Minnen inifrån ett kloster: Identitet och kollektivt minne i ett senmedeltida nunnekloster

Abstract

Memories from inside a convent: Late medieval identity and collective memory

In late medieval Venice, the Dominican convent of Corpus Domini constructed its collective memory and identity in a chronicle and a necrology written primarily by the nun Bartolomea Riccoboni. The texts offer a rare, detailed insight into monastic life, contributing to our understanding of the female medieval experience. The research presented in this article identifies several dominant themes such as ascetic devotion, death, mystical experiences, and counsels of perfection. Despite their significance as one of the few surviving source materials authored by a medieval nun, Riccoboni’s texts have received little attention in the literature.

By applying theories of collective memory, collaborative remembering, and the methodology of qualitative content analysis, I examine how these texts functioned as an instrument for shaping communal identity, memory, and religious legitimacy. To conceptualise collective memory as a bodym of knowledge, an attribute, and a process, I apply an alternative analytical framework, where body of knowledge refers to a group’s shared narratives and facts, such as the convent’s origin story, references to saints, and Dominican paragons; attribute refers to the group’s self-image and understanding of the past, evident in the chronicle’s portrayal of the nuns as pure and divinely favoured; and process refers to the reconstruction and reshaping of the past and creation of a group identity, as reflected in the texts’ tendency to reinterpret negative events in ways that reinforce communal coherence and spiritual meaning. Riccoboni’s writings, though framed in monastic humility, continually emphasised the convent’s self-image of perfect obedience, purity, and community. These attributes were both internal norms and functioned as symbolic and spiritual capital in the medieval religious landscape. By discussing how memory was mobilised when the convent changed religious order and the legitimation of a new institutional identity, ultimately I chart the process of collective memory evident in the collaborative nature of the chronicle and necrology, because the texts combined shared memories, oral testimonies, and retrospective text-editing to construct and communicate the convent’s identity down the centuries.