Distinguishing religious women from lay came naturally in a world that looked upon those consecrated to the church or to God as set apart from this world's society spiritually and physically. That observation is only partially true, however, and will take us only a little way toward understanding all the human and social realities. In truth, interactions abounded, and complementarities were self-evident. Queens came to be consecrated for office, as abbesses were into theirs, each a figure of public female authority with their respective duties and powers blessed by these rites. The women in both also came, with few exceptions, from the upper reaches of society, social distinctions arguably being as important, or more so. In this case, the authority of an abbess was in principle more autonomous and absolute than that of a queen – except when a king was away, or she came to serve in a regent capacity as queen-mother. In social and political practice, abbesses worked with lay benefactors or advocates reporting ultimately to her on abbatial lands. Future queens in turn may well have been reared partly in convents, where they learned there a little Latin, or a lot, and they might also return as widows to retire, while abbesses might well find themselves on occasion in court circles. Below these highest levels of leadership, sisters in convents also mostly retained contact to varying degrees with their families (a regular complaint of reformers), and lay women might well visit monastic complexes, male or female, on special feast days or to pray at particular shrines.

But what then of obedience: the profession sworn by a sister to her mother superior and those marriage vows pledging a woman to her husband? This was a culture inclined to hierarchies, usually male hierarchies, but in practice nonetheless much came down to persons and communities. For medievalists, despite some revealing accounts scattered through the centuries of relationships both hopeful and cruel, all this is not so easy to get at in practice, also despite satirical writings full of naughty nuns, unfaithful queens, and shrewish wives. Wives may well have found somewhat more space to look after themselves, or even on occasion to take the lead, than did sisters subject to a rule and bound to the community disciplines of cloister and choir. Exceptions there were and especially in the grandest convents housing the truly elite.

Eighty years ago, Herbert Grundmann proposed that religious writing moved from Latin into the vernacular initially to meet the needs of women, especially those active in what he called a “women's movement.” That writing, he further held, was not inherently suspicious simply by virtue of being in the vernacular – as post-Reformation interpreters had often instinctively held, and some scholars do still. Either men or women, likewise, might have authored or compiled such works, even if, he tacitly presupposed, it was mostly men and especially friars writing for women. Religious prose writings in the vernacular first emerged on any scale during the thirteenth century, grew exponentially during the fourteenth and especially the fifteenth centuries, and are today still abundantly represented in surviving manuscript materials. At issue, perhaps now more than ever, is how we are to situate all this work: Is it friars writing for their charges, as with many sermons delivered by Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler? Women writing for women, or for women and men, or in not a few cases women and men writing collaboratively? Were these vernacular books actually meant particularly for lay sisters or brothers inside religious orders? Or generated especially by and for “quasi-religious” groups? Or aimed rather at educated and aspiring laypersons? Or indeed written by and for circles of dissenters? All these are variously true, none exclusively so. No one approach will account for the range and multiplicity of surviving vernacular religious writing. We must expect and perceive multiple authorial situations and vernacular readers. This essay takes up, too briefly, one dimension of the issue, that of female authorship, and with respect to one little-studied work in Middle Dutch.

Vernacular writing on religious life undertaken by women, apart from earlier hagiography reconfigured as epic poetry, appeared in Latin Christendom first during the early thirteenth century. Earlier women authors on matters religious, thus Dhuoda or Heloise or Hildegard, wrote in Latin. Courtly epic, Romance, and lyric would move into written vernaculars during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and some of these composers were women, thus “Marie de France” along with trobairitz and trouveres.

Well into the twentieth century, the roles and achievements of women in medieval European society and culture, indeed their very presence, hardly registered in accounts of the ten centuries or so that make up the Middle Ages. Medieval historians, focused primarily on politics, economy, and warfare, mostly left bit-parts at best to women, their roles perhaps as pawns in dynastic arrangements or as queens, very occasionally as a duchess or abbess treated in her own right. Or, alternatively, they were lifted out as wholly extraordinary figures, thus an Eleanor of Aquitaine for instance. In literary and cultural studies, scholars (mostly male) puzzled over the interpretation of texts projecting women primarily as adulterous consorts or distant objects of desire, figures on whose behalf men consumed their strength to prove their virtue. In religious studies, scholars might highlight the role of the Virgin Mary or of female saints, their lives lifted out as exemplary, also their merciful interventions as leavening hardship in a merciless male world. But women as actors or writers in their own right rarely appeared, or then as truly extraordinary figures, even eccentric, a Hildegard of Bingen as prophetic seer or Heloise as early exponent of free love (not as learned abbess). This all may seem overstated on my part, but not by much. The Booke of Margery Kempe, rediscovered in the 1930s, 500 years after its initial writing, became no serious part of literary or religious studies until the 1980s. Indeed its reception – scorn first from high literary and religious types for its “gushing” prose, defenses of the Booke then as articulating distinctively female attitudes and religious affections, efforts next to credit Kempe with a highly literate authoring of this “Margery” persona, arguments too over whether Margery Kempe could oversee the production of her own Booke (a female scholar negative on this, a male positive), now new documentary finds seemingly confirming her place in history – it all mirrors, and here only in part, the interpretive world through which approaches to women in the Middle Ages have passed, and debates continue.

Count Charles Forbes René de Montalembert (1810–70), born the scion of longstanding Catholic gentry on his father’s side, was on his mother’s the son of a Scottish Calvinist family. He came of age fully a generation after the French Revolution, in an era turning back in Romantic nostalgia to pursue Restoration. Some old monastic houses were reopened, and many new houses and orders were founded from around 1840. The count would prove an intriguing hybrid, allied with the “modernist” priest Lamennais as a Catholic liberal, yet also an ardent defender of ecclesiastical liberties (meaning “privileges”) over against the post-revolutionary regime, positions he would publicly articulate in oratory and pamphlets. He also took up an ever more fervent interest in matters his generation had been reared to reject, things “feudal” and especially things “Christian,” matters the revolutionaries had meant to be done with forever.