Preface

Summary

In recent decades the study of medieval women's history has virtually taken off. Because the available source materials pertain for the most part to women in religious orders, the focus has been on nuns, Beguines, anchoresses and other such religious women. In the meantime it has become well known that there was a remarkable flourishing of female religious in the southern Netherlands of the thirteenth century. This is to some extent due to the fact that most of the source texts from this era were written in Latin, and as such have been accessible to the international scholarly world. It is a much lesser known fact that a powerful new impulse in female religious living manifested itself in the northern Netherlands. The Modern Devotion, the reform movement founded by Geert Grote of Deventer, attracted during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries thousands of women in northwestern Europe. That this second religious woman's movement is less well known may be attributed to the fact that in this case the source texts are for the most part in Middle Dutch, a language read by few scholars outside of Belgium and the Netherlands. As a partial remedy to this unfamiliarity, this study of a small yet essential element of the second movement of women religious – the writings of the choir nuns of Windesheim – is offered in the language of international scholarship.

I completed my doctorate at the University of Leiden in 1997 with the dissertation Deemoed en devotie. De koorvrouwen van Windesheim en hun geschriften (‘Piety and Devotion: The Choir Nuns of Windesheim and Their Writings’), which was published by Uitgeverij Prometheus in Amsterdam as volume XVII in the series Nederlandse literatuur en cultuur in de middeleeuwen (Dutch Literature and Culture in the Middle Ages). The translation of this book was made possible due to generous funding from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). The book has been abridged in a number of significant ways in order to keep both the cost and size of the book within reasonable bounds. The main text of the original, with the exception of a few minor corrections and additions, has been translated in its entirety.