Date/Time
Date(s) - 4 Feb 2014
6:00 PM - 7:15 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
The next meeting of the University Seminar on Medieval Studies for the 2013-2014 academic year will take place on Tuesday, February 4, from 6:00-7:30pm in Room 2 of Faculty House (Columbia University). Please note the change from the usual 5:30pm start time. (The talks this semester will all start at 6 pm.) Alison Beach, of Ohio State University and the Institute for Advanced Study, will speak on “The Dis-orderly Women of the Hirsau Reform.”
Recent research on monastic reform has highlighted the role that religious women played in the spiritual and intellectual revival of the central Middle Ages. Scholars in the fields of medieval monasticism, intellectual history, paleography, and gender studies have noted a connection between reform and female visibility in the surviving texts and manuscripts from this period. The traditional narrative of the historical development of monasticism assumes that male forms of religious life were “normative” and that women’s religious practice was imitative or derivative. Hirsau’s women, however, exercised considerable agency in shaping their own forms of religious life. “Female” patterns could also function as models for men’s communities, and not always the other way around. The institutional focus of the historical chronicles penned by reforming monks, however, so central to previous histories of the Hirsau phenomenon, has obscured or distorted the experiences of Hirsau’s women. The first-generation reformers tolerated a large degree of spontaneity and openness among the women in its broader orbit, including forms of religious life practiced by lay women both in households and on the margins of more formal religious communities. Most of the reform’s chroniclers, however, wrote retrospectively, after the most turbulent period of reform. In this context, the spiritual impulses of seemingly independent and charismatic women had to be shown to be orderly, tending toward the formation of an institution. My presentation will move beyond the narratives of the movement’s monk-historians to consider both textual and material evidence for the experiences of Hirsau’s women, and offer a revised narrative that takes them seriously as both agents and subjects of reform.