Research team
- Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)
- Research centre Ruusbroec Institute
Expertise
Patricia Stoop is teaching Historical Dutch Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). She held the prestigious Visiting Brueghel Chair in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania (2014 and 2018) and she was an assistant professor of Medieval Dutch Literature at the University of Utrecht (2015–16). She holds a propedeutic degree in Greek and Latin (Nijmegen, 1993), and a doctoral degree in Dutch Literature and Languages (Nijmegen, 1997). She received her PhD in Literature at the Universiteit Antwerpen (2009). Her published dissertation Schrijven in commissie. De zusters uit het Brusselse klooster Jericho en de preken van hun biechtvaders (ca. 1456–1510) involved the study of the fifteenth-century vernacular convent sermons from the Brussels convent of Jericho and their literary and historical context. As a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) she studied female authorship and authority in late medieval and early modern vernacular sermons from the Low Countries (2010–13). Additionally, she is 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. The three edited volumes have been published by Brepols publishers (2013, 2015, and 2017). Her new book project, Communities of Women's Learning in the Low Countries, c. 1350-1600, uses sermon collections and library collections to explore the scope of women's knowledge, the literary means they used to express it, and the cultural and social field in which they functioned. Furthermore, she is developing a digital database that will eventually contain all vernacular and Latin manuscripts from the Low Countries that show women's involvement in the period between c. 1250 and 1600. The project, which relies heavily on material data in the sources, is the first of its kind and can serve as a pilot project for other regions in Europe. It goes without saying that the focus on religious women and the study of sermons implies a great familiarity with the broader male-led literary and religious culture. After all, both domains cannot be studied in isolation from the important male influences and authors of that period. In addition, she is working on three edited volumes: Commercial Book Production? Writing for Third Parties. Turnhout: Brepols, [2020-] (Texts and Transitions Series); Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Europe: Preachers and Preaching Across Manuscript and Print (c. 1450 to c. 1550), ed. by Veronica O'Mara and Patricia Stoop. Turnhout: Brepols, [2020-] (Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching), and Spiritual Literature in the Late Medieval Low Countries, essays by Thom Mertens, edited, translated, and introduced by John Arblaster, Veerle Fraeters, Kees Schepers, and Patricia Stoop. With and introduction by John van Engen (Turnhout: Brepols, [2020-]). She has been teaching on a broad range of topics in the field of medieval and early modern culture and literature. Her main areas of interest include: women writers, female authorship, literacy and learning, participation by women in the intellectual, religious, cultural and literary field of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, intellectual networks, memoria (both as a rhetorical tool and as an instrument for the commemoration of the dead), commercial book production, and sermon studies.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Project type(s)
- Research Project