Research team
- Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)
- Research centre Ruusbroec Institute
Expertise
Patricia Stoop teaches historical Dutch literature within the Department of Literature at the University of Antwerp. She is also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute. In 2014 and 2018, she held the prestigious Visiting Brueghel Chair in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, and she served as Assistant Professor of Middle Dutch Literature at Utrecht University from 2015 to 2016. She holds a propaedeutic degree in Greek and Latin Languages and Cultures (1994) and graduated in Dutch Language and Literature from the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (now Radboud University) in 1997. She earned her PhD in Literature from the University of Antwerp in 2009. Her first monograph, Schrijven in commissie. De zusters uit het Brusselse klooster Jericho en de preken van hun biechtvaders (ca. 1456–1510) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2013), examined the genesis of fifteenth-century convent sermons from the Augustinian convent of Jericho in Brussels and their literary and historical context. Particular attention was paid to the role of the sisters in preserving and transmitting these sermons. As a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Patricia Stoop studied themes of female authorship and female authority in late medieval and early modern sermons from the Low Countries (2010–2013). She was also one of the initiators of the international and interdisciplinary project Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe, in collaboration with Virginia Blanton (University of Missouri–Kansas City) and Veronica O’Mara (University of Hull, now Leeds). Currently, she investigates the extent of women’s intellectual and religious knowledge and the literary means they used to express it, drawing on sermon collections and convent library holdings. For her subproject, Bridgettine Women’s Convents in the Low Countries as Textual Communities and Centers of Knowledge Transfer in Their European Context (ca. 1440–1600), she received a SEPBOF grant from the University of Antwerp. She is also developing a digital database that will eventually include all vernacular and Latin manuscripts from the Low Countries demonstrating the involvement of women—both religious and secular—between approximately 1250 and 1600. Strongly grounded in the material evidence of the sources themselves, this project is the first of its kind and may serve as a pilot project for other European regions. She received a fellowship from the Tiele Foundation for this project in 2026. Patricia Stoop serves as President of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society; is a board member of Signum, a contact group for the socio-economic and institutional-legal history of religious and ecclesiastical institutions in the medieval Low Countries; serves as an expert in Early Modern Literature and Book History on the advisory committee of the DBNL collection of the Digital Library for Dutch Literature (Dutch Language Union); and is a member of the scientific committee of the project Sorores: Unenclosed Religious Women in Southern Europe, Twelfth to Eighteenth Centuries. She is also a member of the editorial boards of the book series Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval and Reformation Sermons and Preaching and The Other Sister: Active Women Religious in the Premodern World (both published by Brepols). In her strongly interdisciplinary research, Patricia Stoop pays particular attention to women’s contributions to the intellectual, religious, cultural, and literary spheres of the medieval and early modern periods, as well as to sermon studies. Central themes include (collective) authorship, literacy, women’s authority and autonomy. She also focuses on topics such as the formation of collections and networks, memoria (both as memory techniques and commemoration), and commercial manuscript production.
Birgittine Monasteries in the Low Countries as communities of learning and sites of knowledge transmission in a European context (c. 1440-1600).
Abstract
Within half a century after the death of St Birgitta of Sweden (c. 1303–73) and the foundation of her monastery in Vadstena in 1370 the Order of the Most Holy Saviour (Ordo sanctissimi Salvatoris) spread to Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Poland, and as far east as Estonia. Attached to each convent of nuns was a small community of brothers who provided the cura monialium. The women and the men lived separately under the governance of an abbess. In 1437 Mariënwater, the first double monastery in the Low Countries, was founded in Rosmalen near Den Bosch at the northern border of the Duchy of Brabant. Thanks to a wealth of vocations and the generosity of highly placed benefactors, the Birgittine Order flourished in the Low Countries like nowhere else. In the forty years between 1446 and 1485 no fewer than eight convents were founded out of Mariënwater, the mother-house, of which Mariëntroon in Dendermonde in East Flanders was the second-most important in terms of the number of manuscripts that were owned or produced in these convents. The establishment of the Birgittine Order had a huge impact on the literary, intellectual and religious culture of the region. Ulla Sander-Olsen's preliminary inventory (1989–90) ascribes over two hundred, yet largely unstudied, manuscripts — in Dutch and in Latin (and occasionally even Greek and Hebrew) — to the convent of Mariënwater, and an additional fifty to the convent of Mariëntroon. The majority of the books held there and in other Birgittine convents were produced by the nuns in their own scriptoria. They not only copied manuscripts but also illuminated and bound them, and even produced woodcuts and devotional prints to decorate them. This activity made the Birgittine nuns one of the largest monastic producers of manuscripts in the Low Countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and also placed them among the first users of the new technology of the printing press. Given the vast corpus of extant books they possessed and the unique devotional culture they maintained with its specific liturgical and religious texts that circulated throughout Europe in Latin as well as the various vernaculars, the sisters of the Birgittine Order provide an excellent starting point to study women's multifaceted engagement in the literary, spiritual, and learned culture in an international context. Their book production also offers an exceptional opportunity to understand how female religious communities functioned as 'textual communities' and 'communities of learning'. Building on the preliminary work done for the online, open-source database of manuscripts related to women in the Low Countries (c. 1250–1600) that I developed together with John Arblaster (Revealing Female Participation in Literary Culture; BOF KP 2020), this project will expand and improve the content of the database by conducting research into Birgittine primary sources (manuscripts, early prints), and by beta-testing the software to optimize its functionality and search functions. The information in the database will subsequently form the foundation for quantitative and qualitative studies of: 1) the construction, use, and evolution of Birgittine library collections and of the individual and collective efforts of the people instrumental in it; 2) the collaboration and the exchange of literature and knowledge within the convent walls, as well as with people in other religious and secular communities; 3) the transfer of religious literature and ideas through the network of Birgittine monasteries, both within the Low Countries and within the larger European context. By demonstrating the complexity and plurality of the sisters' literacy and learning and their role in the international circulation of books and knowledge, this project will increase the visibility of Birgittine nuns in the richly variegated literary and religious landscape of Europe, and thus will help re-evaluate the role of women in premodern intellectual culture.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Stoop Patricia
Research team(s)
Funding
- BOF
Project type(s)
- Research Project
BOF Expatriation allowance VLIR Scientific Chair Breughel 2018.
Abstract
Grad Course: Women Writers, Their Role in Manuscript Culture, and Their Networks in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (c. 1300–1700) Women were important and active players in the literary field in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Many women throughout the continent and on the British Isles engaged in the book culture, as readers, owners, commissioners, copyists, illuminators, and authors. This course intends to study the role women had in the intellectual and literary culture of their time. Starting from a number of key publications on gender, agency and female literacy and authorship in the medieval and early modern period, we will examine what texts women wrote, to which genres they had access, and what the (literary) agency of female writers was. We will explore the options women had to express their experiences, ideas, opinions and feelings and their interaction with male supervisors (in case of religious women) or male colleagues. What impressions do we get of their intellectual and literary skills? How did women writers publish their works and for whom did they write? We will also study the networks and literary circles in which women participated. Sometimes these networks were local; sometimes literature for and by women circulated through all Europe. In our travel through time and space between c. 1300 and 1700, we will explore several literary genres and meet famous and less famous women such as Hadewijch of Brabant, Marguerite Porete, Theresa van Avila, Christine de Pizan, Anna Bijns, Mary Sidney, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Margaret Cavendish, and their contemporaries. A strong emphasis in this course will lie on the women's texts and the manuscripts in which these have been preserved, in order to shed light on the role of women in the hand-written book culture. In this way we will explore how women, religious and secular, came to the fore in medieval and early modern literary culture. In order to get an impression of the material aspects of the books women produced, read and/or owned, we will visit some of the important manuscript collections in Philadelphia.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Stoop Patricia
Research team(s)
Funding
- BOF
Project type(s)
- Research Project
BOF Expatriation allowance VLIR Scientific Chair Breughel 2014.
Abstract
Grad course - Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe Women religious – whether they belonged to traditional monastic orders, or to semi-religious institutions like sister houses, beguinages, etcetera – were very important and active players in literary field of the Middle Ages. A great many codices were written for and/or used in women's monasteries, and many female religious were involved in writing, translating, collecting, and performing texts – especially in the vernacular. In this course we will create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts nuns read, wrote, illuminated and exchanged, primarily in Northern Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Special attention will be paid to the writings in which religious women were able to create a creative authorship for themselves, like mystical texts, sister books, convent sermons. We include the semi- or quasi-religious women as both actors and authors. We moreover, keep an open mind as to the inclusion of non-clerical religious men in the aforementioned capacities.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Stoop Patricia
Research team(s)
Funding
- BOF
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Revealing the sermon: transcription and construction of a database of sixteenth-century father confessor sermons
Abstract
This research project wants to open up the sixteenth-century collections of father confessor sermons. This aim will be achieved by printing or scanning ready existing microfilms of sermon manuscripts and by transcribing a relevant corpus of sermons. The specific details on sermons, on the collections in which these sermons are preserved, and on the preachers and sister scribes will be put in a database, which - later on - can be connected to already existing databases.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Stoop Patricia
Research team(s)
Funding
- BOF
Project website
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Female authorship and authority in late medieval and early modern vernacular sermons from the Low Countries.
Abstract
The project aims to investigate female authorship and authority within the complete genre of Dutch 'father confessor sermons' of the 1 5th and 16th centuries. This typically clerical (and therefore male) genre has almost exclusively been handed down by sister scribes. Recent research has shown that these women made substantial creative contributions to the written sermons. Therefore they are exceptionally important for a better understanding of female authorship and female religious authority, often linked to it. The main research questions are: what is the contribution of the sisters to the textualization of sermons? To what extent were they able to leave their own mark on these texts and derive religious authority from their writings? Is there any divergence between convents and is there continuity or change in the course of time as a result of religious and other evolutions?Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Clemens Theo
- Promoter: Mertens Thom
- Fellow: Stoop Patricia
Research team(s)
Funding
- FWO
Project type(s)
- Research Project