The life of a motif in the temple environment (on the material of memorations and behavioral practices of Dominican women of the 13th-14th centuries)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the main motives of the nine so-called “sister books” that were created at the turn of the 12^th-13^th centuries in the Dominican convents for women in the south of the German-speaking region and were highly mythologized monastic chronicles. The mystical-ascetic practices of medieval Western monasticism were built on the basis of several (marriage, passion, Christmas) motifs developed by the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux in a cycle of sermons on the biblical Song of Songs of King Solomon. Created in the middle of the 12^th century, these motifs subsequently descended into the environment of common piety at the turn of the 13^th and 14^th centuries. In these three motives - marriage (nuptial), passionate (passionate) and Christmas (natal) - the mystical union of the soul of man and God (unio mystica) is allegorically described. Launched into circulation by Bernard of Clairvaux as conditional metaphors that accompanied discursive theological reasoning, these motifs passed through several stages in their development, until they finally became behavioral scenarios played out by Dominicans in everyday life, in the process of unfolding spontaneous performative practices. Through the efforts of the inquisitors (John Nider and others), such scenarios were rethought in the middle of the 15^th century as constituent elements of witch cults.