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'"For hereby I hope to rouse some to piety": Books of Sisters from Convents and Sister-Houses associated with the Devotio Moderna in the Low Countries' (1995)

'"For hereby I hope to rouse some to piety": Books of Sisters from Convents and Sister-Houses associated with the Devotio Moderna in the Low Countries'

(1995)–W.F. Scheepsma–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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‘For hereby I hope to rouse some to piety’: Books of Sisters from Convents and Sister-Houses associated with the Devotio Moderna in the Low Countries+

Wybren Scheepsma

Since the twelfth century the Christian Church has been confronted with heretical as well as reforming movements, in both of which women usually played an important part. The historical connections between these phenomena are discussed in an impressive study by the German historian Herbert Grundmann.1 Since interest in women and religion in the Middle Ages has so increased in recent years, Grundmann's insights, developed in the 1930s, have come to the fore again. Grundmann formulated the following, by now famous, thesis regarding the connection between the rise of religious literature in the vernacular and the presence of a female audience: where male clergy acknowledged and appreciated the flourishing of religious fervour among women, conditions were favourable for the rise of religious literature in the vernacular.2

Grundmann's survey ends in the fourteenth century, when great Dominican authors such as Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso and Johannes Tauler wrote their mystical works and gave shape to what has been called ‘German Mysticism’. In the fifteenth century, however, there were also reforming movements in the church, as Grundmann himself points out.3 At that time the religious climate in the Low Countries and north-west Germany was dominated by the Devotio Moderna. This reforming movement, too, fostered an extensive body of religious literature in the vernacular.

This article will focus on a form of religious literature associated with the Devotio Moderna that will be referred to by the term ‘Books of Sisters’.4 These books are part of a body of vernacular as well as Latin biographies and chronicles written in the Low Countries at the end of the Middle Ages. From this extensive and complex set of texts, which has as yet hardly been studied as an interrelated whole, only those texts that contain lives of devout women from a particular convent or sister-house will be discussed here.

The Books of Sisters and the other biographical literature produced by the Devotio Moderna have nearly always been studied as chronicles of monasteries or convents, or at any rate as historiographical texts.5 Yet historians complain that the authors of the Books of Sisters lack a sense of historical perspective,6 as these writers focus virtually exclusively on the history of their own convent, concentrating on its spiritual life. One might try to resolve this contradiction by studying such historiographical or biographical literature as a historical genre in itself.7 However, an approach which recognizes that this form of literature crosses the boundary between historical and religious literature would seem to be more fruitful.8 The main aim of these texts, as of almost all the texts produced by the Modern Devotion, was to convey spiritual values.9

The Devotio Moderna as a Religious Women's Movement

Before the Books of Sisters themselves are discussed, something should first be said about the Modern Devotion as a religious reforming movement, and especially about women's role in it.10 It is well-known that in many respects the fourteenth century was a time of malaise, including religious malaise, in Western Europe. As a result, religious reforming movements wishing to restore the spiritual purity that had characterized the initial stages of Christianity sprang up everywhere in the course of the century. In the Northern and Southern Netherlands and in north-west Germany, the most influential of these movements was the Devotio Moderna.

The Modern Devotion was established in the last quarter of the fourteenth century by Geert Grote (1340-1384).11 It spread from Grote's native town of Deventer, and it became an organization with thousands of followers wherever Dutch and German were spoken. The movement can be divided into four branches. The first is that of the Brethren of the Common Life (mostly clerics and priests), who lived together in brethren-houses, and from there provided spiritual care in the world.12 The second branch is that of their female counterparts, the Sisters of the Common Life.13 Like the brethren, the sisters did not take vows, and they can therefore be regarded as semi-monastics.14 The sisters made a living by spinning and weaving. In addition, the Devotio Moderna included the Chapter of Windesheim, an Augustinian monastic order, which comprised both monasteries and convents, the movement's third and fourth branches.15

Within the bounds set by the lifestyles they had opted for, the Devotionalists

tried to realize their religious ideals. Among other things, they laid greater stress on personal spiritual life than on formal celebrations of the liturgy. The Devout had a practical and pragmatic attitude to life, which manifested itself particularly in the all-important pursuit of virtue. One of the means of achieving this goal was the use of the written word, in a receptive, reproductive and creative sense. The German term pragmatische Schriftlichkeit most clearly characterizes this attitude.16

So far research into the Devotio Moderna has focused especially on the male Devout, particularly on the Brethren of the Common Life.17 They were considered to be the ideological founders and creators of the movement, while the women were regarded as recipients.18 In this approach, the fact that the women far outnumbered the men is overlooked: on average, there were three women to every male Devout.19

Geert Grote and Johannes Brinckerinck (1359-1419), a priest from Zutphen, were the fathers of the Devout women's movement. In 1392, Brinckerinck was put in charge of the women of the House of Master Geert, which Geert Grote had founded in 1374. Only when Brinckerinck took over was the Common Life introduced there, which meant that from then on the sisters united their funds and shared their expenses.20 Around 1400, four other Houses of Sisters of the Common Life were founded in Deventer, all of which were led by the inspiring Brinckerinck.21 This made Deventer the centre of the Devout women's movement. In 1400, Johannes Brinckerinck also founded a house on a moor called Diepenveen, near Deventer. This sister-house joined the Chapter of Windesheim in 1412, and was to become the most important convent of that order. Both Johannes Brinckerinck and the convent of Diepenveen organized reforms at several convents.22

The women's movement of the Modern Devotion brought about a peak in the production of manuscripts in the Low Countries in the fifteenth century.23 Religious and ascetic texts intended for these women are estimated to have amounted to at least three quarters of the total number of extant manuscripts

containing Middle Dutch texts.24 Thousands of these manuscripts have survived, the majority of which originate from convents belonging to the Devotio Moderna.25 Most of the texts in them were translated from Latin, but there were also a number of female authors in the Modern Devotion who actually wrote spiritual texts for their fellow sisters.26 These include the writers of the Devout Books of Sisters.

The Books of Sisters from the House of Master Geert and the Convent of Diepenveen: A Provisional Survey

Up to now the term ‘Book of Sisters’ has been used without much reservation. It becomes apparent that such reservation is needed when one tries to determine the exact number of Books of Sisters the Devotio Moderna produced. At the moment, around fifteen different historiographical or biographical texts from convents or sister-houses are known to us.27 Given the present state of research, it is not possible to provide an exact definition of the general characteristics of the genre to which these texts belong. However, in order to be able to make a comparison between the various texts, I will attempt a provisional characterization of the genre, based on two important specimens from the centre of the Devout women's movement: the Books of Sisters from Diepenveen and from the House of Master Geert. As far as can be determined, these two books are the most fully developed variants of this genre. Moreover, the texts that have survived are complete and are easily accessible in modern editions. An additional reason for choosing them is that the House of Master Geert and the convent of Diepenveen were highly influential in their respective branches of the movement, and they may have influenced the Books of Sisters or similar texts in other convents.28

The Book of Sisters from the House of Master Geert, known as ‘Manuscript G’,2930 contains 60 lives of sisters from the convent, and 5 chapters describing episodes from the history of the house. The sisters described all died in the period 1398-1456, and the watermarks suggest that MS G must have been written between 1469 and 1485. None the less, the editor of this Book of Sisters, De Man, assumes that this manuscript was a copy, because it contains a large number of corrections and words that have been crossed out. In his view, the original of this Book of Sisters was written between 1475 and 1485. However, it seems just as logical to assume that MS G was the original, precisely because of the large number of mistakes and deletions it contains.

De Man is convinced that all the texts were written by one person, with one exception: the life of Sister Lutgert van Buderick (d.1453), which was written by Rector Rudolf Dier van Muiden (d.1459).31 The author of the remaining texts is anonymous, but she must have been a sister from the House; she constantly refers to the community of sisters, and regularly uses the words ‘us’ and ‘we’. The writer, as it were, looks back at the history of her House. Her most important source is the information communicated to her orally by older sisters who had known the deceased sisters personally.32 As the lives of the sisters who died around 1400 are rather sketchy, what was still remembered about them at the time the lives were written down must have faded to a large extent. This means that the Book of Sisters was probably not begun before c.1450.

The collection under discussion here regularly refers to another book (that is, a manuscript) containing biographies of sisters, which was also available in the House.33 The practice of writing lives of deceased sisters from this House appears to have continued after 1456, the last year mentioned in the extant Book of Sisters. This is proved by the existence of a Latin life of Sister Ysentrude van Mekeren (d.1470), which was almost certainly translated from

Middle Dutch.34 Unfortunately, the original text from what may have been a second volume of or an appendix to the Book of Sisters from this House has not survived.

To give an impression of what the lives from the Books of Sisters are like, the complete life of Sister Katharina Hughen (d.1411) is as follows. It is fairly short, probably because not much was known about her any more:

Good sister Katherine was far along in years when she came to the sisters, for she was already over fifty years old. She was an ardent and Devout person and took pains - because she had entered the Lord's vineyard in her eleventh hour - to give herself all the more ardently to the virtues, for she had spent her time in the world foolishly. She tried now therefore to retrieve twice as much: Just as earlier she had served the world with everything that was in her, so now she served our dear Lord with everything that was in her. She had once lived with people who were great in the world's eyes, and there she had grown accustomed to much worldliness and done all to serve her own pleasure. But when she came to join the sisters, she converted herself wholly to God and gave herself over to great humility and lowliness, as if she neither had nor had ever had great possessions in the world. For she saw what she had done and therefore counted as nothing what she now did in turn. Because she had joined fully in the idle pleasures of this world, she possessed all kinds of beautiful jewellery; this she brought along and gave to our Lady or elsewhere, as there was need. She was very loyal to our house. Because she wanted so very much that the sisters should receive her earthly possessions, she held on so powerfully in her final illness that she nearly died without the holy sacrament.35

The shorter the period of time that has lapsed since the deaths of the sisters, the longer the lives become. The style and purport of these lives, however, is not very different from those of the life just quoted. After a brief reference to the sister's descent and to her life before she entered the convent, a description of her spiritual life is given. The sisters' good qualities are discussed by means of illustrative anecdotes. For instance, Alijt ten Sande (d.1439) was so chaste and undefiled that at the age of twenty she still thought that children were dug up from holes in the ground.36 The sisters' shortcomings are also described without reservation, because they are no more than obstacles on the way to virtue. This means that the lives present an ideal which can be attained by ordinary people. This is an essential difference between the lives of sisters and saints' lives, of which they are strongly reminiscent in other respects.37

The Prologue at once makes clear the aim of this Book of Sisters:

We like to tell about the virtues of our poor and humble sisters, so much more the amazing because such are not often to be found among these poor and partly rural folk. Yet they possessed the right and true virtues, so purely indeed as if they had seen and read them right out of Holy Scripture and the saints' lives. But it was the Holy Spirit, who filled them, who had also taught and illumined them; and just as they were illumined, so they continued to illumine others, one in obedience, another in humility, a third in resignation, and a fourth in sisterly love, while the others seemed devoured by the earnestness of the house of God.38

This call to virtue and religious enthusiasm should be seen in the context of a general attempt to strengthen spiritual life which took place at the end of the fifteenth century, and which, among other things, appears to have generated the enormous production of manuscripts referred to earlier.39 By describing the lives of the old sisters, the writer wants to revive the religious zeal that

characterized the early stages of the House. She points out that, in contrast to the present sisters, their exemplary predecessors had indeed been capable of living spiritual lives in the same place and under virtually identical circumstances:

Let us listen with inner desire to how these Devout maidens of Christ, our fellow sisters, did their exercises, and not imagine it impossible to imitate what they did before us in this same place and at nearly the same time [my italics, WFS]. Moreover, when we describe and take in the lives and morals of good people, they seem in a certain sense to go on living after death, and they awaken many from living death to true life.40

I will now go on to discuss the Book of Sisters from the Convent of Saint Mary and Saint Agnes at Diepenveen.41 The mere fact that two vernacular versions of the book have come down to us makes it an exceptional work. One of these versions was owned by the Diepenveen convent itself (MS DV); this manuscript was written by Sister Griet Essink in 1524.42 The second version was part of the library of the House of Master Geert in Deventer (Manuscript D), and was made in 1534.43 Both versions contain several dozen lives of sisters of the convent who died between 1407 - the year in which Sister Zwedera van Rechteren, the first sister mentioned, died - and 1494. The Diepenveen version adds a number of lives of sisters who died in the years up to 1504. This version, furthermore, contains a life of Johannes Brinckerinck, which is at the same time a chronicle of the early stages of Diepenveen's history.44 The length of the lives in the Deventer version is generally only about two-thirds that of the lives in the Diepenveen version. What appears to have been left out in the Deventer version are mainly details concerning the convent of Diepenveen and monastic life in general.45 The order in which the lives are presented in

this version is also different.46 For clarity's sake discussion of the complicated relation between the two versions will not be developed further here.47

As far as structure is concerned, the Diepenveen lives can roughly be divided into three parts.48 The first part concerns the period preceding the sister's convent life, and centres on her conversion. This part is told chronologically. The second part concerns the sister's life in the convent and discusses her virtues. Here the story is no longer told in chronological order, but the sister's virtues are usually ordered thematically, and are discussed through anecdotes. In the last part of each life, which deals with the sister's death, chronology is again strictly adhered to. The process of dying is described very precisely, as it is at this point that the languishing sister has proved to be able to persevere in virtue until death.

The fact that the structure of the lives is the same might lead one to suspect that they were all written by one author, but this is not the case. The texts that the Diepenveen and Deventer versions have in common are now supposed to have been written by two anonymous authors;49 it seems likely that the additions in the Diepenveen version were made by a third author, possibly the copyist Griet Essink.50 Like the author of MS G, these writers must undoubtedly have been nuns from the same community as the sisters described. This would seem to be indicated by the authors' use of ‘we’, as well as their knowledge of certain details concerning life at Diepenveen. Both versions are sixteenth-century copies of a collection which was written after c.1470. Separate individual lives may well have been written before the collection was made. At any rate, it had been customary at the convent of Diepenveen to record important statements by rectors and fellow sisters from a very early stage in its existence.51 Such dicta may have formed the basis for the lives.

Only the Diepenveen version of this Book of Sisters has a prologue and an epilogue.52 The prologue reads as follows:

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit I intend to write and compile something on the life and death of our venerable Father Johannes Brinckerinck. I will also write about a number of devout plants that have shot up in his orchard and blossomed there. As it is impossible to describe all, I intend to gather only a few of the many virtues here, so that we may imitate their virtue and example. For Saint Paul says ‘For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us’ [Rom. 15:4]. What follows now is also intended for the benefit of others who are wiser and more sensitive of disposition than I, so that everyone who reads this or to whom it is read will say a short prayer for me, for hereby I hope to rouse some to piety.53

As in the prologue to the Book of Sisters from the House of Master Geert, the moral aim of the book is expressed here and the importance of the virtues described is pointed out. This aim is restated in the epilogue:

Nobody should think that there are not more sisters whose lives we ought to describe. Many devout sisters have died in this place and amongst them there were many whose virtues would definitely be worth recording. But if I wanted to describe the virtues of all the sisters, then I would not be finished in a hundred years. Let us therefore keep in mind these few things as an example and realize that imitating them will make a great enough demand on our weakness.54

Genre and Function

We have now looked at two important Devout Books of Sisters. On the basis of these two examples, a list of the features that would seem to be characteristic of the genre and its function can be drawn up.55 Hopefully, this set will serve as a point of reference for the study of similar texts in the future.56 Six main characteristics can be distinguished:

 

1.As a rule, Books of Sisters are texts written by, for and about Devout sisters. Occasional exceptions to this basic rule, however, can easily be found, as is shown by the inclusion of the life of Johannes Brinckerinck in the Diepenveen Book of Sisters, as well as by the fact that a life written by Rector Rudolf Dier was included in the book from the House of Master Geert. These texts too, however, were edited and collected by sisters.
2.Books of Sisters are sets of texts in which a number of lives of deceased sisters from one specific convent or house are collected. Just as a train can have any number of carriages coupled to its locomotive, a Book of Sisters can have any number of lives coupled to its prologue.57 Each of the manuscripts discussed in this paper was written by one copyist. The texts in this books were apparently written in one go. They were made accessible through an index listing the names of the sisters.
3.As a rule, the authors of the Books of Sisters are anonymous, but it is certain that they were part of the community whose history they record. Only in the case of the possible author of the lives that were added to the Diepenveen MS DV after 1494 can a name be suggested: that of the copyist Sister Griet Essink. Nowhere, however, does she claim to be the author. The authors of Books of Sisters put themselves at the service of their convents and wrote their sisters' lives on behalf of the entire community they belonged to.
4.Books of Sisters have usually come down to us in one manuscript only, which was owned by the convent discussed in the book. They aimed at an audience which did not extend beyond the convent's own spiritual community. This meant that they offered the women reading them or listening to them being read a possibility for identification which was realistic and
attainable. The fact that the books were written in the vernacular also clearly points to a female audience, as women usually did not understand Latin.58
5.Devout Books of Sisters were all begun shortly after 1470. In its present form MS G was definitely written after c.1456, and most probably a few years later. Although the two versions of the Diepenveen Book of Sisters date from 1524 and 1534, respectively, they go back to an exemplar that was written after 1478. After c.1505 no new lives were added to the Diepenveen Book of Sisters.59 The late date of the copies of this Book shows that there was still a clear interest in the lives in later years.60
6.The function of the Devout Books of Sisters is made very clear in their prologues and epilogues: the virtues of the deceased sisters are described so that they may be imitated by their spiritual heirs. Even though the subject matter of the Books of Sisters is the history of a convent and its inhabitants, their primary goal is parenetic.61

 

These six points obviously only constitute a rough and provisional characterization of the Devout Book of Sisters, which will hopefully be refined and extended in the future. Much more research needs to be done, particularly into the structure and the spiritual concepts that are particular to this extraordinary type of women's literature.62 It is very likely that a comparison between the Devout Books of Sisters and a parallel phenomenon in the German-speaking areas, the so-called Schwesternbücher, would yield significant results in this respect. Schwesternbücher are fourteenth-century Books of Sisters from the circles of the Dominican order.63 Just as the Devotio Moderna marked a religious

revival in the fifteenth century, the German Dominicans marked a reformation in the fourteenth century. This so-called ‘German mysticism’ brought about an explosion of religious literature in the vernacular intended for women. Like the Books of Sisters produced by the Devotio Moderna, the nine extant Schwesternbücher stand out because they too were written by, for and about women. Even though no research has yet been done into parallels and differences between Schwesternbücher and Devout Books of Sisters, such a comparison will be fruitful, especially since most manuscripts of Schwesternbücher date from the fifteenth century and were read in convents that had recently been reformed.64

Another avenue that should be explored is a comparison between the Books of Sisters and the Latin Libri Fratrum or Books of Brothers produced by the Devotio Moderna.65 In particular, a comparison with these texts will shed more light on the specifically female aspects of the Books of Sisters. In this connection, the relation between the Devout Books of Brothers, the old Vitae Patrum and the Libri Fratrum of reforming orders like the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, are also interesting. All these reforming movements attempted to conform to the religious ideals of the early Christians and drew inspiration from their writings.66 Research into the Devout Libri Fratrum as a literary genre, however, has as yet hardly begun, as the complexity of the Latin historiography of the Devotio Moderna is perhaps even greater than that of the vernacular texts.


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