Dear Abbey

Keith Preston

1 year ago

This year marks the 1,300th anniversary of the founding of Reichenau Abbey, a Benedictine monastery on a lake island in the far south of Germany that for a few hundred years in the early Middle Ages was, as Beatrice Radden Keefe writes in the Review’s October 17 issue, “a bright center of power, privilege, and learning.” This political and cultural influence afforded the monks the time and resources to turn the abbey and its island into “a rich meadow of wall painting, manuscript making, and Latin poetry”—much of which is on display at the Baden-Württemberg State Archaeological Museum in Konstanz, Germany, through October 20:

At the show in Konstanz, fragments of carved stone, stained glass, and wall painting invoke Reichenau’s decorated medieval churches. An egg-shaped ninth-century incense burner suggests their smell, recordings of music by the eleventh-century polymath Hermann of Reichenau their sound. There is also a scattering of medieval handheld bells from other abbeys. Bells like these would have been used to call Reichenau’s monks in from the garden or out of bed—keeping them organized and on schedule in a busy day of prayer.

Below, alongside Radden Keefe’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the Review’s archives about the lives of monks and nuns.

Beatrice Radden Keefe
Happy Island of Psalters and Cucumbers

Thirteen hundred years ago, the monks on the German lake island of Reichenau tended a rich meadow of wall painting, manuscript making, and Latin poetry. An exhibit celebrating the anniversary chronicles the monastery’s history and art.

Mary Wellesley
Love, Ecgburg

At some point between 776 and 786, an English nun in the Bavarian monastery of Heidenheim wrote four lines in a secret code in the space between the end of one Latin text and the beginning of another. She…had left them anonymous, describing herself at the start of one as no more than an “indigna Saxonica” (“unworthy Saxon woman”). The code was deciphered only in 1931, by the scholar Bernard Bischoff. Decoded and translated from the Latin, the line reads, “I, a saxon nun named Hugeburc, composed this.” In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf observed that “Anon…was often a woman.” Sometimes Anon was hiding in plain sight.

—October 22, 2020

Anthony Grafton
In a Fantastic, Lost World

“The Limbourgs’ miniatures set events from the history of the Church into a late medieval world of costume and architecture. Accordingly, they open a vivid series of windows onto the material and social world in which Burgundian rulers lived and clerics and courtiers mourned the dead.”

—May 13, 2010

Meyer Schapiro
Among Noble Monks

“I have just returned from Santo Domingo de Silos, a Benedictine monastery where I spent four days—What four days! I have not been so happy this whole voyage—The life is so good, I can well join my homely upright friends & remain forever in this cloister—It is surely healthful & sane—It is also beautiful: & beside the world around it[,] it is free from superstition, religion, strife, stupidity, wastefulness, disease, & bad manners—The religion is a reverent habit which gives a great dignity to everything done.”

—December 18, 2008

Willibald Sauerländer
Images Behind the Wall

“Former German nunneries such as Ebstorf, Lüne, or Wienhausen are still stuffed with devotional images and objects. Nuns owned private devotional images—figures of the Christ child, crucifixes, panels showing the crucifixion—which they regarded as brides regard photographs of their betrothed and which they handled as little children handle their playthings. But these images functioned also as the visual images for the imitation of Christ and his suffering, arousing the nuns to tears and self-flagellation. The images began to live, to move, and to speak. ”

—April 25, 2002

Harrisburg: The Politics of Salvation
Francine du Plessex Gray

A characteristic image of [the nun Elizabeth McAlister in 1970]: She drives with a friend down the highway toward a Movement meeting, high beyond the speed limit, the window open. She is now clothed in a brief-skirted sport dress; on her lap is an open copy of the New Testament which she looks at frequently during her voyage. It was during such a trip, on January 12, 1971, as she was getting into a car in a parking lot in Newark, New Jersey, that seven FBI men walked up to her and said: “You’re under arrest, Sister Liz.” “Please,” she replied, her Irish temper rising, “my name is Elizabeth—my friends call me Liz.” They read her the charges: conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up heating ducts in Washington, D.C.

—June 1, 1972

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