INTRODUCTION
I. Women and Manuscripts
It is already clear from convent records and manuscript colophons by scribes such as Guda – illuminator of a manuscript with self-portrait (ca. 1290) – that women were making books in the Middle Ages and illuminating them. Certainly, the assumption that nuns could produce embroidered pictorial works or could restore wall paintings -- but could not draw -- makes no sense. In the secular world, one hears of women trained as artists, who helped out in family workshops. At Nuremberg, for example, a contemporary of artist Georg Glockendon (the Elder, d. 1520) reported that he [Glockendon] "had sons and daughters whom he required to work hard at illuminating and painting cardstock pictures every day" ("Er hatte Söhn und Töchter, die hielt er dazu, dass sie täglich dem Illuminieren und Briefmalen hart mussten obsitzen").
The daughters of such prosperous painters were sometimes accepted into convents, as was Katharina Witz (daughter of painter Konrad Witz) who entered Basel's Magdalen Cloister in 1454. And convent historical accounts tell of female book illuminators within their ranks. At Zürich, a history of the Dominican convent of Oetenbach, written ca. 1340, relates that when the wealthy widow Ita von Hohenfels entered the community – having spent most of her life at court – she brought with her two women: one who could paint and the other illuminate. The account goes on to report that the sisters earned 10 marks a year for the newly founded community by copying and illuminating books. Thus, it may not be unreasonable to imagine that women of talent who had engaged in artistic pursuits at court for enjoyment would have made use of these skills after retiring to a convent. So why not manuscripts illuminated by women? Clearly, women have been making books since at least as far back as Hrosvit at Gandersheim in the tenth century. But how many of them were illustrated?
II. Women’s Manuscripts
Because it is difficult to recognize them, few such manuscripts have so far been identified. But a systematic survey of archive holdings, exhibition catalogues, historical and art-historical writings turns up the names of 21 convent artists who illuminated 55 whole- and fragmentary manuscripts. Another 69 manuscripts by 48 anonymous convent artists can be identified, plus at least 20 more manuscripts by 16 book painters who “probably”worked in women’s convent scriptoria. At this writing, the number of manuscripts listed in the Index totals 145 (by 85 artists). But indications are that this is only the tip of an iceberg. In fact, women most likely have always illustrated books. The question now is how to identify them.
While many of their illustrations have been referred to by cataloguers as “naïve,” that is, by non-professionally trained artists, others are of first-rate quality and have only been noticed because colophons name the painter. But by examining this body of over 140 books, one can begin to construct a paradigm of what kinds of books were made in women’s scriptoria and how to identify them. It turns out that creating art was an important spiritual need, and new forms of it, unique to women, developed as the number of works increased exponentially over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
III. The "Sociology" of Women's Art
These books have much to reveal about women's spiritual needs and outlook as well as about lay medieval society and convent women's influence within it. But it is clear that beyond the obvious aesthetic and devotional significance, convent books had economic, political, and social functions, too, that extended beyond the walls of the religious house. Indeed, recent studies have called attention to the multiplicity of such networks linking women's religious communities and lay society. Women's religious houses served the secular community as schools for educating the young women of the patrician classes, as safe keepers of records (wills, deeds, contracts), as financial institutions for lending and investment, as employers of craftsmen and artisans, as dispensers of food and alms to the poor, and as places of retirement toward the end of life. The nuns offered prayers for the souls of the laity after death and for their welfare and that of the secular community in life.
IV. Nuns and Secular Donors: "Town and Gown" Collaborations in Manuscript Production
Because of their exclusive status as the daughters, sisters, aunts, and relatives of society’s most prominent and influential families, convent women had access to wealthy donor support. Drawing on these connections they sponsored and orchestrated production of some of the most beautiful and costly manuscripts created in the Middle Ages, books such as the huge, richly illuminated gradual of St. Katharinenthal (c. 1312). Although the sisters did not make this magnificent work themselves – except for possibly copying the text, they coordinated the production, the financing, and engaged professional illuminators to produce the stunning major initials. The smaller initials and images of nuns (labeled with their names) that are painted into the margins and into the text itself point to a close collaboration. Similar large-scale “town and gown” projects were undertaken at other convents such as Heilig Kreuz in Regensburg and at Wonnental (near Freiburg). Here opulent manuscripts depict in the margins secular donors – but a predominance of nuns.
The convent's production of splendid liturgical books benefited the lay population by securing God's favor and protection by those patron saints who were honored in the manuscript and in the ceremonial offices sung in the convent’s parish church. In a symbiotic process, these town-and-gown projects engaged both communities, serving the welfare of all.
V. Book Production in Convent Scriptoria: Liturgical, Personal, and Gift Books
While, in their own workshops, the nuns made and decorated many splendid and massive graduals, antiphonals, and other liturgical works with gold and illustrations, they also made small books for personal use and very many as gifts for lay friends and relatives. Often, prosperous townspeople commissioned books from the sisters. Some of these society laywomen may, in fact, have been graduates of the convent’s school and have maintained friendships with their former teachers and classmates who had remained in the religious community as nuns.
Gifts of books from the nuns to the families of city officials could curry favor and secure advantages for a religious house. Thomas Lentes has shown that a large part of convent budgets was devoted to the production of gifts (crosses, cards, cakes and other items as well as books). Manuscripts, presented as gifts from one religious house to another (especially from the nuns to a men’s house) reflect and trace the networks of influence within medieval towns and localities. While production of a costly manuscript could demonstrate and enhance the prestige of a house, less costly types merit attention also as social and cultural artifacts that fill out and delineate the overall scope and economy of artistic production in the Middle Ages. Because of their variety, unconventional images, unique contents, use of the vernacular, and their individual histories, women’s manuscripts offer some of the most promising sources of information that survive.
Differing, however, from the exquisite books of hours owned by queens and the court nobility – works with which we are familiar from art-history surveys – these less professional and more varied images present another side of the Middle Ages: one that fills out part of the picture not seen in surveys of masterworks, but one that existed alongside them. These "other" books express the outlook and practices of a large segment of the medieval population – still not the vast silent majority who left no manuscripts at all – but a quantity of books made by women from prosperous burgher families and the lower aristocracy. These women made and illustrated the kinds of books they liked to own and give as gifts: works that expressed their spiritual needs, interests, and outlook. Most contain prayers, collections of meditations, saints’ lives, songs, and sermons in the vernacular.
VI. Prayer Books: Signature Genres and Regional Styles
In fact, women made thousands of these books and illuminated a good portion of them, most of which still remain to be studied and described beyond the description “prayer book.” It turns out that there are many different kinds of prayer book within this category. Some are signature types that developed at particular convents or in particular areas. North-German cloisters, for example, developed a unique form of book containing a collection of vernacular songs and meditations on the liturgical texts of the religious services, particularly at Christmas, Easter, or for saints' days. The fact that many of these vernacular song-and-prayer books were owned by secular women – although made in the convent workshop – reflects new trends in book production in the fifteenth century. See, for example, the ongoing online project, “Medingen Manuscripts,” directed by Henrike Lähnemann: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/medingen/public_extern/
Not only did convents and regions develop their own signature manuscript genres; they developed styles of illumination that diverged more and more from the mainstream. Women’s works from the Upper Rhine region appear to have been influenced early on by the style of Strasbourg schools of painters such as that of the Master of the Paradiesgärtlein (ca. 1410), but thereafter developed a life and a style of their own. Painters such as Sibylla von Bondorf (ca. 1450-1524) enjoyed a reputation that extended beyond their cloister and town. This can be seen in the number of Sibylla von Bondorf’s illustrations that appear pasted into works by other artists, in copies made of her illustrations, and the imitation of her distinctive style in the work of other artists. Through the exchange of manuscripts, convent artists of this region (and others) can be said to have developed a school of their own, a regional "cloister style."
VII. Illuminations and Texts from Women’s Convent Scriptoria: Characteristics
While a monograph on medieval women’s art is only partially completed, some conclusions can be drawn from the data collected so far. These indicate that works from women’s convents are inclined to depict a larger number of women and female saints in their illustrations. Certain themes such as the infant Christ (often alone), images of spiritual intimacy (nuns embracing Christ), nativity scenes with Mary wearing a crown, or crucifixion by the virtues are found more frequently in these works than elsewhere. In illustrating saints’ lives (a favorite genre), women artists tend to insert cult images within the narrative. In liturgical works, they often include banderoles containing phrases from the liturgy as design elements in the illustrations. Not only do some manuscripts contain embroidery for decorative effect, but the images themselves reflect tapestry and needlework motifs in their designs. Images of nuns – often including their names – kneeling in the margins of graduals and antiphonals seem to constitute a kind of pictorial necrology or anniversary book, reminding those who sing the office to remember the soul of the departed sister.
As would be expected, the number of vernacular and dual-language manuscripts increases in the later centuries, but even in the earliest periods the vernacular can be present in the form of glosses and instructions to the user on how to perform the office or which psalms to read for comfort in particularly trying situations. When not making transcriptions of Latin books for the liturgical offices, women tended to favor vernacular saints' lives, sermon collections, prayers, songs, and meditations in books they made for themselves. Since choir nuns in German-speaking areas sang the Divine Office an average of 8 hours a day, books of hours were rarely made in their convent scriptoria.
A great deal remains to be done and discovered in studying these works, and tools need to be developed for recognizing, investigating and categorizing them. Although the Observant reform produced the great majority of fifteenth-century manuscripts whose provenance can be identified and brought with it a style of its own, other distinctive styles are now recognizable that had developed in individual convents and regions even earlier. All of these offer rich material for further study.
I. Women and Manuscripts
It is already clear from convent records and manuscript colophons by scribes such as Guda – illuminator of a manuscript with self-portrait (ca. 1290) – that women were making books in the Middle Ages and illuminating them. Certainly, the assumption that nuns could produce embroidered pictorial works or could restore wall paintings -- but could not draw -- makes no sense. In the secular world, one hears of women trained as artists, who helped out in family workshops. At Nuremberg, for example, a contemporary of artist Georg Glockendon (the Elder, d. 1520) reported that he [Glockendon] "had sons and daughters whom he required to work hard at illuminating and painting cardstock pictures every day" ("Er hatte Söhn und Töchter, die hielt er dazu, dass sie täglich dem Illuminieren und Briefmalen hart mussten obsitzen").
The daughters of such prosperous painters were sometimes accepted into convents, as was Katharina Witz (daughter of painter Konrad Witz) who entered Basel's Magdalen Cloister in 1454. And convent historical accounts tell of female book illuminators within their ranks. At Zürich, a history of the Dominican convent of Oetenbach, written ca. 1340, relates that when the wealthy widow Ita von Hohenfels entered the community – having spent most of her life at court – she brought with her two women: one who could paint and the other illuminate. The account goes on to report that the sisters earned 10 marks a year for the newly founded community by copying and illuminating books. Thus, it may not be unreasonable to imagine that women of talent who had engaged in artistic pursuits at court for enjoyment would have made use of these skills after retiring to a convent. So why not manuscripts illuminated by women? Clearly, women have been making books since at least as far back as Hrosvit at Gandersheim in the tenth century. But how many of them were illustrated?
II. Women’s Manuscripts
Because it is difficult to recognize them, few such manuscripts have so far been identified. But a systematic survey of archive holdings, exhibition catalogues, historical and art-historical writings turns up the names of 21 convent artists who illuminated 55 whole- and fragmentary manuscripts. Another 69 manuscripts by 48 anonymous convent artists can be identified, plus at least 20 more manuscripts by 16 book painters who “probably”worked in women’s convent scriptoria. At this writing, the number of manuscripts listed in the Index totals 145 (by 85 artists). But indications are that this is only the tip of an iceberg. In fact, women most likely have always illustrated books. The question now is how to identify them.
While many of their illustrations have been referred to by cataloguers as “naïve,” that is, by non-professionally trained artists, others are of first-rate quality and have only been noticed because colophons name the painter. But by examining this body of over 140 books, one can begin to construct a paradigm of what kinds of books were made in women’s scriptoria and how to identify them. It turns out that creating art was an important spiritual need, and new forms of it, unique to women, developed as the number of works increased exponentially over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
III. The "Sociology" of Women's Art
These books have much to reveal about women's spiritual needs and outlook as well as about lay medieval society and convent women's influence within it. But it is clear that beyond the obvious aesthetic and devotional significance, convent books had economic, political, and social functions, too, that extended beyond the walls of the religious house. Indeed, recent studies have called attention to the multiplicity of such networks linking women's religious communities and lay society. Women's religious houses served the secular community as schools for educating the young women of the patrician classes, as safe keepers of records (wills, deeds, contracts), as financial institutions for lending and investment, as employers of craftsmen and artisans, as dispensers of food and alms to the poor, and as places of retirement toward the end of life. The nuns offered prayers for the souls of the laity after death and for their welfare and that of the secular community in life.
IV. Nuns and Secular Donors: "Town and Gown" Collaborations in Manuscript Production
Because of their exclusive status as the daughters, sisters, aunts, and relatives of society’s most prominent and influential families, convent women had access to wealthy donor support. Drawing on these connections they sponsored and orchestrated production of some of the most beautiful and costly manuscripts created in the Middle Ages, books such as the huge, richly illuminated gradual of St. Katharinenthal (c. 1312). Although the sisters did not make this magnificent work themselves – except for possibly copying the text, they coordinated the production, the financing, and engaged professional illuminators to produce the stunning major initials. The smaller initials and images of nuns (labeled with their names) that are painted into the margins and into the text itself point to a close collaboration. Similar large-scale “town and gown” projects were undertaken at other convents such as Heilig Kreuz in Regensburg and at Wonnental (near Freiburg). Here opulent manuscripts depict in the margins secular donors – but a predominance of nuns.
The convent's production of splendid liturgical books benefited the lay population by securing God's favor and protection by those patron saints who were honored in the manuscript and in the ceremonial offices sung in the convent’s parish church. In a symbiotic process, these town-and-gown projects engaged both communities, serving the welfare of all.
V. Book Production in Convent Scriptoria: Liturgical, Personal, and Gift Books
While, in their own workshops, the nuns made and decorated many splendid and massive graduals, antiphonals, and other liturgical works with gold and illustrations, they also made small books for personal use and very many as gifts for lay friends and relatives. Often, prosperous townspeople commissioned books from the sisters. Some of these society laywomen may, in fact, have been graduates of the convent’s school and have maintained friendships with their former teachers and classmates who had remained in the religious community as nuns.
Gifts of books from the nuns to the families of city officials could curry favor and secure advantages for a religious house. Thomas Lentes has shown that a large part of convent budgets was devoted to the production of gifts (crosses, cards, cakes and other items as well as books). Manuscripts, presented as gifts from one religious house to another (especially from the nuns to a men’s house) reflect and trace the networks of influence within medieval towns and localities. While production of a costly manuscript could demonstrate and enhance the prestige of a house, less costly types merit attention also as social and cultural artifacts that fill out and delineate the overall scope and economy of artistic production in the Middle Ages. Because of their variety, unconventional images, unique contents, use of the vernacular, and their individual histories, women’s manuscripts offer some of the most promising sources of information that survive.
Differing, however, from the exquisite books of hours owned by queens and the court nobility – works with which we are familiar from art-history surveys – these less professional and more varied images present another side of the Middle Ages: one that fills out part of the picture not seen in surveys of masterworks, but one that existed alongside them. These "other" books express the outlook and practices of a large segment of the medieval population – still not the vast silent majority who left no manuscripts at all – but a quantity of books made by women from prosperous burgher families and the lower aristocracy. These women made and illustrated the kinds of books they liked to own and give as gifts: works that expressed their spiritual needs, interests, and outlook. Most contain prayers, collections of meditations, saints’ lives, songs, and sermons in the vernacular.
VI. Prayer Books: Signature Genres and Regional Styles
In fact, women made thousands of these books and illuminated a good portion of them, most of which still remain to be studied and described beyond the description “prayer book.” It turns out that there are many different kinds of prayer book within this category. Some are signature types that developed at particular convents or in particular areas. North-German cloisters, for example, developed a unique form of book containing a collection of vernacular songs and meditations on the liturgical texts of the religious services, particularly at Christmas, Easter, or for saints' days. The fact that many of these vernacular song-and-prayer books were owned by secular women – although made in the convent workshop – reflects new trends in book production in the fifteenth century. See, for example, the ongoing online project, “Medingen Manuscripts,” directed by Henrike Lähnemann: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/medingen/public_extern/
Not only did convents and regions develop their own signature manuscript genres; they developed styles of illumination that diverged more and more from the mainstream. Women’s works from the Upper Rhine region appear to have been influenced early on by the style of Strasbourg schools of painters such as that of the Master of the Paradiesgärtlein (ca. 1410), but thereafter developed a life and a style of their own. Painters such as Sibylla von Bondorf (ca. 1450-1524) enjoyed a reputation that extended beyond their cloister and town. This can be seen in the number of Sibylla von Bondorf’s illustrations that appear pasted into works by other artists, in copies made of her illustrations, and the imitation of her distinctive style in the work of other artists. Through the exchange of manuscripts, convent artists of this region (and others) can be said to have developed a school of their own, a regional "cloister style."
VII. Illuminations and Texts from Women’s Convent Scriptoria: Characteristics
While a monograph on medieval women’s art is only partially completed, some conclusions can be drawn from the data collected so far. These indicate that works from women’s convents are inclined to depict a larger number of women and female saints in their illustrations. Certain themes such as the infant Christ (often alone), images of spiritual intimacy (nuns embracing Christ), nativity scenes with Mary wearing a crown, or crucifixion by the virtues are found more frequently in these works than elsewhere. In illustrating saints’ lives (a favorite genre), women artists tend to insert cult images within the narrative. In liturgical works, they often include banderoles containing phrases from the liturgy as design elements in the illustrations. Not only do some manuscripts contain embroidery for decorative effect, but the images themselves reflect tapestry and needlework motifs in their designs. Images of nuns – often including their names – kneeling in the margins of graduals and antiphonals seem to constitute a kind of pictorial necrology or anniversary book, reminding those who sing the office to remember the soul of the departed sister.
As would be expected, the number of vernacular and dual-language manuscripts increases in the later centuries, but even in the earliest periods the vernacular can be present in the form of glosses and instructions to the user on how to perform the office or which psalms to read for comfort in particularly trying situations. When not making transcriptions of Latin books for the liturgical offices, women tended to favor vernacular saints' lives, sermon collections, prayers, songs, and meditations in books they made for themselves. Since choir nuns in German-speaking areas sang the Divine Office an average of 8 hours a day, books of hours were rarely made in their convent scriptoria.
A great deal remains to be done and discovered in studying these works, and tools need to be developed for recognizing, investigating and categorizing them. Although the Observant reform produced the great majority of fifteenth-century manuscripts whose provenance can be identified and brought with it a style of its own, other distinctive styles are now recognizable that had developed in individual convents and regions even earlier. All of these offer rich material for further study.
