| This dissertation takes as its starting point the intimate involvement of religion in the marketplace and the marketplace in religion in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. In such an environment, nunneries as religious communities were also very much social institutions involved in material practices. Additionally, women's monasticism, so little studied in comparison to secular female spirituality, is the source of far-reaching interpretative schemes used to make meaning from the relationships of the interconnected material and spiritual realms.;The study explores the ways in which women religious as individuals and nunneries as institutions were involved in material, symbolic, and spiritual systems of exchange. To this end, it examines archival sources, monastic rules, devotional texts, and sources traditionally designated as "literary" in light of the works of cultural anthropologists and theorists who combine psychoanalysis, historical materialism, and philosophy. Chapters 1 and 2 treat female monasticism "from the inside." The first chapter analyzes obedientiaries' accounts, court records, and letters to demonstrate that the quotidian, material practices of nuns both fit into and disturbed the structures of female monasticism set up in profession services and visitation documents. The second chapter addresses the debate concerning vernacular translations of religious texts, tracing the impact of political and religious unrest on women's monasticism. It argues that some Middle English translations of monastic texts attempt to harness the socially-transformative powers of translation to preserve masculine power and clerical privilege, while others emphasize the translation process's empowering possibilities for women.;Chapters 3 and 4 turn the perspective around to consider the social impact of female monasticism beyond the cloister walls. The third chapter reveals the ways in which textual portrayals of female monasticism present cultural anxieties about women's productivity and simultaneously present solutions to such anxieties. It then explores mobilizations of monastic signifiers by women themselves and by those seeking to regulate women's conduct. The final chapter analyzes the circulation of stories of good women, which have much in common with idealized visions of female monasticism, as commodities in textual transactions between writers, patrons, and authorial predecessors in the increasingly professional fifteenth-century culture of writing. |
