Quite soon after the foundation of the Brussels Augustinian convent Onze Lieve Vrouw ter Rosen gheplant in Jericho in May 1456, canoness regular — and later prioress — Maria van Pee († 1511) conceived the plan of writing down the sermons...
moreQuite soon after the foundation of the Brussels Augustinian convent Onze Lieve Vrouw ter Rosen gheplant in Jericho in May 1456, canoness regular — and later prioress — Maria van Pee († 1511) conceived the plan of writing down the sermons which she heard her beloved confessor Jan Storm († 1488) deliver in the convent’s church — in order to save them for posterity. She started this task on 8 December, 1459, and continued to write until December 1464, thus writing seventy-seven sermons. Maria set an example for her community, for several other sisters also recorded their confessors’ sermons. Writing mistress Barbara Cuyermans († 1507) and Elisabeth van Poylc († 1499), for instance, wrote over forty sermons based on preachings delivered in the convent by visiting priests — mostly of the Dominican and Franciscan orders — in the period between 1466 and 1468 as well as between 1474 and 1476. In the same period Janne Colijns († 1491), who like Maria and Elisabeth was elected prioress at a later stage of her life, copied the first of forty-four sermons Jan Storm preached between 1468 and 1474. The collection containing her sermons was finished in 1507, many years after Jan Storm’s and her own death. The final collection of late medieval convent sermons records twenty-five sermons preached by canon regular Paul van Someren († 1503) in 1479 and 1480, and written by canoness Anne Jordaens († 1495). Although the tradition in sermon writing clearly had its peak in the second half of the fifteenth century, the sisters continued writing until the beginning of the eighteenth century. As a result, about 350 different, original medieval and early modern vernacular sermons have been preserved, in eight handwritten collections.
The large number of sermons is not the only reason why the sermon collections from Jericho are extraordinary. More than is usual in sermon collections from other late medieval convents in the Low Countries, the manuscripts offer us explicit data on the preaching occasions and the preachers and sermon-writing women who were involved. This information can be found in colophons and in the headings of sermons. Even more unusual are the four extensive prologues that precede the three Middle Dutch collections — the two containing Jan Storm’s sermons by Maria van Pee and Janne Colijns, and the ‘Jericho-collection’, — and the seventeenth-century collection by Maria de la Folije (1622–95). In these prologues the sister scribes give detailed accounts of their contribution to the writing and editing of the sermons and the composition of the manuscripts. With due modesty, they claim their share in the writing process instead of hiding themselves behind the preachers, the auctores intellectuales, of these sermons. Thus they arrogate to themselves the apparently clerical genre of the written sermon, and gain some authority over the texts, which they reproduce, although preaching itself was reserved for persons with higher ordinations, such as deacons, priests and bishops, and therefore men. At the same time the sisters state that the sermon collections were written for the eternal glory of God, and in order to preserve the spiritual inheritance of the confessors and to pay them tribute. As such, the sermon collections can be considered memorial monuments. Not only are they used to commemorate the priests, but [at] a later stage also the women who were initially responsible for the redaction of the sermons (in most collections they do not mention themselves, but are named by the sisters who collected and copied the sermons that they had written down, in the preserved manuscripts).
In five chapters and four appendices (which contain detailed descriptions of all the Jericho manuscripts and of the main archival sources, editions of the medieval prologues, and tables of contents of the sermon manuscripts), Schrijven in commissie studies the medieval convent sermons from Jericho and the manuscripts in which they have been transmitted, and puts
them in their historical and literary context. After a short introduction to the sermon collections and a positioning of the book in the (inter)national context of modern sermon research in the first chapter, the second chapter focuses on the historical context of the sermon collections. It provides an extensive description of the medieval history of the monastery, and of the tasks of the office holders. It also gives detailed biographies of the convent’s own preachers, and the canonesses who were involved in sermon writing. In most cases the scribes were the same persons as the office holders, which is not surprising as both the administration of a convent and the redacting of sermons required quite a high level of literacy and education. The (intellectual) skills and training used for (sermon) writing are discussed in chapter three, as well as the products which result from this kind of manual labour, which in the course of the second half of the fifteenth century were executed by over forty women. Not only were these sisters responsible for the convent’s large collection of manuscripts (thirty medieval manuscripts have been preserved, which is the third largest from a medieval women’s convent in the Low Countries), they also wrote many books and documents for people and institutions outside the convent walls.
The final chapters analyse the Middle Dutch convent sermons from Jericho and the manuscripts in which they have been preserved. They demonstrate how the Jericho sister scribes handled the sermons they heard their confessors preach in order to preserve them, and how they thereby designed a creative and collective ‘authorship’ for themselves that was unusual for the Middle Ages. They also show that previous scholars have misunderstood how the canonesses must have worked. The sisters were not simply recording but re-authoring these sermons, after interiorizing them to the point where they became part of their thinking and consciousness; in this way the boundaries between the words of the priest and their absorption of them became blurred, and therefore pose a stimulating challenge for the researcher to investigate.