Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

history at that time. However, Wemple’s preoccupation with these issues led her, when it
came to discussing religious women, to a focus on their roles, rights and abilities.
Towards the end of her period, the voluminous amount of conciliar decrees and the
pronouncements of reformers such as Benedict of Aniane lead her to a very pessimistic
view: her first chapter on religious women is entitled ‘The Waning Influence of Women
in the Frankish Church’. In a similar vein, her concentration on the vitae of nuns in the
early part of her period which used the standard tropes of rebellion against parental
authority and courageous struggles to retain virginity leads to a chapter on ‘The Heroic
Age of Female Asceticism’. Wemple’s narrative of achievement followed by women
suffering oppression has not yet been superseded, and remains influential.
At around the same time as Wemple published her monograph, several articles
appeared on similar themes, taking as their focus one or more aspects of dedicated life or,
as readily, one of more of the queens and abbesses for whom evidence exists. 21
Noteworthy as a further example of Wemple’s discourse of gradual repression is Jane
Tibbetts Schulenberg’s study of enclosure, ‘Strict Active Enclosure and its Effects on the
Female Monastic Experience’. 22 More recently, two monographs including considerable
material on early medieval religious women have been published. The first, JoAnn
McNamara’s Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (1996) evidently
devotes only a small proportion of its text to religious women pre-1000. Its focus on the
ways in which religious women fitted into the wider institutional structures of the
Church, and its attempts to provide a continuous narrative for these structures, make it a
not entirely satisfactory study. 23 The second, Lisa Bitel’s Women in Early Medieval
21 See in particular S.F. Wemple, ‘Female spirituality and mysticism in Frankish monasteries: Radegund,
Balthild and Aldegund’, in J.A. Nicholls and L.T. Shanks (eds.) Medieval Religious Women II:
Peaceweavers (Kalamazoo, MI, 1987) 39-53; J.A. McNamara, ‘A legacy of miracles: hagiography and
nunneries in Merovingian Gaul’, in J. Kirschner and S. Wemple (eds.), Women of the Medieval World:
Essays in Honor of John F. Mundy (London, 1985) 36-52; J.T. Schulenberg, ‘Female sanctity: public and
private roles, 500-1100’, in M. Erler and M. Kowaleski (eds.), Women and Power in the Middle Ages
(Athens, GA, 1988) 102-125.
22 J.T. Schulenberg, ‘Strict Active Enclosure and its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience’, in J.A.
Nichols and L.T. Shanks (eds.), Medieval Religious Women. I: Distant Echoes (Kalamazoo, MI, 1984) 51-
86. A further study of early medieval women’s monasticism, not mentioned elsewhere, is eadem, ‘The
Heroics of Virginity: brides of Christ and sacrificial mutilation’ in M.B. Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance (Syracuse, NY, 1986) 29-72.
23 J.A. McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA,1996).
20