The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages

by Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis

Overview

In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice-liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190851309
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

KATIE ANN-MARIE BUGYIS is a historian of medieval religious women and Assistant Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the co-editor of two volumes, including Medieval Cantors and their Craft and Taken Seriously: Women Intellectuals, Professionals, and Community Leaders of the Medieval World

Table of Contents

List of Tables List of Figures List of Maps List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction: Curates of Nuns Chapter One: Memory-Keepers Chapter Two: Pastors Chapter Three: Evangelists Chapter Four: Confessors Chapter Five: Intercessors Conclusion: Ministers of Christ Appendix A: Analysis of the Alterations to Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 155 Appendix B: Edition of the Second Prayer for an Abbess in Cambridge, St. John's College, MS C.18 (68), fols. 230r-234r Bibliography Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

"This is unquestionably a challenging volume, based on an impressively broad and thorough examination of the relevant manuscript source material, which all future scholars in the field will need to consult at the outset of their research. Bugyis has also taken care to provide us with many helpful aids in order to amplify her text and assist in clarifying her conclusions." — Joan Greatrex, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

"Bugyis painstakingly collects evidence to show not decline but continuity in pastoral and liturgical practices of nuns. She examines a wide range of sources, but the most important are surviving liturgical books, subjected to rigorous and at times brilliant paleographical, codicological, and textual analysis." — Bruce L. Venarde, Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

"Her work should stand as a very worthwhile discussion..." — Veronica O'Mara, Early Modern Women

"This is indeed a 'groundbreaking' study as the cover succinctly suggests. ... This is unquestionably a challenging volume, based on an impressively broad and thorough examination of the relevant manuscript source material, which all future scholars in the field will need to consult at the outset of their research." — Joan Greatrex, University of Cambridge, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

"At last, here is a book on the liturgical practice at Benedictine nunneries in England. ...The impact of this thoughtful study will be felt far and wide.... All in all The Care of Nuns is an admirable and innovative study of active and creative participation of nuns in their liturgies that deserves to be read widely." — Elisabeth van Houts, University of Cambridge, The Medieval Review

"Bugyis's The Care of Nuns is a model of sophistication in its interpretation and explication of sources as well as a testament to the enormous amount of archival work completed by its author, who offers new insights into the medieval monastic tradition. It also encourages readers to broaden and enrich their understanding of pastoral work in the history of the Christian tradition." — American Society of Church History's Brewer Prize

"Katie Bugyis's impressive new book The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages, has a revisionist project at its heart. In a monograph characterized by careful parsing of evidence from the surviving liturgical books, hagiographic literature, mortuary rolls, cartularies, and seals from communities of Benedictine women in England in the central Middle Ages, Bugyis builds a meticulous case to support her thesis that these women performed ministerial roles including but not limited to liturgically reading the gospels, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayer." — Marie Schilling Grogan, Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, ABR

"Bugyis is a gifted writer...The Care of Nuns is an excellent example of the possibilities for recovering women from surviving texts, incunabula, charts, etc. that scholars love to work with. Scholars will value all the detailed evidence Bugyis gathered for their own work. Needless to say, every monastic library ought to have a copy in their collection." — Laura Swan, Magistra: A Journal of Women's Spirituality in History

"There is much to commend this book. Its meticulous and rich use of historical sources is an example of the kind of careful scholarship that needs to be practiced by monastic scholars." — Review in Religion & Theology

"The Care of Nuns should prove useful to researchers interested in female liturgy and religiosity. It provides a thought-provoking and fact-based analysis of the ministerial roles women religious performed in central medieval England, that undoubtedly will stimulate further research on how nuns could exercise liturgical and pastoral authority and agency." — Jirki Thibaut, History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland network

"In this provocative and deeply learned work, Katie Bugyis offers a compelling account of women's liturgical practice in England, one that considers nuns as liturgical actors, and not (as they have more generally been viewed) as passive recipients of men's spiritual care. In so doing, she builds on earlier studies of female religious life and devotion, while simultaneously moving into new and exciting territory: her book works to tease out of the sources evidence of women's pastoral care and even 'ministry' in medieval monastic life. This important book dramatically revises our knowledge of medieval religious women; their authority within the church; their literacy, reading, and book production; and their spiritual self-governance." —Fiona Griffiths, Professor of History, Stanford University

"The Care of Nunsis one of those rare books that radically change the received version of a subject. By illuminating how religious women in the central Middle Ages acted as ministers in their own right, Dr. Bugyis opens up a whole new vision not only of the role of medieval women, but of the central Middle Ages itself." —Gary Macy, John Nobili, S.J., Professor of Theology, Santa Clara University

"This book is a remarkable achievement, one that shows how close attention to often overlooked sources can reshape the stories we tell about the past. Bugyis brings the nuns she studies alive through seemingly mundane sources, demonstrating the tension between contemporary prescriptions for their activities and what the materials they produced and used daily show us that they did. The result is a methodological model for writing history from 'the bottom up' and an invaluable contribution to the study of Christian monasticism." —Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History and the Study of Religion

"Anyone interested in medieval religious women, liturgical practice, or the history of the church will benefit from reading this thoughtful and perceptively argued book." — Speculum 98/4

From the Publisher