Dark Age Nunneries

Abstract

The two-and-a-half centuries between 800 and 1050 are commonly viewed as a 'dark age' in the history of women's monasticism. Dark, in the sense that the realities of life in and around the cloister are difficult to access: the primary evidence is extremely fragmented; the context is ill-understood; and scholars’ findings are scattered across a multitude of case studies. But dark also in the sense that, according to the dominant academic narrative, women's monasticism suffered from the catastrophic disempowerment of its members, the progressive ‘secularization’ of its institutions, and - barring a few exceptions - the precipitous decline of intellectual and spiritual life. Based on a study of forty institutions in Lotharingia – a multi-lingual, politically and culturally diverse region in the heart of Western Europe – this book dismantles the common view of women religious in this period as the disempowered, at times even disinterested, witnesses to their own lives. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, it highlights their attempts - and those of the men and women sympathetic to their cause - to construct localized narratives of self, nurture beneficial relations with their environment, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity.

‘Against the Custom’: Hagiographical Rewriting and Female Abbatial Leadership at Mid-Eleventh-Century Remiremont

“…Such was the case with the abbey of Bleurville, a 1050 aristocratic foundation by a relative of Oda's, Count Raindald II of Toul, that was handed over to the bishop of Toul. 46 Remiremont was the exception to this rule, in the sense that members of the aristocratic house of Alsace in the late tenth century had gained a tight grip on its key offices and institutions. By the second quarter of the eleventh century, they had their relative Oda elected as abbess and positioned her nephew Gerard, who was count of Alsace and duke of Upper Lotharingia, to take the leading lay role.…”

“…48 Further actions from later in Oda's tenure show how aunt and nephew consolidated the abbey's status as a family institution, among other things by preparing Gerard's daughter Gisela to succeed her great-aunt and by arranging for Gerard to be buried at Remiremont. 49 Pope Leo's position with regard to these opposite trends (increasing episcopal control on religious institutions in the Toul area and growing aristocratic power over Remiremont) strikes us as ambivalent. At the time of his election to the Holy See he had been bishop of Toul for twenty-two years.…”