Elizabeth Makowski

In Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages, Elizabeth Makowski continues with her work on the history of medieval women religious and canon law, exploring women who abandoned the religious life or who contested their vows. Makowski draws on both documents of practice (largely from England) and prescriptive texts to assess how the gendered nature of canon law shaped women's choices and how women then navigated those restrictions. She writes with nuance and sensitivity about a topic which has been at once understudied and often misunderstood and sensationalised.

However, there are some issues here. This is a short book that for once I wanted to be longer—Makowski has a bit of a tendency to quote at some length from sources (primary or secondary) and let them stand without much by way of interrogation. I wanted more by way of analysis, especially as to what, if anything, it means that "apostasy" could be deployed as such a big umbrella term in the Middle Ages. As for more minor quibbles, I wished for more consistent grounding in time and place—we're not always told when a particular incident occurred, even to the century—and for better proofreading. (Among various dropped prepositions and inconsistently spelled names, we're told about the nuns praying in the church "quire"—c'mon, Boydell and Brewer!)… (more)

Periculoso was a decree issued by Boniface VIII in 1298, which asserted papal supremacy by requiring the absolute enclosure of all religious women—that is, without specific and remarkable need, they could not leave the cloister and others could not enter, and that women's houses could not recruit new members. Makowski argues that Periculoso gained the influence it did because it was widely discussed by several prominent canon lawyers in books which were commonly used in universities across Europe. This is a very brief study, and while Makowski's analysis is clear and commonsensical, I found myself wishing for more context, and more analysis of the tension between the bull's wide promulgation and its resistance by nuns and their patrons and how it furthered the distinction made between male and female religious. Some of the secondary source material also seems curiously dated—there are many works on English nunneries more recent than Eileen Power's. Ultimately raises more questions than it has space to answer.… (more)