“As Clear as Crystal”: Transparency in the Katharinenthal Visitation Group and Sister Book

Frances Lilliston

The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University

Abstract

This paper examines imagery of transparency in the convent of Katharinenthal, discussing a sculpture of the Visitation carved for the convent around 1310-20, and the Katharinenthal Sister Book. The sculpture is unusual in its use of two rock-crystal cabochons to represent the pregnancies of the Virgin Mary and her relative, Elizabeth. The Sister Book records a chronicle of the founding of the convent, as well as vitae memorializing the lives of deceased sisters and describing their religious visions, several of which feature a motif of transparency. Multiple sisters are recorded as becoming “as clear as crystal,” while another sister beholds a vision of “the wall of the refectory appear[ing] as though it were glass.”

In both the Visitation sculpture and the Sister Book, the symbolism of transparency represents a contradiction: the revelation of an interior space—either the interior of the body or of the convent—simultaneously evokes longing, and the frustration of longing. The transparent material allows ocular penetration, but constructs an impenetrable barrier. In the case of the Visitation group, some of this frustration is allayed through active engagement with the sculpture.

The paper concludes that the paradox of simultaneous visibility and inaccessibility exemplifies the importance of enclosure as a construction of identity for the sisters of Katharinenthal, fundamentally differentiating those within from those without.

“As Clear as Crystal”: Transparency in the Katharinenthal Visitation Group and Sister Book

When viewing a sculpture of the Visitation from the convent of Katharinenthal, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the eye is drawn towards two rock-crystal cabochons inset into the abdomens of the figures.^[i] The transparency of the rock crystal permits the gaze to pass through and reveal an interior space within the bodies of the two women. Transparency seems to have been of general interest to the sisters at Katharinenthal, as it also recurs in the text of the Katharinenthal Schwesternbücher, or Sister Book.^[ii]

The Sister Book, written by the nuns themselves, recorded mystical visions and miracles. While the oldest extant manuscript of the Sister Book dates to the fifteenth century, the sisters memorialized in the text likely lived between around 1245 and 1345.^[iii]  Several of the visions describe the sisters’ bodies or the walls of the convent turning transparent, likened to crystal or glass. In both the Visitation and the Sister Book, the motif of transparency creates a contradiction: the revelation of an interior space—either the interior of the body or of the convent—simultaneously evokes longing, and the frustration of longing. Transparency allows one to see into an interior space, but does not allow one to go into that space. The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which habitual visualization of transparency, with all its associated contradictions, informed the construction and reinforcement of an identity shared between the sisters at Katharinenthal. Contemplation of the Visitation sculpture and close reading of the Sister Book can lead us to an understanding of what the sisters valued as a community, and how those values were embodied by recurring imagery of transparency.

According to a chronicle of the convent’s founding included in the Sister Book, the convent of Katharinenthal originated in 1242 when a small community of women moved to a site on the bank of the Rhine near Diessenhofen in what is now Northern Switzerland. Soon after, in 1245, Katharinenthal was incorporated into the Dominican order, and by 1280, the community of sisters at Katharinenthal totaled around one hundred fifty. Katharinenthal was a part of a larger community of Dominican women’s houses in the area, and its Sister Book likely circulated to nearby convents to be read and copied as a part of the broader culture of exchange between Dominican convents. The Katherinenthal Sister Book is one of nine known Sister Books from the region.^[iv]

Around 1310, Katharinenthal commissioned Master Heinrich of Constance to carve the Visitation sculpture for display in the convent, showing the Virgin Mary and her relative, Elizabeth, when both are pregnant—Mary with Christ and Elizabeth with John the Baptist. The composition, made of walnut with polychromy and gilding, centers on its two distinctive rock-crystal cabochons, inset into the figures’ abdomens to represent their pregnancies. Both women stand up straight, sheathed in gilded gowns and veils. The women’s faces, hands, and rock-crystal cabochons stand out starkly against the enveloping folds of drapery obscuring the rest of their bodies. They tilt their heads toward each other and reach their arms across the divide between them, grasping one pair of hands near Mary’s stomach and both resting their other hands—not quite touching—on Elizabeth’s chest. These two bodily links between the women create a visual circuit, connecting their bodies across the chasm of empty space between them. The viewer’s eye follows this circuit from one woman to the other and back again, looping continuously. This visual cycling draws an emphatic circle around the rock-crystal cabochons, underlining their significance.

To a medieval viewer, rock crystal held connotations of purity due to its paradoxical nature as simultaneously solid and transparent.^[v] This association makes rock crystal an appropriate material to depict the quintessentially pure body of Mary and, by extension, Elizabeth. But beyond this superficial feature of the material, what meaning can be gleaned from the use of rock crystal in the Visitation group? To answer that question, we can consider instances of transparency in the Katharinenthal Sister Book, to investigate how the metaphor of transparency was otherwise understood in context.

Transparency, of the body and of the walls of the convent itself, is a recurring motif in the Katharinenthal Sister Book. In one entry, a sister named Anne von Ramswag is recorded as becoming “as clear as crystal” before “a glow of light emerged from within her.”^[vi] Similarly, a second sister, Mechthild von Eschenz, is recorded as becoming “as clear as a crystal, so that [a companion] saw straight through her.”^[vii] On both occasions, the sisters’ bodies are endowed with the material properties of crystal, and therefore are associated with purity, clarity, and revelation. When the bodies of these sisters transfigure into transparency, they adopt the same paradox of the rock-crystal cabochons in the Visitation group as simultaneously solid and transparent—physically inaccessible, but available for ocular consumption.

In the text of the Sister Book, the miracle of transparency is linked to the virtue of obedience. In one of the entries describing the spontaneous transparency of a sister, she is asked what she was thinking at the time she became transparent. She responds, “I was thinking then that obedience is better than any other thing that I could wish to do.”^[viii] This emphasis on obedience as a central tenet in the convent can be linked to the cultural moment within which the Katharinenthal Sister Book was compiled, read, and copied.^[ix] Observant reforms in the area were gaining momentum, with the goal of returning to a strict adherence of original rubrics of piety. Convents were observed, evaluated, and validated by ecclesiastical authorities based on their cooperation with reforms. The Sister Book, which was copied and circulated between nearby convents in addition to being read by sisters within the convent, served as a defense of collective values, protecting Katharinenthal from outside criticism by reinforcing its identity as a community committed to obedience.^[x]

This awareness of external surveillance is emblematic of how the sisters at Katharinenthal were embroiled in a culture of constant witnessing and being witnessed, both on the macro level, with the convent considered as a single unit, and on the personal level, between individual sisters. The recording of miracles in the Sister Book is illustrative of the reciprocal relationship between witness and witnessed, and shows how the sisters themselves co-constitute the identity of Katharinenthal. Their witnessing and documentation of each other’s visionary experiences assimilates those experiences into the shared body of the community.

It may seem that the visions collected in the Sister Book, focused as they are on individual experiences of mysticism, implicitly refute the idea that they define a shared identity. The experience of a vision is typically understood as a personal event that cannot be mutually experienced by the other members of a group. Since the visionary’s private reception of their vision excludes the remainder of the community, there is a dissonance between the subsuming pull of community and the isolation of the individual. However, the Sister Book, rather than merely exemplifying individuals, also assimilates their experiences into the identity of the collective. When these individual experiences are collected in the Sister Book, they are made available for the entire community to read and participate in, so the book itself becomes a conduit to transform individual visions into a shared experience.

The act of witnessing between sisters is an essential aspect of the Sister Book. The entries in the Sister Book are not told from a first-person perspective, but instead related by secondary sisters. Although these witnessing sisters cannot partake in the vision itself, they can perceive the physical effects of miracles experienced by their visionary sisters, such as turning transparent, glowing, or levitating. There is a recurring relationship between the sister whose body becomes the site of a miracle, and the sister who witnesses that bodily miracle. Essential to this relationship is the lack of self-awareness in the first sister. The state of transparency is not something the sisters are able to identify in themselves; they can only witness it in another.

The Visitation Group similarly expresses this relationship between witness and witnessed. The relationship between the two sculpted figures is one of equal exchange; each witnesses and is witnessed simultaneously as they pass their gaze back and forth. Neither figure casts any direct attention towards her own translucent stomach; instead, the two symbiotically witness each other. Their experience of the miraculous is mediated through a cyclical exchange of witnessing. Compounding this idea of mutuality, the figures’ faces resemble each other—similar narrow eyes, flushed cheeks, arching eyebrows, sloping noses, and mouths turned up at the corners—as if the viewer has caught one of them reaching out to touch a mirror. The exchange of grasp between the two figures complicates this mirroring of the body. When encountering a second self in the mirror, one can only reach so far before being abruptly halted by the mirror’s surface. While one can lightly graze fingertips or palms with one’s mirror-double, there can be no grasping of the hands as there is in the Visitation. Further, in a mirror-double, one can only meet like to like—hand to hand, cheek to cheek. Mary and Elizabeth transcend this limitation of mirroring by reaching their arms across the line-of-symmetry boundary, and entangling their extremities with one another.

In the case of the Sister Book, the witnessing sisters provide verbalization of miraculous events, making them concrete and consumable. This central relationship between witness and witnessed in the Sister Book necessitates that the miracle of one sister must be externalized. What may have been initiated by an internal experience must be made visible to the witnessing sister in order to be recordable in the Sister Book. The witnessed must exhibit their experience visibly, while the witness bears the weight of the experience and catalogues it after the fact; neither witness nor witnessed is a passive role.

By bearing witness to and documenting another sister’s vision, the sisters who wrote these entries integrate the experiences of individual sisters into the communal mythos of the convent. The sisters documenting these visions, transcribing what they see into the pages of the Sister Book, are often unnamed, and so are identified only as anonymous adherents to the collective body, rather than being identified individually. In the text, witnessing sisters remain a ghostly “I,” written in different hands, simultaneously singular and collective, gesturing to the broader, shared “we” of the convent that absorbs the bodily miracles of the sisters into its identity. Of course, the notion of a collective “I” is inherently contradictory, and this contradiction points to the core tension between self and group in the construction of identity within the context of a medieval convent.

The identity of the convent, in addition to being expressed through this collaborative process of collection and assimilation, is written into the Sister Book in the form of the origin chronicle of the convent, which describes the circumstances of the convent’s founding. This chronicle develops and reiterates the mythos of the convent as a collective. By documenting the establishment of the convent, the Sister Book constructs a stabilizing narrative that yokes each of the individual sisters to their identity as a group, thus bonding their self-identification to the definition of the social body. Recording this origin story in the Sister Book monumentalizes the incorporation of the convent as a sanctioned group. The importance placed on this moment of formation shows an inherent valuation of the convent as a group, a collective assembled due to shared identity. The sharing of characteristics, then, is salient to the definition of the identity of the community. The predominant shared characteristic of the sisters of Katharinenthal is their identity as enclosed women. 

This method of constructing a social identity is predicated on the sisters’ formal inclusion in a community, and is therefore also predicated on the existence of those who are excluded from that same community. An extended entry from the Sister Book exemplifies this dialectic of within and without, and can further elucidate the nature of the identity shared between the sisters at Katharinenthal. It reads:

There was a sister called holy Berta von Herten. Once, the holy Sister Berta desired to be at her sister Gůt’s place in the forest. And one time when she was at her prayers after mass in the refectory, she saw our Lord sitting across from her, and His face glowed as brightly as the sun, and then our Lord beckoned to her with His hand. Then she went to our Lord and fell before His feet. Then our Lord took her head and laid it in His lap and treated her very tenderly and dearly. Then she saw that the wall of the refectory appeared as though it were glass, and on the other side of the glass was a pitiful, meager person who acted as though her heart were truly going to break because she wished to come through the glass to our Lord. But she could not come through the glass. So spoke our Lord: “Would you like to know, dear daughter of mine, who that person is?” So she said: “Yes Lord, with all my heart.” So He said to her: “That is Gůt in the forest. And the glass that you see that is between me and her is her own will not to live in obedience. And because of this, she can never come as close to me as you can, living in obedience.^[xi]

Transparency in this entry is a complicated site of identity construction, concisely dividing the community inside the convent from those outside of it, and yet allowing each side visual access to the other. The directional current of longing in this passage initially flows from where Berta resides, within the convent, to Gůt’s unenclosed life outside the walls.

When the wall of the refectory is turned transparent “as though it were glass,” the women’s gazes are now able to traverse the walls dividing them so each can witness the other’s circumstances with full clarity, even as the boundaries of the convent walls remain impenetrable. The previous object of Berta’s desire, to live unenclosed in the forest as Gůt does, is revealed as a “pitiful, meager” prospect. Gůt, able to view the interior of the convent, witnesses Christ’s presence and closeness with enclosed women such as Berta, recognizes what she lacks, and feels the ache of a desire to access the inaccessible. As the transparent wall creates longing in Gůt, the knowledge Berta gains through witnessing that same transparency frees her of her previously held desire.

When Christ speaks to Berta, he says, “the glass that you see that is between me and [Gůt] is her own will not to live in obedience. And because of this, she can never come as close to me as you can, living in obedience.” The boundary between the two women, then, is more than the physical partition of the convent’s walls. It is representative of a fundamental difference between the women, constructed by their conflicting definitions of self through their opposing relations to a collective. Berta, living within the convent, absorbs and is absorbed by the identity of the group; Gůt, living without community, is not fixed into a stable, shared identity, and so is coded by the text as living disobediently, thus deserving of her deeply felt pain, which comes as a direct consequence of her divergence from the convent’s rule of enclosure. As demonstrated in the entry of the Sister Book in which a sister states that her bodily transparency is prompted by a meditation on the pleasure of obeying, obedience is a core value of the sisters of Katharinenthal, so the disobedience of Gůt is an affront to the collective.

Themes encountered in the Sister Book, including transparency, as well as longing and frustration of desire, are also useful to contemplate alongside the rock-crystal cabochons in the Visitation Group. The transparency of the rock crystal contrasts with the opacity of the walnut that comprises the majority of the sculpture. Even the effect of the gilding applied on much of the surface, despite its reflective properties, differs from the effect of the rock crystal. Light falling on the sculpture brightens the gilt wood and glints off it, while the rock-crystal cabochons, due to their transparency, possess an interior space that is made more or less visible depending on the play of light.

So how do our considerations of transparency throughout the Sister Book clarify the centralization of rock crystal in the Visitation Group? Since the rock-crystal cabochons are a critical element of the composition of this Visitation, the question first arises: for what reason would the convent specifically commission a representation of the Visitation with rock crystal employed to indicate the figures’ pregnancies? A common hypothesis is that images of Christ and John the Baptist may have been originally installed beneath the rock-crystal cabochons, which would explain a practical impetus for using rock crystal to allow glimpses of the images. The many Gothic reliquaries made out of transparent rock crystal—to allow for an unfettered view of the precious relics inside—evidence a precedent for using rock crystal to grant visual access to a significant object within.^[xii] If present, these embedded images would have likely been painted on small pieces of parchment and affixed to the interior walls of Mary and Elizabeth’s stomachs with tiny metal pegs, evidenced by pinholes left in the sculpture.^[xiii] However, these pinholes could be a later addition, so it remains uncertain whether such images were ever present, and if so, what they looked like.

This lack of certainty introduces a methodological issue when thinking about this sculpture. How can one discuss the sculpture’s reception within Katharinenthal if one does not know how the sculpture originally appeared? From our consideration of how transparency operates in the text of the Sister Book, it becomes apparent that the transparency of rock crystal can be read as significant in and of itself, rather than simply as a means of revealing images beneath. Therefore, we do not need to become needlessly entangled in wondering whether these images did, in fact, exist; we can instead consider what the rock-crystal cabochons themselves may have communicated to the sisters of Katharinenthal. In particular, how might this instance of transparency have initiated desire and longing, as it does in the Sister Book?

The crystals, catching the light with the viewer’s every move, entice the viewer to peek into the interiors of Mary and Elizabeth’s bodies. Unable to access that interior space further, the viewer is necessarily relegated to the liminal space of the threshold. Arrested here, at the visual entryway to divinity, the viewer is left with unresolved desire that can only be worked through by engaging in speculation and imagination. The transparency of the rock crystals acts as an exhortation to the viewer to imagine what is contained within the bodies of Mary and Elizabeth. Rather than emphasizing the presence or absence of pictorial representations of the infants, the primary phenomenon of viewing the sculpture instead becomes a speculative effort to imagine the interior of the figures’ bodies, and what lies within them. In other words, the viewer, through extended looking at the tangible image of the Visitation, would have been prompted by the crystals to also ruminate on imagined images.

Instead of relying wholly on what is visible, the sisters of Katharinenthal would have referred to their pre-existing knowledge to guide their engagement with the sculpture. The Visitation episode, as described in the Bible, would have been known by most fourteenth-century viewers, and would have been particularly familiar to the sisters—the primary audience for the sculpture. The Bible passage describing the Visitation reads:

And [Mary] entered into the house of Zachary, and saluted Elizabeth.
And it came to pass, that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
And she cried out with a loud voice, and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
For behold as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.^[xiv]

In the Katharinenthal Visitation group, Elizabeth holds a narrow scroll in her left hand, quoting her canonical greeting to Mary: “And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”^[xv] This direct reference to the Biblical source, a lingual linkage between sculpture and scripture, mnemonically prompts the viewer to construct and animate the rest of the scene mentally. The informed viewer, guided by the text intimately known to them, is able to watch and recite along as Mary salutes Elizabeth; Elizabeth fills with the Holy Ghost and becomes pregnant, and the infants in the women’s wombs leap for joy.

As the scene plays out, and the emphasis moves from Mary and Elizabeth’s meeting to the movement of their infants within their bodies, the desire of the viewer to gain access to that interior space intensifies. Despite the transparency of the rock crystal, the illusion that the interior is wholly visible to the viewer is ultimately subverted as the viewer moves around the sculpture. The rock crystals are not perfectly transparent, so they frustrate the viewer’s desire to fully access the interior of Mary and Elizabeth’s bodies. Encountering the cabochons from different angles and peering into the roundness of the rock crystals, the viewer’s penetrative gaze is sometimes able to pass smoothly into the pocket of the body, but is sometimes obstructed by imperfections in the stone. The materiality of the rock-crystal cabochons creates a desire to view the interior of the body, and then swiftly foils the fulfillment of that desire. In this way, the sculpture is a fantasy of revelation, but gratification of this fantasy is limited.

By ‘fantasy of revelation,’ I mean to speak both of fantasy in the sense of a daydream based on desires, and the root meaning of the word from the Greek phantazesthai, literally translated as ‘picture to oneself.’ For the sisters of Katharinenthal, contemplation of the Visitation group would have been a dual experience: a looping cycle of desire and frustration, and a process of ‘picturing to oneself.’ The desire stirred in the viewer by the sculpture comes from the transparency of the rock-crystal cabochons, and their associated contradiction of visibility versus inaccessibility.

This cycle of desire can be further contextualized by returning to the case of Berta’s vision in the Sister Book. As we observed in earlier discussion of this vision, when the convent walls become transparent, Gůt, living alone in the forest, is able to witness the intense closeness that enclosed women, such as Berta, can achieve with Christ. Aware of her own limitations, Gůt desires nothing more than to come through the convent walls, tantalizingly see-through, and enjoy the same religious benefits. However, despite the transparency of the convent walls, they remain as solid as ever, so the satiation of Gůt’s desire remains impossible to attain. Instead, halted outside the walls, Gůt is trapped in a constant state of frustrated want. The desire itself stems from her ability to view the interior of the convent, while the frustration of that desire is due to the solidity of the constructions that relegate her firmly to the opposite side of the glass.

The Visitation group operates in a similar way. The direct opposition between inside and outside—seemingly a rigid binary—is complicated by the translucency of the rock-crystal cabochons, which allow the viewer a paradoxical vision of inside and outside apprehended simultaneously. The rock-crystal cabochons become sites of contact between the interior and the exterior. Due to the contradictory nature of rock crystal as both transparent and solid, the interiors of Mary and Elizabeth’s bodies are visually accessible from the exterior, but remain physically separated. The viewer, able to see through the bodies of Mary and Elizabeth, desires full access to the miraculous pregnancies of the women, and so desires to see, and consequently apprehend, the infant contained within the mother. The absence of the infants frustrates this desire. As the viewer continues to contemplate the sculpture, the same desire to fully access the interior of the holy body and to witness the godhead within wells up once again, before once again being frustrated. As in Berta’s vision, the transparency of a boundary between interior and exterior inspires longing and ignites a fantasy, in the sense of a daydream based on desires, of resolving that longing.

While Gůt is unable to halt her endless cycling between desire and frustration, the spontaneous transparency of the convent walls conversely allows Berta to reach some conclusion to her longing. In her vision, the resolution to her desire only comes from the banishment of that same desire. When Christ shows Berta the undesirability of Gůt’s circumstances, Berta is able to recognize the value of her own community. With this revelation, Berta no longer desires to leave the convent, and is instead devoid of longing. This metaphorical emptying enables Berta to live obediently according to Christ’s instructions, and, by extension, the guidelines of the Dominican order.

Similarly, the viewer of the Visitation is able to satisfy their longing to fully access the interior of the Marian body, and halt the endless cycle of desire begetting frustration, by engaging with the sculpture imaginatively. The mnemonic function of the sculpture, particularly the lingual mnemonic of the verbal greeting on the scroll held by Elizabeth, initiates a speculative completion of the sculpture, animating the remainder of the scene. In this way, the viewers create a fantasy for themselves in the sense of the Greek phantazesthai, or ‘picture to oneself.’

To sum up, the instances of transparency represented at Katharinenthal, both materially in the Visitation sculpture and in the text of the Sister Book, forms an intriguing network suggesting the sisters’ complex understanding of transparency as a concept representing intersections between obedience, desire, and community. In the entries of the two sisters who spontaneously become ‘as clear as crystal,’ transparency of the body is a metaphor for purity of spirit. Virtues, particularly obedience, are externalized and embodied. In the context of the Observant reforms, with external evaluation directed at the convent, there was a particular necessity for sisters to render their virtues as visible, and therefore verifiable, phenomena. In the vision of the sister Berta, when the convent walls become transparent, the paradox of simultaneous visibility and inaccessibility creates tension and longing between those on opposite sides of the walls. This exemplifies the importance of enclosure as a construction of identity, that fundamentally differentiates those within from those without. This construction of alterity through opposition, exemplified in the case of the transparent glass walls of Berta’s vision, also inspires dynamics of longing between those within and those without. By allowing for ocular penetration and simultaneously remaining impenetrable, transparency in both the Visitation group and the Sister Book is the source both of desire itself and the frustration of that desire. By considering the theme of transparency in its multiple contexts and the significance it could have had for the sisters of Katharinenthal, it becomes possible to begin imagining the shared identity the sisters constructed, and by what means.

Endnotes

[i] The Visitation, attrib. to Master Heinrich of Constance, ca. 1310-20, walnut, polychromy, gilding, rock crystal cabochons inset in gilt-silver mounts, 23 1/4 × 11 7/8 × 7 1/4 in. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art 17.190.724. From the Dominican convent of Katharinenthal, near Diessenhofen, Switzerland; gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. See: William D. Wixom, “Medieval Sculpture at the Metropolitan 800 to 1400,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 62, no. 4 (2005): 47.

[ii] The oldest extant manuscript dates to ca. 1424 and is held at Frauenfeld, Kantonsbibliothek Thurgau, MS Y 74. Other copies, dating from between ca. 1450 and ca. 1500, are held in St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 603; Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Cod. Cent. V, 10a; and Überlingen, Leopold-Sophien-Bibliothek, MS 22. For manuscript history, see Ruth Meyer, Das “St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch”: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar. Münchener Texte Und Untersuchungen Zur Deutschen Literatur Des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 6-21, 37-8, 42-53. See also: Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, About Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies), 1996, 28-29, 286-7. See also Amiri Ayanna, “Bodies of Crystal, Houses of Glass: Observing Reform and Improving Piety in the St. Katharinental Sister Book,” The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 43, no. 1 (2017): 24–57.

[iii] Amiri Ayanna, “Selections from the St. Katharinental Sister Book,” Asymptote (January 2016).

[iv] The other known sister books from the region originate from Adelhausen, Diessenhofen, Engelthal, Gotteszell, Kirchberg, Oetenbach, Töss, Unterlinden, and Weiler. See: Gertrud Jaron Lewis, Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1989), 296–316.

[v] See: Brigitte Buettner, “From Bones to Stones: Reflections on Jeweled Reliquaries,” in Reliquiare Im Mittelalter (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 50. See also: Jung, “Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts,” 225.

[vi] Translation by Jacqueline E. Jung, “Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts: The Exuberant Bodies of the Katharinenthal Visitation Group,” in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 231.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Translation by Amiri Ayanna, “Bodies of Crystal, Houses of Glass: Observing Reform and Improving Piety in the St. Katharinental Sister Book,” 35.

[ix] See: Caroline Walker Bynum, “Patterns of Female Piety,” edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, New York: Zone Books, 1998, 181.

[x] See: Ayanna, “Bodies of Crystal, Houses of Glass,” 25-6. Ayanna writes that the Katharinenthal Sister Book “manuscripts also contain other writings, including sister books of other houses, evidencing programs of interconvent exchange.”

[xi] Translation by Amiri Ayanna, “Selections from the St. Katharinental Sister Book,” Asymptote (January 2016). See Jung, “Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts,” 233.

[xii] See: Clare Kilgore, Viewing Heaven: Rock Crystal, Reliquaries, and Transparency in Fourteenth-Century Aachen,” (master’s thesis, University of Nebraska, 2017).

[xiii] Wixom, “Medieval Sculpture at the Metropolitan 800 to 1400,” 47.

[xiv] The Douay-Rheims Bible, Luke 1, 1:40-44. “Et intravit in domum Zacchariae et salutavit Elisabeth/et factum est ut audivit salutationem Mariae Elisabeth exultavit infans in utero eius et repleta est Spiritu Sancto Elisabeth/et exclamavit voce magna et dixit benedicta tu inter mulieres et benedictus fructus ventris tui/et unde hoc mihi ut veniat mater Domini mei ad me/ecce enim ut facta est vox salutationis tuae in auribus meis exultavit in gaudio infans in utero meo.”

[xv] Wixom, “Medieval Sculpture at the Metropolitan 800 to 1400,” 47.

Author Bio:

Frances Lilliston is a dual degree student, pursuing an MA in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and an MLIS at the Palmer School of Library & Information Science, LIU. Originally from Seattle, WA, Lilliston completed her BA in Studio Art and Art History at the Evergreen State College in 2017.