MONASTIC RITUAL

One of the activities of the project, within the line of research focused on performative practices inside monastic spaces, was re-creating in the present the rituals which took place in the Sant Pere de les Puel·les monastery of Benedictine nuns in Barcelona, from the time the abbess died until the choice of her successor.

The documentary foundation of the research was the information contained in a late manuscript, dated from the seventeenth century, which summarises the main scenes that unfolded at this essential time in a monastic community (death of the prelate and choice of the new one) and the archival documentation (especially account books and notary documentation from the fourteenth century) which sheds light on the people, roles and spaces that were involved in these rituals, their gestures and meanings, as well as the material elements acquired for the occasion (clothing, objects, etc.).

The ACUB Àmbit Cultural de Benedictines, an EPO of our project, developed the script of the ‘performance’ based on this documentation, and it coordinated the staging, which involved more than 20 extras who were volunteers from the project, professors and students from the University of Barcelona, along with the use of two choirs specialised in Gregorian music (Auditexaudi and Schola Gregoriana de Catalunya) and the collaboration of the communities of Sant Benet of Montserrat and Sant Pere de les Puel·les of Barcelona. Furthermore, the Monastery of Pedralbes helped with the props (costumes, objects and furniture) needed. The latter, an EPO of our project, also allowed us to use the privileged spaces of the monastery of Santa Maria de Pedralbes in Barcelona, where the re-creation was filmed.

The end result is a video that strings together the different scenes in this ritual of death and the choice of the new abbess. It is a documentary that stresses the gestures (of obedience to the new abbess, respect for the deceased prelate), the music, the silence and the tolling of the bells that accompany the main players (nuns, beneficiate chaplains, canons, gravediggers, bishop, president of the Tarraconense and Cesaragustana Benedictine Congregation, notary, etc.) in their procession through the spaces (cloister, upper and lower choir, chapterhouses, monastery doorway, etc.). In short, it was a major effort to turn the historical scholarly research, performed and promoted at the university, into a product of historical dissemination framed within the digital humanities.

We are aware of the difficulties of the re-creation—which was conditioned by the conservation of the documentation and the profuseness of its information—as well as the license we needed to take, such as recording a Benedictine ritual in a Clarissan monastery, the material possibilities and the budget. Nonetheless, the result, which is the outcome of a collective effort and the scholarly rigour that guided us at all times, far outstrips the initial expectations, entailed a great deal of learning for the project members both individually and collectively and, most importantly, yielded a rigorous scholarly product with the extraordinary potential to widely share the scholarship on the history of female spirituality.