IMC 2024: Sessions

Contact between medieval Carthusians and women (religious) is an under-explored topic. It is well-known, on the one hand, that later-medieval charterhouses counted an increasing number of religious, semi-religious, and lay mulieres among their founders and benefactors, as well as that Carthusian monks were readers and circulators of women’s mystical texts. On the other, Carthusian legislation and rules beginning in the 1120s often sought to curtail or even forbid contact with women, lay or religious.

Despite attempts to regulate contact with women, Carthusians often found themselves in close relationship—spiritual and institutional—with women individually, communally, and textually. Examples of these sorts of relationship treated by our session: the relationship between the Carthusians of Marienzelle in Nuremberg and a nearby monastery of Poor Clares during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the involvement of the Carthusian monks with Liégeois convents of enclosed religious and semi-religious women in the context of the Modern Devotion; and the Regular Canonesses of Saint Agnes in Maaseik owning a number of manuscripts copied, bound, or authored by Carthusians, particularly John Rode’s Van der Vader Insettinghe.