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- [00:01]
Matt Lewis
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis.
- [00:03]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and we're.
- [00:05]
Matt Lewis
Just popping up here to tell you some insider info.
- [00:08]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
If you would like to listen to Gone Medieval ad free and get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit.
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Matt Lewis
With the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries such as my new series on.
- [00:22]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Everyone'S favorite conquerors, the Normans, or my.
- [00:25]
Matt Lewis
Recent exploration of the castles that made Britain.
- [00:29]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
There's a new release to enjoy every week.
- [00:32]
Matt Lewis
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe or find the link in the show Notes for this episode.
- [00:49]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said, what the are you talking about, you insane Hollywood? So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.
- [01:15]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Payment equivalent to $15 per month New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees Extra Speed slower above.
- [01:18]
Matt Lewis
40Gb Details hey marketers, are you ready to discover the latest trends in podcast advertising? The podcast Pulse Report by Acast is out now, packed with fresh audience insights into why podcasts are a must have marketing strategy. Learn how PO audiences are more engaged than ever, why hosts are trusted voices for brands, and how niche shows are delivering massive impact. Download the report today at podcast pulse2024acast.com hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to Popes to the Crusades, we cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here, find out who we really were with Gone Medieval welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Medieval European people are often divided into three those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. Those who fight are often the elite, so are the easiest to see. Amongst those who pray, senior churchmen could become prominent in politics. Those who work are often more difficult to pick out. But amongst those who pray, there is a group who can be equally hard to uncover. Henrique Lehnemann's new book The Life of Nuns sets out to discover what life was really like behind the walls of a convent. What was daily life like? What did education look like? And just how disconnected were they from their families and the communities around them? We're about to answer these questions and more. Welcome to God Medieval Henrike.
- [03:35]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Thanks for having me.
- [03:36]
Matt Lewis
I'm very much looking forward to this. It's an aspect of medieval life that I guess we don't too often talk about. So Gone Medieval is here to try and fill in those gaps for everybody.
- [03:46]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yes, we called our book, in German, Une Hurte Frauen Unheard Women, because their voices are too often overheard, but also because we wanted to show that they are worth listening to. And unerhurt also means unheard of. Kind of plucky, outright outspoken.
- [04:08]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, sounds like a much better title for German than we get in English, I guess, to start off with. What kinds of sources are available for us to tell the stories of nuns? Because I think it's easy to imagine them cloistered away and we wouldn't know too much about them. But what kinds of sources do exist for us to explore their lives?
- [04:27]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
It's astonishingly rich cache of sources, letters, archival material, and partly they haven't been explored because the nuns were two good archivists, so they kept all their material with them, never threw anything away. And it's still partly, at least in Germany, in the archival boxes from the 13th, 14th, 15th century, in the order in which they stacked it in these boxes. So you have to get out of your comfort zone, of your own study and the library, and you have to go there and visit them and their sources.
- [05:12]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, it's incredible that there's that much stuff neatly organized as well. Why did German sources prove to be so fruitful for doing this? Why was Germany in particular a great place to find these kinds of records?
- [05:24]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Because there has been much less damage done to the medieval heritage than in France, where the revolution erased a lot, and particularly England, where the dissolution of the monasteries practically destroyed most of the material that we could learn things from. And Germany also had always had a great culture of communication because it was so regionally scattered. There wasn't just this one center as London is, things going back and forth. And if anything happened to the London copy, then everything was erased. While it's much more regionally organized and the convents and monasteries are set up by local princes, the cities. So it's a much more granular structure of communication, a much more tightly knit or knotted network than we have in more centralized countries. And this is partly the network we wanted to explore, peer to peer support, rather than just from the one center of power down to the subaltern women and men.
- [06:51]
Matt Lewis
Should we be surprised that the records in Germany weren't more affected by the Reformation? Because, you know, the Reformation was quite concentrated in Germany and we know, as you mentioned, the dissolution of the monasteries in England caused us to lose an awful lot of records there. Why was it not similar in Germany, do you think?
- [07:10]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Again, it partly comes down to the regional character. If the convent had been set up by your grandparents, you didn't want the statues that bore their name to be destroyed. So for example, in Nuremberg, which was the first town to go Lutheran in 1525, the town council was very clear, we are being Protestant from next Sunday onward, but nothing will be destroyed. So they just put dust covers over the Marian altars and the statues of the saints, but they left all the epitaphs that bore the family coat of arms in place and they kept all the records. So this local structure prevented a large scale destruction. And also the much stronger city structure overall. There was a large and affluent middle class who had been responsible in sponsoring this. So it wasn't just nobility and single noble families, but it was a much broader sway of society. And this hasn't been seen for a long time. It really the narrative only changed when I was studying in the late 80s 90s to see that the Reformation wasn't this switch being flicked over from darkness to light, Luther as the big revelation and everything changed, but that it is much more grayscale image. So only two years ago a study was published that in 1600 in the Protestant areas in Germany, there were still half of the convents going strong. So that it goes completely against the narrative particularly put forward by Protestant historiography of the 19th century. So Historiogus historiography, Geschichtbessenschaft as a serious university subject, was more or less invented in Prussia in the 19th century as a Protestant discipline. And they built up this teleological looking towards the glorious 19th century development from darkness, Middle Ages Reformation cut point Luther nailing the coffin of the Middle Ages, which he never did, he never swung a hammer. And then everything becomes Protestant, everything vanishes, everything. And there we are in the glorious modern period. And this narrative has prevented people looking for all these regional solutions of coexistence, of arrangement, of this wonderful heritage of Protestant nuns, the Benedictines, Protestant Cistercians, because they just didn't fit into this black and white image.
- [10:39]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, fascinating. I mean, one of the Sources that you talk about in the book is kind of effectively a nun's diary. You know, she writes in partly in Latin, partly in Middle Low German, and it's almost sort of practicing her Latin a little bit in places, but resorting to Middle Low German when she doesn't want to fuss with the Latin kind of thing. And just that really personal element is so fascinating. We don't have many medieval just everyday people's diaries, do we? It's a fascinating source in itself.
- [11:09]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yeah. So that was a really lucky find that Eva Schlot Hoiber, my co author, with whom I work also on the scholarly edition of the nun's letters, found when she was looking through the Herzog Augustbi boutique in Wolfenbuttel, which is another advantage of German transmission that you have all these local libraries where the princes wanted to preserve the memory of their state. So. And it looks completely inconspicuous because it's written on second life parchment of scraped down parchment recycled from an obsolete liturgical manuscript for basically her note keeping. And there seems to be a multiple purpose to it. One, as you mentioned, practicing her Latin and it's fairly rough. I'm also editing other nuns documents and she should have known better. All the nuns had to go through seven years of Latin training, at least mixing up her cases and lots of spelling mistakes. But she can tell a story and she's mainly writing down what went wrong as a kind of memo to herself and to other nuns what not to do in future. And that makes it so fascinating. It's really rare, as you said, that something like this survives because normally the archive was well curated to present to the outside world a happy family image. I spoke to a colleague who grew up in a boarding school, was educated where they had to write letters to their parents once a week. It was. Was very clear that nothing critical could be in there. So it's rare that you have this unfiltered voice of somebody not in power, but just as a chronicler of the life.
- [13:22]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, just sort of talking about their everyday life and their experiences. It's incredible. And so what from all of the sources that you've been able to gather together, what do we know about daily life for a nun inside a convent? So how, how regimented and restricted was it?
- [13:36]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
For example, one of the joys of working with these northern German sources is that we have not just the written records, but also the everyday objects. So for example, the oldest spectacles in the world were found under the floorboards of one of the convents, Wienhausen, where They had literally fallen through the cracks. Since it wasn't dissolved, it shapeshifted through the Reformation, and it also shapeshifted through the other major caesura for German history, the Napoleonic reorganization and secularization of the early 19th century. Because the nuns weren't recognizable to Napoleon as Catholic, since they were Protestants, they weren't dissolved. So we have their things like these spectacles. We have things like the implements for writing, for doing arts and crafts projects. I'm sitting in front of a replica of a medieval tapestry, 5 by 3 meters, embroidered by the nuns to portray the story of Tristan and Isolde, something you wouldn't first associate with a sacred space. So it was a very colorful space that we can learn from material culture. It was a space of learning, basically the only higher education opportunity for women in the Middle Ages. Entering a convent. And they're learning all the liberal arts, starting with a good dose of grammar, even though the diarist didn't take it in, but then going through rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, a lot of music theory and daily practice, but also looking at law. They had to administer large holdings of land and property and going on to medicine, so they had very large herb gardens. One of my doctoral students is currently working on bloodletting in the phlebotomy in the convents. So they needed clear guidelines how to administer something like that and when to call in outside specialists for all day. So we know the life was very clearly structured through the daily routine of the hours, going seven times a day to prayer. But between this liturgical structure and a year, cycling round from Advent via Christmas to the Resurrection and then coming of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, there was a lot of space for individual variation. So if somebody was good at writing, they would be employed with copying manuscripts, also writing sermons. If somebody was good at singing, she would encourage to lead the daily liturgical singing. But also we have songbooks of some of them. Decidedly funny character, secular nature, to collect and curate music. So it was a community united by a clear structure, but within it a lot of opportunity for different skill sets. I'm here in Oxford, member of a college, St Edmund Hall Medieval Foundation. At least once a week, struck by recognizing some of these structures in my own daily life, from gathering together for the communal meal as a focal point, to discussing the election of a new abbess, or in our case, a new principle. So there are lots of points of interaction and communal decision making going forward to make the life very varied.
- [17:58]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, fascinating. And for nuns, how important was it to remain enclosed and secluded within their communities? Or did they Engage with the outer world, or did that vary between different convents?
- [18:11]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
It varied considerably. And it's always a kind of. With monastic life, a circular movement. So things start normally with a very strict observance of a rule, and then more and more exceptions come. The community grows more prosperous, becomes more secular, and then somebody comes in and says, we need to reform. And then a reform movement comes in, be it, for example, the Cistercians to reform the Benedictine movement in the 12th century, or for our sources, particularly important, the Bosefelder reform, which was in the 15th century, influenced by something called the modern devotion, the devotio moderna, a form of turning back to a more inward looking, liturgically focused life. An element of that is stressing the importance of full enclosure. So of the sources we are looking at in our book, about half of them are from a strictly enclosed community that had just undergone this reform process in the late 15th century, which they themselves called reformatio, so the word that used in the 16th century for the Lutheran Reformation, while the diarists from Heiligreuz lived in a much less regulated convent, where it was, for example, possible to have convent feast, where everybody would meet and sing together. Secular people and the young clergy, the male clergy and the novices. So in a way, we can observe movement that goes back and forth. So the stricter the enclosure was, the more intense the written communication gets, because they have to write down basically everything they want to communicate to the outside world. So the rich Source of the 1800 letters collected by the nuns of Lune comes about because they had just decided to have this strict enclosure. So we have also letters that in a convent like Heilig Kreuz would have been instead of just spoken communication with a neighboring convent. In a way, these are the most interesting notes. So they are more like WhatsApp messages that are exchanged between nuns of neighboring convents or between a brother in town with his sister in the convent. So enclosure doesn't mean shutting down the voice. It rather means transferring them on paper or parchment for posterity.
- [21:14]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, which is very helpful for you and for us.
- [21:18]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yes, it is.
- [21:34]
Kate Lister
I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack? Or Julius Caesar? Or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History hit. Because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, warts and all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries as well as probing into everyday issues. The nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan.
- [22:31]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's Unlimited Wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch $45 upfront.
- [22:52]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Payment required equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first 3 month plan only taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40gb on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.
- [23:14]
Matt Lewis
There's a portion of the book as well that deals with the connections that remained in place between nuns and their families. You just talked about. There might be conversations between brothers and sisters. How important was that connection to family in the life of nuns? Because I think again, we tend to have this view that people go into a convent or a monastery, they join the clergy and they sort of sever all of their family ties. Are you able to piece together those connections that were maintained?
- [23:43]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yes. So the daughters or nieces in the convent were incredibly important to the family. I'm again sometimes reminded when we sing evensong in chapel in college, and the proud parents of one of our freshers come along to listen to their daughter or son in the choir singing. So families from Luneburg would go for the high feasts to visit their daughters in the convents. They would be allowed to sit in the church underneath the nuns choir so the nuns would be heard but not seen because they were behind a screen, which meant they could view the altar and the east end of the church. They could hear obviously what the priests were saying. They could hear what the lay people were singing beneath them, but they couldn't be seen. And so the families could listen to the nuns singing. And we know from liturgical manuscripts that they particularly practiced complicated hymns for these feast days where they knew they would be listened to by their families and their parish. And they were also allowed a certain number of hours to meet and speak at the Sprechfenster, the screened window, to communicate with the outside world again, they would be heard but not see. They got regularly letters asking for their advice and that could be more in a spiritual sense. So we have a lot of letters of consolation after the death of the father. The daughter will write to the mother trying to make sense of what happened and giving words of biblical comfort, pointing to spiritual exercises the mother can do to cope with the loss. And also quite practical things. A brother is asking, I'm sending my son to university, what should he read first? And the aunt who has studied all of patristic. So the church fathers, but also the more modern theological writing says, oh well, start with Thomas Aquinas. It's been hard to tackle first, but it will be really worthwhile reading in the end. And make sure you don't give him too large an allowance because he'll start drinking. So quite practical things as well.
- [26:25]
Matt Lewis
And also nothing changes very much, does it? That sounds like the advice you'd be giving to students going off to uni today. Read the right books and don't drink too much.
- [26:32]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yeah, exactly. We also have the notices of we are going to pray for your sick daughter, that she's getting better. We are praying for the soul of the departed. And that is quite often the first reason for the convents to be set up to have a reliable source of prayer for the deceased members of the family. And again, the stricter the enclosure was, the more confident the families could be that the nuns really had time to do their prayers, undistracted from having to worry about running the economy and going on journeys or whatsoever. So that's the benefit of having a daughter in the convent for a family. The other way around, it also works. The nuns regularly write to their brothers who hold important political office in the. We need your lobbying voice to make sure that our confessor, who hasn't got a really well paid prebent at the moment, gets a better job in town so that he can continue hearing our confession.
- [27:53]
Matt Lewis
Fascinating. So they sort of had a local political lobbying role to play as well as the spiritual one. Oh, yes, yeah, fascinating.
- [28:01]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yeah. They administer to their own estates as a. Which in the case of Clos de Lune, was mainly salt pens. So Luneburg was the richest of the Hanseatic towns, so of the towns doing the trade around the Baltic and the North Sea, because it had very rich salt mines underneath the city and none of Scandinavia has salt. So Lubeck, who did the main trading for the other Hanseatic cities, would take Ludeborg salt to Scandinavia and exchange it for furs and other goods from Scandinavia. So the nuns got as dowry when they entered the convent a share in a salt pan. So a quarter salt pan, and that would be quite a good income.
- [28:53]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. I was going to ask how convents kind of made money, but it sounds like they were quite often sort of mercantile enterprises as much as maybe, presumably landowners. Did nunneries own as much land as we associate with the rest of the church as well?
- [29:08]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yes. And again, I'm sometimes reminded of the Oxbridge colleges, whose wealth is still partly hold in property.
- [29:20]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. So but they. They did engage in commerce as well. So they could. If the. If the salt trade is the local industry, they would engage with that as a way to supplement their income too.
- [29:31]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yes.
- [29:32]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, Fascinating.
- [29:34]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
They also had a intranet of exchanging goods. So a lot of the letters we have are, please can you send me another supply of pearls? Because one of the convents specialized in growing these little river pearls, which are grown in the cheeks of trouts in the Cayman. So while other convents would specialize in making really fine fabric and others. So for example, the fabric, woven silk, that was needed for doing the veils for the nuns was done particularly in one convent. And they would sell and also swap goods like that. And they would also negotiate to get better prices by bulk orders. So close to Luna was the convent closest to the next big city. And the other convents, meaning Epstorf Wienhausen, would send their manuscripts to Lune, and then they would get a better price for having all of the manuscripts bound at the local bookbinder than if each convent had sent in their single order.
- [31:19]
Kate Lister
I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bed sheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack? Or Julius Caesar? Or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by history hit because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, warts and all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries as well as probing into everyday issues. The nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to free Find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bed pan.
- [32:16]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said, what the are you talking about, you insane Hollywood. So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 up.
- [32:41]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Front payment equivalent to $15 per month New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees extra Speed slower above 40GB. Details.
- [33:00]
Matt Lewis
It's a fascinating aspect of the ways that they're working together to get good deals as well as everything else I've got. What I'm not sure if this is a stupid question, so feel free to tell me if this is a stupid question, but we often think of nuns as considering themselves to be effectively brides of Christ. So they're wives to the king of kings?
- [33:20]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yeah.
- [33:21]
Matt Lewis
Can we see parallels in the ways that nuns view their roles in the world with the way that queens consider their roles next to kings? You know, they're there to intercede, to plead for mercy and to be a sort of bridge between the king and his people?
- [33:35]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Not at all a stupid question. They really take this metaphor of being brides of quite literally. So we have letters where the nuns write to their mothers. Consider yourself now to be the mother in law of Christ, which gives you a much more powerful role in society than if you were just mother in law of another, cobbler of sword dealer. They take this also very serious as an obligation to share their intimate knowledge of what Christ is really like with others. We can see that, for example, in their translation of their own mystical writing into the vernacular for their lay relatives. I've looked at four sisters, biological sisters, where three of them went to the convent of Meedingen and one, Anna, stayed in the town of Luneburg and married the town mayor, Heinrich Toube. And the three religious sisters write for themselves each a book of prayers with meditations on how sweet it is to taste the kisses of Christ, of drinking his wine, of going for a walk, a stroll in the garden with him in the coolness of the evening. So a lot of the imagery of the Song of Songs coming in, but crossed with their own personal experience. And they translate these texts for their secular sister who didn't have enough Latin to read their meditations in the original. They tried to make it accessible for her in Middle German or in the local dialect.
- [35:43]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. It's such an interesting connection and role there. I was almost imagining you're going to say they were complaining that, you know, Christ leaves the toilet seat up and these dirty towels on the floor.
- [35:52]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
But it's not quite that they seem as demanding. It's not always an easy life being a wife of Christ. So there is a dialogue song, Christ and the Loving Soul, where Christ orders the nun, lift up your cross and follow me. Strip down. It will be easy to. You have to wade through thorns. So it's not necessarily all roses, but it's ultimately worth it.
- [36:25]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And we're converts to a kind of place of medicine and healing in the same way that we often think as male monasteries could be.
- [36:35]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yes. And we. For example, bloodletting was a big part of the regime. And in the letters we have a lot of exchanges of recipes, for example, for healing balm. They wouldn't necessarily. So that's different from monasteries. Take in secular visitors for healing. But it was a sisterly exchange. So, for example, in the diary of the nun of Heilig Kreuz, she notes how two sisters came from another Cistercian convent because Heilig Kreuz was closer to the Braunschweig leading territory specialist in a rare disease, so she could be located with them and the specialist wouldn't have to travel that far. So it was more localized medical provision. But still we have a lot of manuscripts of both Latin and vernacular sources for the most common diseases.
- [37:53]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. There is also a portion of the book that deals with death within the convent and how the community dealt with death. What were you able to uncover about their attitudes towards that?
- [38:06]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Well, in a way, there were the specialists in how to die well, which is a big concern and question in the Middle Ages. And one of the main fears of secular people was to die unprepared. Living in a convent, you were, in a way daily preparing yourself for death and seeing death not as the end, but as a transition, as the point where you are now really meeting face to face, your bridegroom Christ. Like now still at evensong or compline. The song of Simeon A sung Lord now let us thou thy servant Depart in peace according to thy word. This is what the nuns would sing every night before going to bed. So every day closed with this parasia and they were looking beyond two the heavenly Jerusalem. So we've included in the book photographs from the gorgeous nuns choir in Wienhausen, which has a cycle of ceiling paintings and wall paintings which the Nuns could meditate upon while sitting for hours and hours on end in their choir stalls. And they would see this transition to the heavenly Jerusalem, which was painted in the shape of their own convent, guarded by the cherubim. And there Christ sitting side by side with the nuns that had gone before.
- [39:56]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, fascinating. So they almost had this proximity to death that was important in the way they lived their lives.
- [40:02]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yeah. And as I mentioned, a large portion of their spiritual duty was to pray for the deceased. So they would remember those who had gone before. They would be read at each lunchtime the stories of the saints. Many of them had found a very violent death, but who had overcome and where now at the other side.
- [40:34]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. Yeah. It's been absolutely fascinating to try and get a little bit closer to the lives of some of these nuns that have often seemed sort of beyond our reach. And clearly they're not. You've reconstructed so many of them in the book. I wondered if, just to end with whether you had a favorite story or a favorite snippet or a favorite person who appears in the book.
- [40:54]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
I think it's really this story of the song festival gone pear shaped, which we deal with in the chapter on education of nuns, which included this thing. So the story is told that the abbess of Heiligkreuz, for a special treat, had allowed everybody to help with the breaking of the flax, which was a necessary process in producing the garments and the cloth. And it's something that similarly to lifting up the ankle. So is done best if you sing rhythmically with it. So it is an occasion for singing along. And all the older nuns who remembered the songs that used to be sung for that were busy writing these down. But it was also permitted for the younger male clergy to join in. And then when they had exhausted this stock of authorized songs, they started making up songs and improvising. I imagine it a little bit like a stand up routine where you would suddenly address somebody. And so the nun writes, they were suddenly singing oh dear Provost, or oh worthy Abbess. I've tried to look for songs like that in the Wienhausen songbook. I found one of these songs which could be similar to that sung at this occasion, which is a mock song about a stupid priest of rather a donkey who wants to become a priest. And the donkey can only sing, er, which is the sound a German donkey makes, which corresponds to the German letters I and A. And so we have also images of this kind of donkey priest singing Dum klamo vox S E R. There's Akshow imagining these novices and the young clergyman singing along lustily to something like that always brings a smile to my face when looking back through the book.
- [43:25]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I think it's interesting to think of people like nuns and priests having fun, you know, having a bit of a laugh, because it's something we don't necessarily associate with and we think of them as being austere and very serious people, but they were just human beings with all of these connections to their local community and their family and all of this desire to learn and to have fun as well. They're not that dissimilar to everybody else.
- [43:50]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Exactly.
- [43:51]
Matt Lewis
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Enrique. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and I encourage everybody to read the book if you want to find out more about nuns.
- [43:58]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Thanks so much for having me.
- [43:59]
Matt Lewis
Thank you. Henrike's book the Life of Nuns is out now if you'd like to find out more about this fascinating aspect of the medieval world. If you're looking for more on the ecclesiastical world, then you can dig back through our catalogue to find a great episode with Emma Wells on cathedrals and one with Claire Gilbert on her book I Julian, about the anchoress whose writings became hugely influential. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Thursday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe there's a special gift. You could also get 50% off your first three months when you use the code Medieval at checkout. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just Gone medieval with history hit.
- [45:25]
Unknown
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- [46:24]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
ACAST Powers the World's Best Podcasts here's the show that we recommend. Hey everybody, I'm Naomi Ekparigan.
- [46:34]
Unknown
And I'm Andy Beckerman.
- [46:35]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
We're a real life couple and a real life couple of comedians. And we're the hosts of the podcast Couples Therapy. We're the only comedy relationship podcast ever.
- [46:43]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I said it.
- [46:44]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And we're so good.
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Unknown
We've been written up in both the.
- [46:46]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
New York Times and we made Grindr's.
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Unknown
List of top podcasts.
- [46:49]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Yes, we're giving you that high, low appeal trust on the show. We talk to guests like Bob the Drag Queen, Angelica Ross, Bowen Yang, Janelle James, Danny Pudi, Darcy Carden, Paul F. Tompkins and more. All about love, mental health, and everything in between. And we answer your relationship questions. We are two unlicensed comedians just trying to help you out. So open your hearts, loosen your butts because we got a lot of laughs and a lot of real talk just for you. Download Couples Therapy Wherever you get your.
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Unknown
Podcasts.
- [47:23]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.
- [47:29]
Matt Lewis
Acast.com.