Reform Networks and Community among Dominican Nuns in Late Medieval Germany

Pokorski, Robin K.

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-0zw1-9z30

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Reform Networks and Community among Dominican Nuns in Late Medieval Germany

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One of the pressing concerns of the fifteenth century was monastic reform, and reformers of the Observant movement rose to meet the challenge by attempting to return monastic houses to stricter observance of their earliest rules and governing documents. In this dissertation, I examine how Dominican nuns in German-speaking parts of Europe in the fifteenth century envisioned reform as an ongoing communal and intellectual process, contrary to the assumption by both late-medieval male reformers and some modern historians that convent reform for women was as simple as building walls and locking gates. Moreover, as male reformers sought to curtail nuns’ contact with the outside world through stricter enclosure, nuns increasingly needed to marshal support from their families and sympathetic city councilors in order to ensure their convent’s economic longevity. Women also exchanged information and advice through letters and reform-related manuscripts, and at times traveled themselves in the service of reform, moving from one convent to another to instruct newly reformed nuns, conveying knowledge that could not be communicated in manuscript form. Therefore, the Observant movement for Dominican nuns sits at the nexus of religious, intellectual, social, and economic currents. In order to explore how these facets of reform related to each other and how women benefitted from or were disadvantaged by the reform, I proceed through a series of thematic chapters that encompass different aspects of the Dominican community. I argue that considering not only the religious motivations for the reform but the broader societal context, religious and secular alike, help us understand that Dominican nuns perceived the reform as an ongoing process, one to be carefully maintained over the years and decades after its introduction. I use a wide range of sources, from chronicles and letters to prescriptive documents and prayerbooks. This mixture of sources allows for an examination of reform within a variety of contexts. The first of these is the context of an individual convent. The second is within the setting of a broader urban society during a period when municipal power was shifting from the old nobility to newly wealthy merchant families. The final context is the Dominican province of Teutonia, where manuscript networks and reform parties of nuns experienced in the Observant way of life transmitted knowledge.

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