her sources; in contrast, Herold's narrative is replete with gaps in the archival record and self-avowals of her limitations as a historian.