Laura Gisseleire

Project title:  

Mortuary Rolls and the construction of memory in female monastic communities

Project Summary:  

The mortuary roll is a type of commemorative text and practice, observed particularly in Western Europe from the 9th to the 16th centuries. They were written when an individual of particular significance to a religious community passed away, with the initial missive then being carried to other communities. At each community, a note would be added to the text, offering comfort, providing support and, most importantly, promising prayers for the soul of the deceased.

Mortuary rolls are a unique insight into monastic women, their communities, and their networks, but have received little recognition as a form of institutional knowledge-making. Focusing on rolls from continental Europe between the 12th – 14th centuries, my project will explore how female monastic communities utilised mortuary rolls to shape their conceptualisation of their shared past through the construction and communication of memorial narratives. I will explore these manuscripts as sites of transformative memory: a mode of storytelling designed to reimagine and reformulate the past. Understanding the production, exchange, and subsequent conservation of commemorative literature as an inherently creative exercise will, I hope, reveal further nuance in gendered dynamics of memory.

This project therefore aims to address a lacuna in our understanding of female coenobitic culture, particularly the ways in which monastic women engaged in commemorative practice and maintained social networks as part of knowledge-construction. Mortuary rolls from female communities, as a rare category of texts composed by and about named women, are important yet underutilized sources, and are often the sole surviving records of these women. These manuscripts also provide indications to the resources available to female monastic communities, including the economic resources to fund the production and travel of the manuscript, access to scriptoria, and proficiency in Latin.

This project also aims to reframe the mortuary roll as a creative manuscript practice, within both male and female monastic communities. A crucial area of this project is the exploration of a challenging and underutilised corpus of documents. These manuscripts contain rich biographical detail. They also demonstrate a broad range of writings, including extended poetical verses; misogynistic polemics; prosaic expressions of grief, loss, and lamentation. My research explores how we can engage productively with these sources.