Jennifer Summit shows how "... the "woman writer" was constructed by male authors, editors, translators, and printers and defined by her very "exteriority" to literary tradition as being absent or lost."
Anne Winston-Allen shows that "..."convent women" have been constructed by external authorities and sources as absent in the sense of silent, marginal, and walled-off from society. Nuns' writings, however, show that these women were intimately involved.... Neither were they silent. Substantial numbers of still almost completely unknown works by women produced in Dutch- and German- speaking regions exist and need to be taken into account."
"... the visionary mode, so often regarded as medieval women's primary manner of self-expression, was not the only kind of writing in which women engaged." [p. xiv]
In particular, examples of the agency of women can be found.
"The texts they left behind illustrate the relation between authority and text production by women. Like mystical and visionary works that conferred power or sister-books that represented social strategies, historical writings and chronicles are also political. Reform chronicles comprise a literary sub-genre that was both generated by the reform and at the same time constitutive of it, seeking to validate, construct, and perpetuate the Observance." [p. xv]
Anne Winston-Allen wants to show how the shift to a vernacular language allowed more women to 'join in and affect the nature' of contemporary religious discussion. For example, she says women were the largest audience and chief transmitters of sermons in the vernacular and that previously this has gone 'largely unnoticed'. This presence, these faces who were on the stage amidst, and sometimes driving, the changes were people whose record Winston-Allen wants reintegrated into the broader historical record of their culture.
Beyond the preface our author does just this. In her introduction she looks briefly at sources.
"Produced in fifty-two different women's communities... besides the Emmerich text, two other books of sisters, twelve women's cloister chronicles, five foundation narratives, six accounts by nuns of the reform of convents, plus numerous other annals and historical writings."Of these she says four were written in Latin while all the rest in their native German or 'East Netherland' vernacular. The houses themselves that counted among the earliest were those Congregations of the Common Life practicing their self-styled devotio moderno. The numbers of these female houses reached nearly three times as many as the male houses in Dutch lands even thru the fifteenth century. The numbers of female religious in German lands is also remarkaby large.
But she says these were largely ignored in scholarly communities until as recently as 1985. [p.2]
While little is known about what these women did in their actual lives there is ample evidence that exists that could still be explored. While Winston-Allen has Jeffrey Hamburger point out how especially North American scholars have neglected these regions, times and lives there are a few more of French, Italian and English nuns.
"Women were, for example, active participants alongside men in the reform movement that swept the German-speaking areas in the fifteenth century. They left behind accounts that offer a different perspective on the struggle for renewal and reform on the eve of the Reformation. Consequently, to fully understand the dynamics of change that resulted in the radical religious upheavals of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, those records require further study."While others say that a narrative that leaves out half a population must be seen as incomplete at best, our author says the "... task now is to rewrite the action with faces, names and fist-hand accounts from the women ..." who have their "own histories and works...". [p.3]
Women reformers and chroniclers were there in the many Observant houses and the conflicts with Conventuals within the Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians. But of course they were also on the Conventual side. [p.7]
In her first chapter she says she will review sources. Chapter two looks at how the environment for 'women religious changed' 13th-16th centuries. Following that she looks at those for the change in Observance while chapter four highlights those against, the Conventuals. This was one of few central divisive issues that drove many of the other changes in communities and people's religious practices and understandings across Europe. Chapter five she brings light to what she calls the explosion of scribal activity among women of the period. The sixth chapter looks at their various strategies in exercising power in their world.
The result is a broad and inclusive platfrorm providing suitable context, many voices, excerpts to provide solid grounding as well as over fifty pages of copious notes, and a daunting forty-five page bibliography as an aid for more needed research. She succeeds for an English audience in the US where others have not and at 75 years old, teaches German and Medieval Literature at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.
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all quotes and pagination from paperback edition of,
Winston-Allen, Anne: Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages; Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania; 2004
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