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.

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9780190851316

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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

Author Information

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

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