Brides of Christ: Women and Monasticism in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland. Edited by Martin Browne OSB, Tracy Collins, Bronagh Ann McShane, and Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB. Four Courts Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1-80151-022-6. €50.00.

Female monasticism provided a place for women to be spiritual leaders, and to live outside of direct male authority. It is therefore important to any comprehensive history of women. This book, bringing together the fruits of a virtual conference in 2021, provides an excellent survey of women’s communities in Ireland, as well as the problems in studying them given the paucity of sources. The foreword by a current abbess and the epilogue by a bishop in the Episcopal Church of Scotland speak to the ongoing relevance of the subject for religious women and for Christians more generally, but this is a book for scholars rather than mainly for believers. 

The chapters are arranged roughly chronologically, but fall into three groups based on approach. The first group consists of overviews, several of them by scholars who have published books on the chapter topic. Tracy Collins, in ‘”On the Brink of the Wave”: Towards an Archaeology of Female Religious in Early Medieval Ireland,” reviews the extant textual and archeological evidence, identifying a minimum of fifty-one known sites including seven major monastic foundations, satellite houses, and smaller ones which were connected to churches. Despite the evidentiary issues she discusses, Collins demonstrates the diversity that characterised Irish women’s monasticism. 

Mary Ann Lyons provides the same type of broad view as Collins in ‘Keeping it in the Family: Familial Connections of Abbesses and Prioresses of Convents in Medieval Ireland’. She focuses on women as patrons and as leaders of houses founded by Gaelic kings and leading families, then by the first generation of Anglo-Normans, and finally toward the end of the Middle Ages. As elsewhere in Europe, the prestige of a woman’s family, and their ability to provide a dowry or donations, made a big difference. Daughters of major dynasties and, later, of leading noble families became abbesses, and in the Anglo-Norman period could be the front line of the colonization process. By the late Middle Ages the ‘permeable cloister’ (115) allowed women to remain in contact with their families, participate in their political machinations, and engage in sexual relationships.  

Colmán Ó Clabaigh’s chapter ‘Marginal Figures? Quasi-Religious Women in Medieval Ireland’ also gives a comprehensive view, this time of women who lived religious lives other than as nuns. Some were recluses, some Franciscan or Dominican tertiaries, some in other forms of life. Evidence comes from artistic and archeological sources, ecclesiastical legislation and liturgy, exchequer payments, and rules of life. One particularly interesting group are those who cared for the poor and sick in hospitals. Even those hospitals with a Benedictine monastic connection were largely staffed by what Ó Clabaigh calls ‘quasi-religious’, who lived among their charges. 

The early modern period is ably summarised by Bronagh Ann McShane in ‘Who Were the Nuns in Early Modern Ireland?’ By the middle of the seventeenth century there were fourteen foundations on the island, belonging to four religious orders. Where family background can be traced there seem to be strong connections with Old English gentry and merchant families. The best documented order is the Poor Clares, whose history was written by a member, Mary Browne of Co. Galway, while living in Spain. The Poor Clares also produced an Irish translation of the Rule of St. Clare, indicative of the collaboration between Old English and Gaelic communities on the basis of their shared Catholicism.  

 The second group of chapters are what one might call microhistories, those that do a deep dive into a particular source or category of source. Elva Johnston’s ‘Locating Female Saints and their Foundations in the Early Medieval Irish Martyrologies’ considers martyrologies attributed to the Tallaght community, Óengus, and Gorman. Unlike men, women in the martyrologies do not receive titles (unless they are abbesses) and are often not connected to particular sites, reflecting their difficulty in acquiring land. Johnston finds that women’s houses tended toward the smaller end of the scale, whereas men’s had more examples in the middle of the range. Commemorations of female saints clustered based on geographical networks, on individual sites, or on types of ascetic practice. 

Colm Lennon reviews the ‘Sisters of the Priory Confraternity of Christ Church, Dublin, in the Late Middle Ages’. This confraternity was associated with Christ Church or Holy Trinity Cathedral, and is documented by a late medieval record of more than a thousand individuals who were to be prayed for on the anniversary of their deaths. Members participated during their lifetimes not only with their prayers but also with donations to the church and its associated monastery. The book of obits provides information on the backgrounds of the women, who were from gentry families and citizens of Dublin. The confraternity ‘offered a way of bridging social, ethnic and economic divisions through ritual kinship, and provided opportunities for involvement in civic religion and building social capital’ (146). 

The third group of articles embeds the history of Irish monastic women in a pan-European context, either through comparison or through the study of the movement of people and texts. Catherine Swift examines the lives of Brigit and Íte in light of works from the Greek church which circulated, or could have circulated, in Ireland, in ‘Soul Sister: Two Irish Holy Women in their Late Antique Context’. She argues that Irish monasticism was quite different from that in for example Gaul: Irish women were freer to travel and those in Gaul were more likely to be enclosed. Birgit’s and Íte’s practices most closely resembled those of St Macrina of Cappadocia. 

Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel, to whom this volume is dedicated, discusses ‘The Other Peregrinatio: Pilgrim Nuns in Medieval Regensburg and their Irish Connections’. There were communities of Irish monks (Schottenklöster) in Regensburg (Bavaria), and a community of Irish nuns is attested in detail from the twelfth century. Ó Riain-Raedel details the literary achievements of the nuns as authors and patrons, and suggests that all three of the women’s houses in Regensburg had Irish connections. She suggests that the nuns’ origins, like those of the monks in the Schottenklöster, may have been in Munster and presents evidence for ongoing connections with the Uí Briain family. 

The most explicitly comparative chapter is ‘Putting Women in Order: A Comparison of the Medieval Women Religious of Ballymore-Loughsewdy and Prémontré’ by Yvonne Seale. Seale asks what it means that a particular religious house and particularly a women’s house belonged to a particular order. The affiliation of Loughsewdy with the Cistercian order is complicated, but Seale argues that the nuns themselves would have seen themselves as following its ordo even if they did not formally belong to it.  The French houses were composed of women inspired by the life of Prémontré despite efforts of that order to exclude women. Seale uses the comparison to argue that membership of an order was not something imposed on nuns by a founder or by a church hierarchy but often something they chose themselves. 

The volume is exceptionally well-produced, on heavy paper with a section of colour plates as well as black and white illustrations in each chapter. It may be read as an introduction to the subject, as a collection of detailed scholarship on various aspects, and as a programme for further research. Anyone interested in medieval and early modern Irish women’s history will certainly want to read it, but those interested in other time periods, or in other regions of Europe, will learn a great deal from it as well.

Ruth Mazo Karras
Trinity College Dublin 

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Ruth Mazo Karras is Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin and author of several books in the history of women, gender, and sexuality in medieval Europe.