Birgittine Monasteries in the Low Countries as communities of learning and sites of knowledge transmission in a European context (c. 1440-1600).

Within half a century after the death of St Birgitta of Sweden (c. 1303–73) and the foundation of her monastery in Vadstena in 1370 the Order of the Most Holy Saviour (Ordo sanctissimi Salvatoris) spread to Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Poland, and as far east as Estonia. Attached to each convent of nuns was a small community of brothers who provided the cura monialium. The women and the men lived separately under the governance of an abbess. In 1437 Mariënwater, the first double monastery in the Low Countries, was founded in Rosmalen near Den Bosch at the northern border of the Duchy of Brabant. Thanks to a wealth of vocations and the generosity of highly placed benefactors, the Birgittine Order flourished in the Low Countries like nowhere else. In the forty years between 1446 and 1485 no fewer than eight convents were founded out of Mariënwater, the mother-house, of which Mariëntroon in Dendermonde in East Flanders was the second-most important in terms of the number of manuscripts that were owned or produced in these convents. The establishment of the Birgittine Order had a huge impact on the literary, intellectual and religious culture of the region. Ulla Sander-Olsen's preliminary inventory (1989–90) ascribes over two hundred, yet largely unstudied, manuscripts — in Dutch and in Latin (and occasionally even Greek and Hebrew) — to the convent of Mariënwater, and an additional fifty to the convent of Mariëntroon. The majority of the books held there and in other Birgittine convents were produced by the nuns in their own scriptoria. They not only copied manuscripts but also illuminated and bound them, and even produced woodcuts and devotional prints to decorate them. This activity made the Birgittine nuns one of the largest monastic producers of manuscripts in the Low Countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and also placed them among the first users of the new technology of the printing press. Given the vast corpus of extant books they possessed and the unique devotional culture they maintained with its specific liturgical and religious texts that circulated throughout Europe in Latin as well as the various vernaculars, the sisters of the Birgittine Order provide an excellent starting point to study women's multifaceted engagement in the literary, spiritual, and learned culture in an international context. Their book production also offers an exceptional opportunity to understand how female religious communities functioned as 'textual communities' and 'communities of learning'. Building on the preliminary work done for the online, open-source database of manuscripts related to women in the Low Countries (c. 1250–1600) that I developed together with John Arblaster (Revealing Female Participation in Literary Culture; BOF KP 2020), this project will expand and improve the content of the database by conducting research into Birgittine primary sources (manuscripts, early prints), and by beta-testing the software to optimize its functionality and search functions. The information in the database will subsequently form the foundation for quantitative and qualitative studies of: 1) the construction, use, and evolution of Birgittine library collections and of the individual and collective efforts of the people instrumental in it; 2) the collaboration and the exchange of literature and knowledge within the convent walls, as well as with people in other religious and secular communities; 3) the transfer of religious literature and ideas through the network of Birgittine monasteries, both within the Low Countries and within the larger European context. By demonstrating the complexity and plurality of the sisters' literacy and learning and their role in the international circulation of books and knowledge, this project will increase the visibility of Birgittine nuns in the richly variegated literary and religious landscape of Europe, and thus will help re-evaluate the role of women in premodern intellectual culture.

Keywords:HISTORY OF BOOKS, DUTCH LITERATURE, LATIN CHRISTIAN TEXTS, RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Disciplines:Early modern history, Medieval history, Literatures in Dutch, Literatures in Latin, Study of Christianity