Morton, Vera, ed., trans.; Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, ed., Guidance for Women in 12th-Century Convents (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003).

Text name(s): Lives of the Abbesses of Barking

Number of pages of primary source text: 142

Medieval Author(s): Abelard, Peter Goscelin of St. Bertin Osbert de Clare Peter the Venerable

Dates: 1100 - 1200

Archival Reference:

Original Language(s): Latin;

Translation: English translation.

Translation Comments:

Geopolitical Region(s): England; France;

County/Region: Barking; Marcigny

Apparatus: Index Bibliography Introduction

Comments:

This volume contains several letters from male spiritual advisors to their female charges, religious women in convents. These letters address themes such as virginity and chastity. Included are letters to abbesses (the first two, from Osbert of Clare to Adelidis, Abbess of Barking, and Peter Abelard to Heloise), to young women in convents from older male relations (Peter the Venerable to his Nieces in Marcigny and Osebert of Clare to his nieces in Barking), and writings on the duties of abbesses (another letter from Abelard to Heloise, and extracts of Goscelin of St-Bertin’s Lives of the Abbesses at Barking.

Introduction Summary:

The brief (15 pp) introduction discusses medieval views of virginity and chastity, women’s lives in convents, and the level of learning which these letters suggest women sometimes achieved. The volume also includes a longer (23 pp) interpretive essay entitled “Dead to the World?: Death and the Maiden Revisited in Medieval Women’s Convent Culture”, which considers death and ritual remembrance in convent settings during the 12th century. The auhtor suggests that through ritual and writing, women living in convents played an active role in shaping the memory of their own institutions, and of themselves.

Cataloger: MCB