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Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries

The `Modern Devotion', the Canonesses of Windesheim, and their Writings

Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries
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In the last decades of the fourteenth century a new religious movement arose in the Northern Low Countries, that came to be known as the Modern Devotion. It became to influence religious life in a great part of Europe very thoroughly, especially in the fifteenth century. Like former religious movements, this one also attracted thousands of women. One could even speak of a second movement of religious women in the Northern Low Countries, the first one being dated in the thirteenth century and located in the Southern Low Countries. Research did not pay much attention to the women of the Modern Devotion. The present book tries to fill this lacuna. It deals with all the known mystical and religious texts the canonesses of the Chapter of Windesheim produced. These sisters from the monastic branch of the Modern Devotion may be regarded as models of the female variant of the spirituality of the whole movement. The texts written by canonesses as Salome Sticken, Alijt Bake and Jacomijne Costers are placed within the context of daily life in a Windesheim convent. The sisterbook of the leading convent of Diepenveen is an inexhaustable source for historical information about the life of this sisters, as it is an important normative literary work in itself. The anonymous sisterbook as well as the authors Sticken, Bake and Costers all wanted to improve religious life in their own convent, but are not consistent at all in their approach. Bake especially was to be confronted with the limits the male leaders of the Chapter of Windesheim dictated. She tried to intensify a mystical way of living in her convent Galilea in Ghent and wrote several treatises to teach her fellow sisters this special way of religious life. The fathers of Windesheim however ultimately rejected Bake's idea about a mystical spirituality and sent her into exile.

WYBREN SCHEEPSMA teaches Dutch language at the Hogeschool Leiden.

Boydell & Brewer; April 2004
294 pages; ISBN 9781846151194
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