Medieval Women's Letters, 1000–1400

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000–1400 Between about 1000 and 1400, women across Europe used letters to console, cajole, petition, patronize, inform and inquire. They wrote to protect the interests of their family, to gain protection or freedom for their monastery, to admonish and advise people in authority, to seek patronage and advice, and to forge alliances. The letters that remain from medieval European women are thus a rich resource. They offer a vista upon the ways in which some women – typically elites – were able to negotiate the world in which they lived, and the hierarchies into which they were born. As communicative tools, designed for a recipient, they can reveal much about relationships in a given period and, by reading them, we can glimpse how the sender constructed her place in the world in relation to those around her. We can also see the strategies she deployed in her efforts to secure outcomes for herself and her household. Given that in this period sources written by men dominate the extant record, the letters of medieval women, taken collectively, offer a unique chance to explore how women constructed their own authority and managed their affairs. The centuries following 1000 CE witnessed the consolidation or emergence of major institutions of patriarchal authority, such as the papacy, royal administrative bodies and universities, and most textual production therefore favoured male interests. The growing needs of these institutions probably catalyzed the codification of letter writing norms and prompted the development of formal avenues for training in epistolarity which were in turn monopolized by men. The evidence of medieval women’s letters is therefore all the more valuable. Nevertheless, as much as we might seek to find real voices of medieval women in these sources, it is important to be mindful of the 1 K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. myriad points of mediation that took place in the making of these letters. As Laurie Finke has observed, ‘medieval epistolary prose does not support a distinction between a public realm of business affairs dominated by men and a private domain of emotion and sentiment presided over by women.’1 In the modern era the letter comes to be understood as a feminized genre, but this was not the case in the Middle Ages. As our discussion reveals, the surviving letters by women are mostly lordly or spiritual. Medieval women’s letters were not ‘personal’, then, but rather were highly constructed formal texts that aimed to intervene in a given situation. They were also precious artifacts. Parchment and paper were difficult to procure and relatively expensive. Letters were written according to formal epistolary rules and required literacy in Latin, especially before the mid-thirteenth century. Consequently correspondents normally deployed scribes to help them compose and write. Senders also needed to arrange their own means of carrying missives to their destination as there were no standard postal mechanisms. Thus, each stage of the making of a letter – composition, writing, delivery – required means and resources. As a result, letter writing was an activity restricted to the few. The surviving body of medieval women’s correspondence bears out this impression of epistolarity as an elite and expensive activity. Certainly, only particular types of correspondence were preserved. Just as with letters written by men during the same period, those that remain today tend to have been assessed positively at their time to be worthy of preservation. Our extant collection, then, consists of letters that were prized for their literary qualities, were written by an eminent author, or contained important administrative 1 Laurie A. Finke, Women's Writing in English: Medieval England (London New York: Longman, 1999), 117. 2 K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. information that needed to be archived. Women’s inclusion in those categories is sometimes notable in itself. It is probable, however, that other types of letters that have not survived also proliferated in the Middle Ages, especially ones that deployed cheaper and more temporary epistolary technologies such as wax tablets and bark. The different types of medieval women’s letters that we discuss below necessitate different reading approaches. Medieval religious women’s epistles survive commonly in literary letter collections, and so what is left to us are frequently letters that were prized for their writerly qualities, as well as the fame of the author. In order to understand their cultural and gendered work, we therefore need to pay heed to their rhetorical properties and their wealth of biblical allusions. In what follows, we perform close readings of some of the key surviving letters and we aim to show the way in which these female authors negotiated dictaminal norms to produce particularly gendered forms of self-authorization. They did this by figuring themselves within the frame of religious history, accounting for their own voice within a broader typological imaginary. The ‘Lordly’ letters we examine are different. They are far more numerous, often having been preserved in administrative records as part of a legal imperative, political interest, or dynastic strategy. With the exception of the highest political register of correspondence, these tend to be less self-consciously literary than the spiritual letters we discuss. In this case, instead, we examine patterns and incidence, as well as performing close readings, to gauge the ways they enabled aristocratic women to maintain and manage their kinship networks, express and exercise authority, and negotiate moments of personal and political contingency. The boundaries of our chronology in this chapter stretch from the early emergence, in the eleventh century, of a formalized theory of letter writing in Latin, the ars dictaminis, to 3 K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. the establishment of a less formal, genre of vernacular letters by the end of the fourteenth century. Within these bounds, we examine women’s participation in both the discourse of formal Latin epistolarity, and the new opportunities offered by vernacular letters from the mid thirteenth century onwards. The growth of vernacular epistolarity, we argue, was neither particular to women, nor the origin of women’s epistolarity. However, it did permit a new social stratum of women —and men— to take part in letter writing: a change that would contribute to the flourishing of commercial women’s correspondence in the following centuries, and gradually free correspondents from some of the mediating factors of production that underpinned Latin letters. Medieval Epistolary Materiality The production of a letter in the Middle Ages took resources well beyond most of the population, male and female.2 The sender typically belonged to an institution of means, such as a monastery or a court, or a significant aristocratic household. The most permanent and costly materials of production were parchment, i.e. prepared animal skin, or paper. Parchment was the hardest wearing and more commonly available of the two, although it required intensive investment of time and money to produce.3 Producing letters on parchment 2 However, note the interesting example of letters scratched into strips of birch bark that have been found in archaeological contexts in Novgorod. See Mary Garrison, ""Send More Socks": On Mentality and the Preservation Context of Medieval Letters," in New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. Marco Mostert, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). The accidental survival of these letters suggests circumstantially the possibility of a range of other epistolarities operating within the Middle Ages. 3 H. E. Bell, "The Price of Books in Medieval England," The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society s4, XVII, no. 3 (1936); Helmut Gneuss, "More Old English from Manuscripts," in Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach (Tempe: ACMRS in collaboration with Brepols, 2008); Eric Kwakkel, "Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation," in The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Thanks to Anne Holloway for these references. 4 K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. therefore implied some degree of intent to preserve the epistle. For this reason, parchment is the most common material of extant letters in royal archives, such as those found in The National Archives of the United Kingdom. The Archives preserve several thousand originals and enrolled copies of letters, the vast majority of which are on parchment, including several hundred women’s letters from our period of interest. These letters concern matters of legal and financial importance and constitute an official record of related requests, commands and transactions, which suggests an explanation for the investment inherent in their materiality. Similarly, letters collected and preserved in monastic letter books typically had some bearing on the corporate life of the community, whether

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