Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta

There is little evidence that speaks directly to medieval women's religious experience prior to the thirteenth century. (Notably, the second volume of George Duby and Michelle Perrot's five-volume A History of Women in the West is subtitled Silences of the Middle Ages.) Things changed after the year 1200. As, decades ago, Caroline Walker Bynum brought to the attention of Anglophone audiences, thirteenth-century Cistercian nuns at Helfta left behind the equivalent of roughly 1,250 published pages composed of prayers, meditations, spiritual exercises, and visions of mystical union. The sources give a firsthand account of these women's religious lives while detailing the characteristics of a distinctive spirituality. Bynum's study broke new ground in asking two key questions: Why did women play such a fundamental role in shaping late medieval Christian piety, and why did women's spirituality have the characteristics that it did? Examining the historical context for the Helfta writings as well as the lives behind them, Bynum showed that the nuns’ piety reflected a creative response to a growing clericalism that sought to limit women's religious authority. The socialization provided by living in an established community of female religious was a critical component in the nuns’ creative response.Harrison's Thousands and Thousands of Lovers builds on Bynum's work and paints a loving and finely grained portrait of the nuns’ day-to-day lives, their spirituality, their sense of self, and their place in the world. Her emphasis throughout is on how the nuns’ understanding of community shaped every aspect of their experience. As Harrison shows, “community” entailed much more than the women's communal lives at Helfta. Hewing closely to the sources, Harrison's study moves outward from examining the ties between the nuns themselves to their relationships with those outside the convent, both living and dead. “Community” thus includes all those who will be saved, regardless of whether they are currently sinners or saints. What binds this community together are the good works that the nuns performed for Christ and for others. These good works in turn benefit the nuns in what could be called a triangulated gift-exchange: service to the extended community serves Christ, while service to Christ rebounds to the nuns as it contributes toward their own salvation. The life of service is not necessarily all rosy. Praying for others, especially the unknown dead in purgatory, may be tedious. But the visions of the “spiritual luminaries” living at Helfta (Gertrude of Helfta and Mechtilde of Hackeborn) affirmed the efficacy of the nuns’ service and even validated the women's performance of certain clerical duties. In Harrison's reading, the sources depict a joyful convent “confident in the immensity of its collective contribution to the salvation of the world.”