Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England.(Book Review)

By NANCY BRADLEY WARREN (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2001; pp. 280. 33.50 [pounds sterling]).

IT is usual to see the communities of religious women as marginal to the cultural, social and spiritual life of later medieval England. In a world that was beginning to turn its back on the religious orders, it was they who inhabited the smallest and poorest houses far from urban centres. The difficulty of their position was compounded by Boniface VIII's bull, Periculoso (1298), which sought to enforce strict enclosure in all communities of women. In recent years Roberta Gilchrist, Sharon Elkins and others have challenged some of these assumptions, using the material record of female monasteries to re-examine the full extent of the nuns' spiritual activities and social interactions. Nancy Bradley Warren now continues this process, shifting the focus from the material to the literary remains of these communities. Drawing on a variety of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts written by or for the use of women religious, as well as those from secular sources in which they were represented, she suggests that for all their appearance of poverty and powerlessness, …