Spiritual Economies Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England
Nancy Bradley Warren Winner of the 2004 Gustave O. Arlt Award in
the Humanities "An ambitious study of the actual and symbolic place
of women and femininity in fifteenth-century English monastic,
literary, and political culture."--Nicholas Watson, University of
Western Ontario "Impressive. . . . Warren is careful to honor the
integrity of religious life while looking at the multiple forces
that influenced it, and that it influenced as well."--Sharon
Elkins, Wellesley College "The sheer range of Warren's stimulating,
provocative discussion . . . is impressive. The richness of her
sources, a number of which are examined here for the first time,
will make her book an important port-of-call."--"English Historical
Review" From its creation in the early fourteenth century to its
dissolution in the sixteenth, the nunnery at Dartford was among the
richest in England. Although obliged to support not only its own
community but also a priory of Dominican friars at King's Langley,
Dartford prospered. Records attest to the business skill of the
Dartford nuns, as they managed the house's numerous holdings of
land and property, together with the rents and services owed them.
That the Dartford nuns were capable businesswomen is not
surprising, since the house was also a center of female education.
For Nancy Bradley Warren, the story of Dartford exemplifies the
vibrancy of nuns' material and spiritual lives in later medieval
England. Revising the long-held view that fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century English nunneries were impoverished both
financially and religiously, Warren clarifies that the women in
female monastic communities like Dartford were not woefully
incompetent at managing their affairs. Instead, she reveals the
complex role of female monasticism in diverse systems of production
and exchange. Like the nuns at Dartford, women religious in late
medieval England were enmeshed in material, symbolic, political,
and spiritual economies that were at times in harmony and at other
times in conflict with each other. Building on emerging
cross-disciplinary trends in feminist scholarship on medieval
religion, Warren extends ongoing debates about textual and economic
constructions of women's identities to the rarely considered
evidence of monastic theory and practice. To this end, "Spiritual
Economies" emphasizes that the cloister was not impermeable. As
worldly forces such as economic trends and political conflicts
affected life in the nunneries, so too did religious practices have
political impact. In breaking down the convent wall, Warren also
succeeds in breaching the boundaries separating the material and
the symbolic, the religious and the secular, the literary and the
historical. She turns to a wide range of sources--from legislative
texts, court records, and financial accounts to devotional
treatises and political propaganda--to explore the centrality of
female monasticism to the flowering of female spirituality and to
the later Middle Ages at large. Nancy Bradley Warren teaches
English at Utah State University. She is the author of "Women of
God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict,
1380-1600," also available from the University of Pennsylvania
Press. The Middle Ages Series 2001 280 pages 6 x 9 ISBN
978-0-8122-3583-8 Cloth $65.00s 42.50 World Rights History,
Religion, Women's/Gender Studies Short copy: "The sheer range of
Warren's stimulating, provocative discussion . . . is impressive.
The richness of her sources, a number of which are examined here
for the first time, will make her book an important
port-of-call."--"English Historical Review"
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