Lives of Medieval Nuns

The often forgotten world of medieval nuns holds many secrets about the lives of ordinary people of the age, their daily routines, education, and societal roles. German medieval historian Henrike Lähnemann shares with Matt Lewis her research into the rich archives of convents, which revealed nuns' vibrant lives, from their involvement in local politics and commerce to their spiritual duties and family bonds. They discuss how medieval convents served as hubs of learning, medicine, and community interaction, complete with both solemn rituals and moments of joyful laughter. Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:21Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 3:02Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. Medieval European people are often divided into three: those who fight, those who pray and those who work. Those who fight are often the elite, so are the easiest to see. Amongst those who pray, senior churchmen could become prominent in politics. Those who work are often more difficult to pick out. But amongst those who pray, there is a group who can be equally hard to uncover.

• 3:34Matt Lewis?

  Henriques Lehmann's new book, The Life of Nuns, sets out to discover what life was really like behind the walls of a convent. What was daily life like? What did education look like? And just how disconnected were they from their families and the communities around them? We're about to answer these questions and more.

• 4:02Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to Gone Medieval, Henriques.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:06Matt Lewis?

  I'm very much looking forward to this. It's an aspect of medieval life that I guess we don't too often talk about, so Gone Medieval is here to try and fill in those gaps for everybody.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  Yes, we called our book in German unerhörte Frauen, unheard women, because their voices are too often overheard, but also because we wanted to show that they are worth listening to. And unerhört also means unheard of, kind of plucky, outright outspoken.

• 4:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, sounds like a much better title for German than we get in English. I guess to start off with, what kinds of sources are available for us to tell the stories of nuns? Because I think it's easy to imagine them cloistered away, and we wouldn't know too much about them. But what kinds of sources do exist for us to explore their lives?

• 4:56Speaker 04

  It's astonishingly rich cache of sources, letters, archival material. And partly, they haven't been explored because the nuns were too good archivists. So they kept all their material with them, never threw anything away. And it's still partly, at least in Germany, in the archival boxes from the 13th, 14th, 15th century, in the order in which they stacked it in these boxes. So you have to get out of your comfort zone of your own study and the library, and you have to go there and visit them and their sources.

• 5:41Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's incredible that there's that much stuff neatly organised as well. Why did German sources prove to be so fruitful for doing this? Why was Germany in particular a great place to find these kinds of records?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Because there has been much less damage done to the medieval heritage than in France, where the revolution erased a lot, and particularly England, where the dissolution of the monasteries practically destroyed most of the material that we could learn things from. And Germany also had always had a great culture of communication because it was...

• 6:25Speaker 04

  So regionally scattered, there wasn't just this one centre as London is. Things going back and forth and if anything happened to the London copy, then everything was erased. While it's much more regionally organised and the convents and monasteries are set up by local princes, the cities. So it's a much more granular structure of communication. A much more tightly knit or knotted network than we have in more centralised countries. And this is partly the network we wanted to explore.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Peer-to-peer support rather than just from the one centre of power down to the sub-altern women and men.

• 7:21Matt Lewis?

  Should we be surprised that the records in Germany weren't more affected by the Reformation? Because the Reformation was quite concentrated in Germany. And we know, as you mentioned, the dissolution of the monasteries in England caused us to lose an awful lot of records there. Why was it not similar in Germany, do you think?

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Again, it partly comes down to the regional character. If the convent had been set up by your grandparents, you didn't want the statues that bore their name to be destroyed. So for example, in Nuremberg, which was the first town to go Lutheran in fifteen twenty five. The town council was very clear, we are being Protestant from next Sunday onward, but nothing will be destroyed. So they just put dust covers over the Marian altars and the statues of the saints.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  But they left all the epitaphs that bore the family coat of arms in place and they kept all the records. So. This local structure prevented a large-scale destruction. And also the much stronger city structure overall. There was a large and affluent middle class who had been responsible in sponsoring this. So it wasn't just nobility and single noble families, but it was a much broader sway of society. And this hasn't been seen for a long time.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  It really, the narrative only changed when I was studying in the late eighties, nineties, to see that the Reformation wasn't this switch being flicked over from darkness to light, Luther as the big revelation and everything changed, but that it is a much more grayscale image. So only two years ago, a study was published that in sixteen hundred, in the Protestant areas in Germany, there were still half of the convents going strong.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  So that it goes completely against the narrative particularly put forward by Protestant historiography of the nineteenth century. So historiogus historiography, geschichtswissenschaft, as a serious university subject, was more or less invented in Prussia in the nineteenth century as a Protestant discipline. And they built up this teleological looking towards the glorious nineteenth century development from darkness, Middle Ages, Reformation cut point, Luther nailing the coffin of the Middle Ages, which he never did, he never swung a hammer.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  And then everything becomes Protestant, everything vanishes, and there we are in the glorious modern period. And this narrative has prevented people looking for

• 10:50Speaker 04

  All these regional solutions of coexistence, of arrangement, of this wonderful heritage of Protestant nuns, Protestant Benedictines, Protestant sisters, because they just didn't fit into this black and white image.

• 11:08Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. I mean, one of the sources that you talk about in the book is is kind of a effectively a nun's diary. And, you know, she writes in partly in Latin, partly in middlelow German, and it's almost sort of practicing her Latin a little bit in places, but resorting to middlelow German when she doesn't want to fuss with the Latin kind of thing. And just that really personal element is so fascinating. We don't have many medieval, just everyday people's diaries, do we? It's a fascinating source in itself.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that was a really lucky find that Eva Schlotheuber, my co-author, with whom I work also on the scholarly edition of the Nuns' Letters, found when she was looking through the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, which is another advantage of German transmission, that you have all these local libraries where the princes wanted to preserve the memory of their state. So and it looks completely inconspicuous because it's written on second

• 12:18Speaker 04

  life parchment, so scraped down parchment recycled from an obsolete liturgical manuscript for basically her notekeeping. And there seems to be a multiple purpose to it. One, as you mentioned, practicing her Latin, and it's fairly rough. I'm also editing other nuns' documents, and she should have known better. All the nuns had to go through seven years of Latin training, at least mixing up her cases and lots of spelling mistakes. But she can tell a story, and she's mainly writing down what went wrong as a kind of memo.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  To herself and to other nuns what not to do in future. And that makes it so fascinating. It's really rare, as you said, that something like this survives because normally the archive was well curated to present to the outside world a happy family image. I spoke to a colleague who grew up in a boarding school, was educated and where they had to write letters to their parents once a week. It was very clear that nothing critical could be in there.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  So it's rare that you have this unfiltered voice of somebody not in power, but just as a chronicler of the life.

• 13:51Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, just sort of talking about their everyday life and their experiences. It's incredible. And so what, from all of the sources that you've been able to gather together, what do we know about daily life for a nun inside a convent? So how regimented and restricted was it, for example?

• 14:06Speaker 04

  One of the joys of working with these northern German sources is that we have not just the written records, but also the everyday objects. So for example, the oldest spectacles in the world were found under the floorboards of one of the convents, Wienerhausen, where they had literally fallen through the cracks. Since it wasn't dissolved, it shape shifted through the Reformation. It also shape shifted through the other major Cezura for German history, the Napoleonic reorganization and secularization of the early 19th century.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Because the nuns weren't recognizable to Napoleon as Catholic, since they were Protestants, they weren't dissolved. So we have there things like these spectacles. We have things like. The implements for writing, for doing all the crafts projects. So I'm sitting in front of a replica of a medieval tapestry, five by three meters, embroidered by the nuns to portray the story of Tristan and Isolde, something you wouldn't first associate with a sacred space. So it was a very colourful space that we can learn from material culture.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  It was a space of learning, basically the only higher education opportunity for women in the Middle Ages, entering a convent and learning all the liberal arts, starting with a good dose of grammar, even though the diarists didn't take it in, but then going through rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, a lot of music, theory and daily practice, but also looking at law. They had to administer large holdings of land and property.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  And going on to medicine, so they had the large herb gardens. One of my doctoral students is currently working on bloodletting in the phlebotomy in the convent. So they needed clear guidelines how to administer something like that and when to call in outside specialists for that. So we know the life was very clearly structured through the daily routine of the hours, going seven times a day to prayer. But between this liturgical structure and a year cycling round from

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Advent via Christmas to the resurrection and then coming of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost, there was a lot of space for individual variation. So if somebody was good at writing, they would be employed with copying manuscripts, also writing sermons. If somebody was good at singing, she would be encouraged to lead the daily liturgical singing. But also we have songbooks of some of them decidedly funny character, secular nature to collect and curate music.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  So it was a community united by a clear structure, but within it, a lot of opportunity for different skill sets. I'm here in Oxford, member of a college, St Edmund Hall Medieval Foundation. At least once a week struck by recognising some of these structures in my own daily life, from gathering together for the communal meal as a focal point, to discussing the election of a new abbess, or in our case, a new principal. So there are lots of points of interaction and communal decision making going forward

• 18:25Speaker 04

  to make the life very varied.

• 18:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. And for nuns, how important was it to remain enclosed and secluded within their communities? Or did they engage with the outer world? Or did that vary between different convents?

• 18:40Speaker 04

  It varied considerably and it's always a kind of, with monastic life, a circular movement. So things start normally with a very strict observance of a rule and then more and more exceptions come. The community grows more prosperous, becomes more secular, and then somebody comes in and says, we need to reform. And then a reform movement. Comes in, be it, for example, the Sesterians to reform the Benedictine movement in the 12th century, or for our sources particularly important, the Bussfelder Reform,

• 19:23Speaker 04

  which was in the 15th century influenced by something called the Modern Devotion, the Devotio Moderna, a form of turning back to a more inward-looking, liturgically-focused life. An element of that is stressing the importance of full enclosure. So of the sources we are looking at in our book, about half of them are from a strictly enclosed community that had just undergone this reform process in the late 15th century, which they themselves called Reformatio, so the word that used in the 16th century for the Lutheran Reformation,

• 20:07Speaker 04

  while the diorists vom Heilig Kreuz lived in a much less regulated convent, where it was, for example, possible to have a convent feast, where everybody would meet and sing together sexual people, and the young clergy, the male clergy, and the novices. So, but in a way, we can observe a movement that goes back and forth. So the stricter the enclosure was, the more intense the written communication gets,

• 20:45Speaker 04

  because they have to write down basically everything they want to communicate to the outside world. So the rich source of the 1,800 letters collected by the nuns of Lüne comes about because they had just...

• 21:03Speaker 04

  Decided to have this strict enclosure. So we have also letters that in a convent like Heiligkreuz would have been instead of just spoken communication with a neighbouring convent. In a way, these are the most interesting notes. So they are more like WhatsApp messages that are exchanged between nuns of neighbouring convents or between a brother in town with his sister in the convent. So enclosure doesn't mean shutting down the voices. It rather means transferring them on paper or parchment for posterity.

• 21:44Matt Lewis?

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• 21:48Speaker 04

  Yes, it is.

• 21:59Matt Lewis?

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• 23:25Matt Lewis?

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• 23:33Speaker 01

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• 25:28Matt Lewis?

  There's a portion of the book as well that deals with the connections that remained in place between nuns and their families. You just talked about, there might be conversations between brothers and sisters. How important was that connection to family in the life of nuns? Because I think, again, we tend to have this view that people go into a convent or a monastery, they join the clergy and they sort of sever all of their family ties. Are you able to piece together those connections that were maintained?

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Yes, so the daughters or nieces in the convent were incredibly important to the family. I'm, again, sometimes reminded when we sing even song in chapel in college and the proud parents of one of our freshers come along to listen to their daughter or son in the choir singing. So families from Lüneburg would go for the high feasts to visit their daughters in the convent. They would be allowed to sit in the church underneath the nuns choir, so the nuns would be heard but not seen, because they were behind a

• 26:42Speaker 04

  screen, which meant they could view the altar and the east end of the church. They could hear, obviously, what the priests were saying. They could hear what the laypeople were singing beneath them, but they couldn't be seen. And so the families could listen to the nuns singing and we know from liturgical manuscripts that they particularly practised complicated hymns for these feast days where they knew they would be listened to by their families at the parish. And they were also allowed a certain number of hours to meet and speak at the Sprechfenster, the screened window, to communicate with the outer world.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Again, they would be heard but not seen. They got regularly letters asking for their advice and that could be more in a spiritual sense. So we have a lot of letters of consolation.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  After the death of the father, the daughter will write to the mother, trying to make sense of what happened and giving words of biblical comfort, pointing to spiritual exercises the mother can do to cope with the loss. But also quite practical things. A brother is asking, I'm sending my son to university, what should he read first? And the aunt who has studied all of patristic, so the church fathers, but also the more modern theological writing, says, oh, well, start with Thomas Aquinas. It's hard to tackle first, but it will be

• 28:26Speaker 04

  really worthwhile reading at the end. And make sure you don't give him too Latin allowance because he'll start drinking. But so quite practical things as well.

• 28:38Matt Lewis?

  And also, nothing changes very much, does it? That sounds like the advice you'd be giving to students going off to uni today. Read the right books and don't drink too much.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. We also have the notices of, we are going to pray for your sick daughter, that she is getting better. We are praying for the soul of the departed. And that is quite often the first reason for the convents to be set up, to have a reliable source of prayer for the deceased members of the family. And again, the stricter the enclosure was, the more confident the families could be that the nuns really had time to do their

• 29:23Speaker 04

  prayers, undistracted from having to worry about running the economy and going on journeys or whatsoever. So that's the benefit of having a daughter in the convent for family. The other way around, it also works, the nuns. Regularly write to their brothers who hold important political office in the and say, we need your lobbying voice to make sure that our confessor who hasn't got a really well-paid prevent at the moment gets a better job in in town so that it can continue hearing our confession.

• 30:07Matt Lewis?

  Fascinating. So they should have had a local political lobbying role to play as well as the the spiritual one.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 30:13Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, they administered to their own estates, which in the case of Kloster Lune was mainly salt pans. So Luneburg was the richest of the Hanseatic towns, so of the towns doing the trade around the Baltic and the North Sea because it had very rich salt mines underneath the city. And none of Scandinavia has salt. So Lübeck, who did the main trading for the other Hanseatic cities, would take Luneburg salt to Scandinavia and exchange it for furs and other goods from Scandinavia.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  So the nuns got as dowry when they entered the convent, a share in a salt pan. So a quarter salt pan and that would be quite a good income.

• 31:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I was going to ask how convents kind of made money, but it sounds like they were quite often sort of mercantile enterprises as much as as maybe presumably landowners. Did they didn't nunnery's own as much land as we associate with the rest of the church as well?

• 31:22Speaker 04

  Yes. And again, I'm sometimes reminded of the Oxford colleges whose wealth is still partly held in property.

• 31:33Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. So but they they did engage in commerce as well. So they could, if the if the salt trade is the local industry, they would engage with that as a way to to supplement their income too.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah.

• 31:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  And they also had a intranet of exchanging goods. So a lot of the letters we have are, please, can you send me another supply of pearls? Because one of the convents specialised in growing these little river pearls, which are grown in the cheeks of trouts in the Kemen. So while other convents would specialise in making really fine fabric and others, so for example, the fabric woven silk that was needed for

• 32:31Speaker 04

  doing the veils for the nuns was done particularly in one convent. And they would sell and also swap goods like that. And they would also negotiate to get better prices by bulk orders. So Kloster Lüne was the convent closest to the next big city, Lüneburg. And the other convents, Meding, Ebstorf, Wiethausen, would send their manuscripts to Lüne and then they would get a better price for having all of the manuscripts bound

• 33:11Speaker 04

  at the local bookbinder than if each convent had sent in their single order.

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• 34:00Speaker 01

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• 34:03Speaker 02

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• 34:45Matt Lewis?

  That's a fascinating aspect of the ways that they're working together to get good deals as well as everything else. I've got what, I'm not sure if this is a stupid question. So feel free to tell me if this is a stupid question. We often think of nuns as considering themselves to be effectively brides of Christ. So they're wives to the King of Kings.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:05Matt Lewis?

  Can we see parallels in the ways that nuns view their roles in the world with the way that queens consider their roles next to kings? You know, they're there to intercede, to plead for mercy and to be a sort of bridge between the King and his people.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  Not at all a stupid question.

• 35:22Matt Lewis?

  Phew.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  They, they really take this metaphor of being brides of Christ quite literally. And so we have letters where the nuns write to their mothers. Consider yourself now to be the mother in law of Christ, which gives you a much more powerful role in society than if you were just mother in law of another cobbler of salt dealer. They take this also very serious as an obligation to share their intimate knowledge of what Christ is really like with others.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  We can see that, for example, in their translation of their own mystical writing into the vernacular for their lay relatives. I've looked at four sisters, biological sisters, where three of them went to the convent of Medingen and one, Anna, stayed in the town of Lüneburg and married the town mayor, Heinrich Töbe.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  And the three religious sisters write for themselves each a book of prayers with meditations on how sweet it is to taste the kisses of Christ, of drinking his wine, of going for a walk, a stroll in the garden with him in the coolness of the evening. So a lot of the imagery of the Song of Songs coming in, but crossed with their own personal experience. And they translate these texts for their secular sister who didn't have enough Latin to read their meditations in the original. They tried to make it accessible

• 37:21Speaker 04

  for her in middle old Germans or in the local dialect.

• 37:27Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's such an interesting connection and role there. I was always imagining you were going to say they were complaining that Christ leaves the toilet seat up and these dirty towels on the floor, but it's not quite that.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  And they seem as demanding. It's not always an easy life being a wife of Christ. So there is a dialogue song, Christ and the Loving Soul, where Christ orders the nun, lift up your cross and follow me, strip down, it will be easy, you have to wade through thorns. So it's not necessarily all roses, but it's ultimately worth it.

• 38:09Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And we're convinced to a kind of place of medicine and healing in the same way that we often think as male monasteries could be.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Yes, and we, for example, bloodletting was a big part of the regime. And in the letters, we have a lot of exchanges of recipes, for example, for healing balm. They wouldn't necessarily, so that's different from monasteries, take in secular visitors for healing.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  But it was a sisterly exchange. So for example, in the diary of the nun of Heiligkreuz, she notes how two sisters came from another sisterian convent because Heiligkreuz was closer to the Braunsteig leading territory, a specialist in a rare disease. So she could be located with them and the specialist wouldn't have to travel that far. So it was more localized medical

• 39:21Speaker 04

  provision, but still we have a lot of manuscripts of both Latin and vernacular sources for the most common diseases.

• 39:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. There is also a portion of the book that deals with with death within the convent and how the community dealt with death. What were you able to uncover about their attitudes towards that?

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Well, in a way, there were the specialists in how to die well, which is a big concern and question in the the Middle Ages. And one of the main fears of secular people was to die unprepared. Living in a convent, you were, in a way, daily preparing yourself for death and seeing death not as the end, but as a transition, as the point where you are now really meeting

• 40:27Speaker 04

  face to face your bridegroom Christ. Like now still at Even Song or Compline, the Song of Simeon is sung, "Lord, now let us thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word." This is what the nuns would sing every night before going to bed. So every day closed with this paration. And they were looking beyond to the heavenly Jerusalem. So we've included in the book photographs from the gorgeous nuns choir in Wienerhausen, which has a cycle of ceiling paintings and wall paintings.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Which the nuns could meditate upon while sitting for hours and hours on end in their choir stalls. And they would see this transition to the heavenly Jerusalem, which was painted in the shape of their own convent, guarded by the cherubim and their Christ sitting side by side with the nuns that had gone before.

• 41:40Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. So they almost had this proximity to death that was important in the way they lived their lives.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, and as I mentioned, a large portion of their spiritual duty was to pray for the deceased. So they would remember those who had gone before. They would be read at each lunchtime, the stories of the saints. Many of them had found a very violent death, but who had overcome and were now at the other side.

• 42:18Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's been absolutely fascinating to try and get a little bit closer to the lives of some of these nuns that have often seemed sort of beyond our reach. And clearly they're not. You've reconstructed so many of them in the book. I wondered if, just to end with, whether you had a favourite story or a favourite snippet or a favourite person who appears in the book?

• 42:38Speaker 04

  I think it's really this story of the song festival gone pear-shaped, which we deal with in the chapter on education of nuns, which included this. So the story is told that the abbess of Heiligkreuz for a special treat had allowed

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Everybody to help with the breaking of the flags, which was a necessary process in producing the garments and the cloth. And it's something that, similarly to lifting up the ankle, so it's done best if you sing rhythmically with it. So it is an occasion for singing along. And all the the older nuns who remembered the songs that used to be sung for that were busy writing these down. And but it was also permitted for the younger male clergy to join in. And then when they had exhausted this stock of authorized songs,

• 43:43Speaker 04

  they started making up songs and improvising. I I imagine it a little bit like a stand up routine where you would suddenly address somebody. And so the nun writes that they were suddenly singing, "Oh, dear Provost, or worthy abbess." I've tried to look for songs like that in the Wienerhausen Songbook. I found one of these songs which could be similar to that sung at this occasion, which is a mock song about a stupid priest, or rather, a donkey who wants to become a priest.

• 44:26Speaker 04

  "As they're loose in their mola, na wohl obfangs im Herrn." And the donkey can only sing "er", which is the sound a German donkey makes, and which corresponds to the German letters I and A. And so we have also images of this kind of donkey priest singing, "Dum klamo wachs ist er?" "Der sagt so mich bringen." And imagining these novices and young clergymen singing along lustily to something like that always brings a smile to my face when looking back through the book.

• 45:09Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I I think it's interesting to think of people like nuns and priests having fun, you know, having a bit of a laugh because it's something we don't necessarily associate with and we think of them as being. Auster and very serious people, but they were just human beings with all of these connections to their local community and their family and all of this desire to learn and to have fun as well. They're not that dissimilar to everybody else.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 45:35Matt Lewis?

  Well, thank you so much for joining us, Enrique. It's been absolute pleasure to talk to you and I encourage everybody to read the book if you want to find out more about nuns.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Thanks, Art, for having me.

• 45:43Matt Lewis?

  Thank you. Enrique's book, The Life of Nuns, is out now if you'd like to find out more about this fascinating aspect of the medieval world. If you're looking for more on the ecclesiastical world, then you can dig back through our catalogue to find a great episode with Emma Wells on cathedrals and one with Claire Gilbert on her book, I, Julian, about the Ankaress, whose writings became hugely influential. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Thursday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that

• 46:26Matt Lewis?

  you've gone medieval. You can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. As a special gift, you could also get 50% off your first three months when you use the code MEDIEVAL at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 47:40Speaker 06

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