Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis Joy Foundation Fellow Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Harvard University The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages Book Abstract This book recovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries performed by Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. Three ministries are examined in detail—liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others—but they are prefaced by profiles of the monastic officers most often charged with their performances—cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. This book challenges past scholarly accounts of these ministries that either locate them exclusively in the so-called Golden Age of double monasteries headed by abbesses in the seventh and eighth centuries, or read the monastic and ecclesiastical reforms of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries as effectively relegating nuns to complete dependency on priests’ sacramental care. This book shows instead that, throughout the central Middle Ages, many nuns in England continued to exercise primary control over the cura animarum of their consorors and others who sought their aid. Most innovative and essential to this study are the close paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses of the surviving liturgical books from women’s communities. When identified and then excavated to unearth the liturgical scripts and scribal productions they preserve, these books hold a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding the lives of nuns in England during the central Middle Ages. These books serve as the foundational documents of practice for this study because they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral ministries that nuns performed, but also to the productions of female scribes as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts. Introduction: Curates of Nuns The Introduction challenges previous interpretations of the term cura monialium in the historiography of medieval nuns that have restricted its use to the material and spiritual care that these religious women, both as individuals and as communities, received from resident chaplains, visiting priests, and diocesan bishops. Such interpretations too often neglect the other meaning that this term could and did convey: the care that nuns extended to themselves and to those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, absolution, and intercession. Such care was no less vital to nuns’ practices and identities. Indeed, it is the contention of the Introduction and the chapters that follow that examining this meaning of cura monialium gets to the very heart of what it was to be a Benedictine nun in England during the central Middle Ages. Chapter One: Memory-Keepers Chapter 1 details the roles and responsibilities incumbent on two monastic officers—cantors and sacristans—who, though indispensable to the production and direction of their communities’ liturgies, have been neglected in histories of medieval monasticism. This chapter identifies nuns known to have held these offices and examines the different ways they created, preserved, and passed on their communities’ memoria through copying books, circulating mortuary rolls after the