"Against the Custom": Hagiographical Rewriting and Female Abbatial Leadership at Mid-Eleventh-Century Remiremont

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of a recently identified campaign of hagiographic writing from the mid-eleventh-century monastery of Remiremont to reconstruct how this female convent positioned itself at a time when clerical resistance to the lifestyle and autonomy of non-Bened...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Vanderputten, Steven 1976- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brepols 2021
In: The journal of medieval monastic studies
Year: 2021, Volume: 10, Pages: 41-66
IxTheo Classification:KAE Church history 900-1300; high Middle Ages
KBG France
KCA Monasticism; religious orders
KCD Hagiography; saints
NBE Anthropology
Further subjects:B female abbatial leadership
B Networking
B Remiremont
B Memory Culture
B hagiographical rewriting
B Luxeuil
B Exemption
B WOMEN'S MONASTICISM
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Summary:The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of a recently identified campaign of hagiographic writing from the mid-eleventh-century monastery of Remiremont to reconstruct how this female convent positioned itself at a time when clerical resistance to the lifestyle and autonomy of non-Benedictine communities was gaining momentum. In a first stage it looks at the three hagiographies from this campaign and how they reveal a cohesive strategy to drastically review the abbey’s narrative of origins. In a second it reconstructs how their argument fits into Abbess Oda’s (before 1045-1065/70) governance strategy and how that strategy was influenced by historical leadership choices at the nearby male houses of Luxeuil and Lure. And in a final one it considers memories of abbatial agency and discourses of communal identity at ninth- and tenth-century Remiremont, and how these influenced the abbess and her associates. In doing all these things, this study reveals that the abbey's leadership deployed a multi-faceted strategy to secure Remiremont's independence, taking ownership of its identity narrative at a critical juncture in its existence.
ISSN:2034-3523
Contains:Enthalten in: The journal of medieval monastic studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1484/J.JMMS.5.125358