Age and the Monastic Life at Thalbach in Bregenz

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.

Not a Village, a Community: Building Thalbach’s Church (1609)

A glimpse of the Thalbach church and its windows

In 1609, it was time to raise the walls on the Thalbach convent church in Bregenz. Much labor went into the church, including that of the Tertiaries themselves, for the sisters helped haul stone, cleaned up the worksite, and generally contributed their own proverbial sweat of the brow to the project.

But supplies don’t come cheap, and the sisters turned to fundraising to meet their needs. Their reach was remarkably large, for contributions came from more than the local village and represented donors ranging from the princely to the servant. This suggests the importance of the Catholic network of the day, one which extended across social classes and geographical boundaries to connect the community of the faithful.

The Thalbach Chronicle records the gifts of 75 people, places, institutions, and families who supported the building enterprise. In the middle of the pack in terms of openness of purse fall the administrative gifts. The Lords of Bregenz-and-Hohenegg had their representatives pay for screens so that the sisters could be in seclusion in the church, and the representative of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria gave cash.

At first glance, the Chroniclist’s donor list appears fragmented, but a closer examination reveals patterns in the record. Most donors are identified by place, but 28 people are identified without geographical markers, including all of the donors who gave in Hellers rather than in florins. That probably reflects the convent’s (or at least the chroniclist’s) bookkeeping habits, since she clusters her entries by type of payment: florins, in kind, women’s donations (!), hellers. Some of the inconsistencies of identifying details simply reflect different decisions made at different times for the separate chapters that list donors.

A different situation holds, I think, for the women donors, who are separated into a chapter of their own (as if their cash were somehow different from their male peers). About half of the women donors lack geographical placemarkers, and are identified instead by marital status (wife, widow) and/or natal identity. This decision seems more gendered; marital affiliation “names” the woman, whereas for men, their community serves as part of their defining characteristics. This is perhaps confirmed by the fact that the unmarried women -- “noble and virtuous maidens” in the language of the chronicle – are tied to place. It seems an X+Y kind of equation: as a person one needs a name and either a place or a social connection – to be sure that the reader knows whose gift is being recorded.

For the remaining two-thirds of the gift-related entries, geography is part of this identity equation. Some donations might be predicted. Two former Thalbach sisters, now serving as leaders of convents elsewhere, sent contributions, as did the prioress of Hirschthal and a canonness from Lindau Abbey. Similarly, collective gifts came from several churches/monasteries and the city of Feldkirch, from whence many of the sisters came.  

Yet the donor pool extended far beyond the expected circles of monastic and clerical supporters. Of the 38 individual donors with geographical markers, nine are from Bregenz and five from Wolfurt – the “local citizenry” contributing their piece to the sisters whose prayers were said on their behalf. Two donations come from Hohenegg, which, though farther away, sent multiple sisters to Thalbach. But beyond these strongholds, the chroniclist records gifts from a whopping 22 other locations, one-off contributions from a mix of secular and sacred donors – the local parish priest, a member of the lesser nobility, a particular family, the mayor, an abbot.  Many donations come from Vorarlberg or the Allgäu, but others came in from places as far afield as Schwartzenburg, Zweifalten, and St Moritz in Augsburg.

What this pattern of support shows is the strength of the Catholic network, not just amongst clerical folk, but also, and especially, amongst the laity in the early seventeenth century. True, five individual parish priests donated to the building of the church. But so did widows, and tax collectors, and even a servant. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but evidently, it takes a whole Catholic community to raise a church.
 

Manipulations of reality’s sounds: Drever on Soundscape Composition (11/6/24)

A Venn diagram of soundscape and ethnography with interpretation & soundscape compositions in the middle

Drever, John Levack. “Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and acousmatic music.” Organised Sound, 7 ((2002): 21-27. doi:10.1017/S1355771802001048 

Thinking about nature films and their scores and sounds reminded me of the Drever article from 2002, where he makes the case that ethnography and soundscape composition for a kind of Venn diagram. Okay, okay, that’s reductive, but memory latches on to simple solutions. 

Soundscape composition, in brief, uses noises from nature as a significant element in the compositional palette, manipulating recorded sounds or their electronically-generated equivalents to evoke a sense of place – in situ (as with sound-sculpture or sound installation) or as a re-creation or reminder of a place, real or imagined. (Hildegard Westerkamp’s "Kits Beach Soundwalk" (1989) interlays natural sounds with an interpretive text, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg96nU6ltLk). 

Drever wants us to think about Soundscape composition as more than just sonic tourism. Since he believes that a significant element of soundscape is “the way it is perceived and understood by an individual or by a society,” he’s interested in drawing out that sense of meaning. 

As a result, to qualify as “good” (my label) soundscape music, soundscape must be the driver at both the deep and the surface level of the composition. That is, it’s not enough to signal the twittering of birds, but there needs to be a form-based intentionality to how the environment intersects with its musical response. Best, he says, is when the work enhances our understanding of the world. 

The composer must interpret and represent sounds in ways that respect the original environment--and also (he suggests) the original listeners' experiences. Drawing on Steven Feld’s 1994 study of Papau New Guinea and that society’s vocal mimicry of bird song as communication, he argues that since both ethnography and soundscape thinking approach their environment from the inside, a compositional response might be a useful representation of an ethnographer’s understanding of sound in a culture. Privileging that original meaning means that interpretation needs as much attention as aesthetics in the finished work. 

Drever’s argument has been widely cited, but I was surprised on this reading that it didn’t help me much with my own thinking. Perhaps the arguments from 20 years ago have simply become commonplace. Of course I respect and want to understand the meanings the nuns of Thalbach (in Bregenz) assigned to the sounds that they heard. The chronicle account (in Ch 28) of the windstorm that trapped sister Margretha Schmidin as she was crossing the bridge on a wagon, and her three-fold recitation of the rosary as thanksgiving for her rescue when the wagon tipped draws attention both to nature and to prayer as ambient experiences. The noise and bluster, the confrontation with the cart-driving farmer and his wife, the articulated plea before the crossing and the thanksgiving prayers afterwards: each bead in her story (as told by the Chroniclist) is situated in a multisensory world. But I am not drawn to reconstruction in a compositionally creative sense; I’m not sure how that work would advance my understanding in any meaningful way. I suppose that’s because I carry the sounds of a storm, or a plea, or a prayer in my head, and create that internal soundtrack in the imagined recreation as I read (and then remember). I can open a YouTube tab and sample such things if I need; and my readers can too. 

So my take-away is: I think we may have moved beyond that moment as our soundworld has shifted so strongly to that digitally archived space, and I think I might have more luck with sound and memory than sound and composition. But I suspect that we had to read cases like Drever’s for thinking interpretively about soundscapes before we could get to a place where they are perhaps a given of our discussion.

Political Scientist Sean Gray’s typology of political silences (10/13/24)

 I read Sean Gray’s article on silence in the political sphere with interest, both in the middle of a busy US election season and as a prompt to think about silence and community in the context of the monastic sisters in the Early Modern period. This post is both a summary of Gray’s ideas and a first-pass response to them.

 

CJC's visual representation of Gray's typology (compares Disempowered and Communicative silences)

CITATION: 

Gray, Sean W. “Towards a Democratic Theory of Silence.” Political Studies, 71 (2023): 815-834. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211043433

 

GRAY'S ARGUMENT:

“The opposite of voice is silence,” asserts Sean Gray in the context of democratic theory. The large-scale self-muting of members of the community has historically been read as “civic disengagement and disempowerment” – of stepping away from participatory democracy. Gray, on the other hand, thinks that silence can be a net positive, a form of political expression. Silence, he argues, is a form of political communication.

(As someone who tends to keep my politics to myself, Gray’s evocation of self-censorship resonates. For me, that can be bound up with questions of intimacy and trust; I may not choose to trust pollsters with my beliefs, but I will vote the heck out of them!)

Gray identifies the “the communicative dimension of silence,” but reads silence as “not voting,” whereas those of us in a world of social-media cesspits tend to think of silence as “avoiding trolls.” He does ask the important question, however, of “how silence can communicate across a whole range of cases.”

He posits different kinds of silence:

• disempowered silence – a barrier-driven silence; the silence of lack of (perceived) access; being silenced, and/or being unheard.
  

• communicative silence – e.g. choosing to disengage out of frustration

  • silent resistance – perhaps a subclass of communicative silence; a significant effort to withhold verbal support or recognition. This can be read as demonstrative silence and the audience may infer the silent party’s opinion (rightly or wrongly)

  • affective silence – the silence out of fear of the cost of speaking; can push an agenda of shame since the resistance asks for a change in the behavior of its audience.

  • compliative silence – a rule-following silence; going along with norms; the silence of libraries

  • facilitative communicative silence – which can focus on listening or civility – turn-taking in conversation

Gray believes that “By definition, to be silent is to hold back—or be held back—from speech or utterance.” In this context, silence should be understood as “a social artifact.” It’s not the natural world’s silence in the pre-dawn world of silent birds and sleeping community, but instead an absence of expected (or even demanded) engagement. Failure to respond to polls? Silence… This is silence as a failure to comply with external demands.

Disempowered silences occur because of direct silencing (infrastructure access and its many, many costs) or the indirect silencing of not being heard (think: woman offering opinion in a board meeting: this is [too often] identity-based; a lack of being heard more than an absence of expression).

The idea of communicative silence is perhaps more powerful. Our voice should neither be coerced nor compelled. “You have the right to remain silent” is an adjudicated right within US culture.

Silent resistance: consider the blank paper protest. Chinese Covid protests in 2022 and Russian protests of the Ukraine invasion (also 2022) both sought to message through the absence of a message. But, Gray argues, speech-acts (throwing a tomato, burning a flag, carrying a blank piece of paper) have more content than the silence itself:

Silence doesn’t give us a vocabulary to make political claims or to provide reasons for them. Silence on its own (and unlike language) cannot be used to reference ideas, to test assertions, to debate, to deliberate, or to explain and justify collective decisions and actions, and revise them as necessary

Silence, in other words, is still a failure to comply with external demands, a refusal to (publicly) “play the game.”

Importantly, though, Gray offers a shift of perspective to the question of the audience’s perception of silence. He does point out that politicians routinely misconstrue the silence of constituents in ways at odds with actual political beliefs, and tries to provide a framework in which such misreadings might be minimized.

My biggest concern is that not voting and not speaking up publicly are actually different things, and carry different moral valences. To me, I see a duty to vote, but a right to keep silent on issues for any of a variety of personal reasons. But the effort to understand the meanings of these two acts of silence is certainly not without merit.

APPLYING GRAY’S MODEL TO EARLY MODERN MONASTICS:

To my eye, Gray's typology of silence also resonates (pardon the pun) beyond the political sphere. For early modern monastics, silence—whether as a form of compliance or resistance—played a crucial role in shaping religious and communal life. I decided to play a bit with his ideas and see how (and whether) they applied to my data. It seems like a pretty good fit:

• disempowered silence – a barrier-driven silence; the silence of lack of (perceived) access

  • This might be the silence of the sisters in the face of rules imposed through Visitation; there are internal signals of resistance to particularly momentous changes (the adoption of the Roman Breviary in Thalbach in 1594) but the demand is expected to result in a “Yes Sir, How High?” kind of response.

• communicative silence – e.g. choosing to disengage out of frustration

  • silent resistance – perhaps a subclass of communicative silence; a significant effort to withhold verbal support or recognition. This can be read as demonstrative silence and the audience may infer the silent party’s opinion (rightly or wrongly)

    • A silence of “forgetting” to impose a change or a duty; or the silence of Thalbach sisters omitting the identities of your peers at St Anna’s in your prayer-list since you’d really rather they didn’t exist at all. In any way, shape, or form. Those nasty gits.

  • affective silence – the silence out of fear of the cost of speaking; Gray observes that this kind of silence can push an agenda of shame since the resistance asks for a change in the behavior of its audience.

    • This is harder. Perhaps taking prayers private? And in Bregenz overall post-Reformation, the silence about beliefs that might be at odds with the heightened Catholic narrative of town. Moving away – as several reformed families did, rather than stay in Catholic Bregenz -- could be a larger form of affective silence.

  • compliative silence – a rule-following silence; going along with norms; the silence of libraries

    • An easy one! The silence within the cloister during set hours; the silence of church preparing for prayer; these are silences of CHOICE.

  • facilitative communicative silence – which can focus on listening or civility – turn-taking in conversation

    • The silence of waiting -- for the correspondent to write back, for the Chapter to make decisions, perhaps even the silence of contemplation, as one waits for the spark of divine wisdom to arrive.

IN CONCLUSION... SILENCE AS A TOOL:

Gray’s exploration of silence reminds us that what we don’t say can carry as much weight as what we do. Whether in modern political contexts or early modern monastic communities, silence takes many forms—sometimes disempowering, sometimes resistant, and sometimes entirely intentional. (These are rather different kinds of silence than those of Rossetti’s poems, which are more personal silences; I shall have to think more on that topic later). For Gray, silence can come as a reflection of external forces or as a personal choice, can be read as a way to quietly dissent or to cultivate thoughtfulness.

In our current political climate, where loud, shouty voices often dominate the discourse, understanding silence as more than disengagement seems to me crucial (and rather missing from the conversation). Silence can be a tool of agency, whether one is acting to protect oneself, to resist “the thing,” or to create a space for listening and thereby create connection and community. By recognizing the complexities of silence, we challenge the assumption that only vocal participation matters in civic life.

Gray’s framework, in other words, offers a vital reminder that silence is not neutral. It carries meaning, whether in political arenas or in historical settings, and invites us to question not just what is said, but what is left unsaid and why (Trouillot’s Silencing the Past comes to mind). For communities, both those of the past and our many disparate communities of the present day, silence may communicate as effectively as words—and sometimes, perhaps, even more so.