Ruling the Spirit. Claire Taylor Jones
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it was long assumed that late medieval nuns of all orders were generally Latin-illiterate, a growing body of scholarship argues for reassessing the Latinity of medieval religious women, often by adding nuance to the very notion of literacy.19 Adjusting our lens in this way allows us to move beyond reliance on women’s original compositions or reception of prose literature as a means of assessing Latin comprehension to address liturgical Latin as a unique competency. Liturgical literacy and accuracy was an essential component of the order; reading theological treatises (for women) was not.
Despite evidence of flourishing vernacular literacy, the state of Latin fluency among the Dominican women of Teutonia remains an open question. While the library collections of several Southern German convents have been studied in some detail, the vast preponderance of German-language devotional material has led scholars to focus on vernacular sources within these collections.20 Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner has conducted the most comprehensive study of the educational expectations and practices of Southern German Dominican women. She notes that recruits to Dominican convents were expected to be litterata and able to read the psalter upon entrance to the novitiate.21 The sisterbook of St. Katherine’s St. Gallen records that the Nürnberg sisters expected a novice to learn to read a little Latin from the psalter as well as singing and solmization before entering the convent.22 Dominican novices would have developed literacy either at home or in a city school.23 However, “literate” could mean anything from phonetic decoding to nuanced comprehension. Ehrenschwendtner assumes that the designation litterata did not imply understanding the Latin language but simply deciphering the signs on the page.24 In her recent study of the Observant Dominican convent of St. Katherine’s in St. Gallen, Simone Mengis largely concurs with Ehrenschwendtner.25 Latin instruction in St. Gallen was practical and performance-oriented, so successful mastery did not necessarily entail comprehension of the Latin words, only accurate recitation.
The composition of the Latin holdings of St. Katherine’s conforms to Ehrenschwendtner’s and Mengis’s assessments. Of the 161 Latin-language manuscripts, only 19 (12 percent) contained prayers, sermons, and treatises, while the rest were liturgical. None of these, nor any Latin text, are indicated as table readings in the catalog.26 It is possible that the few Latin prose manuscripts were not for the nuns at all but rather for the use of their male confessors, as Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner has argued for Altenhohenau and Simone Mengis for St. Katherine’s in St. Gallen.27 It seems not even Latin regular documents were used; St. Katherine’s owned multiple manuscripts with German translations of the Augustinian Rule and the Dominican Constitutions.28 The broad vernacularization of the order’s legislation leads Mengis to conclude that a revival of higher standards of Latin literacy among women was not part of the Observant reform program.29 Although the Dominican women of Nürnberg avidly acquired and read vernacular literature, there is no evidence that they read Latin prose.
Eva Schlotheuber argues for a more optimistic assessment of late medieval religious women’s Latin. She insists that in the Middle Ages litteratus/litterata always indicated facility in Latin language, not just phonetic literacy.30 She disagrees with the assumption that Latin-language volumes must have been intended for a male chaplain, and points to Karin Schneider’s identification of several scribes among the Dominican nuns who copied liturgical Latin fluidly and accurately.31 Schlotheuber’s more recent work on the northern German convent of Paradies bei Soest has borne out earlier claims, as her team has been able to demonstrate quite advanced levels of Latin literacy in the richly decorated choir books these women produced.32 Their study of this Dominican convent joins an explosion of recent research on the Cistercian communities of northern Germany, which similarly reveal high levels of Latin fluency, especially in the wake of the fifteenth-century reforms.33
Despite differences in tenor and emphasis, all three scholars agree that the level of Latin literacy within a convent cannot have been uniform but varied from woman to woman.34 This observation conforms to more systematic assessments of Latin literacy in late medieval English convents. David Bell outlines levels of literacy prior to the ability to compose an independent text in the target language. These levels of ability range from phonetic decoding, to basic comprehension of commonly encountered liturgical texts, to full comprehension of nonliturgical Latin.35 Performance of the liturgy involved a great deal more than Latin language competency; it required a spectrum of literacies that encompassed music and musical notation in addition to grammar and letters. Katherine Zieman describes this “liturgical literacy” as also incorporating musical ability, swift decoding of script, and good memorization. Like Mengis, she emphasizes that this form of literacy did not aim for nuanced comprehension of a text, but rather that the range of abilities were subordinated to the goal of accurate performance.36
Building on Bell’s and Zieman’s work, Anne Bagnall Yardley proposes a scale of liturgical literacy that ranges from singing the basic chants of the Divine Office from memory, to familiarity with the repertoire and ability to use the choir books, to knowledge of musical theory and even ability to compose polyphony. From consideration of the English sources, she concludes that the first two levels of ability would have been common and expected, whereas anything further was exceptional.37 Any choir nun would have been expected to be able to read not only Latin but also musical notation, in the sense that she needed to produce the sounds signified by the marks on the page. Latin literacy, like any linguistic fluency, was not an all-or-nothing game but could be acquired to varying degrees of competence. The extent to which she understood the words must have varied widely from nun to nun even within the same convent.
The paucity of Latin devotional literature in St. Katherine’s in Nürnberg does not necessarily reveal any information about the sisters’ ability to understand liturgical Latin. Indeed, sweeping generalizations about Latin fluency must give way to a more nuanced picture of varying competence, talent, and ability. In the absence of evidence that the women of a given convent wrote or read Latin tracts, we still cannot conclude that none of them understood the texts of the liturgy. As Bell, Zieman, and Yardley have argued, liturgical and prose Latin comprise two different levels of literacy, and it is entirely possible to understand the psalms of the Office without being able to read the Constitutions. Reception of prose literature cannot be used to draw conclusions about women’s engagement with the Office.
It is worth noting, however, that in the argument over medieval women’s literacy modern scholars often are picking up on the doubts of contemporaries. Fifteenth-century friars were deeply concerned by the idea that the nuns were merely parroting sounds without comprehending the words of the Office. This anxiety was motivated by an association of liturgical devotion with regular virtue. In 1454 Sister Katharina Holzschuher recorded a sermon delivered to St. Katherine’s by a Friar Alanus, who asserts, “darumb ist es nütze vnd heilsam züurstëen das man alle tag list und pet, wann die verstantnüße meret die süssen andacht, vnd wenn man verstet daz man singt, so aüßlaufft nit daz gemüte durch unzimlich züfell [It is useful and salutary to understand what you read and pray every day, since understanding increases sweet devotion, and when you understand what you sing, you do not lose your concentration to inappropriate thoughts].”38 A wandering mind is almost inevitable when singing what amounts to nonsense syllables.39 Since the choir nuns spent a hefty portion of the day singing Latin texts in the canonical hours, it was critical that this time be well spent in attentive contemplation rather than bored and mechanical rote performance, which too easily gave way to impure distraction.
I have elsewhere argued that the Observance did, in fact, witness a promotion of women’s Latin literacy that has gone unrecognized as pedagogical material. Vernacular hymn translations did not replace the Latin hymns of the Office, but instead were used pedagogically for Latin language instruction that was oriented around the goals of the reform.40 Dominican friars in Teutonia encouraged Dominican women to understand enough liturgical Latin to engage in the Divine Office intelligently and in a way that would foster spiritual devotion. Throughout the later Middle Ages, Dominican friars approached comprehension of liturgical Latin and access to prose texts as separate issues, one of which was essential for their sisters’ spiritual well-being and one of which was irrelevant. Interest in boosting women’s Latin fluency was motivated by this concern alone: that