The Matrix, a research tool produced by Boston College, is designed as a portal and bibliography for research about women’s religious communities in medieval Europe. It focuses on individuals and groups, as well as on material culture and relationships between communities. Contributors to The Matrix have included such medievalist luminaries as Caroline Walker Bynum and Jeffrey Hamburger. The site also contains decorative images culled from the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
The resource is freely available on the Web and does not require registration or subscription. At the time of writing, completed sections of the project include the Vocabularium, a glossary; the Bibliographica, an indexed, searchable bibliography; and Figurae, a growing collection of images depicting material culture and browsable by century. The Commentaria section contains a number of sources, and The Matrix’s editors expect it to grow over time; currently the search and browse interfaces are incomplete, but the collection is browsable by author. The index page clearly presents the variety of resources available. While each section has a Latin name (“Vitae” for a section of biographies, and “Cartularium” for the collection of primary sources), it is labeled clearly and descriptively in English as well.
The Vitae section, a large collection of thumbnail biographies of individual nuns, anchoresses, beguines and other members of formal or informal religious communities, will be most useful as a reference tool for students of English history since the vast majority of the biographies are of English women. Those studying the religious communities of mainland Europe may be surprised at the absence of Hildegard of Bingen and Mechtild of Magdeburg, both notable nuns. The information contained in the miniature biographies will be of more use when it is standardized and comprehensible to a lay user (pun not intended!). For example, Fina, a woman from Somerset, is given “BATH.W” as her listed birthplace; Julian of Norwich’s date of birth is “1394‐1416or1429occ.Carrow”. The inclusion of Julian, however, highlights one of this project’s strengths: the presence of anchoresses, the enclosed hermetic women whose decentralized, informal orders remain somewhat mysterious to historians, is unusual in a study of women and monasticism.
Many of the links on different pages of The Matrix have yet to go live. The Monasticon page was linked to the home page but refused to fully load (a particular loss since the editors identify this section as the “basis” of the project). These technical problems certainly detract from the actual utility of such a resource. The editors seek collaboration from users of the resource, however, and hopefully such users will, collectively, help to troubleshoot and improve the site. Technical problems aside, The Matrix has the potential to be a hugely useful resource for scholars researching women’s religious communities.
