Last night I used movie clips to help my students understand a bit more about monastic life. I did, in fact, use a clip from Sister Act (1992) as a set-up for a discussion of Vatican 2. (None of the seminar students are Catholic, but all of them are able to discuss cogently the differences of the staid presentation at the front end of “Hail Holy Queen” and the more animated popularized version with clapping and jazzy riffing at the back end). That example also gave me an excuse to bring in a quick discussion of Salve services.
But the core of our discussion was on vocation and discernment, and for that, I offered several longer clips, mostly from the amazingly beautiful film In This House of Brede (1975) starring Diana Rigg as Philippa Talbott. To me, the novel and the movie are compelling in different ways -- and the movie is easier to teach with!
I recently discussed age at entry and at profession at Thalbach in Bregenz, and I shared those data with my students. But I suspect they appreciated the movie clips more since they bring the sights and sounds of monastic ceremony to life.
1. From secular space to sacred: Postulancy (7:08-16:46)
How do you leave the world you have inhabited? I love the film’s many details, but for my students chose to start with Philippa’s arrangements for her cat. This act of providing caring for the life she’s lived is important, as are the visual symbols of the luxuries she’s foregoing. But then, she arrives at Brede Abbey, a (fictional) Benedictine community, and has to ask permission to enter:
“What do you ask?” “To try my vocation as Benedictine in this house of Brede”
With her, we follow the thread of music into the heart of the convent, where the sisters are gathered in choir…
2. Joining the novitiate (29:07-31:10 and 48:10-51:18)
Different stages are marked by different clothing, as people of different life backgrounds merge into a community. I showed two clips of the Reception of the Habit (aka Investiture), one for Philippa, and then one for Joanna, a much younger sister. In both clips, we hear chants from the ceremonies; Philippa’s is accompanied by the “Veni Creator Spiritus” and Joanna by “Jesu corona virginum” and “Te Deum laudamus.”
In this male celebrant-led ceremony, a Benedictine sister receives the white veil and habit that marker her as a dedicated and committed learner, and some, like Joanna, take on a new name.
“What do you ask? “The mercy of God, and the grace of the Holy Habit”
Joanna’s ceremony contrasts visually, since she dresses as the bride of Christ, but both go through the process of petition, and both have locks of hair shorn, a symbol of renunciation and transformation.
Philippa’s Investiture (29:07-31:10):
Joanna’s Investiture (48:10-51:18):
3. Making Solemn Vows: Profession (52:21-53:50)
Taking permanent vows is the final stage in making a lifelong commitment to religious life. As depicted here, the professed prostrates herself as prayers are said over her, a symbol of dying to the world and rising to new life within the monastic order. My students were uncomfortable with the element of prostration – it isn’t used in their personal faith practices – so it sparked a conversation about the humbling of self before God and visual signals of a choice to serve.
4. Death of the Abbess (17:02-19:56)
One more clip for today, and that is the death of the abbess. This depiction is compressed (obviously) and lacks the full gathering and prayers of the sisters at her final bedside, but the movie version uses the moment to show Philippa’s farewell and foreshadow some of the later elements of the film's story-line. And I do like the glimpse of the funeral we get. The death of an abbess is a deeply significant moment for a convent, and that this one comes so early in the story will drive some of the “afterwards” of Philippa’s personal narrative.
CONCLUSION
Sometimes it’s helpful to visualize (and audiate) the ceremonial events which serve as such significant markers in women’s monastic lives. These rituals – whether the quiet renunciation of the postulant, the symbolic transformation of investiture, or the solemnity of final vows – embody a deep and deliberate commitment to the religious path.
By engaging with these depictions in In This House of Brede, I think my students were able to see (and hear) not only the formality of the monastic life, but also the personal, spiritual, and communal dimensions of vocation. Their reactions, particularly to the act of prostration, reveal how physical expressions of devotion vary across traditions, sparking valuable discussions about embodiment, humility, and dedication in religious practice.
Works Consulted
Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede (Viking, 1969; digital copy Open Road Integrated Media)
See also the arrival of novice Richardis at Disibodenberg from Hildegard of Bingen (1994), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlziyM3xWWs, especially 2:24-8:13, which includes a performance of “O Eucharii” and a discussion of music learning
Medieval prayer was not just a matter of words – it was a full-bodied practice, shaped by movement, posture, and gesture. As Jean-Claude Schmitt observes, such “[g]estures do not derive their meaning from their form but from their social use, from the context in which they were carried out” (p. 133). That is, we understand the significance of certain ways of holding the body and arms from the space in which they occur, the person or persons carrying them out, and the framing activities in which they are embedded.
This post briefly explores three twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources that illuminate the role of gesture in Dominican prayer: Peter the Chanter’s reflections on movement in devotion, Humbert of Romans’ structured taxonomy of bows and prostrations, and the treatises on Saint Dominic’s own prayer postures.
Together, these perspectives reveal how physical expression was not only an outward sign of inner devotion but also a communicative act, shaping and reinforcing the experience of prayer for both the individual and the community.
Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) tells us that prayer is a continuous movement. Take, for instance, his praise of the French at the moment of transubstantiation in the mass:
these god-fearing men, I say, not only bend their head and kidneys but also remove all their hoods and caps from their heads, [and] prostrate themselves and fall on their face during the making and taking of the flesh and blood of Christ.
Four verbs in one short description: prayer for Peter is both active and sequential. Because of this, he considers gesture to be foundational for the act of praying. The positionality of the body matters in appropriately signaling the state of mind and spirit with which the petitioner approaches prayer. Here, Richard Trexler reminds us, we have submission postures. But to gesture, Peter reminds us, is an action, not an attitude. From a modern perspective, it’s a revelation of energy expended as well as engagement with the moment. Even when held in stasis – as with extended kneeling – the petitioner is putting physical energy into the act of prayer to supplement the verbal energy of the spoken prayer itself. Movement matters.
Trexler rightly points to the inconsistencies among the depictions as well as inconsistencies in Peter’s construction of the biblical authenticity for the seven gestures he articulates. Nevertheless, these “devote postures” are crafted to provide models of action in prayer. As Trexler summarizes,
Peter the Chanter knew that the most sophisticated reader would learn body motions more quickly through pictures, and he wanted clerks to then act out his seven modes of prayer in a fashion which would edify spectators. Depersonalized figures would teach clerks, whose ritual life would then be the "book of the simple" (Trexler, p. 110).
Humbert of Romans (1200-1277) agrees with Peter the Chanter, at least in part: gesture matters, and it is imitable. Humbert, however, is less taken with ideas of movement and more with its visual endpoints. He offers a gestural grammar that explore the patterns of bending bodies in the context of the liturgy.
Humbert provides a six-fold matrix of bows (inclinationes), genuflections (genuflexiones), and prostrations (prostrationes):
In his assessment of Humbert’s discussion, scholar Dmitri Zakharine points out that prostrations were an extended form of genuflection – “an amplification of the genuflection in liturgical ceremony.” (Zakharine, p. 349). He notes, however, that all these gestures had communicative power: they meant something to the petitioner, and, equally, they meant something to those who viewed these gestures.
It’s not unlike the teenager, arms akimbo. There is an authority of attitude inherent in these gestures if we see them in their proper context. For that teen with attitude, we’re mere steps away from the eye roll and the snarky comment. For the prayer-giver, we are in an opposite space, one in which the attitude reinforces a petitioning stance in the adoratio of the liturgy.
And Saint Dominic (1170-1221) himself explored a variety of stances in his prayer, at least as recorded in the multiple copies of The Nine [Alt: Fourteen] Ways of Praying of St Dominic. As Schmitt explores in detail, the illustrations to the Dominican treatise give us a wide range of gestures that Dominic was thought to have modeled.
That passive voice is doing some important work, because while the treatises agree in their hagiographical intent, they disagree, at least in part, about which prayer gestures were important enough to include. As Schmitt puts it, “the saint’s gestures quickly escaped pre-established codification of the inclinations” (Schmitt, p. 133).
The discussions of Dominic’s prayer in the treatise make clear that the captured gestures illustrated in the treatise iconography are part of a broader gestural complex. Take Dominic’s act of reading “some book opened before him.” Schmitt quotes the treatise: “He venerated his book, inclined himself toward it, kissed it with love.” In other words, the saint responded emotively and acted out his impulses in a set of actions – kissing the book, but also covering his head with his hood, or turning away from the book as if overwhelmed by its content. (Schmitt, p. 133)
This is important, because, pace Schmitt, the images and texts “offered a type of practical manual, a guide where the images presented more accurately the description of the gestures and moreover, the movement to imitate” (Schmitt, p. 140). In other words, the wise viewer might use the image as a model, for there is an “imitability” between friar and saint, reinforced by the choice of the vernacular.
CONCLUSION
Given the differences in what they have to say, Peter, Humbert, and Dominic give us a rich view of medieval prayer gesture. For Peter the Chanter, the action is at the center of the gesture. These gestures reinforce the embodied nature of the petitioner, the life behind the words on the page or spoken into the air. For Humbert, the grammar of gesture is a central concern. He’s trying to think through the categories of meaningful acts, to give us the geometry of suitable self-abnegation, as the petitioner humbles him or herself before god. For Dominic, gesture is part of an almost theatrical construct, a staging in which bodily responses reinforce and make manifest the affective power of prayer.
Much like the implicit codes of modern body language, medieval prayer gestures carried with it meaningful information, shaping and being shaped by those who performed and witnessed them. Schmitt makes the point that prayer gestures were open to scrutiny by all – that one could see the forms of the prayer even if the words were only sub-vocal. Even in silence, the body spoke, making devotion visible to all who had eyes to see.
RESOURCES
Humbert of Romans. “Expositio super constitutiones fratrum praedicatorum.” In Opera Omnia, edited by Joachim Joseph Berthier, vol. 2: 160-167. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1888-1889.
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. “Between Text and Image: the Prayer Gestures of Saint Dominic.” History and Anthropology 1 (1984): 127-162.
Trexler, Richard C. “Legitimating Prayer Gestures in the Twelfth Century. The De Penitentia of Peter the Chanter.” History and Anthropology, 1 (1984): 97-126.
Zakharine, Dmitri. “Medieval Perspectives in Europe: Oral Culture and Bodily Practices.” In Body - Language - Communication, Volume 1, edited by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, Sedinha Tessendorf, pp. 343-364. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 38,1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
I’m newly collaborating with a colleague and it’s made me hyper aware of my own system of article writing. We all have quirky shortcuts, and writing is ALWAYS a case of “you do you” (and I do mean that in the nicest way possible: you really should follow the thing that works for you as a writer!). But I also love hearing how other people approach things, so thought I might usefully share my own standard ramp-up.
First, of course, is the good idea or the new data point. Something important enough to be written up, something bright and shiny, something interesting enough to pause a colleague in the hallway and talk about it. (Brainstorming ideas is a separate process, and not the subject of today’s post.)
And then, it’s time to do something with it, and that’s where we begin.
WHERE TO TARGET:
First, I figure out where I might like to write about it. I am a bonafide nerd; I keep a spreadsheet of possible venues, categorized by area. Oooo, this is medieval. No, it’s musicological. Gee, I should write for the regional history crowd. This one is definitely monastic. Whatever it is, there’s an outlet for that. (Fun fact, I also scrutinize my own article bibliographies for venues that might be a possible future locale where my words might reside. Where do my so-interesting colleagues publish? Write that place down!)
So, I generally try to envision two or three different journals where this future “thing” might go. That will be shaped by style, by content, by my current proclivity for footnotes, and by the capacity to write mere words, or to include images/tables/figures, depending on my mood and on the nature of the bright idea.
I then sit with recent issues of each, getting a sense for what the current editor/editorial team seems to like. From that, I usually find a clear target, the place I want to publish this bright shiny thing. First task in writing is always to know your audience. Done!
HOW TO START:
Starting the writing is hard, I know. So, shortcuts help. I use that “sit with the journal” time to get a sense of the shape of articles from that journal.
How many intro paragraphs?
Does the article use sub-headers or continuous narrative?
How much space devoted to the author’s method and how detailed does it get?
How many “big sections” are typically in the main body?
How many images / tables / figures are there?
What kind of conclusion does it use, and how “big picture” does it get?
What’s the total word count for each article?
How many sources are cited? Is this one of those tour-de-force places demonstrating complete bibliographic control, or is it more “here are a bunch of related books”? I have sometimes switched target journal based on those practices. Ahem.
I make a little table from 3 to 5 of the recent articles, and I also use that time to capture the citation conventions (and translation habits) that are typical. Yes, I know that most journals have a style guide for authors, but I am here to tell you that they are … uneven … in their level of detail.
Why do all that work on topics unrelated to my bright shiny thing? Because these become your formulaic guide to how to approach your own writing.
BUILDING THE (BROAD, VERY BROAD) OUTLINE
For me, the next step is building my own article’s broad outline – capture the content in 5 to 7 big strokes, and distribute the number of paragraphs according to the shape you want it to have. Is there a climax to the article? A place where that treasured story needs to go?
Here’s where math comes in. My standard default article length is around 35 paragraphs, though my most recent article was actually 52 paragraphs after revisions, so, yeah. Choose a number somewhere between 30 and 60 paragraphs – those tables you built will help.
Of those 35 paragraphs, I figure I’ll spend about 3 paragraphs for the intro and 3 to 5 for the conclusion. Method might fall in intro or in main body, depending on my thinking and on the habits of the journal. We’re in the humanities; there is no one journalistic formula.
Then 25 to 28 “main body” paragraphs gives me space for about three categories of supporting data. What are they? I try to come up with provisional sub-headers, since that will shape content disposition.
As a frame of reference, that collaborative article that got me thinking about this? We have 6 “content points” identified, one of which has 4 subtopics. We’ll do more extensive outlining next week, but I already feel good about where this is going.
This is also a good moment to just free associate. Do I already know of subtopics? Are there authors I should cite? Can I bullet point any of this? Whatever you have an answer to, and this is important, WRITE IT DOWN. At this point, my “progress” might look like a bullet-point list, or a mind map, or a scrawled flowchart, or several pages of word-doodles in my notebook. But it’s a first-round “capture” of what I think I might be doing.
BUILDING THE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Then comes my favorite part: building out my reading list. I do love to go trolling through the literature. I want one of those, and one of those, and three of those… My habit is to have bibliography in at least two and maybe three areas.
One is the content area, obviously, and that often includes going through my old bibliographic lists. Is this a case of “go deep” on the monastic element? The musical one? The “cool thinking about contemporary topics using the past as a case study”? The list of citations will vary depending on the answer to that question.
But the part that’s the most fun is the “how could I approach this topic” reading. There’s a whole set of topic-adjacent literature to draw on, some from people whose work I know, and others who are new to me. That’s the real permissive joy of scholarship: the adding something new to one’s own perspective.
What that looks like for me is usually thinking about one of two things: methods that match, but content that differs, or content that’s similar but spaces or times that are different. For the former, it’s reading about community music – a scholarship largely focused on 20th/21st century musicking experiences – and then applying it to 15th century Vorarlberg. For the latter, it’s reading about chaplains in England and Bavaria in order to write about chaplains in Bregenz. (Austrian-focused chaplain lit would already be in my own content area.)
This “breadth” gives me a focus for reading. My lists of “new lit” typically run from 30 to 90 items for an article, though the handbook article I wrote recently wound up at 125 items or so. (Yikes!)
I would like to take this moment to thank the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office without whom life would be much much much more complicated. You make what we do possible.
Not all of these articles and book chapters are going to be in the bibliography, obviously, but it gives me a chance to poke at the shape of the field. I’ll cruise through them at the rate of about 10 articles a week. Some just get the “AIC treatment” – Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion, and a bit of “what is this doing” by flipping through the middle sections of the article. Others I read fully. Still others get extensive notes and make it into my everything notebook. But all of them bring me joy. (Except that one. That one was terrible. That gives me an excuse to grump about the state of scholarship. Grump grump grump. Which brings me a bit of joy. Plus, I now get to DELIBERATELY omit it from my bibliography.)
And that, friends, is how I get started with an article. Figure out the “where,” and how it does its business; map out a high-level overview of this current project, and generate the bibliography to support that work. Then it's time to go play with your material and do more formal writing. GOOD LUCK!
Tufted titmouse with a call-out saying tweetle tweetle tweetle
In What the Robin Knows, Jon Young suggests that we all follow the practice of sitting and actively listening to birds. He observes that the world birds share with us – that we share with the birds – can be understood through the acoustical signals they send. There’s a background level of noise that is standard, the so-called baseline, and there are the alarm calls and sudden silences that tell us about the “happenings” that the birds are experiencing – ones we can share if we’re paying full attention to their signals. Is that alarm call about us, walking obliviously through the woods, or is it about the nearby fox that we won’t see unless we pay attention?
Paying attention is a challenge, of course. He talks about beginning listeners, and the differences between their experience of soundscape (my word, not his) versus those of more experienced attendees. A bit of explanation first: he uses the term “sit spot” to characterize a place outdoors where one goes to meditate listen repeatedly over time. He recommends these be convenient to the household to encourage frequent practice.
To get at the idea of what listening is, he first gives instructions, and then contrasts two listeners. The task is a simple one: “Listen to the silence and hear all the sounds around you. There will be many in your sit spot.” The results are quite varied:
I always find it instructive to ask new people how many airplanes they heard while sitting in their sit spots. “Three?” one might say hesitantly, after a pause. I may have asked a more experienced individual with a nearby sit spot to be sure to pick up the planes. I turn to her and say, “How many?” “Seven,” she replies. “No way! I can hear a plane. There were three,” the new student argues. “No, there were seven.” The next day, I put that same student in charge of counting planes in his sit spot, and his count goes up. (Young, 2012, p. 59)
Young’s point is that listening isn’t passive—it’s a skill developed over time. Noticing all the layers of sound, even silence, is part of the task:
I like differentiating between the sounds made by the wind as it flows through the branches, the shrubs, the grass – all of them different… Even in the bedroom in the dead of night, there’s plenty to hear. Silence itself has a sound, and listening to it is good practice for picking up the junco’s tiny tunes and alarms. (Young, 2012, p. 59)
He calls for us to adopt what he characterizes as the “Routine of Invisibility,” using an observer’s amble rather than the destination-focused stride of the hiker. This, he argues, will give us more grounding in what is happening within our sphere of observation, since we will avoid becoming that obnoxious thing, the “bird plow” that drives the birds upward toward safety as we move forward into their space. He also makes a strong case for the “interspecies alarm system,” where the listening birds will respond differently (as a group) to the tense, stressed coyote needing to feed its young than to the more relaxed coyote out on an amble – and where the signal that one group of listening birds sets off will be picked up by altogether different species in ways that tend to make all the song-bird species safer. (Unless, of course, there’s a “wake hunter,” the raptor coming along to pick off one of the disturbed birds while it’s distracted. It’s a jungle out there.)
In all, I enjoyed the book, but as my dad says, Young’s notion of the sit spot is not a practice that I’m likely to adopt. My precious outdoor minutes are probably better spent on the walking that keeps me healthy than on the listening stance, if only because it encourages an outdoor stillness that too closely reflects the indoor stillness of the writer’s daily life. But I’ll certainly use Young’s idea of the variability in bird calls – the companion check versus the song vs the adolescent “feed me” demands – as well as his idea of tending to the baseline sounds as part of my outdoor practice.
And as a musicologist, I firmly agree with his ideas that we should all listen to ALL the sounds that we find ourselves immersed in. Awareness, self-discipline, and attentive practice shape how we hear the world. And that’s a takeaway I can get behind.
Young, Jon. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Mariner Books, 2012/r2013.
What about the invisible-to-you institutional spam folder?
Have you released the possibly important messages?
What about the ones asking you to do things for the discipline?
Or the ones from the listserve you subscribe to?
Have you deleted the older messages?
No, we can’t let you delete more than 50 messages at a time. Try again.
Have you saved the messages you’ll need three months from now? What about the ones that are in the “maybe” category?
Did you back up the email chain for your advisee?
Have you reviewed their progress toward degree?
Did you write the student?
Did you copy the dean?
Did you send them a reminder about their appointment? Don’t you want them to graduate?
Have you backed up your computer recently?
Have you enabled the institutional cloud backup?
Why not?
What do you mean it bricks your computer?
Have you written to IT about that?
Did you copy the proper Associate Dean?
Did you give documentation?
Have you checked your phone messages? Yes, your office has been assigned a phone number. No, we haven’t assigned you a telephone.
Have you checked your computer file where we put such messages?
How do expect to recruit students if you don’t check messages on your nonexistent phone?
Have you updated your C.V. recently?
Did you remember to include the peer review stint last week?
Did you give the journal ISSN?
Has that populated through to your online CV?
How are we supposed to establish a reputation if you don’t share your work? No, we can’t just let you submit a PDF. You need to retype that information in our form. No, we can’t accommodate umlauts. No, it’s not set up for italics. No, we don’t have a category for that. Put it under “Other.”
Have you submitted your mid-semester grades?
Have you met with any delinquent student?
Why not?
No, Zooming the sick ones into class isn’t allowable. Yes, it used to be required. No, we can’t explain our policy. Why do you ask?
Have you uploaded your material to the LMS?
Is any of that material copyrighted?
Not by you, by real copyright holders?
Did you pay the fees? Did you charge the students? Of course we understand that you thought that use was covered by the library agreements. Have you always been an optimist?
Have you planned next year’s classes?
Did you submit the times and rooms?
Those rooms aren’t available, now where do you want it?
Main campus isn’t available, now where do you want it?
What do you mean the students won’t fit in the room? Have you considered a rotating attendance policy?
Yes we know that it has passed curricular review. No, it’s not ready to show in the system. Don’t you think the staff have enough to do?
Have you filled out your institutional satisfaction survey?
What did you say?
Privacy is so 1990s. Let us know how we can help you. We see that you haven’t yet responded.
Have you published anything this year? Was it a book? Then why are you bothering us about it?
Have you responded to the committee meeting-time poll yet? Which committee? What do you mean?
Have you backed up your computer yet? This is your second warning. We can’t be accountable for any glitches in that process. It worked perfectly for another faculty member on another system altogether.
Age and the monastic life: age at entry visualized
BACKDROP:
When did convent sisters join a monastic community? There’s no one clear answer. During the Middle Ages, the church sought to regulate the age of entry; the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, for instance, set that age limit at 14 for girls and 15 for boys. Evidence from England suggests that, at least for men, the age of profession was set between 15 and 21 years (Hatcher, p. 26), and Knowles’s study on The Religious Orders in England finds that by the fifteenth century, there were “few late entrants” to the monastic life (pp. 230-31).
The circumstances are quite different in the Ukrainian orbit, where “secular women could enter a monastery... on a temporary basis” and might only later join the novitiate (Charipova, p. 267). For the convents that Liudmila Charipova has studied in the 18th century, the age of admission clusters between 15 and 22, with an average age at profession of 20. Outliers as young as age 12 and as old as 35, however, show that the age-range at entry was quite variable for these Ukraniane convents (Charipova, Table 1). She identifies a “clear distinction,” however, between profession of “virgins” and that of widows; those entries are listed separately in her source records and had different entrance requirements (Charipova p. 271 and Table 4). She finds the size of Catholic convents in the Polish region, however, to be substantially smaller than their Orthodox peers (Charipova p. 277); their demographics also seem to have followed patterns closer to those familiar from Western European convents.
In Western Europe in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period, one would typically start the monastic life as a postulant (a kind of testing period) and then be formally received as a novice in the community. Profession came later, at the time of maturity, which the Council of Trent set at age 16 as a bare minimum, after a minimum of a one-year novitiate.
From Postulant to Novice to Professed Sister
Craig Harline shows that for the Early Modern period, the sisters of both active and contemplative orders in the Low Counties tended to be in their 20’s “when they began the religious life.” Eva Schlotheuber, on the other hand, sees a persistence of child oblation, noting that the girls had typically lived within the convent community already for several years prior to this more permanent dedication to the religious life. Whether as oblates or postulants, there is clearly a probationary period before the mature sister can make her profession.
The term “oblate” doesn’t appear in the records at Thalbach in Bregenz, but the patterns of entry can tell us something important about the nature of the community. Thalbach had been founded, at least according to legend, in 1336 as a loose sisterhood, was brought into the more structured fold as Franciscan Tertiaries during the sixteenth century, and was closed during the Josephine reforms (the “Aufhebung”) in 1782, and the building passed to the Dominicans of Hirschberg a few years later.
The work that follows is based on Thalbach in its Franciscan identity, and draws heavily on the Thalbach monastic Chronicle, which frequently reports sisters’ age of entry as well as their age at profession (seen as two distinctive events), and sometimes gives age at birth. For other sisters, birth-year for these sisters can be back-calculated, for a number of entries give age at death. We should use these data with caution – are we sure that 75 year olds have secure memory of their birth year? – but it gives us a shape and profile to the monastic community at a specific Vorarlberg-area tertiary house in the early modern period.
AGE OF ENTRY
At Thalbach in Bregenz, we can determine the age at entry for 80 sisters – roughly half the sisters whose names are known. For 65 of these monastic sisters, the chronicle actually records the age of entry. For another 15, we have age at death plus death year, so we can roughly calculate birth year, and that can be subtracted from the date of entry to determine an approximate age of entry.
Data profile: most evidence at Thalbach is 17th and early 18th c
There’s some bias to the Thalbach data; we have no age-related information for the first two centuries of the convent’s existence, picking up only in the middle of the 16th century. The bulk of the information on specific sisters comes from the 17th century, and the data drops off sharply at the mid-18th century, since the closure of the monastery in 1782 disrupted both lives and data-keeping for the convent community. But with data for at least half the sisters, there’s some utility in understanding how age intersects with convent entry.
The Tridentine clerics might have appreciated the overall profile of entry; 45% of Thalbach’s sisters entered at age 13 to 18 (shown in green), and another 25% entered as adults at ages 19 to 24 (in blue). Thus, self-election into the sisterhood was largely done at the ages legally empowered to make decisions, and for the youngest of the group (the 13-year-olds), profession typically held off for an extra year or two. There was a small “bump” of older entries above age 25, but this was not a house that had a large population of widows or late-in-life entrances. Once one hit age 30, life would take a different course than entry into this house of tertiaries.
More challenging, however, is the presence in the convent of pre-teens, who made up 23% of the convent entries (teal and orange in the pie chart above). As the saying goes, every life has a story, and there are some stories to be told about these early entries. We shall return to them below.
A different visualization of the
same data shows that the distribution of entry into Thalbach really did
center on the 13 to 18 year olds. The “bell curve” skews a bit to the
older population, with 20 sisters entering in the 19-to-24 range vs only
13 in the 7-to-12 range. This is, of course, as it should be from a
legislative standpoint for convent life.
The challenge is, if
one isn’t supposed to be able to “enter” the convent until maturity,
what are all those younger girls doing in the house?
YOUNGSTERS OF THE CONVENT
Part of the answer lies in the education that Thalbach provided. Like so many other women’s convents, it provided a community service, functioning as a school though not formally labeled as one. Some of these early entries might be school-girls who wound up drawn to the monastic vocation. That is borne out in many of the endowment documents, which show several youngsters’ affiliation with the convent started as an educational one, before converting to a profession-track novitiate at some time in the teen years.
The call to spirituality could be a powerful force, and it’s important to recognize its import for the life of the Thalbach community. Two of the mid-18th century sisters were, in fact, given profession on their deathbeds. Maria Augustina Müller made her vows on her deathbed in 1752, and Maria Justina Secundin from Weingarten did likewise in 1765. The latter was a music student, and had been looking forward to her profession. When she became ill, the sisters rallied around her, and let her take her vows of profession early in order to be joined to the Order before her death. She was buried in the garb of a full-fledged sister, in keeping with her wishes. (Details on both sisters can also be found in Fußenegger (1963), 137 and 139.)
There were exceptions to the rule, however. Take Anna Kläfflerin (Kläfler / Kläffler), for instance, who had joined as an infant. She was, to quote the Chronicle, “found in the chapel on the altar.” An abandoned foundling, the sisters clearly had a duty to care for her, even if, in 1532, her entry was without precedent (see Fusseneger 137 and Chronicle fol. 13r). Nearly a century later, in 1616, Amalia Rehmin, who eventually took the monastic name Felicitas, entered at age 4. Her father, however, was an administrative secretery at Mehrerau, and her mother, Euphrosina Öltzin, was equally well-connected, so her early entry may have been a matter of political maneuvering. But as represented in the chronicle, the majority of the early entries are simply noted without further commentary. A sister arrived young, stayed for a period of years, and then professed when of the age to do so. For Thalbach, at least, this seems to have been a relatively standard practice.
What the convent’s membership files suggest (but the Chronicle does not say), given the presence of numerous paying youngsters over the years, is that the educational offerings of the convent may have been among their strongest recruiting tools. As an institution serving pre-teen girls in Bregenz, the Thalbach sisters had relatively little institutional competition. Some students took their education with the Sisters and returned fully to secular life; others became part of the convent’s sisterhood themselves.
AGE AT PROFESSION
Given the variable age at entry at Thalbach, it is perhaps reassuring to see that the age of sisters at profession is in the more mature years. With two notable exceptions, none of the sisters professes before age 13, and there are peaks at age 15, 19, and 21 as sisters choose the permanence of community over the possibility of a secular lifestyle. The average age of profession at Thalbach is 18 years old.
What of those two exceptions? Both are unusual cases. The first is Barbara von Ach of Wolfurt. Her noble status and the needs of dowry, marriage alliances, and the politics of noble life may have led to an early decision based on family need more than a mature monastic calling. In other words, she might be truly categorized as an oblate, with family decision as a stand-in for her independent choice. The second, however, is 8-year-old M. Dorothea Mayer. Her situation – like the infant Anna discovered on the altar mentioned above – is one of charity, for she enters at age 5, already a “righteous and motherless” (Rechten vnd Mutterloß) candidate. Dorothea’s permanent affiliation to the convent is inevitable, and the decision was evidently made to allow her to profess formally before the normal age of decision in light of personal circumstances.
AGE
AT DEATH
One more category of age-related data remains: age at death. What the statistics from Thalbach suggest is that convent life must have been relatively congenial. Of course, given that dates of profession precluded the years of early childhood mortality, we should be unsurprised that life expectancy ran longer than for the average population of the day. At Thalbach, average life expectancy was nearly 63 years, and a substantial portion of the sisters lived into their seventies and eighties:
CONCLUSION
The patterns of age at entry, profession, and death at Thalbach offer a window into the lived realities of its monastic community. While most sisters entered the convent in their teenage years, a significant portion joined as pre-teens, often for educational access. However, the presence of child entrants, some as young as infants, underscores the complex interplay between charity, family dynamics and decisions, and monastic vocation during the time. Meanwhile, the relatively high life expectancy of the sisters suggests that convent life was both structured and, in many ways, life-sustaining. By analyzing these age-related patterns, we gain a deeper understanding of how Thalbach functioned not only as a religious institution, but also as a social and educational space within early modern Bregenz.
WORKS CITED
Charipova, Liudmila V. “Virgins and Widows: Imperial Legislation and Practices of Admission to the Novitiate and Profession in Ukrainian Women's Monasteries (1722–86).” Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 90 no. 2, 2012, p. 262-287. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.90.2.0262.
Fußenegger, Gerold. “Bregenz am Bodensee: Terziarinnenkloster Thalbach.” Alemannia Franciscana antiqua 9 (1963): 93–140.
Harline, Craig. “Actives and Contemplatives: the Female Religious of the Low Countries before and after Trent.” The Catholic Historical Review 81 (1995): 541-67.
Hatcher, John. “Mortality in the Fifteenth Century: Some New Evidence.” The Economic History Review, N.S. 39 (1986): 19-38.
Knowles, David. The Religious Orders in England, vol. ii. Cambridge UP, I955.
Schlotheuber, Eva. “Die Klöster im Kreise der Familien. Orte der Erinnerung, des religiösen Kultes und der Feste.” Monastische Kultur Als Transkonfessionelles Phänomen 4 (2016): 239-248.
Schlotheuber, Eva. Klostereintritt und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der Nonnen im späten Mittelalter. Mit einer Edition des ‚Konventstagebuchs‘ einer Zisterzienserin von Heilig-Kreuz bei Braunschweig (1484–1507). Tübingen 2004, especially pp. 175–221.
A pink pig puppet in a black and white striped hat with a bucolic background
News flash: “Swine flu breeds in pigs,” says announcer Anderson Cooper on CNN, and we flash through five flu alerts (including one interview with a masked couple) as we listen to the opening chords of “The Swine Flu Song,” posted to YouTube by PutnamPig in April 2009. Before we even make it to the first verse, we’re aware of the positionality of its creator. News anchors have been modified to judder, their mouths shaking in a visual equivalent of a musical trill, yet their anxious words proceed undoctored – except for the underscoring, of course. The news here is suspect, its narrative in question, the packaging of global media shown to be an artificial manipulation of reality. It is, in other words, an effective intro for a pop song about a problematic world event, written within a few days of the topic becoming international news.And when we do get to the verse, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a satire, mocking the concept of Swine Flu as a whole and, even more, to the public narrative about the threat. The bulk of the text is delivered by a puppet pig wearing a black and white striped hat and an FBI shirt (! standing for “Bald Innocent” !), singing in a whiny and nasal Elmo-like voice, the timbre of which may haunt your dreams. That, coupled with the obsessive melodic repetition – relying on a pentatonic scale (degrees 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, a melodic language which avoids all the musically-directional half-steps) over and over and over again – creates a catchy-but-annoying landscape in which one’s brain knows exactly what to expect – and so slides its attention to the words.
Those words are quite remarkable too. From a textual standpoint, the song purports to be debunking the false claims leveled against the poor pig population. Pigs didn’t cause the swine flu, the song contends. It comes… from a lab. This is particularly funny if you happen to identify the musical inspiration behind the song – Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The claim here is much the same: if we’re culturally are not at fault for everything going wrong in society, well, pigs aren’t at fault for the swine flu either. The parallel is amusing.
PutnamPig’s version of the song has three verse sets, each of which includes four short quatrains linked together in a parallel structure (a1, a2; a1, a3). These, per standard pop-song format, alternate with a chorus. Structurally, after the beginning clips which orient us to the newsworthiness of the song, there are two more intercut news clips with continued harmonic underscore: one between the pairs of quatrains in the first set, and a much shorter one between the two pairs of the second set of verses. The overall structure is:
The first set of verses (1a through 1b) names a whole series of wholesome childrens’-book characters as their images flash on screen; none, points out the song, have any symptoms:
Miss Piggy, Arnold Ziffle, neither has a little sniffle Porky Pig and Pooh's Piglet, No fever yet
Putnam, Gordy, Toot and Puddle, Not contagious safe to snuggle Ask Petunia Babe, Noelle All of them feel well
The patter presentation, mostly presented recitationally, plus the regular rhyming and the attention-grabbing hiatus for Piglet at the cadential drop – “No fever yet” [pause] -- pulls us into children’s song landscape.
But we cut back to the news alert, “The World Health Organization says it appears to be spread from human to human.” That topic seems to inspire a shift of melodic structure, for the second pair of strophes of the first verse (1b) start out parallel to the first pair, but digress as the song starts to blame-storm. Instead of heading downward for the cadence as we did for Piglet, the melody (can we call the recited text a melody?) moves upwards to an anxious clangor: “Now it’s in the USA, No one's safe this day and age!” Hammered out in bad Elmo-esque whine with staccato 8th notes repeating the same pitch 14 times (with some intonation bending), we certainly get the idea of street-shouting, even though there is nominally only the single singer:
How it started I don't know Stay away from Mexico Now it's in the USA No one's safe this day and age
Together, that verse 1 complex makes sense of an unfolding pandemic: everyone’s well, and when they’re not, well, perhaps intensification should be the go-to response:
But there is some relief, at least musically. That pentatonic melody from the beginning, that seemed really repetitive? By now we’re glad to have its multi-pitch variety return in as the music of the chorus. Having established a recitational style during the four quatrains of verse one, the contrast of style comes as a relief and enhances the chorus’s musical allure.
The text context of the chorus, however, is firmly in the realm of conspiracy: “Pigs didn’t start the swine flu / Blame the laboratory / For this awful Story // Pigs didn't start the swine flu / No we've been betrayed /The strain appears man-made… “ With the punchline rhymes of “betrayed” and “manmade,” the song posits a nefarious origin rather than a porcine one.
The second set of verses also starts by shaping the melody to descend at the end of each quatrain, but as we approach the next blame-topic, we again elevate the pitch as we escalate the claims, again with the shouty reciting: “Run a temp and get the chills / Everyone run for the hills.” There’s truth buried in the text – no-one blames dogs, for instance. (That’s actually for good reason, though. For swine flu (H1N1), the transmission chain was human to dog, rather than the reverse, and normal canine influenzas, HDN8 and H3N2, don’t typically infect humans.)
The third set of strophes actually starts at the escalated and elevated pitch as if shouting rejection to its claims; instead of viewing pigs as “clean and pink,” the association of name with virus sticks in the mind. Of course, the same was true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968; there is a reason we have moved from location-based naming of diseases. As it happens, the World Health Organization’s guidance in 2015 – six years after the 2009 Swine Flu – suggested avoiding associative terms for new diseases, in part because they triggered the needless slaughter of food animals. The world is counseled to avoid:
• geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), • people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), • species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), • cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and • terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).
Putnam’s recommendations, it seems, were culturally resonant, and eventually acted upon!
As we move toward the end of the song, the third strophe’s second half follows the more familiar shape. It offers a lower first quatrain first, and then the by-now-familiar escalation, this time for the climax: “This disease it needs a name / Which animals should we defame / Nobody will likely mind / If we named it for an ugly swine.”
The song ends with two full statements of the chorus, and a long instrumental outro. Over the first part of the outro, Putnam speaks his final lines, which are, curiously, non-rhyming, conveying both a sense of intimate conversation (just him as speaker and the solitary listener listening to confidences that just happen to be picked up by microphone), and an authentic perspective after the highly stylized and structured main body:
The pigs are innocent I tell you / We didn't do anything wrong We didn't start this disease / But we're taking all the blame.
With all that, have a listen to the whole song:
PutnamPig, “The Swine Flu Song,” April 30, 2009
ORIGINS AND CONTEXT
PutnamPig (who goes only by that cognomen, even on Facebook and LinkedIn, leaving his/her/their actual identity private) is primarily a Minecraft account, and was set up a year before the swine flu pandemic. Even though coming to health commentary as a sidelight to their normal offerings, their swine flu song is remarkably well-aligned with sentiments of the time, and perhaps even prescient.
Two things strike me as particularly insightful. First, the timeline of events, traced by Paul Shapshak et al. (2011) and Smallman (2015), shows that Putnam’s creator was actually quite forward-looking, writing about the flu before it was considered a global pandemic. The lyrics early on in the song point out that cases were now being found in the United States. This is a remarkably quick capture of the event that had actually justified the change of the disease’s status to stage 5, as the timeline shows. The song was posted just 8 days after the first national alert, and only four after the US declaration of a public health emergency:
March 24-April 24, 2009: influenza infections in Mexico
April 22: the Mexican government issues a national alert
April 23: the US government announces 7 cases across Texas and California
April 25: the Mexican government declares a public health emergency
April 26: The US government declares a public health emergency
April 27: H1N1 found in Europe
April 29: WHO raises pandemic alert level to “phase 5” (with outbreaks at least two countries in one WHO region)
April 30: Egypt announces a cull of pig herds
APRIL 30: PutnamPig’s Swine Flu Song
May 2, 2009 China suspended flights to Mexico
June 12, 2009: WHO announces a full “phase 6” pandemic alert level
August 10, 2010, the WHO declared an end to the 2009 influenza A/H1N1 pandemic
Or maybe that’s easier to see in the calendrical view – here, yellow is outbreak, blue is government action, and pink is the song’s debut:
A little more than a week from first government action to the song's debut
Likewise, the themes of the chorus –
the purported laboratory origins and man-made release of the disease –
align with many of the conspiracy theories Smallman (2015) was able to
trace, including a cluster which called out Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld’s long-term involvement with Gilead Laboratories as a potential
beneficiary of a global pandemic. They were, after all, the ones who
owned TamiFlu. As they say, “Information” doesn’t have to be true to
circulate widely on the internet. Smallman also implicates YouTube as a
news source, finding that more than 15% of the 142 “news” videos
examined from that first few months of the swine flu epidemic “called
the outbreak a man-made conspiracy.”
PutnamPig’s “Swine Flu Song”
stands as both a time capsule and a cultural artifact. Although it
shares the relentlessly upbeat idiom of the Flying Fish Sailor’s
confrontation with the past in “The Flu Pandemic Song” (which I wrote
about last month), it differs in important ways, since
the “Swine Flu Song” captures the anxieties, misinformation, and
conspiratorial currents that swirled around the 2009 pandemic as it was
happening. It is reportage, but reportage with a difference. Its rapid
creation and viral spread underscore the speed with which music, satire,
and digital media can shape public perception, particularly in moments
of crisis. By setting news clips against an intentionally grating yet
catchy melody, the song exposes the performative aspects of media-driven
panic while, ironically, simultaneously participating in the same
ecosystem of viral information.
A decade and a half later, the song’s
themes remain strikingly relevant, reminding us that the ways we frame
disease – whether through news narratives or pop-cultural satire – carry
real consequences for how societies respond to outbreaks, assign blame,
and remember pandemics.
WORKS CITED:
Billy
Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” from the album Storm Front (1989),
with the chorus “We didn't start the fire / It was always burning /
Since the world's been turning / We didn't start the fire / No, we
didn't light it / But we tried to fight it...” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
History of the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) outbreak of 2009:
McCauley, M., Minsky, S. & Viswanath, K. The H1N1 pandemic: media
frames, stigmatization and coping. BMC Public Health 13, 1116 (2013).
https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-1116; https://rdcu.be/eckME
Phases
of Pandemics explained: “Pandemic Influenza Preparedness and Response: A
WHO Guidance Document,” National Library of Medicine, NIH, from Pandemic Infleunza Preparedness and Response, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143061/
