Dr Edmund Wareham Wanitzek was delighted to take on the role of Publicity Officer for the EHS in summer 2023.
I am a lecturer in Early Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London and came to Egham via undergraduate and postgraduate study in Oxford, Trier, and Freiburg im Breisgau. My work explores the religious, gender, and literary history of German-speaking Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which crosses artificial boundaries between the medieval and the early modern.
I have a particular interest in the history of convents and nuns which first emerged attending a palaeography seminar as an undergraduate exchange student at the University of Trier. My doctorate was a microhistorical study of the Cistercian convent of Günterstal, near Freiburg im Breisgau, in which I explored daily and sensory life through objects such as gingerbread. As part of ‘The Nuns’ Network’ project, I contributed to the ongoing edition of nearly 1,800 letters written in Latin, Low German, and a characteristic mixture of both languages by the Benedictine nuns of Lüne between 1460 and 1555. The letters offer a wonderful window into how a group of religious women navigated the enclosed life as well as the changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a year when the EHS conference has been exploring the topic of ‘Margins and Peripheries’, my work aims to show that, while convents may often have been physically located on marginal land or outside town walls, they were far from marginal within late medieval and early modern society and were crucial economic, spiritual, and cultural centres.
I am currently exploring the history of the German Peasants’ War (1524-5), the largest uprising in the history of Western Europe before the French Revolution, and its impact on female monastic life. In just over a couple of months, hundreds of monastic houses were seized, plundered, and sometimes even burned to the ground by peasants. A significant number of these were convents. Through an exploration of female Cistercian houses in south-west Germany, I am investigating why it was that monastic houses were targeted in such a way, how this was experienced, and what it meant for the future of monasticism. While we now know a lot more now about mendicant nuns’ reactions to the introduction of the Reformation in urban centres such as Strasbourg or Nuremberg, we know far less about the situation of rural convents of the older orders for whom the Peasants’ War was so decisive. I am hoping to correct that imbalance in my forthcoming book Walled Women: The Convent and its World in an Age of Reform and Revolt and have been fortunate to receive funding from a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to create a website which will visualise the destruction of monastic houses during the revolt.
Ecclesiastical History Society 