Gender, authority, and monastic work

Abstract

This chapter examines the negotiation of gender and authority in the governance of a women’s monastery in late medieval Germany. Arrangements for the direction of female monasteries reflected gendered assumptions about governance as a primarily masculine preserve, as religious women relied upon clerical officials to provide various spiritual and material services. The nuns of the Cistercian monastery of Holy Cross, near Brunswick, jointly managed the spiritual and economic affairs of their monastery with a senior cleric, the provost. The Konventstagebuch or ‘convent diary’, a narrative of convent life written by an anonymous nun from Holy Cross in the final decades of the fifteenth century, offers glimpses into the inner workings of convent life and how the interdependent responsibilities of successive abbesses and their provosts were negotiated in practice. By focusing attention into how these senior monastic officials worked together, or in tension, this chapter examines the scope for and limitations of female authority within the institutional structures of joint monastic governance.

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