Gone Medieval - Lives of Medieval Nuns

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

The often forgotten world of medieval nuns holds many secrets about the lives of ordinary people of the age, their daily routines, education, and societal roles. German medieval historian Henrike Lähnemann shares with Matt Lewis her research into the rich archives of convents, which revealed nuns' vibrant lives, from their involvement in local politics and commerce to their spiritual duties and family bonds. They discuss how medieval convents served as hubs of learning, medicine, and community interaction, complete with both solemn rituals and moments of joyful laughter.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis.

Medieval European people are often divided into three. Those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. Those who fight are often the elite, so are the easiest to see. Amongst those who pray, senior churchmen could become prominent in politics. Those who work are often more difficult to pick out. But amongst those who pray, there is a group who can be equally hard to uncover. Enrique Laineman's new book, The Life of Nuns, sets out to discover what life was really like behind the walls of a convent. What was daily life like? What did education look like? And just how disconnected were they from their families and the communities around them.

We're about to answer these questions and more. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Henrika. Thanks for having me. I'm very much looking forward to this. It's an aspect of medieval life that I guess we don't too often talk about. So God Medieval is here to try and fill in those gaps for everybody. Yes, we called our book in German, Unerheated Fraun, Unheard Women,

because their voices are too often. often overheard, but also because we wanted to show that they are worth listening to. And unerheard also means unheard of, kind of plucky, outright, outspoken. Yeah, sounds like a much better title for German than we get in English. I guess to start off with, what kinds of sources are available for us to tell the stories of nuns? Because I think it's easy to imagine them, you know, cloistered away, and we wouldn't know too much about them. but what kinds of sources do exist for us to explore their lives? It's astonishingly rich cash-off sources, letters, archival material,

and partly they haven't been explored because the nuns were two good archivists. So they kept all their material with them, never threw anything away, and it's still partly, at least in Germany, in the archival boxes from the 13th, 14th, 15th century in the order in which they stacked it in these boxes. So you have to get out of your comfort zone of your own study and the library,

and you have to go there and visit them and their sources. Yeah, it's incredible that there's that much stuff neatly organized as well. Why did German sources prove to be so fruitful for doing this? Why was Germany in particular a great place to find these kinds of records? Because there has been much less damage done to the medieval heritage than in France where the revolution erased a lot, and particularly England where the dissolution of the monasteries practically destroyed most of the material that we could learn things from. And Germany also had always had a great culture.

of communication because it was so regionally scattered. There wasn't just this one center, as London is, things going back and forth, and if anything happened to the London copy, then everything was erased. While it's much more regionally organized and the convents and monasteries are set up by local princes, the cities, so it's a much more granular structure. of communication, a much more tightly knit or knotted network than we have in more centralized countries. And this is partly the network we wanted to explore peer-to-peer support, rather than just from the one center of power down to the subaltern women and men.

Should we be surprised that the records in Germany weren't more affected by the Reformation? Because the Reformation was quite concentrated in Germany. And we know, as you mentioned, the dissolution of the monasteries in England caused us to lose an awful lot of records there. Why was it not similar in Germany, do you think? Again, it partly comes down to the regional character. If the convent had been set up by your grandparents, you didn't want the statues that bore their name to be destroyed. So, for example, in Nuremberg, which was the first town to go Lutheran in 1525, the town council was very clear. we are being Protestant from next Sunday onwards, but nothing will be destroyed.

So they just put dust covers over the Marian altars and the statues of the saints, but they left all the epitaphs that bore the family coat of arms in place, and they kept all the records. So this local structure prevented a large scale, destruction and also the much stronger city structure overall. There was a large and affluent middle class who had been responsible in sponsoring this. So it wasn't just mobility and single noble families, it was a much broader sway of society. And this hasn't been seen for a long time. It really the narrative only changed when I was studying in the late 80s, 90s, to see that the

reformation wasn't this switch being flicked over from darkness to light, Luther, as the big revelation and everything changed, but that it is a much more grayscale image. So only two years ago, a study was published that in 1600 in the Protestant areas in Germany, there were still half of the convents going strong. So that it goes completely against the narrative, particularly put forward by Protestant historiography of the 19th century. So historiography, historiography, history. as a serious university subject, was more or less invented in Prussia in the 19th century as a Protestant discipline. And they built up this teleological looking towards the glorious 19th century development from darkness, Middle Ages, Reformation cut point, Luther nailing the coffin of the Middle Ages,

which he never did, he never swung a hammer. And then everything becomes, Protestant, everything vanishes, and there we are in the glorious modern period. And this narrative has prevented people looking for all these regional solutions of coexistence, of arrangements, of this wonderful heritage of Protestant nuns, so the Benedictans, Protestant Cistercians, because they just didn't fit into this black and white image. Yeah, fascinating. I mean, one of the sources that you talk about in the book is kind of effectively a nun's diary. You know, she writes in partly in Latin, partly in Middle-O-German, and it's almost sort of practicing her Latin a little bit in places, but resorting to Middle-O-German when she doesn't want to fuss with the Latin kind of thing. And just that really personal element is so fascinating. We don't have many medieval, just everyday people's diaries, do we? It's a fascinating source in itself.

Yeah, so that was a really lucky find that Eva Schlozheimer, my co-author, with whom I work also on the scholarly edition of the nun's letters, found when she was looking through the Herzog August Biblibe Büttec in Wolfen Bütel, which is another advantage of German transmission, that you have all these local libraries, where the princes wanted to preserve the memory of their, state. So, and it looks completely inconspicuous because it's written on second life parchments of scrape down parchment recycle from an obsolete liturgical manuscript for basically her note keeping.

And there seems to be a multiple purpose to it. One, as you mentioned, practicing her letter. And it's fairly rough. I'm also editing other nuns, documents, and she should have known better. All the nuns had to go through seven years of Latin training at least, mixing up her cases, and lots of spelling mistakes. But she can tell a story. And she's mainly writing down what went wrong as a kind of memo to herself and to other nuns what not to do in future. And that makes it so fascinating. It's really rare, as you said, that something like this survives because normally the archive was well curated to present to the outside world a happy family image. I spoke to a colleague who grew up in a boarding school, was educated, and where they had to write letters to their parents once a week. It was very clear that nothing critical could be in there.

So it's rare that you have this unfiltered voice of somebody not in power, but just as a chronicler of the life. Yeah, just sort of talking about their everyday life and their experiences. It's incredible. And so what, from all of the sources that you've been able to gather together, what do we know about daily life for a nun inside a convent? sort of how regimented and restricted was it, for example? One of the joys of working with this northern German sources

is that we have not just the written records, but also the everyday objects. So for example, the oldest spectacles in the world were found under the floorboards of one of the convents, Wienhausen, where they had literally fallen through the cracks. Since it wasn't dissolved, it shapeshifted through the Reformation, and it also shape-shifted through the other major caesura for German history, the Napoleonic reorganization and secularization of the early 19th century, because the nuns weren't recognizable to Napoleon as Catholic,

since they were Protestants, they weren't dissolved. So we have their things like these spectacles. We have things like the implements for writing, for doing all the crafts projects. I'm sitting in front of a replica of a medieval tapestry five by three meters

embroidered by the nuns to portray the story of Tristan and Isolde, something you wouldn't first associate with a sacred space. So it was a very colorful space that we can learn from

material culture. It was a space of learning, basically the only higher education opportunity for women in the middle ages entering a convent. And they're learning all the liberal arts, starting with a good dose of grammar, even though the diarist didn't take it in, but then going through rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, a lot of music, theory and daily practice, but also looking at law. They had to administer large holdings of land and property and going on to medicine. So they had large herb gardens.

One of my doctoral students is currently working on bloodletting in the phlebotomy in the convent. So they needed clear guidelines how to administer something like that and went to call in outside specialists for all day. So we know the life was very clearly structured through the daily routine of the hours, going seven times a day to prayer. But between this liturgical structure and a year cycling round from Advent via Christ, to the resurrection and then coming of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, there was a lot of space

for individual variation. So if somebody was good at writing, they would be employed with copying, manger scripts, also writing sermons. If somebody was good at singing, she would encourage to lead the daily liturgical singing, but also we have songbooks. of some of them decidedly funny character, a secular nature to collect and curate music. So it was a community united by a clear structure, but within it, a lot of opportunity for different skill sets. And here in Oxford, a member of a college at Edmett Hall, Medieval Foundation, at least once a week struck by recognizing some of these structures.

in my own daily life, from gathering together for the communal meal as a focal point to discussing the election of a new abbess or in our case, a new principle. So there are lots of points of interaction and communal decision-making going forward to make the life very varied. Yeah, fascinating. And for nuns, how important was it to remain enclosed and secluded within their communities? Or did they engage with the outer world? Or did that vary between different convents?

It varied considerably. And it's always a kind of with monastic life, a circular movement. So things start normally with a very strict observance of a rule. And then more and more exceptions come. the community grows more prosperous, becomes more secular, and then somebody comes in and says, we need to reform. And then a reform movement comes in,

be it, for example, the Cistercians, to reform the Benedictine movement in the 12th century, or for our source is particularly important. The Boothfelde reform, which was in the 15th century influenced by something called, the modern devotion, the devotion, the devotion, the devotion to a form of turning back to a more inward-looking, liturgically focused life. An element of that is stressing the importance of full enclosure. So of the sources we are looking at in our book, about half of them are from a strictly enclosed

community that had just undergone this reform process in the late 15th century, which they themselves called reformatio, so the word that used in the 16th century for the Lutheran Reformation. While the diarists from Heiich Kreuz lived in a much less regulated convent, where it was, for example, possible to have a convent feast, where everybody was, would meet and sing together sexual people and the young clergy, the male clergy, at the novices.

So in a way, we can observe a movement that goes back and forth. So the stricter the enclosure was the more intense the written communication gets

because they have to write down basically everything they want to communicate to the outside world. So the rich source of the 1,800 letters collected by the nuns of Lune comes about because they had just decided to have this strict enclosure. So we have also letters that in a convent like Heilichkreuz would have been instead of just spoken communication with a neighboring convent. In a way, these are the most interested. notes. So they are more like WhatsApp messages that are exchanged between nuns of neighbour and convents

or between a brother in town with his sister in the convent. So enclosure doesn't mean shutting down the voice. It rather means transferring them on paper or parchment for posterity. Yeah, which is very helpful for you and for us. Yes, it is. There's a portion of the book as well that deals with the connections that remained in place between nuns and their families. You just talked about there might be conversations between brothers and sisters. How important was that connection to family in the life of nuns? Because I think, again, we tend to have this view that people go into a convent or a monastery, they join the clergy, and they sort of sever all of their family ties. are you able to piece together those connections that were maintained?

Yes, so the daughters or nieces in the convent were incredibly important to the family. I'm again sometimes reminded when we sing Evensong in Chapel in college and the proud parents of one of our freshers come along to listen to their daughter or son in the choir singing. So families from Luneburg would go, for the high feasts to visit their daughters in the convent. They would be allowed to sit in the church underneath the nuns choir. So the nuns would be heard but not seen because they were behind a screen

which meant they could view the altar and the east end of the church. They could hear obviously what the priests were saying. They could hear what the laypeople were singing beneath them, but they couldn't be seen. And so the families could listen to the nuns singing, and we know from liturgical manuscripts that they particularly practiced, complicated hymns for these feast days where they knew they would be listened to by their families and their parish. And they were also allowed a certain number of hours to meet and speak at the sprechfenster, the screened window to communicate with the outside world.

Again, they would be heard but not see. They got regularly letters asking for their advice, and that could be more in a spiritual sense. So we have a lot of letters of consolation. After the death of the father, the daughter will write to the mother, trying to make sense of what happened and giving words of biblical, comfort pointing to spiritual exercises the mother can do to cope with the loss.

It also quite practical things. A brother is asking, I'm sending my son to university, what should he read first? And the aunt who has studied all of patristic, so the church fathers, but also the more modern theological writing says, well, study. with Thomas Aquinas. It's been hard to tackle first that it will be really worthwhile reading at the end and make sure you don't give him too large an allowance because he'll start drinking. So quite practical things as well. And also nothing changes very much, does it? That sounds like the advice you'd be giving to streams going off to uni today. Read the right books and don't drink too much. Yeah, exactly. We also have the notices of we are going to

pray for your sick daughter that she's getting better. We are praying for the soul of the departed, and that is quite often the first reason for the convents to be set up to have a reliable source of prayer for the disease, members of the family. And again, the stricter the enclosure was, the more confident the families could be that the nuns, really had time to do their prayers, undistracted from having to worry about running the economy and going on journeys or whatsoever. So that's the benefit of having a daughter in the convent for a family. The other way around, it also works the nuns regularly write to their brothers who hold important political office and say, we need your lobbying voice.

to make sure that our confessor who hasn't got a really well-paid prebent at the moment gets a better job in town so that he can continue hearing our confession. Fascinating. So they should have had a local political lobbying role to play as well as the spiritual one. Oh, yes. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, they administered their own estates, which in the case of Cluster Lüde was mainly salt pans. So Luneburg was the richest of the Hanseatic towns, so of the towns doing the trade around the Baltic and the North Sea, because it had very rich salt mines underneath the city, and none

of Scandinavia has sold. So Lubek, who did the main trading for the other Hanseatic cities, would take Luneburg salt to Scandinavia and exchange it for furs and other goods from Scandinavia. So the nuns got as dowry when they entered the convent a share in a saltpan. So a quarter saltpan and that would be quite a good income. Yeah. I was going to ask how convents kind of made money, but it sounds like they were quite often sort of mercantile enterprises as much as maybe, presumably landowners. Did Nunnery's own as much land as we associate with the rest of the church as well?

Yes. And again, I'm sometimes reminded of the Oxford College's whose wealth is still partly hold in property. Yeah, yeah. But they did engage in commerce as well. So they could, if the salt trade is the local industry, they would engage with that as a way to supplement their income too. Yes, yeah. Yeah, fascinating. And they also had an intranet of exchanging goods. So a lot of the letters we have are, please can you send me another supply of pearls? Because one of the convents specialized in growing these little river pearls,

which are grown in the cheeks of trouts, in the kemen. So while other, convents would specialize in making really fine fabric and others. So for example, the fabric proven silk that was needed for doing the veils for the nuns was done particularly in one convent. And they would sell and also swap goods like that. And they would also negotiate. And they would also negotiate to get better prices by bulk orders. So Closed Alunewa was the convent closest to the next big city, Luneburg, and the other convent meeting, Epstorf Wienhausen, would send their

manuscripts to Lune and then they would get a better price for having all of the mendi scripts bound at the local bookbinder, then if each convent had sent in their single order. That's a fascinating aspect of the ways that they're working together to get good deals as well as everything else. I've got what, I'm not sure if this is a stupid question, so feel free to tell me if this is a stupid question. But we often think of nuns as considering themselves to be effectively brides of Christ. So they're wives to the king of kings. Yeah. Can we see parallel in the ways that nuns view their roles in the world with the way that queens consider their roles next to kings.

They're there to intercede, to plead for mercy and to be a sort of bridge between the king and his people. Not at all a stupid question. They really take this metaphor of being brides of quite literally literally. So we have letters where the nuns write to their... mothers, consider yourself now to be the mother-in-law of Christ, which gives you a much more powerful role in society than if you were just mother-in-law of another cobbler or salt dealer. They take this also very serious as an obligation to share their intimate knowledge of what Christ

is really like with others. We can see that, for example, in their translation of their own mystical writing into the vernacular for their lay relatives. I've looked at four sisters, biological sisters, where three of them went to the convent of Medingen, and one, Anna, stayed in the town of Luneburg and married to the town mayor, Heinrich Treube. And the three religious sisters write for themselves each a book of prayers with meditations on how sweet it is to taste the kisses of Christ, of drinking his wine, of going for a walk, a stroll in the garden with him in the coolness of the evening. So a lot of the imagery of the song of songs coming in.

but crossed with their own personal experience. And they translate these texts for their secular sister who didn't have enough Latin to read their meditations in the original. They try to make it accessible for her in Middle-O-Germans or in the local dialect. Yeah, it's such an interesting connection and role there. I was always imagining you're going to say they were complaining that Christlews.

the toilet seat up and these dirty towels on the floor, but it's not quite that. And they seem as demanding. It's not always an easy life, being a wife of Christ. So there is a dialogue song, Christ and the loving soul, where Christ orders the nun, lift up your cross and follow me, and strip down, it will be easy to, you have to wade through thorns. So it's not necessarily all roses, but it's ultimately worth it. Yeah. And were convents to a kind of place of medicine and healing in the same way that we often think as male monasteries could be?

Yes. And for example, black letting was a big part of the regime. And in the letters, we have a lot of exchanges of recipes, for example, for healing balm. They wouldn't necessarily, so that's different from monasteries, take in secular visitors for healing.

But it was a sisterly exchange. So for example, in the diary of the nun of Heilichkreuz. She notes how two sisters came from another Cistercian convent because Heiichkreuz was closer to the Braunschweig leading territory, a specialist in a rare disease.

So she could be located with them and the specialist wouldn't have to travel that far. So it was more localized medical provision, but still we have a lot of manuscripts of both Latin and. vernacular sources for the most common diseases. Yeah, yeah. There is also a portion of the book that deals with death within the convents and how the community dealt with death. What were you able to uncover about their attitudes towards that?

Well, in a way, there were the specialists in how to die well, which is a big concern and question in the Middle Ages. And one of the main fears of secular people was to die unprepared. Living in a convent, you were in a way daily preparing yourself for death and seeing death not as the end, but as a transition as the point where you are now really meeting face-to-face, your bridegroom cries. Like now still at Evensong or Compline, the song of Simeon is sung, Lord, now let us thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word. This is what the nuns would sing every night before going to bed.

So every day closed with this parisian. They were looking beyond to the heavenly Jerusalem. So we've included in the book photographs from the gorgeous nuns choir in Wienhausen, which has a cycle of ceiling paintings and wall paintings, which the nuns could meditate upon while sitting for hours and hours on end in their choir stalls. And they would see this transition to the heavenly Jerusalem, which was painted in the shape of their own convent, guarded by the cherubim,

and there Christ sitting side by side with the nuns that had gone before. Yeah, fascinating. So they almost had this proximity to death that was important in the way they lived their lives. Yeah. And as I mentioned, a large portion of their... spiritual duty was to pray for the deceased. So they would remember those who had gone before.

They would be read at each lunchtime, the stories of the saints. Many of them had found a very violent death, but who had overcome and were now at the other side. Yeah, yeah. It's been absolutely fascinating to try and get a little bit closer to the lives of some of the these nuns that have often seemed sort of beyond our reach, and clearly they're not, you've reconstructed so many of them in the book. I wonder if, just to end with, whether you had a favourite story or a favourite snippet or a favourite person who appears in the book? I think it's really this story of the song festival gone pear-shaped, which we deal with in the chapter on education of nuns, which included this. So the story, the story. The story

is told that the abbess of Heilichkreuz for a special treat had allowed everybody to help with the breaking of the flax, which was a necessary process in producing the garments and the cloth. And it's something that similarly to lifting up the ankle, so it's done best if you sing rhythmically with it. So it is an occasion for singing along. And all the, The older nuns who remembered the songs that used to be sung for that were busy writing these down, but it was also permitted for the younger male clergy to join in. And then when they had exhausted this stock of authorized songs, they started making up songs and improvising.

I imagine it a little bit like a stand-up routine where you would suddenly address, somebody. And so the nun writes, they were suddenly singing, oh, dear provost or worthy abbess. I've tried to look for songs like that in the Wienhausen songbook. I found one of these songs which could be similar to that sung at best occasion, which is a mock song about a stupid priest or rather a donkey who wants to become a priest. A zealous in their mola, the molo von Zimher. And the donkey can only sing E R, which is the sound a German donkey makes, which corresponds to the German letters I and A.

And so we have also images of this kind of donkey priest singing, Domklamo, Vox est I. Dezakshu, me it's bringing. And imagining these novices and the young clergymen singing along lustily to something like that always brings a smile to my face when looking back through the book. Yeah, I think it's interesting to think of, people like nuns and priests having fun, you know, having a bit of a laugh because it's something we don't necessarily associate with and we think of them as being austere and very

serious people, but they were just human beings with all of these connections to their local community and their family and all of this desire to learn and to have fun as well. They're not that dissimilar to everybody else. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Enrique. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and I encourage everybody to read the book if you want to find out more about Nuns. Thanks, Lord, for having me.

Thank you. Henrika's book, The Life of Nuns, is out now if you'd like to find out more about this fascinating aspect of the medieval world. If you're looking for more on the ecclesiastical world, then you can dig back through our catalogue to find a great episode with Emma Wells on cathedrals, and one with Claire Gilbert on her book, I. Julian, about the anchoress whose writings became hugely influential. There are new installments have gone medieval every Thursday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts

and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts, add free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at HistoryHit.com slash subscribe. As a special gift, you could also get 50% of your first three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.